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Rajiv Malhotra interviews Stuart Sovatsky an American scholar and practitioner of Psychology and Hindu traditions on the Wendy Doniger syndrome.

Note: Stuart Sovatsky is an American scholar and practitioner of Psychology and Hindu traditions for the past 40 years. We have known each other for 15 years and worked on many projects together. In fact, he supported my critiques of Wendy Doniger since the early days of that debate and hence he is cited in the book Invading the Sacred as well as my early blogs on the subject. Recently, I interviewed him on the scholarship of Doniger. As a professionally trained Freudian Psychoanalyst among other disciplines, he brings expertise to this debate which it has lacked.

Rajiv: You are a brahmacari-tantrika for a few decades. What is your favorite tantric shloka?

 Stuart: My guru Swami Kripalvanand awakened the rare path of khecari mudra of tantra in me in 1975 that uplifted my sadhana ever since. Here are my favorite shlokas from Jnaneshvar-gita on khecari and the inner union and Thirumular’s Thirumandiram on the necessity of naturally-occurring khecari for any real erotic tantra with a partner:

 A coil of lightning, a flame of fire folded (224)

She [kundalini] cleans the skin down to the skeleton (233)

Old age gets reversed (260)

She…dissolves the five [bodily] elements (291)

…[then] the yogi is known as Khecar [tumescent tongued]

Numbered couplets related to kundalini,

Dnyaneshwari (Jnaneshvari)1, Chapter 6 (1210/2002)

Only Those Who Have Naturally-arising Khecari

Can Resort to Pariyanga [tantric “sex”]

Thirumandiram of Siddhar

Rajiv: Do you see a way in which this tantra perspective from centuries ago can help resolve the turmoil surrounding Wendy Doniger’s usage of psychoanalysis to interpret texts?

Stuart: Yes, the central topic of my own forty years of sadhana, clinical and scholarly research is the absolute misfit of using psychoanalytic-sexology to shed any useful light on tantra-vidya. The fact is that tantra-vidya is so saturated in devotional bhakti and stages of body-psyche maturity like khecari and kundalini. These are far beyond Freud’s so-very-limited, “final stage” of maturity which he quite pointedly named, “the genital personality.”

Rajiv: So, what I call an “invasion of the sacred” is consistent with what you regard asdistortions caused by scholars such as Doniger when they try to psychoanalyze these ancient texts used in sadhana.

Stuart: Yes, India’s culture is so rich in the Krishna-lila imagery of endless charming flirtations and mystical dalliance inclusive of a spiritual-eros state of conscioiusness far beyond the fathoming capabilities of modern man. Sringara Rasa of myriad enjoyments is already present in the collective Hindu-Indian imagination: then what need at all does dharma-vidya have for a psychoanalytic “invigoration” of its traditions? In my opinion: almost none.

Rajiv: Do you have some examples of how psychoanalytic distortions make more problems than they solve?

Stuart: Freudian ideas would make a travesty of khecari mudra, a word which I very, very carefully translate as “lingual-pineal puberty of the Soul identity,” that transforms the entire endocrine chemistry. This transformation results in ecstatic, reverential feelings and electrifying “tumescences” that infuse the inner and outer life. These experiences go way beyond Freud’s reductive psychology of “desire” and its “genital primacy ego.” Nearly a century ago, Freud called yoga “a killing of the instincts.” Later, he pathologized all spiritual experiences by calling these “oceanic feelings” a fearful “regression to the womb.” So the core problem is a clash between Freud and yoga, because Freud sees the yogic higher states as serious mental disorders.

Rajiv: Have there been any significant consequences to this pathologization of meditative states by these psychoanalysts?

Stuart: Unfortunately, yes. I worked with psychologist and psychiatrist colleagues for twenty years to change the American Psychiatric Association diagnostic code book, the DSM-IV. My effort was to differentiate those who seek the “oceanic feeling” via meditation or bhakti longings for union, from those persons with psychiatric disorders. From Freud on, these psychiatrists had lumped meditative states with the severe “Depersonalization – Dissociation Disorders.” Doniger’s decades of Sanskrit scholarship shows that she does not understand how psychoanalysis has a long history of distorting Indian dharma, not shedding light on it.

Rajiv: You are broadening the scope of the Doniger havoc beyond the ivory tower and public drama into the ripple effects on people’s lives.

Stuart: Yes, this is real stuff! This distorting of tantric texts by these psychoanalyzing scholars gives more legitimacy to the errors perpetuated by psychiatry in this area; it harms ordinary people hoping to uplift their lives. The West has Adam and Eve with their “enmity between man and woman” as a core background myth to contend with.

