Articles by Rajiv

India breathes through her multiplicity, not her fragmenting voices.

There is a buzz about India becoming a superpower. But are superpowers confused about national identity or inviting others to solve their civilization’s “backwardness”? Does a superpower allow foreign nexuses to co-opt its citizens as agents? India graciously hosts foreign nexuses that treat it as a collection of separate parts. Is superpowerdom delusional?

The Mumbai massacre painfully exposes flaws in our national character, the central one being the absence of a definitive, purpose-filled identity. Who are “we” whose interests are represented, internally and internationally? How should Indianness be defined? Where is the Indianness that transcends narrow identities and vested interests, one that is worth sacrificing for? Is it in the popular culture of Bollywood and cricket? Or is it deeper? The national identity project is at once urgent and compelling.

The need for national identity 

In their pursuit of personal goals, Indians are intensely competitive. However, we lack consensus on a shared national essence, so there is no deep psychological bond between citizens and nations. National identity is to a nation’s well-being what the immune system is to the body’s health. The over-stressed body succumbs to external and internal threats, and eventually death, as its immunity weakens. Similarly, a nation stressed by a vacuum of identity, multiple conflicting identities, or outright confusion can break up. Just as the body’s immune system needs constant rejuvenation, a nation also needs a positive collective psyche for political cohesion.

Major nations deliberately pursue nation-building through devices such as shared myths, history, heroes, religion, ideology, language, and symbolism. Despite internal dissent, Americans have deep pride in their heritage and have constructed awe-inspiring monuments to their founding fathers and heroic wars. Where are Delhi’s monuments honouring the wars of 1857 or 1971, Shivaji, the Vijayanagar Empire, Ashoka, or the peaceful spread of Indian civilisation across Asia for a millennium? Where are the museums that showcase India’s special place in the world?

Forces that fragment 

Voices of fragmentation drive India’s internal politics — from Raj Thackeray to M Karunanidhi to Mamata Banerjee to the Quota Raj to the agents of foreign proselytising.

While social injustice demands effective cures in India and elsewhere, proper treatments do not follow faulty diagnoses. Since colonial times, influential scholars have propagated that there is no such thing as Indian civilization. India was “civilised” by successive waves of invaders. The quest for Indianness is futile since India was never a nation. The noted historian Romila Thapar concludes that India’s pluralism has no essence. Like a doughnut, the center is void; only the peripheries have identity.

Such thinking infects the Indian elite. Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju, citing western historians, asserts that the Munda tribes are the only true natives and that 95 percent of Indians are immigrants; that all so-called Aryan and Dravidian classical languages are foreign, ruling out anything as pan-Indian in our antiquity; and that worthwhile Indian civilisation begins with Akbar, “the greatest ruler the world has ever seen.”

This accelerating crescendo, portraying India as an inherently artificial, oppressive nation, is directed by Western academics advocating Western intervention to bring human rights. It is supported by private foundations, churches and the US government and promotes fragmentation by bolstering regional identities, “backward” castes, and religious minorities. Sadly, our people, such as many activists and the westernised upper class, have internalised India’s “oppression of minorities.” The human catastrophe that would envelope diverse groups — especially the weakest — in the aftermath of India’s break-up is blithely ignored.

Beyond tolerance and assimilation

Critics worry that national identity promotes fascism. But while many civilisations have used identity for conquest, my vision of Indianness is driven by mutual respect. We respect others who are different, provided the other reciprocates with respect towards us, in rhetoric and in action. The religious “tolerance” of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is a patronising accommodation; it puts up with others’ differences without respecting their right to be different. In contrast, Indian civilisation embraces differences reciprocally.

Movements that eradicate differences span the ideological spectrum. Some religions claim mandates from God to convert the religiously different. Although the European Enlightenment project dispensed with God, it enabled the erasing of ethnic diversity through the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of African Americans. Asians were luckier because they could become “less different” via colonisation.

Today, many Indians erase their distinctiveness by glamorising white identity as the gold standard. Skin lighteners are literal whiteners. Media and pop culture incorporate white aesthetics, body language and attire for social status, careers and marriage. The venerable “namaste” is becoming a marker of the older generations and the servants. Pop Hindu gurus peddle the “everything is the same” mumbojumbo, ignoring even the distinctions between the dharmic and the un-dharmic. Intellectuals adopt white categories of discourse as “universal”.

Differences eradicating ideologies are hegemonic. Either you (i) assimilate, (ii) oppose and suffer, or (iii) get contained and marginalised.

But Indian philosophy is built on celebrating diversity — in trees, flowers, matter, human bodies, minds, languages and cultures, spiritualities and traditions — and does not see it as a problem to be dealt with.

All social groups manifest an affinity for in-group relations, but in the ideal Indian ethos, in-group affinity is without external aggression. Before colonial social engineering, traditional Indian castes were fluid, informal containers of identities, interwoven with one another, and not frozen hierarchically. This applied to Muslims, Christians and Hindus. Each caste had its distinct norms and was respected by others. My India is a web of thousands of castes encapsulating diverse genes and memes. This ideal is the exact opposite of fascist ethnocentrism.

Diversity, yes; fragmentation, no

The socially mobile castes that had preserved India’s diversity were frozen into castes to serve the British divide-and-rule. Independent India adopted caste identities to allocate quotas instead of safeguarding individual rights. Regional vote-banking entrepreneurs captured India’s political fragments when the Congress party failed to integrate a vast mishmash of subidentities. Now, national interests are casually disregarded for fear of offending these fragments.

Globalisation has opened the floodgates for minority leaders to tie up with Western churches and NGOs, Saudis, Chinese and just about anyone wanting to carve out a slice of the Indian elephant. Such minorities include the Nagas, now serving as a foreign subsidiary of the Texas Southern Baptist Church; Tamils who first got Dravidianised and are now being Christianised through identity engineering; Maoists in over 30 per cent of India’s districts; and Saudi-funded Pan-Islamists expanding across India. These fragmented identities weaken Indianness due to their loyalty to foreign alliances. The leaders depend on foreign headquarters for ideological and financial support.

Such groups are no longer minorities, but are agents of dominant world majorities. They are franchisees of the global nexuses they serve. They are adversaries of the Indian identity formation. Do they truly help India’s underclasses? These global nexuses have a disappointing track record of solving problems in countries where they have operated for generations, including Latin America, the Philippines and Africa, where most natives have become converted. The imported religion has failed to bring human rights and has often exacerbated problems. Yet, Indian middlemen have mastered the art of begging foreign patronage in exchange for selling the souls of fellow Indians.

Towards an Indian identity

Hindutva is a modern political response lacking the elasticity to be a pan-Indian identity. Other popular ideas are equally shallow, such as the Indianness defined by Bollywood and cricket. Ideals like “secular democracy” and “development” do not make a distinct national identity. It is fashionable to blend pop culture with European ideologies and pass it off as Indianness. Such blends cannot bind a complex India together against fissiparous casteism and regionalism coming in the orbits of Islamist jihad and evangelical Christianity.

Indianness must override fragmented identities, no matter how large the vote bank or how powerful the foreign sponsor. Gandhi articulated a grand narrative for India. Tagore and Aurobindo saw continuity in Indian civilization. Nehru had a national vision, which Indira Gandhi modified and defended fiercely. The Ashokan, Chola, and Maratha empires had well-defined narratives, each with an idea of India.

Debating Indianness fearlessly and fairly

A robust Indianness must become the context in which serious issues are debated. Everyone should be able to participate — be it Advani or Sonia, the Imam of Jama Masjid or Hindu gurus, Thackeray or the underworld — in a free and fair debate on Indianness, and no one should be exempt from criticism.

But the Indian intellectual mafia, which built careers by importing and franchising foreign doctrines, suppresses debate outside its framework and brands honest attempts at opposing them as fascism. I offer a few examples.

A few years before 9/11, the Princeton-based Infinity Foundation proposed a prestigious Delhi-based centre to research the Taliban and their impact on India. The centre’s intellectuals pronounced the hypothesis an unrealistic conspiracy theory and unworthy of study. Even after 9/11, the American Academy of Religion refused to study the Taliban as a religious phenomenon while persisting with Hindu caste, cows, dowry, mothers-in-law, social oppression, violence and sundry intellectual staples.

Some analysts hyphenate Islamist terror with Kashmir, implying that terrorism is a legitimate dispute resolution technique. “The plight of Muslims” is a rationalisation. Martha Nussbaum, a University of Chicago professor, blames “Hindu fascism” as the leading cause of terrorism and justifies the Mumbai massacre by hyphenating it with Hindu “pogroms,” Hindu “ethnic cleansing against Muslims,” and the Hindu project to “Kill Christians and destroy their institutions.” Her insensitivity to the victims, just two days after 26/11, was given a free pass by the LA Times. Double standards are evident when cartoons lampooning Islam are condemned, whereas serious attacks against Hindu deities, symbols and texts are defended in the name of intellectual freedom.

