Wendy’s Child Syndrome

“The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think…Throughout the Mahabharata … Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war…. The Gita is a dishonest book …”

– Wendy Doniger, Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago.
Quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 November, 2000.[ i ]

In my previous Sulekha column[ ii ], I pointed out that whereas elite colleges in the West teach great respect for Greek and other Western Classics as being the bedrock of their civilization, it has become fashionable for elitist (i.e. Westernized) Indians to denigrate their own Indian Classics. Furthermore, these Indians see their education in Western literature as validating their Western identity (falsely equating modernization with Westernization), and go out of their way in putting down their Indian heritage.

The present essay deals with yet another important discipline, namely, Religious Studies, which is growing rapidly in the US and in many other countries. Unfortunately, this is not so in India, where a peculiar brand of “secularism” has prevented academic Religious Studies from entering the education system in a serious manner. Therefore, most Indians do not have the necessary competence in this academic field to be able to understand how it differs from both (i) religious instruction that one expects to find in a temple, church or mosque, and (ii) political or popular ideological depictions of religion in the media.

Article 28.1 of The Constitution of India reads: “No religious instruction shall be provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds.” However, the scholarship and teaching about religion in the academic field of Religious Studies would not violate the intent of this Article, because academic Religious Studies does not preach (i.e. does not “instruct”) any religion, and nor endorse or negate any religion’s claims. Rather, it teaches about the truth-claims[ iii ] made by a given religion, along with its history, its sociology, and so forth. This is an important separation enshrined in the US Constitution also. Nevertheless, “Indian secularism” has prevented the population from becoming educated about the diversity of religions so central to Indian life. This vacuum of authentic knowledge has been filled by unscrupulous elements in many instances.

This essay’s thrust revolves around the portrayal of India’s religions in the West. Being unable to appreciate how and why academic Religious Studies is different from other activities that might appear similar, most Indians are ignorant of the abuses being caused in the West as a result of (a) the negative stereotyping of Indic traditions, and (b) the misappropriation from Indic traditions while erasing the sources.

Here is a typical anecdote that illustrates my frustration: I sent an article to an Indian journal about how Hinduism was (mis)portrayed in American academe. The editor was very interested. But the reviewers’ comments were incredibly naïve about the basic structure and nature of the field of Religious Studies — one reviewer was confusing academic Religious Studies with something that Hindu temples or ashrams in USA were already teaching, while the other reviewer wondered why this field was so important in a secular age! When I showed it to Western friends in academics, they found this Indian thinking amusing.

As with any large academic field, Religious Studies in the US is highly organized, with prestigious journals, chairs and programs of study. To carry out the studies and research, there is a well-defined system that uses the tools and methods that have come to be known as “hermeneutics”. This is the theory of interpretation, especially of religious texts, using a process of deriving new interpretations from a body of text or knowledge, so that (hopefully) our insights about the text or subject keep growing.

To control and regulate this field pertaining to Indian religions, there is the association known as RISA (Religions In South Asia). RISA is a unit within The American Academy of Religion (AAR), which is the official organization of academic scholars of Religious Studies in the Western world.

Around fifty years ago, there was a partition of the guild of scholars who studied religion, and two organizations were created: AAR and SBL (Society of Biblical Literature). AAR and SBL maintain very close relations and influences, and hold their annual conferences jointly. While SBL members study and promote the insiders’ view of Judeo-Christianity, AAR members are supposed to pursue the objective view from outside a given tradition and to not promote anything. However, as I have noted many times, outsiders to Hinduism are insiders to Judeo-Christianity, and/or to Western Feminism, and/or to Marxism, and/or to other ideologies, and hence they are not “neutral” as advertised.

With a membership of over 10,000 scholars — and growing — the AAR has enormous clout over the future direction of Religious Studies, and indirectly, over the humanities at large.

Because the depictions of India in the West are inseparable from depictions of India’s religious life (something that Indian secularists have tried to wish away unsuccessfully), the work done by RISA scholars has implications that go well beyond the discipline’s boundaries. Religion is prominently featured in South Asian Studies, Asian Studies, International Studies, Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, History, Literature, and Politics, and indirectly also influences Journalism, Film, and so forth. Therefore, the utter ignorance of Indians regarding such a discipline is a major gap that deserves attention and remedy.

Meanwhile, under Western control, Hinduism Studies has produced ridiculous caricatures that could easily be turned into a Bollywood movie or a TV serial. This Lila[ iv ] of the inner workings of RISA is the subject of this essay. (Readers who are unfamiliar with RISA and AAR should read this essay as a general account of Western academic engagement and control over India-related studies. While the examples given are RISA-specific, the message applies more broadly.)

