I was planning to put in Part 2 of my "West & the Rest" series, but looks like that will have to wait before the dust settles on this new event.
A book arrived in the mail today, a book I'd been eagerly waiting for. So far I've only read the Foreword, and gone to the website, and have been blown over. I will write the review after I've read the book, but right now, I just wish to share the foreword with others here. So, here goes.
{Begging the indulgence of the book editors, & the author of this foreword, Dr Balagangadhara, I'm going to type it in & reproduce the Foreword, which is just a bit over two pages, in full.}
~x~
FOREWORD
Non-White and non-Christian cultures will increasingly have a significant impact on the affairs of humankind in this millennium. Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the 'Indianness' of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian Culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe.
(Puzzle)
In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow will have to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange and grotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant.
If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of European culture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkers in Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining, and defending undesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha and our Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is trus, the Indians have but one task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one Goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.
However, what if this portrayal is false? What if these basically Western descriptions of India are wrong? In that case, the questions about what India has to offer the world and what Indian thinkers were doing becomes important. For the first time, the current knowledge of India will be subject to a kind of test that has never occurred before.
(First Time)
Why 'for the first time'? The answer is obvious: the prevailing knowledge of India amongst the English educated elite was generated primarily when India was colonized. Subsequent to the Indian independence, India suffered from poverty and backwardness. In tomorrow's world, the Indian intellectuals will be able to speak back with a newly found confidence and they will challenge the European and American descriptions of India. That is, for the first time, they will test the Western knowledge of India and not just accept it as God's own truth. This has not happened before; it will happen for the first time.
Generations of Indian intellectuals have accepted these descriptions as more or less true. The future generations will not be so accommodating though: they will test these answers for their truth. I say this with confidence because I find that more and more people in India are gravitating towards this kind of research. These are not of mere academic interest for such people, whose numbers steadily increase. Many of them realize that Western explanations of their religion and culture their lived experiences; by distorting, such explanations transform these, and this denies Indians access to their own experiences. It can thus be said to rob them of their inner lives. But that is not all. More than most, they realize that answers to these and allied questions about the nature of Indian culture have the potential to ignite an intellectual revolution on a world scale.
(In the Book)
The essays and critiques of Western scholarship on India's religions contained in this book must be seen as the early signs of this awakening, and of this questioning. It is thus an important chronicle of the beginnings of a shift. Some of the essays are critical surveys of what is still being purveyed as factual and veridical knowledge about India and Hinduism. These are often startling and shocking to the Indian reader, but serve the useful purpose of benchmarking the state of current Western 'knowledge' about India. Others are critiques of the application of European ideas like psychoanalysis to Indian culture. But all of them, at various levels, must ask the question-is the Western academia producing knowledge about India?
The latter half of the book chronicles how key sections of the academic establishment in America have responded to these challenges, and tries to understand how they processed it as a threat rather than as a long overdue call for a dialog. The book suggests that the answers to some of these questions may lie in American culture and its European roots. In many ways, therefore, the book is an attempt to reverse the gaze on the West, and is sure to make for provocative reading.
S.N Balagangadhara
University of Ghent,
Belgium
After that introduction, it may be time to take a look at the book's website.
The Website
The website has more details on the books, the Preface of the book, and an impressive set of endorsements. People endorsing the book are a sort of Who's who from Academia, Arts, Politics, Media, etc...
Also, don't forget to look at the sample comics there too! As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and humor puts across points much better than deadly dull droning of sentences..
And last but not the least, sign up for the discussions.
Here's the book’s website:
BL,
Sorry I missed that comment! (Been on & off Sul for a while...)
Good comment, I agree!
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Invading The Sacred-A Review
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Posted by
Balagangadhara on Sep 21, 2002Jeffrey Kripal (A Multi-part Post)
Before addressing this post to Jeffrey Kripal, I would like to very clearly stipulate some of my basic stances so that the discussion does not get derailed into these issues.