Be positive and “live happily ever after”

The Bollywood grand finale, where the couple lives happily ever after, is de rigueur. Friends insist that my analysis must end with something positive by solving the problems I uncover. Hard evidence of dangerous cleavages in India, spinning out of control, is too “negative.” The need to work backwards from a happy ending and only admit evidence that fits such endings is an Indian psychological disorder. But we don’t expect doctors to reject negative diagnoses, analysts to ignore market crashes, or teachers to praise our unruly children. What if there is no “good” alternative?

It is disturbing that strategic options against Pakistan must subserve the sensitivities of Indian Muslims. This gratuitously assumes that Indian Muslims are less Indian than Muslim. Some fear that strong Indian action will precipitate increased jihad, or even nuclear war. Such fears recapitulate the early campaigns to appease Hitler. Once a violent cancer spreads outside the tumour’s skin, it demands a direct attack. Vitamins, singing, and lamp-lighting are pointless. In sports or warfare, medicine or marketing, you cannot win by only using defence. The offensive option that cannot be exercised is merely a showpiece. If minority sentiments dominate national interests, our enemies will exploit our weakness. A paralysed India emboldens predators.

Games nations play 

After Indians return to psychological normalcy, apathy will be confused as resilience. When each episode is seen in isolation, there is short-term thinking, a tolerance of terrorism, and an acceptance that mere survival is adequate. Strategic planning requires connecting the trends.

Indians must understand the reality of multiple geopolitical board games. Moves on one gameboard trigger consequences on others, making the tradeoffs complex. The South Asia gameboard involves the USA-India-Pakistan as well as China-Pakistan stakes. Besides external games with its neighbours, India plays internal games to appease fragments, which foreign stakeholders influence. Religion is used as soft power in the game of Islam versus the West, and India’s fragmentation hastens the harvesting of souls in the world’s largest open market. The multinational business gameboard spotlights India as a market, a supplier, a competitor, and an investment destination.

In another gameboard, scholars of South Asia construct a discourse with Indian intellectuals as their sepoys and affiliated NGOs as paid agents. Following the academic and human rights experts who profited from the Iraq invasion, the players in this game hope that US President Barack Obama will budget billions to “engage South Asia.”

The identity challenges are offset by forces that hold India together. Private enterprises that span the entire country bring cohesion that depends on high economic growth, and it trickles down to the lowest strata to outpace population growth and social unrest. Economic prosperity is also required for military spending. The armed forces unify the nation more than any other institution because they realise that soldiers must identify themselves with the nation they are prepared to die for.

Recent US policy supports India’s sovereignty, but this should be seen in the context of using India as a counterweight against Pan-Islam and China. In the long run, the US would like India not to become another unified superpower like China or to disintegrate into a Pakistan-like menace. It will “manage” India between these two extremes. An elephant cannot put itself up for adoption as someone’s pet. It must learn to fend for itself.

Lessons for India. Although the US is a land of immigrants, pride of place goes to the majority religion. Political candidates for high office are seriously disadvantaged if they are not seen as good Christians. The church-state separation is not a mandate to denounce Christianity or privilege minority religions. America was built on a white identity that involved the ethnic cleansing of others. To its credit, India has avoided this. Obama sought a better, unified nation and transcended the minorityism of previous Black leaders. Unlike the Dravidianists, Mayawati, and those Muslim and Christian leaders who undermine India’s identity, Obama is unabashedly patriotic and a devout follower of its majority religion. America celebrates its tapestry of hyphenated identities (Indian-American, Irish-American, etc.), but “American” supersedes every sub-identity. Being un-American is a death knell for American leaders.

In sharp contrast, Mayawati, Indian Muslim leaders, Indian Christian leaders, Dravidianists and other “minority” vote bankers have consolidated power at the expense of India’s unified identity. Unlike the promoters of fragmented Indian identities, Obama is closer to Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar, champions of the downtrodden within a unified Indian civilisation.

India can learn from American mechanisms. Indian billionaires must become major stakeholders in constructing positive discourse on the nation. They must make strategic commitments like those made by the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Fords in building American identity and its sense of history and projecting American ideals. American meritocracy in politics, implemented through internal primaries, is vastly superior to the cronyism in Indian politics.

The area studies programmes in American universities have close links to the government, think tanks and churches, and they examine nations and civilisations from the American perspective. India should establish a network of area studies to study neighboring countries and other regions from India’s viewpoint. India should study China’s establishment of 100 Confucian Studies Chairs worldwide and the civilisational grand narrative of other nations.

Ideological “camps” with pre-packaged solutions are obsolete. The Indian genius must improvise, innovate, and create a national identity worthy of its name.

Published: January 17, 2009

The evolution of whiteness as America’s identity

The term whiteness denotes not necessarily race but a power structure based on a politically concocted ethnic and cultural identity. (For example, Japanese businessmen were given “honorary white” status by South Africa’s apartheid regime.) The central role of whiteness in American identity goes back to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who pioneered the Europeans’ conquest of America from the Native Americans.

They initially referred to themselves as “English” and the natives were called “Indians”. Later, the “us” included many kinds of Europeans besides the English, so they called themselves “Christians” and the natives of America were “Heathens”. But then various non-Europeans such as Black slaves and many Native Americans became Christians; so the term “Christian” was no longer exclusive and could not be a marker to distinguish the “superior” people. That is when the term “White” became popular to differentiate from the others.
Laws were enacted that gave Whites special rights with regard to property, marriage, immigration, etc. Popular literature, political discourse by the Founding Fathers, discussions in the US Congress and by Presidents, writings by academic scholars, and media – each of these explicitly utilized this classification of America’s population for most of the past 400 years. Only relatively recently did the term “White” go out of intellectual style to mean “real American,” but it remains implicit and its effect is still felt in subtle and insidious ways.

The sense of White identity has had both positive and negative impacts on the formation of America as a nation.  Not just 18th and 19th century thinkers, but also respected academics today like Samuel Huntington, have argued that American democracy’s vitality and innovativeness derive from its Anglo-Protestant ideology and identity. The definition of who is White and civilized, and who is not, has changed over time.  The book, “How the Irish Became White”, shows how the Anglo-Saxon Protestant monopoly on whiteness was first challenged by Irish immigrants who were not Anglo-Saxon and not Protestant (but Catholic), hence officially classified as non-White. The Irish were prevented from entering White labor unions and commonly mocked by Whites as “savages.” It was only in the late 1800s, after years of violence and tension that the Irish finally reached a treaty with Anglo-Saxon Protestants to be admitted as Whites. Henceforth, the Irish became White. A similar struggle took place in many other cases of non Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigrants – including Greeks, Italians, Poles and other Slavic peoples, etc. This inclusion of other Europeans as Whites implied that America’s civic religion expanded from Protestantism to Christianity. But the core character remained the Protestant Ethic, as explained by Max Weber’s popular thesis.

Another important book, “How the Jews Became White Folks”, documents the same trajectory followed by Jews in the 20th century, prior to which they were classified as colored people in America. Henceforth the civic religion became Judeo-Christian, a new kind of religious ethos that is unique to America and not common in Europe.  Today this Judeo-Christian civic religion remains a strong rallying cry for politicians in both the Democratic and Republican camps, but is an imperfect surrogate for whiteness as the case of African-Americans demonstrates. While predominantly Christian, Blacks are still not equals in the American power structure.

Whiteness for nation building and mapping others:

 Whiteness was a key ingredient in the westward growth of America.  The related notion of “Manifest Destiny” officially formulated and codified into law the right of White people to take over lands from non-White people. This was applied first against Native Americans, then to justify the conquest of California, Texas, Arizona, etc. from Mexico. Later, this right was projected overseas to justify the US invasion of Philippines, Latin America, and so forth. These notions of being a privileged club with special standing in the world were originally premised on the Bible. But later, the Enlightenment thinkers, including luminaries like Thomas Jefferson, made the same arguments without reference to God or Bible, about the inherent superiority of European civilization. The White Man’s Burden was spun as the moral duty of civilizing the non-Whites for their own good.

A key ingredient in formulating whiteness as the basis for America’s exceptional status was to set up a powerful mechanism to produce “authoritative” knowledge about various kinds of non-Whites.  This ranged from popular narratives about non-Whites to sophisticated accounts by academics.   To stir up wide support for campaigns of conquest based on Manifest Destiny, sensational accounts were written about the atrocities committed by, and weird/grotesque practices of, those non-Whites who happened to be the target group at a given time.

Thus, Mexicans were widely portrayed as lazy, immoral, “mongrels” and abusive of their women – the women were shown to be in need of rescuing by White men. Native Americans were depicted as dangerous savages who threatened not only White women but also each other.  Blacks were “children” who needed to be tutored and controlled by Whites.  A long lineup of great Enlightenment thinkers, ranging from Buffon to Hume to Kant (and Jefferson), each produced learned academic tomes that lent tremendous prestige to these sensational stories that had currency among lay Whites and popular media of the day.