Act 1 of the RISA Lila deals with the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy Doniger[ v ], who is undoubtedly the most powerful person in academic Hinduism Studies today, and by others inspired by her. She is a former President of the American Academy of Religion, now leads Religious Studies at the University of Chicago, chairs many academic and powerful bodies, has two PhDs (from Harvard and Oxford) and is a prolific author. She was also a past President of the very influential Association of Asian Studies.

The most important leverage she has is that she has given more students their Ph.Ds in Hinduism than any other person in the world and has successfully placed these former students in high-leverage academic jobs throughout the Western world, to carry the torch of her theories and principles of researching Hinduism. There is no place one can go to in this academic discipline without running into the effect of her influence, through her large cult of students, who glorify her in exchange for her mentorship.

The BBC-linked site introduces her as follows: “Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts…” (For a picture of Wendy Doniger, see the footnote.[ vi ])

In the Annual Convention of the AAR in 2000, Wendy (as she is affectionately known) was felicitated by her fans at a special session in her honor. She has enjoyed building her franchise and sees her own immortality through it[ vii ]. One speaker after another spoke about her great accomplishments. Many persons from the audience joined in — presumably to ensure their tenure, or job, or promotion. Then I raised my hand, and when Wendy acknowledged me, I stood up and asked: “Since you have psychoanalyzed Hinduism and created a whole new genre of scholarship, do you think it would be a good idea for someone to psychoanalyze you, because an insight into your subconscious would make your work more interesting and understandable?”

There was both uneasy tension and laughter in the audience, and she replied that there was nothing new that any psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not hidden anything. I stood up again, and stated that most clients also tell their psychoanalysts that they have nothing hidden in their mental basement, but that such clients are precisely the most interesting persons to psychoanalyze. She laughed again, took it well, and said, “You got me on this one.” I concluded with a remark that I would predict that research on her own private psychology would get done in the next several years, and that it would become important some day to psychoanalyze many other Western scholars also, since they superimpose their personal and cultural conditioning on their research about other peoples.

This Act 1 of the RISA Lila begins such an analysis. I wish to clarify that it is not intended to be a generalization applicable to all members of RISA. It deals specifically with one important phenomena in Religious Studies, that I have defined as Wendy’s Child Syndrome. The structure of this Act 1 is to first summarize four examples of recent RISA scholarship of this new genre that is being championed by Wendy’s Children[ viii ]:

1. Sri Ramakrishna, the 19^th century Hindu saint, has been declared by these scholars as being a sexually-abused homosexual, and it has become “academically established” by Wendy Doniger’s students that Ramakrishna was a child molester, and had also forced homosexual activities upon Vivekananda. Furthermore, it has become part of this new “discovery” that Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences, and indeed those of Hindu mystics in general, are pathological sexual conditions that need to be psychoanalyzed as such. Furthermore, these scholars have concluded that the entire Hindu society needs to be psychoanalyzed in terms of sexual deviance, in order to understand modern Indian society and politics objectively.

2. The Hindu Goddess is described by these scholars as a sex maniac, with a variety of pathological conditions. Western scholars are busy debating which kinds of pathologies best apply in specific instances, and are hard at work to capture supporting data in the backwaters of Indian society.

3. Other conclusions by these well-placed scholars include: Ganesha’s trunk symbolizes a “limp phallus”; his broken tusk is a symbol for the castration-complex of the Hindu male; his large belly is a proof of the Hindu male’s enormous appetite for oral sex. Shiva, is interpreted as a womanizer, who encourages ritual rape, prostitution and murder, and his worship is linked to violence and destruction.

4. Hindus are being profiled by these scholars, potentially setting them up for denial of the same human rights as the “civilized West.” For instance, anthropologists have concluded that nursing Hindu mothers do not bond with their babies the way white women do, that Hindus lack a sense of individuality because of their inability to perceive separation in space or time, and that the Mahabharata is best seen as Krishna’s Genocide.

After a brief review of this “scholarly” literature, there awaits a major bombshell in this essay — reasonable doubts on whether these acclaimed scholars properly know the Indian languages in which they claim to be working.

After this background, I go on to define and analyze Wendy’s Child Syndrome, and analyze the anger my investigative research has triggered. The essay concludes with responses to criticisms that I have received from certain RISA members who commented on the draft of this “scandalous” report.