Moreover, Freud’s odd choice of the Oedipus Myth of child-parent sex and hatred, has ruled my profession for a good fifty years. Radhe Krishna on the other hand, is a beautiful idealization of romantic love. I begin many of my marriage therapy sessions by showing couples headed towards divorce, the sandalwood carving of Radhe Krishna lovingly gazing at one another that I have had in my office since 1987. It turns their heads completely around! And this includes Hindu and mixed-marriages in the US.

Rajiv: What about Indian marriages today? Doniger stirred a hornet’s nest with her psychoanalyzing of Indian culture.

Stuart: Your question reminds me of a couples’ workshop I led after one of our conferences in India, which focused on improving communication skills in almost all marriages, Indian and others. But, instead of using the Freudian-shaped psychodynamic “let it rip” idea of marriage counseling that too often breaks couples up, I shared tantricdristhi of opportune moments of gazing at one another (during a moment of admiration, sorrow or gratitude) or nyasa sacred touch to deepen the love between these long-married spouses.

But, once again, the core values of lifelong marriage and family life and any aspirations for a “sacred sexuality” need not and should not get supplanted with Freudian genital-centric preoccupations. A best-selling pop-sexuality author wrote Life is Too Short for Tantric Sex in which he assumes that tantra has no place in today’s fast paced world because it requires maturity. This same erotic-impatience creates the too-hip cultural mood that leads to many unnecessary divorces and broken homes of the so-called, “liberated” modern world. Indian marriages can and indeed should instead turn to the lifelong-developing paths of tantra. (See this 1982 study for more on “psychotherapy in India” )

Rajiv: So, contemporary Indian therapists, rather than blindly aping Western therapy models, can draw from tantra, grihastha and bhakti teachings.

Stuart: Exactly. Indian therapists should continue to add dharma perspectives where garbha “womb-as-holy-Creatrix” and bindu-seminal-milk are considered as being more precious than gold. They should invoke a Shiva-Shakti dynamic appreciation of gender-interactivities that imbue the cosmos with primordial bliss and endless creativity. The Freudian pedestaling of the “purely bio-regulatory” genital orgasm in its theory of “Final Erotic Truth” seems rather limited, not to say, Eurocentric, and perhaps comical, and should be discarded by the Indian therapist. When the pineal and hypothalamus begin to secrete their ecstatic rasas, then one knows for sure what I mean here.

Rajiv: So, even the eroticism of so-called “modern sex” falls short of tantra? And what about the yogi’s path?

Stuart: Yes, when we add in the inner marriage, the saintly-ecstatic manifestations of brahmacarya of the yogis and the Buddha’s bliss (that is completely distorted when translated with the baggage-laden term, “celibacy,”), there can be only one conclusion: Psychoanalysis is obviously helpful to its true-believers, but is incapable of non-reductively dealing with tantra-vidya. In this regard, Invading the Sacred should be required reading for all scholars of tantric texts. My own book, Advanced Spiritual Intimacy is a 300-page discussion and protection of this holy of holies to uplift lives, families and marriages beyond the psychoanalytic “liberation,” worldwide.

Rajiv: We aren’t alone in critiquing the limitations of psychoanalysis. Who else did you find that has published such warnings?

Stuart: As early as 1955, Herbert Marcuse warned in Eros and Civilization of the de-spiritualizing effects of this exclusively “bio-sensate” psychoanalytic theory and called for a “re-spiritualization of the instincts.” Jung, of course, was excommunicated from the Freudian fold for asserting that the life energy (prana) should be seen as spiritual in nature. And earlier still in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World envisioned a futuristic and coldly mechanistic “sex-centric” world that has become only too real, such that even its more liberal proponents now speak out that aspects of “modern sex” may have gone too far.” [1]

 In his 1980 TheHistory of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Michel Foucault wrote that an entirely new category which he termed, ars eroticas (profound pleasures of the body and soul) was needed to even approach an accurate understanding of the erotic wisdom of India (as well as that of Greco-Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic cultures).

Rajiv: Jung and Huxley were, of course very much basing their ideas on what they learned from Hinduism. Foucault is legendary in today’s academia. What did he say about protecting ars erotica wisdom from this “psychoanalytic gaze?”

Stuart: Foucault was adamant that the world’s ars eroticas be kept completely free from psychoanalytically-derived sexology which he saw, not as giving the world “final erotic truths” but instead as entangled from its very beginning in an ideological battle to “liberate” Europeans from the Judeo-Christian moralistic indictments of a “primordial fallenness” and an “originally-sinful flesh”. These are the cornerstones on which Western minds and bodies have been molded for millennia and the singular cause for their fear.