Today, similar atrocities literature about the “third world” is generated in sections of anthropology, film, fiction, international studies. Nowadays such atrocities literature is called “human rights violations” reports, and is used to argue for interventions, such as those against Iraq. The Civilizing Mission is now called “bringing democracy and human rights” to the others for their own best interests.

While new groups such as the Irish, Italians and Jews were gaining acceptance by virtue of their claims to whiteness, the same did not happen for what was then America’s largest minority, i.e. African-Americans.  Even though they were mostly devout Christians, having been converted en masse during their enslavement, they were carefully kept out of the White or “civilized” camp.  For a brief period after the Civil War, known as the Reconstruction, Blacks did achieve political freedom and even a semblance of social mobility.  But these were swiftly taken away by a combination of political and economic shifts, and also because the intellectual climate was increasingly hostile to seeing Blacks as being on par with Whites.  Leading academics, such as ColumbiaUniversity’s very influential professor Dunning, produced volumes of research showing how Blacks were incapable of handling power and responsibility. They cited all sorts of anecdotes and analyses that Blacks committed many kinds of atrocities.  This intellectual climate, along with Jim Crow legislation, was powerful enough to keep Blacks out of mainstream power until the 1960s.  Even today, Blacks and Whites worship in segregated Christian churches throughout America. The Black church helped cement a positive Black identity and provided a forum for political and social action, without which there would not have been the civil rights movement or the present self-confident leadership.

It has been said that America’s history is the story of new waves of immigrants fighting to become White (i.e. full-fledged insiders). Today, the Hispanics are divided between those who lobby to become White (i.e. assimilate and dissolve their separate identity), and those who want to claim a third cultural pole that is neither White nor Black, but distinct and called Hispanic. The latter group champions the Spanish language and its embedded culture as the vehicle to preserve its identity. Highly regarded scholars like Samuel Huntingdon have raised the alarm very openly from prestigious Ivy Leagues forums that the Hispanics will threaten the American nation because they are not Anglo-Saxons and not Protestants. Such xenophobia relies upon an army of scholars and activists – including some from Hispanic backgrounds – to stereotype the Mexicans, produce reports about social oppression within Hispanic communities, and thereby show that America is endangered by Hispanic influence.

 To understand Americanness/Whiteness deeper, the three-volume American Frontier by Richard Slotkin is an excellent work. It traces deeply embedded notions of identity, privilege and destiny in the American mythos, and how this mythos has built a grand nation but at the expense of a whole series of non-White peoples. It should be required reading for all those who dismiss the civilizational superiority complex that is built into America.

Obscuring whiteness: 

In order to examine the extent to which the sense of whiteness persists today, one should reference the new bibliography mentioned at the beginning of this article. Those who want to specifically understand what is called “implicit Whiteness” (i.e. superior identity that is denied by the individual but exists subconsciously) should look at recent cognitive science research, such as, Devos, T., & Banaji, M.R. (2005), “American = White?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 447-466.   ( See: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~tdevos/thd/devos_jpsp2005_abstract.pdf ) Also see the paper at: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~tdevos/thd/Quintana_wpa2005.pdf
There are divergent views regarding whiteness as the implicit reference point relative to which American identities are being shaped even today. Some of these prevailing views are summarized below.

Perhaps the most important intellectual movement that has unwittingly created confusion about the nature of American society today is postmodernism.  Many postmodernists imagine that social power based on identity differences is being eroded rapidly. To them, Whiteness is irrelevant now as the nexus of power. But they cite only the pop culture to give examples of this new idealized America, whereas America’s power structure is not based in its pop culture. They ignore the deeper structure of society where whiteness rules. Ziauddin Sardar has criticized such postmodernist intellectuals for complicity because he alleges that it lets western imperialism off the hook while focusing on deconstructing other cultures. Indirectly, it facilitates the re-colonization of other cultures by the West.

Another view is held by Diana Eck and her Pluralism Project, which promotes multiple religious identities, and projects America as a role model for success in this. But often, and even before 9/11, pluralism in America has been mostly interpreted as incorporating Islam into America’s civic religion, moving America from Judeo-Christianity to Abrahamism. This largely leaves out the non-Abrahamic religions. Buddhism is an exception to this and  does get a fair representation, thanks to its powerful support base in the American academy and among important intellectuals. Also, being non-theistic it does not threaten Abrahamism and many of its practices can be assimilated easily.

However, when Hinduism is represented, the academic establishment tends to picks a “noble savage” as spokesperson, one who typically says lofty things like, “All religions are the same,” etc. Prof. Joshi’s new book, discussed below, and many other writings in the Whiteness Studies bibliography prove that identity oppression is real in America. It is not something that a group of scholars in the liberal academic cocoon can whitewash away.

Whiteness Studies:  A key to understanding America

Whiteness is to America what the “Pentium inside” (now “Centrino inside”) is to a computer. (It is not something found in Europe in the same sense, because there the dominant cultural substrata varied: Frenchness in France, Germanness in Germany, Englishness in England, etc., but no melted down pan-European Whiteness, even though the European Union might move in that direction. There is a growing voice arguing that Christianity is the very core of Europeanness, giving the EU its own kind of Manifest Destiny.)

I see three dimensions to whiteness in America today: (1) as a secular blend of race, ethnicity and culture; (2) as a civic religion based on Judeo-Christianity/Bible; and (3) as a socioeconomic status. How White you are is measured in this 3-dimensional model. All other identities are based on difference from whiteness.

Relevance of whiteness to Indian-Americans

This historical background and framework is used in my research to address the following question: Will Indian-Americans “become White” like various European immigrants did? Or will they claim a separate identity similar to the Hispanic one, which is not White or Black, yet fully American in status? This question is one of the reasons for exploring the history of Whiteness – i.e. learning from the experiments and experiences of other immigrant groups.

Indian-Americans are already climbing socioeconomically to “become White” in the #3 dimension. This success reduces their “difference” from the “real” Whites. Historically, this was the mercantile path to the American mainstream. But it does not make them fully White because of the other two factors. Many Indian-Americans (like Bobby Jindal) convert to Christianity to reduce #2 (i.e. religion) as a factor of difference. In order to reduce the alienating impact of #1, one may adopt Enlightenment or Postmodern ideologies, and American pop culture also facilitates this blurring.

An important new book has come out based on surveys of Indian-Americans. It identifies the role of religion as a factor in making Indian-Americans feel less Americans than Whites. This book is by Khyati Joshi, “New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground”. It proves with empirical data that there is religious bias facing Indian-Americans especially on account of being Hindu (i.e. #2 factor), even after they have achieved parity with Whites on socioeconomic criteria (i.e. #3); and this applies even to the second-generation who are born and raised in USA (and hence have lesser #1 difference). This is an important new book, and more scholars need to examine this issue courageously.

What should Indians do about this identity issue, as a new minority group in America? This is a nation where identities are projected publicly in the mainstream, often quite assertively and chauvinistically.

Several Indian academicians in the humanities regard the Indian identity to be a source of conflicts in India. Amartya Sen is one prominent example. Their political position on India gets projected onto Indian-Americans, who are therefore scolded for hanging on to Indianness which is seen as something arcane and shameful. Given the all-pervading nature of whiteness as the American substratum, such a position puts pressure on Indian-Americans to de-Indianize and dissolve into whiteness. Harvard’s Homi Bhabha has come up with postmodernist theories of “mimicry” and “hybridity” that make this hip. But such scholars do not seem to have examined the American history of “us/other” (as explained, for example, in Slotkin’s three volumes), or the present depth of whiteness in America. The burden to dissolve difference is thus being placed entirely on the non-Whites. Their positions are unrealistic and oppressive.

There is a double standard here. Because identity difference is projected by scholars as a cause of conflict and violence in India, the dominant culture in India is rightly asked to shoulder the burden of removing difference with the underclasses. The same rules should also be applied to America. These scholars should similarly pressure the dominant White American culture to change itself, in order to become less White and thus shoulder the burden of reducing difference with others. But while in the case of India they champion the underclass, and attack the dominant culture’s hegemony, they are unable to do the same in the case of America. Are they too invested in the American power structure? Would such an approach undermine their “honorary White” status through the adoption of “White epistemology” and their positions in institutions of intellectual power?

This brings me to the trajectory followed by many Indian-Americans in the humanities to “become White” by proving their competence in White ways of “gazing”. This means seeing things through European epistemological categories, which nowadays means “theories” of culture, textual analysis, etc. that have been accepted by the Anglo-American academy as a part of the “canon of theories” one is supposed to use. The Indian equivalent of such theories would be the very large and sophisticated range of “siddhantas”. But these are simply ignored in modern/postmodern studies, or are trivially dismissed, or are mapped/co-opted into trendy new theories owned by White experts or their whitened followers. This is a new kind of civilizational power that has been called “theory power.” I call it epistemic arrogance. Bhabha is a role model being projected by the American establishment for young Indian-Americans in English Departments to emulate. He has proven himself as having the “White gaze”. This is the liberal path to becoming White, just as Christianizing was Bobby Jindal’s Biblical path to Whiteness. One may think of them as left-wing and right-wing whiteness, respectively.