(A) Even though the communications will be directed to the person of Jeffrey Kripal, it is not *ad hominem* but issue-oriented. However, I will eschew making some *kinds* of qualifications academics are prone to make, so that any intelligent, but lay person can not only follow the discussion but also *evaluate* what is being said.
(B) I do not subscribe to the ‘identity politics’ popular in the US universities, any more than I belong to the community of writers who call themselves ‘post-colonial’ or as defenders of the ‘sub-altern’ studies. I find such writings intellectually both puerile and pernicious.
(C) In no form of fashion do I want to claim that the location of a person is relevant to *evaluating* what he says. Caste, creed, ethnic origins, cultural location, skin-colour, passport, etc. are no more relevant to this debate than the fact that the ‘Jewishness’ of Albert Einstein is relevant to evaluating his theory of general (or special) relativity. That is to say, if we can do physics, Mathematics, Biology, etc.; if we can write in illuminating ways about St. Augustine or Martin Luther; I do not see why someone from another culture (whether Western, African, or American Indian) cannot do the same about Shankaracharya or Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
(D) The above stance is not a mere moral one, as far as I am concerned. This is an *integral part* of what it is to contribute to human knowledge. In so far as possessing a white skin does not make one into a scientific researcher only by virtue of this fact alone, the same does not disqualify one from being a researcher either. It is strictly irrelevant. However, this does not mean that it is irrelevant to *producing* that knowledge. In more ways than one, one’s context is important and, perhaps, in these posts I can talk about the ways in which it is the case. But this concerns the production of knowledge not its evaluation.
(E) Therefore, I will be interrogating Jeffrey Kripal with respect to one single question: has he produced knowledge or not? I do not believe he has; I do not believe he knows this; I believe his stance prevents him from recognising either of these two. I will try to provide arguments in defence of these charges. This is my brief.
Dear Jeffrey Kripal,
Many voices will have joined in this debate by the time I get to post this. Mine is one such. In the course of the communication, it is possible that I raise my voice now and then to make some point or another. Let this only draw your attention to the fact that we are disputing some issues not as disembodied minds but as human beings. *Menschlich, als zu Menschlich* (Human, all too Human), as Nietzsche put it so beautifully while titling one of his contributions thus.
Your first book raises many issues; your other book even more. As did Rajiv Malhotra’s article. So does your response. I want to take up many of them; but my ‘wordiness’ (as some people so kindly characterise my style) will no doubt prevent me from doing all I want to. But the issue I want to tackle requires this writing style. So, please indulge me. In order to set the problem up, I will begin by sketching some relevant anecdotes.
1. As is the case with most Indians, I learnt English through an Indian language. I was taught that *puja* was worship, ‘devas’ meant ‘gods’ (with this capitalisation) and so on. It was not clear what exactly ‘God’ was even though I was taught that you write ‘God’ with a ‘big G’ as we used to say. I guess I assumed that ‘God’ referred to the entity you ‘chose’: mine, for instance was ‘Ishwara’. Some how, I fell in love with this ‘erotic asectic’ (as Wendy Doniger titled her book on Shiva): with his abode in the ‘cemeteries’, with his tendency to be easily provoked to anger; his ‘veebhoothi’ and his snake and, of course, his children Ganesha and Skanda. No doubt, it has something to do with my name and my ‘short temper’ (as we say in India) too. One day, I must have been around 14 then, I ‘discovered’ that ‘linga’ meant phallus (a ‘penis’ as it was explained to me) and that it was a ‘symbol’ of male fertility. So, when my sisters and mother went to do *puja* in the nearby temple of Mallikarjuna (another name for Shiva), they actually went to worship a male penis. I was terribly, terribly embarrassed by this explanation, felt it was wrong too, but did not know what to say about it. I still remember running to the temple to see whether the Shiva linga looked like a penis. I must confess that it did not. However, my insistence on this fact generated a jeering laughter from the person who had ‘broken this news’ to me: "How many have you seen? That is what the penis will look like when you grow old." My sense of wrongness persisted, the embarrassment never left me, especially when Europeans asked me what ‘Shiva linga’ stood for. But I did not know what to say.