Rajiv: In other words, this Freudian project is violent when applied to non-Westerners who do not suffer from the Adam-Eve original sin complex to begin with. What about the psychoanalytically-trained, early anthropologists who studied the non-Western “other?”

Stuart: The early anthropologists (Mead, Benedict, Malinowski) who gazed upon “other” cultures through the psychoanalytic lens, as if from superior heights, came to similar conclusions: this lens is not a “clear, illuminating magnifying glass,” but a funhouse mirror of Oedipal distortion and “hyper-repressive desublimation” (Marcuse’s term) more likely to distort than to reveal its “object” of study.

Rajiv: Sudhir Kakar, who delivered the keynote address at the World Spirituality Congress of which you and I were co-conveners in Delhi in 2008, made an interesting comment defending Wendy Doniger. He said, “Psychoanalysis could very well have been Indian, and Freud a tantrikguru”[2]

What do you make of that?

Stuart: A freeing-up of people from their anxieties and facilitating their longings for love and pleasure is a wonderful thing. Had Freud actually been a highly devotional and mature tantricguru, learned in the ars erotica of India instead of only devising his “scientia sexualis” altogether entangled with Judeo-Christian teachings on “sin” and “fallenness,” Doniger could have used this ars erotica lens in her Indological studies.

With this very different and respectful lens, she could have helped to reveal these tantric depths, for the good of all. Indeed, in this fantasied, ars erotica “tantric Freud,” The Hindus: An Alternative History would now itself have an “alternate history.” Such a (hypothetical) book would be appreciated by all concerned.

Rajiv: Should Indian Psychology seek to free up certain sectors of the Indian populace—as Doniger and Kakar also point to?

Stuart: Here I strongly warn against imitating the Western “sexual liberation.” But I enthusiastically encourage a reinvigoration of India’s indigenous ars erotica energies, its love of the lifelong intact marriage and family lineages and, not the least, its reverential eroticism such as Thirumular notes in my opening quote to this article. Jnaneshvar echoes this further:

Attaining this [tantric khecari] state is a miracle (296)

Shakti and Shiva become one

and in their union, everything…gets dissolved (306)

Further, there is nothing more to experience beyond [this]

Hence, let me stop speaking of it

For it is useless to talk (318)

Dnyaneshwari (Jnaneshvari) Chapter 6 (1210/2002)

Selected readings and references in next page.

 Selected Readings

• Dnyaneshwari Once Again. Translated by Radhikananda, D. Saraswati. Pune, India: Swami   Radhikanand. 2002.
• Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality. V 1. Trans by Hurley, R. New York: Vintage, 1980.
• Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Freud Reader, Edited by Gray, P. New York:   W. W. Norton, [1920] 1989.
• Huxley, A. Brave New World. New York: Perennial, [1932] 1998.
• Kripalvanand, S. Revealing the Secret: A Commentary on the Hathayogapradipika by Yogiraj Atmarama.. Edited by Berner, H. C. 1/34 Imlay Street, Merimbula, N.S.W. 2548, Australia, 2002. http://www.naturalmeditation.net/Design/meditation1RS.html
• Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1955. Boston: Beacon, 1974.
• Sovatsky, S. Advanced Spiritual Intimacy. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, June, 2014. http://tinyurl.com/kpadmzg
• From Foucault’s Ars Erotica to the Next Wave of Inwardly Inspired Yoga and “Tantric     Sex.” In Journal of Holistic Psychology. Berkeley, CA, 2013.
• Thirumoolar, S. Thirumandiram, A Classic of Yoga and Tantra. Vol. 1-3. Translated by Nataranjan, D. Montreal: Babaji Kriya Yoga. 1993.

Footnotes

[1] See Cindy Gallop’s “Make Love Not Porn” TED Talk http://blog.ted.com/2009/12/02/cindy_gallop_ma/ one of the “most talked about presentations” at the 2009 TED conference, on the negative effects of hardcore porn having become a main source of male sexual “education.”

[2]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/all-that-matters/Psychoanalysis-could-have-Indian-and-Freud-a-tantrik-guru/articleshow/30494766.cms

A new humanities discourse around India has to be created from scratch. The existing one, is beyond repair. 

Recently, Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley was attacked in a petition by US-based academicians led by scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock. Over 80 per cent of the signatures were by Indian ‘sepoys’ joining the bandwagon. As a rejoinder, there emerged two counter petitions supporting Modi, each signed by much larger numbers of US-based academicians, who were also mostly Indians. This clash between the two camps of Indians is important to analyse because they represent two entirely different constituencies.