One finds many Indian anthropologists (serving western funding sources, mentors, institutions, journals, etc.) referring to other Indians as “native informants” in their research – a racial slur from the colonial era that positions the “other” as someone below the glass ceiling who is not to be treated as an equal in cultural inquiry. On the other hand, the Indian who confidently gazes back at Whites (such as through Whiteness Studies), who talks as an equal, and who theorizes about them as the exotic other, is often seen as a threat especially if he is outside the control mechanisms of the academic establishment. (Such persons must be branded the “dangerous savage” who is threatening civilization)

Sudhir Kakar and Amartya Sen disagree on whether or not there is a positive Indian identity and what its implications would be. Kakar’s new book on the psychological profile of Indians shows that there is a definite Indianness that pervades across the ethnicities, castes, and economic strata of India. He also considers this Indianness as something positive, implying that it is something worth protecting. Indeed, there are major problems to be solved in India; but the same could be said of any cultural identity in the world, and Indianness has repeatedly proven its internal reform ability without foreign interventions.

Amartya Sen, on the other hand, asserts that a distinct Indian identity breeds violence. He wants to show that there is no clash of civilizations – I use the term “clash” not as physical violence but as competition among world-views. His stance implies that non-Western epistemologies (ways of seeing things) are invalid when they differ from Western epistemologies – i.e. Chinese Civilization, Islamic Civilization, etc. are valid only to the extent they agree with the premises of Western thought. Is he not adopting the White Gaze that sees itself as universal, and hence denies the very existence of any other legitimate gaze? It is the truth, its proponents claim in all sorts of “universal” declarations.

Harvard’s Sugata Bose takes this to the next step, and debunks India as a nation-state on the grounds that it has always been oppressive and is inherently bad for its minorities. (The Mughal structure was good, though, these scholars say, because it partially cured the Indian oppressiveness.)   Other Indian-American scholars use the postmodernist line without adequate examination, and directly attack the legitimacy of the Indian nation-state.  But these scholars do not give the same argument against America as a nation-state, nor call for its break-up along ethnic or religious lines, despite the fact that its 400-year history shows how it has been based on the oppression, or at least the marginalization, of non-Whites! Nor are they willing to critique living scholars in the academy who study India from a standpoint that is implicitly Eurocentric. Postcolonial Studies focuses largely on the dead empire and dead scholars, and when criticizing America they are typically limited to reproducing self-criticisms by Liberal Whites. The invisible, unconscious gold-standard of whiteness as the reference point persists because of the reluctance to gaze at it.

One consequence of undermining a distinct Indianness in America is being played out in the growing field of South Asian Diaspora Studies.  To cite but one example, Professor Prema Kurien is one of the upcoming young Indian-Americans being groomed by White Protestant institutions to do surveillance on Hindu-Americans. The goal is to show them as “savages” invading America who needed to be civilized.  She unquestioningly accepts certain premises deriving from whiteness. Indians who are benign and unquestioning of Whiteness or of Judeo-Christian norms, can serve as role models for others: these are “noble savages.” But those who challenge the cultural power structure are branded as “dangerous savages”, and the syndicated research desires to impute that they must have links with violence in India. My research is examining the possibility that this is a continuation of the way the American Frontier managed the non-Whites, especially those non-Whites who were self-assured and articulate intellectuals. The academic discipline of Diaspora Studies is being used by some to keep tabs on non-Whites who do not assimilate, and especially those who want to reverse the gaze and study Whiteness.

There is also the position adopted by many that a given culture does not belong to anyone, and hence there is no “owner” with the legitimate right to “defend” it. Other postcolonial scholars disagree, such as Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. They feel that this free-for-all posture is too lofty. It clears the way for “EuroModernism” to colonize others, because it is in charge of the parameters of the inter-cultural debate, and it sets up straw-men/women of non-Western cultures to knock down. Culture is a form of capital, and the West controls most of the means of global distribution. The prerequisites of free trade are simply not in place, given the concentration of capital. There is no reason to treat this kind of capitalism any differently than material capitalism, especially since cultural capital and material capital are mutually supportive.

Regardless of one’s position on these matters, whiteness is the underlying canvas on which this identity drama plays out today, just as it did in America’s past.

The cultural dynamics within America is not the only theater where whiteness is important. There are two other spheres where whiteness is a key player. In the geopolitics of today, the America/Islam ideological conflict may be modeled in large part as one between whiteness and Arabness (with the Persianness/Arabness tension manifesting as the Shiite/Sunni sub-conflict). Likewise, the America/China competition (moving towards all-out conflict) is deeper than a mere competition for economic goods. Just as America is based ideologically on the White Protestant Ethic, so also modern China is a renaissance of what its own intellectuals refer to as the Confucian Ethic.

Yet another arena where whiteness is playing a role is inside India. India’s modernization is commonly being seen as synonymous with westernization. This is in contrast to the way Chinese intellectuals (such as Prof. Tu Weming, Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute of China Studies) resist calling China’s modernity as western. They use the ideological foundation of a Confucian continuity over thousands of years to frame the miracle of China’s distinct kind of Modernity. The West was a catalyst, they say, but the character and future of modernization in China is rooted in its own civilization. Yet in India the intellectual trajectory is different, as it sees the native civilization to be the problem to eradicate. India’s westernization of lifestyles, economy and government policymaking are often at the expense of Indic traditions. Add to this the fair-skin complex that has entered Indian aesthetics over the past thousand years, and theories of Aryans bringing civilization into India from Europe. One has an interesting study of India’s own peculiar kind of whiteness at work. Perhaps, similar to the American books, “How the Irish became White,” and “How the Jews became White Folks,” there is need to write about “How the Desis are becoming White”!

As a final remark, I do not consider the orthodox categories of left-wing and right-wing to be very useful, especially in the understanding of Indian society and politics. These mutually exclusive left/right binary options simply do not work, and fail to represent the far more complex dynamics on the ground. Yet Indian social thinkers have internalized these epistemic categories – as a sort of pseudo-intellectual whitening. For a leftist, any opponent is easily branded “right-wing.” Likewise, for the so-called right-wingers, those who criticize their ways are instantly demonized as “leftists.” A richer model is based on the notion of identity and culture as forms of capital, complete with capitalists, competition over control of means of production and distribution, and so forth. The sociopolitical dynamics of nations and the globe may then be seen in a very different light.

This is just a brief report on some of my ongoing work. I hope that the new bibliography will provoke free-spirited inquiry among scholars.

Published: 2007

Recently, I read an excellent book by Professor Uma Narayan called Dislocating Cultures, in which she compares how dowry-deaths in India are of high interest in the West whereas spousal-killings in America are not given the same emphasis, despite that fact that statistically the percentage of American women victims of spousal killings are at least as high as the percentage of Indian women victimized by dowry-deaths. She explains that this dichotomy and disconnect of understanding involves various factors: The language of ‘dowry-deaths’ is so India-specific, to begin with, that it precludes the equivalent American phenomenon to be within range of the radar.

Once thus framed, the issue of dowry-deaths then gets measured, studied at various levels of scholarship, and gets a life of its own. America’s equivalent problems get exempted from examination, especially as the scholars place themselves on a platform above the glass ceiling. This made me wonder whether caste is a somewhat similar phenomenon. After all, every society has strata and ethnic groups. In modern America, we call these ‘demographic segments’ — there are demographic segments such as ‘inner city African Americans’, ‘rural Hispanics’, ‘suburban whites’, ‘Asian immigrants’, etc. and these are common terms in consumer marketing. I wonder how different these are from India’s much studied castes. Yet, people give funny looks when the term ‘caste’ is suggested pertaining to America.

The book The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen gives an interesting insight into how the demographic group we now call’white’ emerged. He writes: “[Until the 17th century, the] white skin privilege was recognized neither in the law nor in the social practices of the labor classes. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, racial oppression would be the norm in the plantation colonies, and African Americans would continue to suffer under its yoke for more than two centuries…African bond-laborers were turned into chattel slaves and were differentiated from their fellow proletarians of European origin. Rocked by the solidarity across racial lines exhibited by the rebellious laboring classes in the wake of the famous Bacon’s Rebellion, the plantation bourgeoisie sought a solution to its labor problems in the creation of a buffer control stratum of poor whites, who enjoyed little enough privilege in colonial society beyond that of their skin color, which protected them from enslavement…Such was the invention of the white race.”

America’s color-coding was based on the category of labor that one was placed into. This is further elaborated in the book How the Irish Became White, written by Noel Ignatiev, a lecturer at Harvard. He describes how the Irish, who were branded for centuries as the underclass in Europe, came to America and used the labor color-coding system of the American society to get reclassified as the white class. Especially in places where the slaves had been freed, it became important for European immigrant groups to make sure that they were distinguished and protected through labor unions that were racially exclusivist. Blacks often became factory workers in large centralized environments, whereas construction jobs such as plumbing, electrical, masonry, and carpentry became the turf of specific European ethnic labor unions.