2. Fast forward. Nearly a decade later. I am 24 and on my first trip to Europe. I ‘knew’ about homosexuality abstractly (i.e. it never occurred to me to visualise it concretely), and had ‘no problems with it’ (as I used to put it in those days). However, I was quite unprepared for the sight of males ‘French kissing’ each other openly and therefore was incredulously fascinated by the scene when I first came across it in Amsterdam. Any way, I went back to India having learnt about some of the outward signs of manifesting homosexual affection.
As you will no doubt know, it is a common practice for friends to walk the streets in India, holding hands and moving them breezily. It is equally common to put your arm across the shoulders of your friend and walk or cycle. In India, I had a friend who had this habit of clasping your hands and walk along with you. After my return from Europe, I could not reciprocate any more: I knew what it ‘meant’. Even though I had no problem doing the same before I went to Europe, after my return, I could not. It was embarrassing; but I could not share this feeling with my friend who had never been to Europe. I could not tell him to stop doing it either because it would have affected our friendship. So, I tried not to walk next to him when we were together in a group. When two of us were alone and on the streets, I solved ‘the problem’ by *constantly* holding a lighted cigarette in the hand he would want to clasp. Instinctively, as it happened many-a-times, he would move to the other side; then, so would my cigarette.
3. Fast forward again. Nearly a quarter century later. Today, I am able to reflect about what embarrassments like the above signified. Now I have begun to fashion the intellectual and conceptual tools needed to interrogate these experiences: not mine alone but those of a culture. What was the nature of wrongness and embarrassment I felt when I ‘discovered’ that linga ‘meant’ penis? Why did I feel embarrassed to hold my friend’s hand? What sense of ‘wrongness’ prevented me from telling him what ‘embarrassed’ me about this simple act of affection between friends? And so on and so forth.
4. Many readers of the debate that has ensued after Rajiv Malhotra’s article are expressing this sense of ‘wrongness’ as well. Probably, most of them do not belong to the ‘Hindu right’ or to the ‘Hindutva’ movement. Nor are they expressing an ironed out, prudish ‘neo-vedantic’ strain, as you put it. Something else is involved.
5. Surely, Jeffrey Kripal, this is the *first* thing you have to explore when you want to ‘understand’ a culture different from your own. You say, in your defence, that you have assembled a thick file of correspondence (both positive and negative) from Indians and that you are ‘sensitive’ to their feelings. This is not an issue about your sensitivity or mine, my friend, but about *cultural sensibilities*. What kind of shock and sense of wrongness does one feel to see Ramakrishna portrayed as a sort of paedophile? (Of course, you do not quite ‘say’ it in these terms; we will have time to look at your nuances later.) You have the answers ready: I know them, so do the readers. Instead of discussing them in the abstract, let us try and interrogate these experiences themselves, and do an exercise in ‘cultural hermeneutics’as it were.
6. Here is the first striking thing: these purported ‘explanations’ *trivialise experiences*. When I ‘found out’ that my mother, my sisters, all women and all men, were *merely worshipping the male penis* it told me the following: (a) that what I was doing was, in fact, ‘worshipping’ the penis; (b) that I was a ‘fool’ to think that I was doing something else other than this. That is to say, not only did it make all hitherto acts of worship look foolish, it also insisted that I was being doubly ‘foolish’ for not knowing this. [Ibid. with respect to claiming that Ganesha’s love of sweets expresses his appetite for oral sex or that his trunk is a limp penis. How foolish is it to cook all those many, many sweet dishes during ‘Ganesha Chaturthi’!]
7. By virtue of this, it ‘transformed’ my experience. What does the transformation consist of? Such purported explanations *re-describe experiences by twisting or distorting them*. Before I went to Europe, holding hands *was not* experienced by me as an expression of homosexuality but now it gets distorted to *become* one after my encounter with the European culture. Same thing with respect to the re-description of linga as penis.