The anti-Modi petitioners proudly characterised themselves as faculty members of South Asian Studies, the new term for what was known as Indology in the colonial era. Stated simply, this is the study of India’s faiths, culture, history, politics, journalism, social sciences and related areas. On the other hand, the pro-Modi academicians were mostly from science, technology, business, medicine, law and other technical fields. I will refer to the former group as ‘South Asianists’ and the latter as ‘technocrats’. It is not a mere coincidence that these opposing camps are shaped by the disciplines they work in. It is important to understand the reasons for this.

South Asianists learn about India using Western-developed frameworks, vocabularies and theories that have Western cultural biases built into them. This hegemonic discourse on India subverts Indian native categories and the Vedic worldview, characterizing Indian civilization as a human rights nightmare whose solutions must come from Western thought. In other words, the South Asian Studies lens uses the West’s past for interpreting India’s present. The solution offered is that India’s desirable future is to mimic the West’s present society. The field is driven by the consensus of Ivy League gatekeepers, who can act like a sort of mafia to make or break an individual’s academic career.

The technocrats are not burdened by such culturally-determined programming, at least not to the same extent. Their disciplines are based more on empirical data and logic. In other words, it is possible to argue one’s controversial thesis in Chemistry, for instance, by demonstrating laboratory evidence that is verifiable. But it is not as easy to prove a theory of human rights violations without dealing with cultural biases of various kinds. The humanities are inherently more subjective, and hence vulnerable to power plays.

Another difference is that the technocrats tend to be more logical. A typical batch of students entering college in the technocrat fields tends to have higher scores in mathematics (i.e. logical mind set) than their counterparts entering humanities and social sciences. Add to this that India’s technocrats are now super confident, knowing that they are second to none in their fields. They have achieved global success based entirely on merit. Therefore, they see no reason to bow down to Westerners when it comes to interpreting their Hindu heritage. This latter quality is what differentiates me from the Indian scholars of Hinduism Studies:  I owned companies where I employed many Americans, and a large number of managers from many nations reported to me. I find that Indians lacking such a background of managing Western professionals with authority are afraid to take them on, because of their deep inferiority complexes.

In other words, our colonized mentality can be isolated largely to our professionals in the humanities and social sciences. We have a clash between Indians in the two camps of humanities and technical fields. The technocrats tend to be patriotic and the humanities/social sciences scholars tend to be Hinduphobic and apologetic. The Indian media, in turn, are largely educated in fields with deep influences from South Asian Studies.

I am not against Western Ivy Leagues in general. But I oppose their stranglehold over South Asia Studies in particular. This is equivalent to the power of colonial era Indology that was headquartered in places like Oxford.

Until recently, the South Asianists and their mainstream media supporters have had a virtual monopoly as the voice and face of India. But in recent years, a counter voice has emerged that cannot be dismissed. Only a couple of months ago, I was personally the target of a massive attack demanding that my books be withdrawn (ironically by the same South Asianists who oppose such bans when their own books get targeted). While it garnered 240 signatures, a counter petition initiated by Madhu Kishwar that supported me got well over 10,000 signatures. Every such victory is another nail in the coffin of the Hinduphobic forces.

The clash is also over who has the adhikara (authority) to speak for our heritage. South Asianists close ranks to mock at the voices that are not certified by their institutions. But our tradition has always valued experience over book knowledge. Our history is filled with exemplars who did not get certified by any institutions resembling the Western Ivy Leagues.

With this background, I wish to discuss the right and wrong approaches to address this problem. In the 1990s, my Infinity Foundation pioneered the funding of Western academicians in order to improve the portrayal of Indian civilization. It took over a decade and several millions of my hard earned dollars before I understood the academic game. Gradually, I developed my insights into how insidious the South Asian Studies machinery is. I witnessed first-hand the complex funding mechanisms, intellectual and political networks, and interlocking of agendas across government, private foundations, church and academics. That is when I concluded that planting chairs in such a giant machinery was like feeding a crocodile hoping to turn it into a friend.

I am now an ardent critic of Indian movements that seek to establish Hinduism-related chairs within Western academe. Such projects are premature and counterproductive, driven naively by glamour and prestige.

What we need first and foremost is a new corpus of content and discourse, one that would challenge the prevailing discourse on Indian civilization. Such provocative discourses simply cannot be produced from within the walls of the very same fortress that has to be exposed and dismantled. It cannot be achieved as an ‘inside job’ because that would entail a greater degree of personal risk and brilliance than what is available among our academically certified scholars today. It would also need a large critical mass of like-minded scholars in one place, with political clout and will. It is a sheer waste to develop a random scattering of chairs here and there, occupied by individuals craving personal (petty) career success.