Another useful book is How the Jews Became White Folks, authored by Professor Karen Brodkin at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Jewish woman herself, she tells the story of how the Jews started this climb up the caste ladder of America just fifty years ago to reach their present position, mainly by taking control of specific professions.

Caste systems in India evolved, just as they have done in the US, as a labor group by the kind of work. This is why each of India’s castes corresponds to a category of labor, much like the modern guild of American workers of a given profession, with its own procedures for membership and strategies to compete with outsiders. In India, this segmentation got perpetuated because training was done through work apprenticeship under one’s parents, thereby turning family lineages into specialized labor.

Perhaps, ancient rulers found it easier to negotiate with a given category of labor collectively, much like the British created the landowner class (zamindars) in India as a more efficient way to maximize the collection of taxes. Most law firms in the US are owned by Jewish families; most motels are owned by Gujaratis from India; and this kind of list goes on. Communities evolve towards centers of skill, excellence, and specialized assets. Bush and Gore are both political dynasties.

Language is just another quality passed on this way to the next generation, especially as it entails learning at home from a young age. Pronunciation, accent, idiom, sophistication in usage, and reference to prior literature with authority, all require great mastery of language. Over time, certain language styles become prized as belonging to’high’ society. The way one speaks becomes a marker of social status. In modern times, where one’s works get published depends largely upon one’s language skill, and determines one’s standing. The currency of language was Sanskrit in ancient India and it is English in the modern world. Just as Sanskrit usage was caste-related in India, English is turning into a device for caste hierarchy around the world today.

A key difference is that in India, caste became explicitly codified, whereas in America social structure by ethnicity or family lineage remains uncodified and subliminal. But what is commonly not pointed out today is that India’s smritis (codified rules) pertaining to many topics including caste, were meant to be specific to a given time, place and cultural context and not intended as universal ‘commandments’ for all people at all times. They were more akin to a specific European king’s laws in a given kingdom. Naturally, there were hundreds of smritis made by different people at different times, covering various aspects of social life. Manysmritis contradicted others and/or superceded others, just as one would find among the myriad of codified laws across medieval Europe.

The advantage of the uncodified, invisible and often denied phenomenon of the American caste system is that it does not become cast (excuse the pun) in concrete. Rather, the lack of rules make it porous and not impermeable, and open to change over time rather than static. On the other hand, something subliminal rather than explicit is more dangerous as it gets applied arbitrarily. Also, since most people who use it, deny its very existence, it becomes difficult to have an honest debate on it so as to modify it. This is the situation in America today. I wish American academicians teaching about India would examine their own students to see how India’s social structures resemble modern America’s.

My experience has been that India’s caste discussions are locked into a ‘South Asian’ contained context, and that most well educated Americans have a blind spot about their own caste system. Using the same terminology forces the comparison.

Note that ‘caste’ is not a term indigenous to India, because the term jati is more akin to community. ‘Caste’ is a term introduced by the colonialists and deserves to be re-examined. Would India’s affirmative action be better off defined in terms of underprivileged labor classes and demographic communities, permitting and even encouraging migration across them, as opposed to remaining in terms of static caste boundaries that are assumed to be genetic?

Understanding this American caste system has important implications for Asian Americans. Indians have traditionally been too introverted and due to that, have not studied the rest of the world. But the dynamics of the West are important to understand, even to deepen one’s understanding of oneself. The field of academic scholarship and teaching of Hinduism is dominated by Jews and Christians. Indians have been content to be portrayed by others, and yet complain later when the portrayal begins to play out in society — be it in the form of peer pressure facing their own kids growing up in the West, or as public opinion shaped by Marxists of Indian origin, or in the form of aggressive proselytizing back in India.

East Asia has managed its branding in America much more actively. Thanks to over thirty endowed Japan Studies chairs in USA, to The Asia Society, and to millions of dollars spent annually for teacher training in America on how to teach about Japan, the Japanese Americans are ahead of other Asians in their climb up this caste ladder. Notice how the Japan bashing that was characteristic of the early 1980s has mysteriously disappeared from the media. China is second among Asian countries in this climb, having started only 15 years ago to negotiate their way in America.

Indian Americans are doing well in the high tech/professional caste as individuals. There is also the caste of Indian’intellectuals’ who write popular and serious books with great command of the English language, small in number but large in visibility. Often, this latter category has its training in the use of Western and/or Marxist metaphor, as India’s own English medium education system subverted the teaching of India’s classics – the Ramayana and Mahabharata – and of Sanskrit. These young Indians often shy away from too much linkage with their own heritage, preferring to classify themselves as ‘South Asian’ after leaving their parents’ home.

The Hindu identity is still largely outcast in America or subverted in many instances. Media, education and public images of Hinduism are often dominated by negative stereotypes. Hence, most Indians have multiple identities, bringing out the one that works best in a given situation. A Hindu who worships at home in front of a Hindu deity and socializes with other Indian friends in very ethnic settings, often erases every sign of such linkage when he goes to work each day. Post-colonialists have written about a phenomenon called ‘brown shame’ that was encouraged amongst Indians by the British as a way to dominate Indians. But nobody has brought out the more recent phenomenon that I call ‘Hindu shame’. To be openly Hindu is often seen as a matter of shame, as was the case with Jews in Europe in the early 20th century. This demonizing has worsened in the past five years and Hindus are now concerned about being branded ‘fascist’, ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’, or as some other negative ‘ism’ or ‘ist’ depending upon the particular writer’s toolbox.

Either Hindus are described as world negating, based on narrow interpretations of select textual passages, i.e. shown as having little or no interest in the affairs of the world, as a sort of mystical escapism. Or, if they are acknowledged as socially engaged, and hence not world negating, they are often depicted as abusing women and poor, and generally backward in social practices. So Hinduism is not seen as having the resources within itself to be progressive in a socially responsible manner, the way the ‘rational’ West is seen to have.

This new Hindu American caste needs to learn from the successes of other American castes noted above. This is especially important as the population of Indians in America is projected to increase to ten million by 2050, and there shall also be many non-Indians who continue to adopt Hinduism.

Published: 2001

In the Bhagavad Gita, God appears in human form as Krishna, to guide Arjuna in the fight / don’t fight dilemma that Arjuna faces. What might this 18-chapter holiest of the Hindu scriptures teach us in the dilemma we now face concerning global terrorism? Krishna’s advice fits neither of the two extremes that are presently dominating the media debate: at one end are the majority of Americans who promote revenge against the terrorists as a notion of justice — an eye for an eye. At the other end is a minority of anti-war activists who want no violence, and instead advocate that the US should take the blame for having caused hatred against itself. The Gita’s message rejects both these. Its short-term message for this situation pertains to the ethics of war, and its long-term message calls for systemic changes required by both Islam and the West in order to harmonize humanity.

Dharmic War

Krishna scolds Arjuna for his initial attitude of abandonment, saying that there is a global evil that must be dealt with; Arjuna is the best qualified one to fight this evil, given his training, capabilities, and position. This is God’s work and not his own. By analogy, one could argue that the US must play Arjuna’s role, being positioned as the only superpower and having the resources to carry this out. In Hindu dharma, a ruler has the obligation to protect the public from such menaces, and to abandon this role would be irresponsible. God’s advice to Arjuna is: “Engage in battle with equanimity and without getting overwhelmed by the extremes of joy and sorrow, gain and loss, and thus you won’t incur sin.”

A just war (“dharma-yudh” = war-as-duty) should not be for revenge but for the prevention of terrorism in the future. The Hindu idea of justice is in the form of karmic consequence, but these consequences are for God to take care of, whenever and however he chooses. The Gita emphasizes one’s rightful action, but always letting God take care of the fruits. Therefore, from President Bush down to the pilots making the strikes, the attitude should be one of doing duty for the sake of ridding society of evil, and not for revenge.

Furthermore, the response has to be relevant and proportional. The Gita does not condone indiscriminate “carpet bombing.” Since karma is individual and merit-based, there cannot be racial profiling against anyone.

It is also made clear in the Gita that Arjuna has nothing personal to gain from winning. He does not seek power, wealth, fame, or glory. Hence, it is not an act to be carried out by the ego and must be free of selfish motives. Applying this to the present dilemma, there are some implications:

The US should not be motivated for the sake of securing its oil supply, as that would be a selfish act.

The US should not focus on ending only the terrorism that is against the US, but rather, it should deal equally with all terrorism that hurts anyone in the world, including remote corners where the US does not perceive a direct selfish interest at this time. Everything is totally interconnected as per Indian cosmogony, and there is no morality in segregating the US’s selfish interests from the interests of humanity at large. Unfortunately, Senator Kerry, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, amongst other policymakers, has defined the area of US interests to be from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, which means that the Indian subcontinent’s Islamic terrorism remains a blind spot.