Of course, it is the case that scientific theories ‘correct’ experiences too: we see a stick appearing bent when immersed in water and see the movement of the sun across the horizon. Our scientific theories tell us that neither is true. In such cases, it is important to note that these theories *preserve* our experiences the way they are: in fact, the scientific theories explain to us the *necessity* of such appearances. They do not *distort* them, much less *deny* them.
8. That is what these purported explanations do: *deny our experiences*. Our worship of the linga is *in reality* not a worship of Shiva at all, but a ‘subconcious acknowledgement’ of some ‘repressed’ notion of fertility (or whatever else). Whatever we ‘experience’ is not the said object at all but something else.
9. What happens when your experience is denied by being distorted and trivialised? If you ‘accept’ this story of penis, both erect and limp, can you feel the same sense of ‘reverence’ (or call it what you want) that you did once, remember it too, without feeling a perfect ass? You cannot. You cannot have access to such an experience any more. That is, these purported explanations *deny access to our own experiences*.
10. Here lies the root of the sense of ‘wrongness’ that my brother and many others feel. Who or what is denying access to our own experience? It is not a theory, but a *theorising of someone else’s experience*. Because this point can be easily misunderstood, let me unravel this just a bit.
Much before Freud wrote whatever he did, we had people from other religions coming to India to say the same thing: first from Islam and then from Christianity. They told us (not only them, many Indians in their wake told us that as well!) that we were worshipping the cow, the monkey, the penis, the stone idol and the naked fakir. This is how these people *experienced us and our activities*. Their theologies had prepared them for such an experience much before they came to our part of the world. Of course, they ‘saw’ only what they expected to see.
The descriptions the missionaries provided, the reports of Christian merchants, the interpretations of the Muslim kings, the developments within Christian theology, etc. were the ‘facts’ that Freud sought to understand. (To the extent he believed that he was laying the foundation of a ‘scientific’ theory, to that extent these were the ‘facts’ he was accounting for.) What did he ‘theorise’ then? He theorised upon the *European experience* of other cultures and upon a theological elaboration of these experiences.
Consequently, who or what is denying the access to our experience? The *experience of another culture*. (Or, the ‘theorising of such an experience.’ Though important in its own right, we can safely drop this distinction. Taking it into consideration would make the analysis complex without adding anything of substance.) This lies at the root of the feeling of wrongness: *our experiences are being trivialised, denied, distorted and made inaccessible by someone else’s experience of the world.* Is this justified or is justifiable? Apparently, there is only one way of experiencing the world: the ‘western way’.
11. More interesting points can be brought to light by interrogating the experiences I have talked about. But they are sufficient (the post has become very long already) to raise the following question: What are you trying to ‘understand’ when you use your ‘hermeneutic’ to understand Ramakrishna? How *you* see him? Or how *we* see him? What are you theorising about? *Your experience* or ours?
12. You insist that how your culture experiences the world is also the only possible experience of the world. (Not explicitly, of course. But, as the above ‘analysis’ has shown, that is what you do.) You want to tell us what Ramakrishna’s ‘mysticism’ is *all about* because this is the only way your ‘theories’ allow you to see it. Your theories, your explanations deny us what you would not, as a person, dream of denying to us: that we too have an experience, another one perhaps, but one that is as ‘valid and legitimate’ as any human experience can be.
You end your article with these words: "I at least am ready to laugh again, to exchange gifts, to argue, to apologize, to weep. I always have been." I believe you. But do you know, people from other cultures do so too? We too laugh, exchange gifts, argue, apologise and weep? You know *that* we do it; you assume you know it because that is what *you* do too. But do you know *how* we do any or all of these things? Does it occur to you that we might do them *differently*? Do you know, Jeffrey Kripal, *how we cry* or even why? I wonder.
Friendly greetings
Balu
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