Given the cost of setting up one academic chair in USA (approximately $4 million), it would be far better to use that money and set up a whole department of scholars in India with the concentrated goal to develop a new discourse on some specific topic. As an example, a centre to develop a Hindu perspective on women’s status and role could be tasked to produce game changing discourse on that theme. This would then be disseminated worldwide through multiple channels. Several such theme-specific centres ought to be established in India. This is how China has taken control of the way China is being studied worldwide. They did not outsource the knowledge production about their civilization the way Indians have.

Such an approach would nurture the ‘Make in India’ spirit in the field of South Asian Studies. It would keep the adhikara and world class expertise within Indian institutions. The new genre of discourse would also be intimately connected with our traditional mathas and peethams, rather than with the likes of Ford Foundation, Western churches and think tanks and their paradigms. This would de-colonize our youth and media once they realize that we are the best experts on who we are as a people.

Rajiv Malhotra responds to Andrew Nicholson’s charges of plagiarism. See this post for more context.

Dear Andrew Nicholson,

I am glad you have entered the battlefield so we can get into some substantial matters. Since this is an extended article, I want to go about it systematically, starting with the following clarifications: I used your work with explicit references 30 times in Indra’s Net, hence there was no ill-intention. But I am not blindly obeying you, contrary to your experience with servile Indians; hence your angst that I am ‘distorting’ your ideas is unfounded. My writing relating to your work can be seen as twofold:

• Where I cite your work.
• Where it is my own perspectives.

You are entitled to attribution for ‘A’ but not for ‘B’.

Regarding ‘A’, I am prepared to clarify these attributions further where necessary. But, as we shall see below, I am going to actually remove many of the references to your work simply because you have borrowed Indian sources and called it your own original ideas. I am better off going to my tradition’s sources rather than via a westerner whose ego claims to have become the primary source. This Western hijacking of adhikara is what the elaborate Western defined, and controlled system of peer-reviews and academic gatekeepers is meant to achieve, i.e. turning knowledge into the control of western ‘experts’ and their Indian sepoys.

Regarding ‘B’, let me illustrate by using the very same example you cite as my ‘distortion’ of ‘your’ work. You wrote in your book that Vijnanabhikshu unified multiple paths into harmony. This is correct. That comes under ‘A’. But I add to this my own statement that Vivekananda does the same thing also. This is important to my thesis that Vivekananda built on top a long Indian tradition, and not by copying ideas from the West as claimed by the neo-Hinduism camp. This is ‘B’ – my idea. Your complaint is that by asserting this about Vivekananda, I am distorting you. You fail to distinguish between ‘A’ and ‘B’ because you assume that you are the new adhikari on the subject and anything in addition to or instead of your views amounts to a distortion. I see this as a blatant sign of colonialism.

You are carrying the white man’s burden to educate the Indians even about our own culture. Please note that Vijnanabhikshu is an important person in our heritage and there are numerous commentaries on his work. Yours is not any original account of him. You got this material from secondary sources. But by complying by the mechanical rules of ‘scholarship’ you got it into western peer-reviewed publications, and hence you claim to be the new adhikari. Furthermore, nor was Vijnanabhikshu the first to unify Hinduism. I have sources of the unification of various Hindu systems that go back much further in time and you do not seem to be aware of these. My point is that Vivekananda stands on the shoulders of many prior giants within our own tradition. I cited you to the extent it worked for me but did not stop there; I took it further than you have.

Sir Williams Jones started this claim to be the ‘new pandit’ in the late 1700s when he was a top official for the East India Company. Today that enterprise is dead in one sense, but has revived and reincarnated into new forms. You do not seem conscious that your position is not only arrogant but also puts in the parampara of Sir William Jones.

I re-examined your book lately and find too many ideas taken from Indian texts and experts that are cleverly reworded in fancy English. Let’s take a look at bhedabheda Vedanta. My teacher of this system has been Dr Satya Narayan Das, head of the Jiva Institute in Vrindavan, who spent considerable time with me while I was writing Being Different where I first explained my understanding. He is considered one of the foremost adhikaris today in this system, and adhikar in our tradition is not a matter of producing publications (with lots of quotation marks and obedience to other rules), but mainly requires actual experience of what is being said. Without the inner experience of the states of consciousness being discussed, it is at best secondary knowledge.