The US cannot aid terrorists one year by classifying them as freedom fighters against a US enemy, and fight them the next year when they turn sour.

Arjuna is required to act in a sattvic mode (i.e., in an attitude of purity) even while carrying out a violent attack against evil. The US must note that collusion with evil cannot be sattvic, and that in the end such collusion cannot expect to result in lasting good, as the deed itself gets tainted by the affiliation. The Gita requires us to repudiate even the actions of our friends if wrong. Have we, as the United States, had the courage to repudiate ‘friends’ who are clearly part of the problem? To have a sattvic activity, we must re-examine two countries we call friends, one that financed terrorists and the other that trained them:

For decades, Saudi Arabia has sponsored Wahhabi Islam, a fundamentalist variety of Islam, and funded madrassas (religious schools) to expand the market share of Islam in poor countries. Madrassas often teach Islamic extremism and triumphalism, and then some of the youth advance into the hands of jihad preachers who are linked to some madrassas, if not in charge of them. Yet, given their importance to the US oil supply, the Saudis have not been taken to task.

Pakistan created the Taliban, with US funding and weapons, to fight a jihad against the Soviets. This is not emphasized today by the US media, as it might embarrass prior presidencies and some of the senior cabinet members today who played a role in those governments. We must also ask whether strengthening the dictatorial army rule in Pakistan, and thus subverting democracy, is in the best interests of Pakistan’s citizens. US media has stated that 15% to 20% of Pakistanis are Talibanized, and given its population of 140 million, that is larger than the total population of Afghanistan. Pakistan has openly hosted Bin Laden’s operating bases to attack civilian targets in India, killing more Indians than any other nationality from terrorism over the past five years.

Saudi Arabia’s oil and Pakistan’s geography give them unique value to the US short-term tactics at the expense of the long-term vision. The Gita does not recommend such collusion with forces that are themselves responsible for the evil to be fought. Any such war would be a stopgap solution at best, and eventually, the US would be playing into the hands of the very evil forces it seeks to eradicate. The US must encourage liberal Islamic scholars at the expense of totalitarian Islamic rulers; it must actively discourage Islamic triumphalism that drives many Islamic organizations.

Dharmic War is Jihad

It is also important to contrast the message of the Gita with that of jihad, since some Western scholars have tried to draw similarities:

The Gita’s call to Arjuna is not against a country that is a thousand miles away and that has never in its history threatened anyone militarily. Moderate Muslim interpretations state that jihad is an internal fight against evil within, thereby denying the Taliban’s legitimacy. There is merit to this claim. However, for 1300 years, a great many individuals, societies, and rulers have interpreted jihad as a license to kill infidels and as a mandate to expand. The 7th-century invasion of Sindh (India) by Arabs was explicitly celebrated as jihad, and history is filled with one wave of Islamic plunder of India after another. The Taliban’s atrocities look benign by comparison. These Islamic jihads, such as those by Mohammed of Ghazni, Ghauri, and all the way down to Aurangzeb, were not rationalized by the conquerors as a fight against any threat or based on any dispute. Rather, these were justified as wars to kill infidels and to destroy their idols. Therefore, attempts to rationalize terrorism by blaming US and Israeli policies ignore the history of jihad that precedes the existence of the United States and Israel.

The Mahabharata war, within which the Gita is revealed, was undertaken only after exhausting all avenues for a negotiated settlement, with Krishna himself as the chief envoy. Jihad theology does not require any such attempts, because it can be applied simply on the basis that the other party is non-Muslim.

Arjuna complied with the ethics of war: he did not engage in covert activities; he declared the war, warned the people concerned, allowed them to retreat, allowed them to even take rest during nights, and did not hurt innocent people. He did not burn any city or house with innocent people or even enemies. He did not consider the death of innocent people as “collateral damage.”

As interpreted for centuries by many invaders, Islamic jihad asks the holy warriors to enjoy the fruits of plunder as their reward, including the sharing of loot, slaves, and women. This scriptural authority was invoked repeatedly by Islamic invaders into India to enlist criminals as mercenaries with the promise of becoming free and living the good life after a profitable raid of India. Such repeated jihads were selfish ventures sponsored by tribal chiefs but promoted using Islamic theology. No such enjoyment of loot, taking of slaves, or other atrocities is justified in the Gita’s call to fight evil. Arjuna was not seeking heaven with a large number of virgins as a reward.

Questioning Eurocentrism

Beyond the dharma of war itself, there are many other lessons that Hinduism offers to both sides in this clash between Islamic fundamentalism and the West. The US must introspect about its own intellectual chauvinism towards non-Western cultures, which includes all non-Western people and not just Arabs and Muslims:

Chauvinism: Western scholars have often subverted other civilizations’ legitimacy. Much what the West appropriated from others is deemed to be the consequence of Western superiority. This includes land and gold from Native Americans, free labor from Africans, trillions of dollars (in today’s value of money) from India under the British, enormous amounts of science and technology from India (often via translations by the Arabs/Persians), know-how from the Chinese, etc. The Gita would call for an honest portrayal of every civilization’s contributions.

Asymmetric power: Eurocentrism has had a symbiotic relationship with power, as one feeds the other. A Eurocentric representation of different cultures in history, sociology, science, and technology, and the story of civilization, is often used to justify the systemic inequalities in globalization, and the hegemony of Christianity through proselytizing. In the true spirit of India’s darshanas (systems of representation and debate), there would be equal self-representation by all major civilizations in the modern discourse.

Dharmic compassion: There must be a new moral order in globalization, centered around human unity and not politics. Dharmic compassion needs to be given higher priority in policymaking at all levels and must transcend the notion of ‘us’ and ‘others’. For instance, is it moral to ignore Chinese human rights violations against Tibet, just because Tibet does not have oil or other strategic value to the US?

Cooperation amongst religions: Mere religious tolerance must be replaced with respect for all religions, and the world must invest in the preservation of religious diversity. Religious exclusivism is against dharma, as it results in cultural chauvinism and imposing one’s ideology under the pretext of ‘saving others from their own traditions’. Mono-theism has often become my-theism. There should not be competition for God’s brownie points, as it divides faiths into camps fighting for market share.

Islam Versus Islam

The Gita’s dharma is built on profound self-examination. Professor Akbar Ahmad, as quoted in Newsweekrecently, says that the clash of civilizations is a clash between Islam and Islam — the liberals versus the fundamentalists. Islamic scholars need to introspect about fashioning Islam for democratic, secular and pluralistic times, and should take on social reforms seriously. Islam’s history has had some such voices of progress, but these were often dominated by radical elements opposed to pluralism and modernity.

We must remember Emperor Akbar, who utilized India’s tradition of interfaith debate and cross-fertilization to facilitate dialogues between Hindu and Muslim scholars. This resulted in spiritual innovation and syncretism of new Hindu-Muslim hybrid theologies and sociologies. India became the ground of the most progressive Islam in the world. His grandson, Dara Shikoh, the heir to the Mughal throne, was an eminent scholar of Sanskrit and Hindu texts, having personally translated the Gita and the Upanishads into Persian. His vision was to have a Hindu-Muslim harmonious society of mutual respect. However, he was murdered by his younger brother, Aurungzeb.

The oppressive rule by Aurungzeb was the longest rule amongst all Mughal rulers, in which he planted the seeds of communal hatred and the eventual collapse of the Mughal Empire at the hands of a small number of British traders. Aurangzeb’s killing of Dara Shikoh was the defining moment in the history of the Indian subcontinent, with far-reaching effects to this day. This Hindu-Muslim history offers many lessons on dharma and the playing out of the karma that was created.

No religion is free from radical elements, and no religion is essentially radical. Islam has had more than its fair share of radicalism through much of its history. There are many moderate and liberal Islamic scholars, but they fear the clerics, and their voices are subdued. The Gita’s message would be for Islam’s political leaders to empower their liberal scholars, and to examine Islam’s positions on the following matters:

Promotion of Pluralism, not Abrahamism: Islamic public relations is emphasizing that Islam worships the ‘same God as Christianity’, that Islam believes in all the Christian prophets, and that Islam believes in Jesus as a prophet. This call to the brotherhood of Abrahamic religions using the ‘Monotheism card’ is at the expense of the non-Abrahamic religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Wicca, Paganism, Native American shamanism, Shintoism, and many others. This bifurcation would merely reconfigure who is ‘in’ as a legitimate religion, and who is ‘out’ as ‘worshipping false gods’. This is a double standard, as it tries to legitimize Islam by glorifying Abrahamic exclusiveness.

The Gita promotes pluralism, explaining that different humans have different gunas (qualities), and therefore describes a variety of religious paths that are all valid. There is hardly a spiritual methodology known in the world today that the Gita does not list as valid.