Before you dismiss the significance of the RISA Lila to the Indian community at large, please bear in mind that college professors write most of the school textbooks in the US. These scholars’ writings are also used to teach the next generation of journalists, political leaders, and our own kids when they leave home and go to college. Wendy Doniger and her Children contribute to many articles on Hinduism and India in widely used resources such as Microsoft’s Encarta and other encyclopedias. Therefore, if you wish to get to the bottom of figuring out how and why the American mainstream misunderstands India so pathologically, RISA is certainly one of the places to investigate.

I hope this essay begins a feedback loop to educate the Indian community, which is the subject of RISA’s work, but which has so far been kept in the dark concerning what is being written and said behind its back.

Target: Sri Ramakrishna

Introducing One Wendy’s Child:

As a student of Wendy Doniger at University of Chicago, Jeffrey Kripal did research on Sri Ramakrishna for his Ph.D. dissertation. He visited the Ramakrishna Mission for information and discussions on this research, and they helped him openly and enthusiastically. As one of the sisters of the Mission puts it, “He seems to be such a nice and endearing young man that anybody would trust his intentions.” However, contrary to well-accepted academic ethics and common decency, he did not give the Mission’s experts any chance to review his dissertation’s draft in order to make sure that there were no factual inaccuracies in it.

The Ramakrishna Mission scholars found out about Kripal’s scandalous conclusions only years later, after his book had come out and had immediately won enormous acclaim from Wendy Doniger’s club. The book published by him on this work, titled Kali’s Child[ ix ], won him the first book award by the AAR, a job at Harvard and a prestigious academic position at RiceUniversity. Encyclopedia Britannica listed his book as the top choice for reading about Ramakrishna. While the entire thesis was based on alleged misinterpretations of Bengali writings about the life of Ramakrishna (see details below), none of the persons who finally signed off on his PhD dissertation, or who were on the AAR Book Award Committee, or who glorified and endorsed his book, are, to the best of my knowledge, Bengalis with a familiarity with cultural nuances that are at stake here. Based on information given to me, and subject to being verified and corrected, the sole Bengali expert left before the conclusion of the project. But my main point is more general: If this Ph.D. dissertation (or book) had been based on sources in Hebrew or Greek — in short, had it been in the Bible or early Christianity fields – would it have passed? The standards that prevail in those fields are indeed rigorous. This needs to be independently evaluated by someone in the field of Bible/early Church. Of course, as a fringe thesis, many things could be approved. But would an equivalent thesis, based mainly on Freudian psychoanalysis, be supported to a similar extent in the mainstream academy, if it were about the Bible? That should be the benchmark, and that should have been how such a bold new hermeneutics should have been academy-tested before attempting it on any far away neocolonized culture whose direct representatives were not even part of the process. In short, is this new fashionable hermeneutics of eroticisation of spirituality a form of Eurocentrism being projected upon “others”?

I started to complain that RISA had prematurely and incorrectly passed sweeping judgments on Ramakrishna, without even a proper representation of the opposing point of view (which happened to be the view of those who know Ramakrishna best). This seemed to me to be a blatant violation of academic due process and ethical norms. However, I was told many things by the chowkidars and sepoys of the academic fortress, that bordered on deception and intimidation.

First, I was told that Kripal is suffering from depression because of “threats” he received from critics, and that he regrets having written the book, and wishes to forget it completely. I found just the opposite to be true: Kripal very much enjoys the controversy as a way to advance academically and, when asked point-blank to produce any evidence of “threats,” he slips his way out of it.

Second, I was advised in person, by emails, and via other associates, that if I criticized Wendy, I would get personally attacked and blackballed, and my projects would be boycotted. Guess what? This intimidation is precisely what motivated me, even more enthusiastically, to continue my research into this incestuous cult. I felt like the investigative reporter who is on to something big. I wondered: why would they not take my critical investigations in their stride, given how they pride themselves on claims of being open-minded?

While at first the Ramakrishna Mission was reluctant to battle against the academic establishment on these blatant misportrayals, one of its monks, Swami Tyagananda, started to take the matter seriously. But this happened only after Kripal’s thesis began to devastate Ramakrishna’s reputation in the mainstream, including in American schools. This led Swami Tyagananda to write his 130-page rebuttal, that lists many serious errors in Kripal’s work[ x ]. Kripal turned down my suggestion to include a summary of Tyagananda’s rebuttal at the end of his book, in a new edition, and cited all sorts of technical and scholarly reasons that are illogical.[ xi ]

After summarizing a few of Kripal’s glaring errors of scholarship below, I shall explain why such bogus scholarship, especially since it gets legitimized and popularized by sheer mafia-like politics, is very dangerous at many different levels.