This experience is not a simple matter for western Indologists who spend hours going through other western interpretations and Sanskrit dictionaries. By complying with the procedural requirements of citations, etc. they suddenly claim to have become the new original and primary source. This system needs to be questioned, and I have written extensively about the syndrome I call the peer-review cartel. (You can read my debate on this a decade back on Rediff.com)

Therefore, I intend to delete most of the references to your book for bhedabheda, because it is clear that you lack the adhikara as per our system. I do wish to credit you in some respects but nowhere close to what you demand. It amazes me that there is nothing original in your explanation of bhedabheda, as your knowledge is obtained from reading Indian texts, western interpretations and sitting at the feet of Indian pandits to learn. Unfortunately, western Indology does not recognize what the pandit teaches you as his work, because it is oral and not written in a peer-reviewed (hence western supervised) publication. So the whole protocol of claiming something to belong to you as the author is a sort of technology of thievery. Fortunately, Indians have started claiming back their bio-heritage such as Ayurveda from such thievery that is being done by westerners claiming that Indians never filed patents as per western rules. It is time to also claim our intellectual heritage back.

Indian pandits know their materials by heart and it is orally transmitted, and they do not have the ego to claim authorship. They are very humble and hence get taken for a ride. They are duped by any ‘good cop’ from the west who comes in Indian dress to talk to them nicely and bamboozle them into believing that he is a friend of the tradition. Westerners can pick their brains freely, without which you would not be able to learn; but then you go back to the West and have the arrogance to call it yours. As per your Western protocol, you thank the pandit in some preface once, and feel that it suffices. But if you want that my 30 references to your work fall short then by the same token, please note that you, too, ought to be acknowledging your pandits and Indian textual sources in every single paragraph, if not every sentence.

Only that portion of your work which you feel gives truly original thoughts can become yours and make you its adhikari. If you would be kind enough to send us a list of what you consider original thoughts in your book, and that I have used these because they are not found anywhere else except in your work, then I would gladly bow to you and thank you profusely. But whatever portions (which is almost the entire book) are merely your rehashing the Indian materials in fancy English, over those I do not grant you the status of ‘ownership’.

Poetry and art are different than this. There, the originality is not in the substance but in the presentation. However, you are writing analytical works and there the originality would have to be established in the content and substance of the work, and not based on the ‘form’ of language gymnastics. Much of Western Indology is a factory to copy-paste and distort Indian materials, and process it through an industrial machinery called ‘academic knowledge production’ controlled by the Western institutions, journals, funding agencies, archives, gatekeepers, standards and rules, and so forth. Its requirements of idiom, the toolkit of theories to be used, language standards, etc., are such that 99% of the Indian traditional pandits (the true keepers of adhikara) are unable to participate.

My forthcoming book examines these mechanisms of exclusion in detail, which is why the war against it has started already. (This attack by you out of the blue comes 1.5 years after Indra’s Net, not as some remarkable coincidence, but because your peers are rattled at the thought that they are about to be exposed as the continuation of Sir William Jones.)

I challenge you to disclose all your Indian teachers – these are not ‘native informants’ as your system calls them but the true adhikaris of our heritage, and whose services you purchase to be able to do your work. What frightens your colleagues is that my book will educate our traditional pandits about your methods of exploitation. Let me frighten you even further: All my books are in the process of being translated into Sanskrit, specifically for the purpose of education of young pandits about the issues I raise. So my target reader is not folks like you, but our own pandits and others who claim this as their heritage and practice. I am especially interested in those who did not sell out to western sponsorship, foreign tours, etc. These will comprise my home team. I am only doing a humble service to inform them about the issues and remedies.

This is why more and more Indologists will be asked to come out of the woodwork and defend the old fortress. In the process they will also expose themselves. But that fortress is crumbling and my work merely accelerates the process of India once again becoming the center of Indology and not a subservient satellite of it.

Indian authorities should demand the return back to India of the 500,000 Sanskrit manuscripts that are lying outside India in various Western universities, archives, museums and private collections. These are our heritage just like old statues and should be returned since they were mostly taken by theft during colonial rule. I consider these more precious than the Kohinoor diamond. Right now, it is western Indologists like you get to define ‘critical editions’ of our texts and become the primary source and adhikari. This must end and I have been fighting this for 25 years. Now we finally some serious traction, thanks in part to people like you who attack and give me a chance to make my case more openly. Please note that what happens to me personally is irrelevant, and I am glad if attacks like this awaken more people.

My response to you is nothing personal, but serves to educate my own people. You are a glaring example of what I have called a ‘good cop’, i.e., one who goes about showing love/romance for the tradition. But at some time his true colors come out when he does what I have called a U-Turn. You would make an interesting case study of the U-Turn syndrome, for which we ought to examine where you got your materials from, and to what extent you failed to acknowledge Indian sources, both written and oral, with the same weight with which you expect me to do so.