Reconciling the two faces of Islam: Pan-Islamic global organizations have a westernized face of peace and tolerance, as opposed to a different internal face of Islam back home. The rulers of Islamic societies who deal with the West are projecting an image that is democratic and peace-loving, whereas the Muslim clergy who control the religious teachings and interpretations often tend to be radical exclusivists and expansionists. Hence, there is a ‘westernized Islam’ practiced by a small elite and a different ‘native Islam’ practiced by the vast majority. This has resulted in a good guy / bad guy role-playing, in which Islamic lobbyists are the good guys claiming to save the West from some bad guys of Islam.

Decoupling from terrorism: Islamic leaders are trying to decouple Islam’s image from terrorism, decrying the very use of the term ‘Islamic terrorism’. But they should also decouple Islam from various geopolitical struggles and missions where Islam gets routinely invoked to mobilize support. No dharmic end can be pursued using non-dharmic means. Extremism is basically ‘tamas guna’ (ignorance). It gets mobilized into a campaign by combining it with ‘rajas guna’ (passion). Such a dangerous mixture of tamas driving rajas cannot be controlled towards specific purposes only. In the end, it assumes a deadly life of its own, and spins out of the control of its own creators — this is the story of the Taliban.

The us / them mentality: Islam divides the world into two categories: ‘dar-ul-Islam’ (the world of Muslims) and ‘dar-ul-harb’ (the world of non-Muslims, called kafirs or idolaters). Muslim law demands different standards and norms by which Muslims must deal with insiders and outsiders. Such built-in chauvinism towards others is contrary to the Gita’s teachings and is dangerous. Pan-Islamic organizations should focus on Muslims’ respect and responsibilities towards others, and not just push for greater rights and privileges for Islam.

Minority rights within Islam: In Medieval Europe, Muslims tolerated Jews better than Christians did. But in the 20th century, minority religions have been oppressed in Islamic countries. The Rights of non-Muslims in Islamic countries need to be made comparable to the rights that Muslims demand for themselves in the West. Islamic leaders should create Islamic commissions and forums on pluralism, where non-Muslims could submit complaints and get a fair hearing on instances of Muslim hate speech against infidels, prejudicial laws or practices in Islamic countries towards non-Muslims, and crimes committed in the name of Islam. They should consider issuing fatwas to stop hegemonic Islamic triumphalism, since it has led to ‘religious cleansing’ of religious minorities in virtually every Islamic state since World War II (as evidenced by a decline in the percentage of religious minorities).

Unfreezing the Islamic Law: While Christianity is also based on canon and uniqueness of specific historical events, it has been reformed, and Enlightenment secularized the West’s public space. Since the Sunni Muslim Law was frozen by order of the caliph in the 10th century, the only mechanism that exists in Islam to update the law is the fatwa, which may be considered as the case law of Islamic jurisprudence. There are many muftis who can issue fatwas, and the Holy Quran and the Hadith are often misinterpreted to promote extreme positions. Islamic leaders should immediately set up a panel to amend the sharia (Islamic Law), especially as it pertains to non-Muslims, so as to be compatible with this global era. They should invite and encourage critical examination of Islamic history and texts by all, without intimidation of scholars, just as is common for other world religions.

Fairness in education and dialogue: (a) Islam’s leaders should investigate whether terrorist campaigns were sponsored in Islam’s name, which they now want to disown since things have turned sour. They should examine whether they can ethically disown the baby of radicalism that was created many times during Islam’s history, as an expedient means.

(b) Muslim leaders who condemn terrorism have often qualified it by blaming it on US foreign policy. Yet they have failed to criticize with equal intensity Islam’s own policies and long history of aggression towards non-Muslims. They should sponsor an honest and complete account of the history of Islamic expansion since the 7th century by conquest, jihads, and plunder. While the Islamic expansion into the West and the crusades are known to most Westerners, the long-term violent campaign eastwards into India is kept out of educational material in the name of political correctness. Only by honestly teaching history can the world heal and move on, rather than by one-sided PR campaigns.

Gita’s Recipe for Humanity to Advance

Imagine hypothetically that the Gita’s teachings were adopted by humanity at large. What would the way forward look like in such a scenario? Specifically, the Gita’s spiritual methodologies, to upgrade each individual in this very life, as opposed to promises for the hereafter, may be broadly grouped into four categories:

Jnana Yoga (path of higher knowing): This involves understanding and living various principles, such as (1) the complete unity and inseparability of all that exists, including all living creatures; (2) one ultimate Reality that may be conceptualized in a variety of approximations none of which could ever be complete; (3) multiple spiritual paths leading to the same ultimate Reality; and (4) the principle of rebirth and its challenge to selfishness and unethical living.

Raja Yoga (psycho-physiological disciplines): Besides the popular Yoga, these include esoteric meditation, kundalini, tantra, and transpersonal and humanistic psychologies that are becoming mainstream in America. Approximately twenty million Americans are engaged in practicing some form of these disciplines. Documented benefits merely after one generation of practice in the West include: better health, stress reduction, less violence, improved ethical conduct, and improved intellectual, emotional, and athletic performance. A growing number of Americans are also advancing into the higher levels of Yoga, at which one experiences exalted spiritual states and embodied transformation.

Karma Yoga (ethics and compassion): The Gita places high expectations of ethical conduct in every aspect of living, including: towards family and friends; towards society at large, without regard to a person’s religion or ethnicity; and towards nature and ecology, since the environment is sacred.

Bhakti Yoga (devotion): This encompasses a variety of techniques for worship, prayer, and rituals. These include both personal practices in complete privacy and public group activities in a place of worship.

Recognizing that human diversity is a basic principle of creation, the Gita’s spiritual repertoire accommodates as many paths as there are human temperaments: any religion’s theological principles can be accommodated within this open system. The Gita therefore, has several messages to the leaders of world religions today:

Religions should stop competing. Homogenizing humanity into ‘my’ religion must stop. They should cooperate, learn from each other, and share their respective experiences as pieces of a puzzle to be solved collectively. Humanity must preserve religious diversity just as enthusiastically as we now try to preserve plant and animal species from becoming extinct.

Spiritual truths are ever unfolding, and cannot be frozen into canon. Nor do they privilege one ethnic group or culture over the rest.

Dharmic living is not achieved by joining a club of believers of any sort, or by subscribing to any theory of history of past events, but by practicing the art of living in the present in accordance with the dharma. The journey is an individual one and not a team sport to beat others. The Gita is against a triumphal attitude towards others. Its yoga is not a ‘let’s go kick some ass’ mentality.

The power of the clergy and hierarchy of any sort should be lowered, as these become too institutionalized, self-serving, and obstacles to advancement.

‘Dharma’ is not a prophetic religion, but a spiritual framework and set of tools for personal righteousness and spiritual quest. The Gita calls upon all humanity to truthfully and courageously go beyond boundaries in the present crisis. Any ulterior or narrowly defined initiatives would be against dharma. Hindus must set the example by not seeing anyone as ‘other’ based on ethnicity or religion. Karma and gunas are entirely based on individual merit and not dependent upon ethnicity or religion.

Published: 2001

In our world of constant change, many entrenched paradigms and worldviews are being challenged by marginalized voices. As a patriotic American, I consider these healthy debates as another stage in the series of progressive movements, like civil rights, feminism, gay rights and other movements that started as underdogs and outsiders to the established power structure and had to battle at great expense for every bit of progress they won. The 19th-century Irish fought to be included as equals in America, followed by the Jews and various other new groups. Eventually, the efforts of each of these groups paid off, and these movements reinvented and strengthened our nation.

However, pluralism should also go beyond the inclusion of different racial and ethnic groups within the paradigms of a monolithic culture. There needs to be a welcoming of perspectives that both complement and occasionally compete with the dominant Western mindset. As the recent geopolitical trends reveal, many Americans, even at the highest levels of government, academia and media, are often unequipped to deal with the growing resistance to the imposition of Western frameworks upon other traditions. Globalization is not going to be the Westernization of the globe. Budding discourse outside the purview of academia is increasingly challenging the monolithic and hegemonic position that Western ideals have assumed over the past few centuries.

Particularly misleading has been the West’s reliance upon foreign cronies (often positioned as institutional “experts”) who reproduce and propagate the same Eurocentrism (or should we call it “American-centrism”) that they have learnt by mimicry from Western institutions. They do this largely to gain admission into the Western Grand Narrative, and they do a disservice to long-term American interests.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of many Indians who work in the humanities and English-language media, both in the West and in India. They have found that such mimicry serves them well in their fast-track quests for greater name recognition and prominence than would be achieved if they were to expose the establishment’s blind spots.

Globalization requires a challenge to the well-entrenched discourse: Dissenting public intellectuals should be given a fair chance to articulate from outside the walls of the academic and big media fortresses. Given the expanding Indian-American community and the increasing importance of India in the American mind, new minority Indian-American voices have emerged outside the establishment’s walls, and these are very slowly being taken note of, if not always sympathetically.

When the Washington Post was recently approached by the public relations campaigns emanating from Emory University and other supporters of the powerful Wendy Doniger, a door was opened for the Post to play a responsible role in bringing out serious blind spots of Eurocentrism/American-centrism that reside deep in America’s higher education. As shown below, the Post bungled up this opportunity by regurgitating the narratives supplied to it by the establishment of India Studies.