To suit their agendas, westerners have pronounced theories like ‘nobody owns culture’ and ‘the author is dead’. Our naïve pandits are too innocent to know any of this, but I wish to inform them. The claim that nobody owns a culture makes it freely available to whosoever wants to do whatever they choose to do with it. Hence, Indian cultural capital is being digested right and left. The contradiction is that the west is ultra-protective about its ‘intellectual property’ and your obsession to squeeze more references/citations out of me illustrates this.

By declaring that the ‘author is dead’, the West says the contexts and intentions of the rishis are irrelevant. They are dead and nobody knows what they meant. So ‘we’ (the Western Indologists) must interpret Indian texts by bringing our own theories and lenses. This has been the basis for the Freudian psychoanalysis of Hinduism, and all other Western theories being applied. If the original author is dead, the material does not belong to anyone. It is public domain. So whoever has more funding and powerful machinery will determine how it is interpreted. However, the same ‘nobody owns culture’ principle does not apply to what you consider as your ‘property’. Indians need to wake up to this game.

They need to stop funding Western Indology and develop Indian Indology. The ‘make in India’ ideal should also be applied here. Expecting Indologists to change because you dole out money is like feeding a crocodile expecting him to become your friend. For the first 10 years of my work in this area, I gave away a substantial portion of my life savings in an unsuccessful attempt to fund and change the Indologists’ hearts. But they play the good/bad cop game with skill. I learned a great deal because I was acknowledged as the largest funder of western Indology at one time. Then I stopped and became their harshest critic. I have on file a lot of grant correspondence with Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, to name just a few. Naturally, they worry that I am exposing their secrets. One day I will get someone to organize all that material into a publication.

Before I close, I wish to address one of your points – that I lack the competence in Sanskrit to be able to do my work. I will address in a separate article my background and experience and how it fits the specific type of work I have focused on. But meanwhile let me inform you that, just as Western Indologists work in teams of collaborators consisting of specialists in different domains, so also I have been building my team of collaborators whose combined strength on Indology far exceeds anything you can possibly match. I bring a specialty they lack, and vice versa. But I am unable to get into further details at this time.

Welcome to the battlefield! I hope we can avoid personal acrimony and deal with the multiple issues I have raised above in a professional and mutually respectful manner. I give back as hard as I get. (Dr. Swamy’s slogan, being acknowledged without need for quotation marks…)

Dramatic scandals routinely fill India’s media headlines about some poor victim from a remote area being exploited by upper strata Delhi elites. Yet there is no investigative journalism to uncover the inconvenient facts about certain NGOs that operate what amounts to a human trafficking industry. One reason for this conspiracy of silence is that the traffickers are linked with some politically connected NGOs that make noises in the metros ostensibly on behalf of the victims. In reality the noise made serves to cover up the sinister role of NGOs in this industry that brings Christianity to the remote villages in exchange for maids to Delhi.

The elaborate scheme works as follows. Christian missionaries in adivasi (indigenous, “tribal”) areas offer poor families an inducement that is hard to resist: If the family converts to Christianity, one of its young daughters will be sent as a domestic servant to Delhi or another metro.

The affiliated “agencies” in the metros collect placement fees up to Rs 50,000 per maid from the household that hires them. In between the point of “recruitment” and the point of placement there are intermediaries that “sell”, transfer and move the young, vulnerable person through the supply chain. Money is exchanged at each stage.

The agencies keep relocating the same girl from one employer to another every few months in order to collect their placement fee repeatedly. This disruption adds to the trauma of the young girl. The agency becomes, by default, her only hope of security, and in the process she becomes even more vulnerable to the agency’s exploitation. Delhi alone is estimated to have several thousands of such girls being brought every year.

The cultural gap between India’s adivasis and its metro elites is larger in many ways than the gap between people living in Delhi and New York. The victim often gets duped into thinking that she is headed for the good life of an Indian metro, and her parents are often hand in glove in selling her into such a scheme. The money given to the parents is a “down payment” to convert them, their daughter’s placement as maid being part of the transaction. Many churches also provide safe transfer of the girl’s monthly salary back to her parents, with a certain “donation” charged by the church for its services. All this is a package deal for “being saved”.

This end-to-end system functions like the old slave trade from Africa to America and other continents — in which the church had also played a major role. Today’s racket hides behind the mask of helping the downtrodden by finding them employment in a faraway place. By no means do I wish to imply that all abuses of maids from villages are the result of this system, but that fact that such a system exists outside the bounds of investigative scrutiny is noteworthy.

In the most recent episode of this tragedy, a woman executive working for a French multinational in Delhi has been arrested on charges of committing atrocities against a girl from the Santhal tribe of Jharkhand state. The maid comes from Sahibgunj, one of India’s poorest districts. The media is having a field day sensationalising this as child labour, even after the police confirmed that documents in her village show her to be over the age of 18. The girl had worked for this executive for only 3 months, prior to which she had worked in numerous other households in Delhi since age 15. So the child labour stage of her exploitation was done under several previous employers. But there is no investigation of the previous employers. Why?

The reason for authorities not pursuing the earlier employers is that the girl is a Christian convert from a very poor family; and uncovering the entire chain of events and parties involved would expose the nexus of the Jharkhand church, the political parties that use these poor folks as their vote bank, and various NGOs involved in so-called “human rights” programs. The placement agency in Delhi is run by a Christian woman with likely links to the Jharkhand Church. The media sensationalises the matter as an isolated, localised episode when in fact it deserves to be investigated as a system of mafia-like underground network.

Brinda Karat, the rabid voice of the Communist Party of India, swung into rapid action targeting the maid’s employer, but not wanting a broader inquiry into the supply network that originates in the remote villages where her party seeks support from the church and NGOs.

Many other political leaders also saw opportunity in this scandal to show support for dalit communities whose votes can swing elections. These remote villages are also infested with Maoists seeking to topple the Indian state. The political stakes are high and NGOs compete to prove their worth by claiming to champion the plight of the poor. The same NGOs also raise funds under various “noble” pretexts.

The media ought to act more responsibly than selling us Bollywood-style action drama. To expose the large criminal networks and attack the roots of the problem, they should emphasize some systemic changes. First and foremost, it should be declared illegal to offer employment or other material inducements for religious conversion of poor and vulnerable persons. In particular, the church, parents and agencies that are involved in peddling the labor of a person under age 18 should be prosecuted. This is the nexus where the focus of prosecution should be targeted when incidents of abuse are discovered.

At the same time, one should recognise the legitimate need for domestic servants in Indian metros. To serve this demand, agencies should have to be certified periodically that they are in compliance with all laws. This must include transparency of disclosure of the full details concerning every employee and employer served. There must be a mechanism by which the legal age of a potential maid can be formally ascertained and the agency must bear this burden prior to offering her as a candidate. All commissions and salary payments must be legalised.

The media must start educating the metro employers about the laws concerning minimum wages and others aspects. Right now most Delhi households lack such awareness, as the media has focused on sensationalism without its shouldering social responsibility or due diligence.

There are also many instances of exploitation in the reverse direction that should be noted: Elderly persons in Delhi are too often being criminally attacked by their domestic servants who threaten legal action with the help of NGOs, and thereby prevent the crime from being reported. I know of cases where a youth gang has repeatedly burglarised the house of an elderly woman living alone. The police have been reluctant to file charges because of the threat by NGOs that these youth criminals are protected as “minors”. This means tougher juvenile crime laws need to be enacted and enforced.

I have anticipated such NGO-backed crimes within India since the 1990s when I first became aware of foreign nexuses intervening in India’s so-called tribal areas. It was a Harvard Roundtable Conference on Indology sponsored by Infinity foundation where I found that Western scholars had become very interested in Indian communities belonging to the “Munda” family of languages. The thesis formulated was that the Munda people were the only indigenous peoples of India. They were first invaded by the “foreign Dravidians” coming from the Middle East, and later on both the Munda and the Dravidians got invaded by the “foreign Aryans”. Thus, Indians were classified into layers with the intention of empowering one group against the others. In my earlier book, Breaking India, I mention some important US based interventions through this type of anthropology and linguistics work.

The Santhal community where the maid in the latest scandal comes from is one of the largest communities in what is called India’s “tribal belt”. Most anthropological studies on them were done by Christian missionaries since British times. The colonial-evangelical lens used was the same as for other non-Christian peoples that were encountered outside Europe, and many of its prejudices have become accepted by modern Indians. The “tribals” are considered “pagans” because they believe in “animism”, meaning that they consider all of nature as inhabited with divine spirit. (Ironically, the latest trend among Western thinkers is to appropriate these very ideas into Judeo-Christianity, using fancy new terms like “panentheism” and “immanence” after studying Hindu philosophy on which such ideas are based.) These villages have been a hotbed for missionary activities for the past few centuries, and this intensified in 1914 when the first complete translation of the Bible into the Santali language was finished by a Norwegian missionary.

Clearly, the battle for fragmenting Indians has entered a new phase. “Tribal” Indians will be increasingly exploited in various ways in the guise of bringing them human rights. The media’s framing of such episodes as “secular” crimes of an isolated kind is a shallow and inadequate treatment of what is much deeper and multilayered. This issue has far reaching implications.

Published: October 15, 2013