Washington Post’s front-page article entitled, “Wrath Over a Hindu God: U.S. Scholars’ Writings Draw Threats From Faithful,” by Shankar Vedantam (April 10, 2004; Page A01) misrepresents the topic by failing to highlight the central issues being debated, namely, systemic ideological biases within academia, while caricaturing the community’s dissenting intellectuals in ways that approach Hinduphobia. Its strategic timing on Easter weekend, which is charged with Christian emotions, especially after the “Passion” movie, was a serious setback to America’s pluralism. It has the effect of misdirecting the casual reader towards an intellectual cul-de-sac and away from serious inquiry. The Post’s article could discourage further dissenting discourse, which would stifle much-needed reform and progress within academic scholarship.

Intellectual corruption

It is good that government corruption and corporate corruption have come under considerable public attention in the US. But academic corruption, the core issue that I have tried to examine for the past several years, remains largely ignored by the public. Just because this corruption trades not in conventional monetary terms but in terms of career advancements, book sales, political ideological promotion, and evangelism does not make it any less harmful. The biases in the Post’s article (as explained below) illustrate the further need to look into media corruption.

In both cases, the key issues deserving examination are who controls the discourse, how do they exert control over it, and what are its consequences?

Government corruption in countries like India is often the result of a concentration of power over the control of commerce. Analogously, channels of knowledge distribution around the world are often controlled by vested interests, and I have highlighted this extensively in the case of knowledge about India and especially about Hinduism. A small subset of Western-controlled knowledge producers about India control the academic journals, conferences, grants, PhDs, appointments and award committees. If a similar control existed over commercial distribution channels, it would be grounds for antitrust action against the monopolists.

For exposing this and especially for naming specific parties (whom I have referred to as the “cartel”), the wrath of the gods of the India Studies establishment has descended upon me. The results of this wrath are evident in the manner in which they successfully manipulated the Post’s journalism. (For more about the cartel, see my The Peer-Review Cartel, Cartel’s Politics, Cartel’s Theories, Asymmetric Dialog of Civilizations ).

Power and the construction of “truth”

At the same time, the Post’s article opens up an opportunity to see how the media, as a channel of information distribution, is sometimes manipulated by vested interests that have the power to do so. It is an interesting hypothesis outside the scope of this article that the same nexus of power exerts an unfair advantage over both the academic discourse and the English language media in the case of India-related writings, because the academicians often function as public intellectuals and media experts.

Alvin Toffler explained how knowledge is constructed by those in control of the process: “Virtually every ‘fact’ used in business, political life, and everyday human relations is derived from other ‘facts’ or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every ‘fact’ thus has a power history and what might be called a power future.[1]”

Former US Ambassador to India, John Galbraith, went further and blatantly downgraded the claims of objectivity in these so-called truths: “[T]he required doctrine need not be subject to serious empirical proof…It need not even be seriously persuasive. It is the availability of an ascertainable doctrine that is important; it is that availability and not the substance that serves.[2]”

The Post’s article dishes out what Galbraith calls “the availability of an ascertainable doctrine” that is devoid of “substance” or “empirical proof.” The established doctrine is promoted as a given without analysis.

Nietzsche explained the harmful consequences of such pre-packaged bias that enjoys widespread media distribution: “The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for – originally almost always wrong and arbitrary – grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes, in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such.”

Just as Wendy’s Children trivialize Indian texts and practices by publishing highly influential caricatures of Hinduism, so also the Post’s article illustrates how the dominant media can trivialize the issues being raised by the dissenters. Both play into the hands of Hinduphobics, such as aggressive evangelists, Indian communists (including those who relocated to US campuses after the collapse of Soviet sponsorship in India) and other subversives who regard the fabric of Indian society as a scourge and an obstacle to their idea of “progress.” (For more on this subversion, see my articles Preventing America’s Nightmare, Axis of Neocolonialism).

Colonized minds

Edward Said’s important book, “Orientalism,” after being fiercely attacked, created a whole new trope in the discourse on colonialism. However, the scholars who are now in this field (known as post-colonial studies) are themselves a part of the academic empire controlled by the West. The brilliance of this new empire is that, whereas the British Empire relied mainly upon European scholars of Indology (with Indians largely as native informants) to construct and propagate ideas about Indians, the new empire has successfully lured ambitious Indians into prestigious jobs provided they sublimate their own identities and serve the dominant culture

This makes the criticism of the biased discourse on India much harder, because the strategy has been to deploy Indian intellectual sepoys against any Indian dissenting voices. The same scholar who is deeply invested in subtle and sophisticated India/Hindu-phobia in his/her day job in a Western institution is also charming and manipulative at impressing and disarming the fellow-Indians. S/he easily slips into Indian attire, recites Urdu poetry, even sings bhajans, and expresses great sympathy for India’s poor. In fact, if it were not for their artificially Indianized unctuous obeisance to the prevailing powers, many such Indian intellectuals would get devalued in the eyes of the Western institutions they serve.

Consequently, despite its many positive contributions to Western civilization, Hinduism continues to be studied using Western chauvinistic paradigms by packaging the “Hindu other” as “exotic,” and by the Washington Post as “violent,” and by ignoring devout Hindus who are normal, modern, intelligent persons and who could be a physician, neighbor, classmate, boss or colleague.

As analogies, imagine if the dominant culture had appropriated articulate blacks to fight against civil rights, or if the male chauvinists had appropriated enough bright women to fight against feminism, or if gays were to be hired by institutions to refute gay rights’ discourse. Besides derailing the minority movements, such a sellout would have also harmed American society in the long run while helping make a few big careers in the short term.

That this strategy – of getting bright Indians to fight against India – continues to succeed is a tribute to the long-range impact of the British colonialists.

This trend is now being spread like a cancer by Indian brown sahibs based in the West and with followers in India’s elitist higher education, media, and most of all, foreign-funded NGOs (Non-Government Organizations). The fight between India’s Left and the Hindutva Right (in which I distance myself from both sides because neither side is sufficiently in tune with the overriding global forces at play), is a subset of the bigger global project of exacerbating the “Indians versus Indians” cleavages. (See my articles Human Rights’ Other Face, Conversion Agenda, Indians undermining India.)

In my telephone interview with the Post’s journalist, Mr. Vedantam, and in follow-up emails to him, I had focused mainly on the above issues of the power equation concerning the construction and distribution of knowledge about India. Besides ignoring my central thesis in its article, the Post has also failed to provide me an opportunity for rebuttal and correction, even though I have written to it that I was the main person named and was (mis)quoted by it.

Therefore, just as my Sulekha article exposing CNN’s bias favoring Pakistan over India had pressured CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta to initiate a dialogue with the Indian-American community, I hope this Sulekha article will cause some honest introspection in the hallways of the Washington Post’s media circles.

Post’s biased framing of the issues

After Mr. Vedantam had called me for an interview and also asked for leads for his story, I wrote to him, cautioning that “a lot depends on how things are framed.” My point is that if an interview with President Clinton was framed in the context of sexual harassment, Clinton would come across negatively, whereas if he were interviewed in an article about social-security reform, he would be seen in another light. Therefore, I wrote Mr. Vedantam an email explaining the importance of properly framing his article:

“If the framing is about dangerous Hindu hooligans attacking scholarly Western academicians…then the setup would work against me, no matter what. It would be party A making accusations against party B (within this overall framework), and B would be depicted as a defendant denying the charges. On the other hand, it could be framed as the [academic] Empire now doing what the British Empire [of Indologists] once did by way of a hegemonic construction of Indian culture, in tacit and/or explicit support of evangelists and/or [Indian separatist] subversive activities. Here, I would be a voice of dissent, causing anguish to a Goliath not used to being criticized by the very culture it denigrates with impunity. This framing would be Gandhi’s satyagraha, Nader’s consumer activism…If the academics or their PR firms approached the Washington Post for the story…then the die would have been cast in favor of the former framing already by the time you interviewed me. As you know, framing is everything.”

However, I did not suspect an ambush from the nation’s most prestigious daily newspaper.

I also wrote to him about my position as follows: “I have championed the case for de-monopolizing the religious studies by adding practitioner-scholars…What we seek is the same kind of seat at the table of discourse about our tradition as blacks have in black studies and Jews, Christians, Muslims etc, each have in their respective portrayals. But when the native informant starts to answer back, it is seen as an “attack” because they are just not used to treating us as equals. However, over the past 32 years since I have been in the US, Indians in many other professions have upgraded their standing and are not second class anymore – so why not in the academic field of religious studies? Why is that a bastion of prejudices still? It is only a matter of time before they realize that the field will get enriched and expanded with more voices. My sense is that this resistance comes from the old guard who has lots to lose.”

Hinduism has an old tradition of debate and criticism, and this must be encouraged in order to continue to develop and not become frozen into a canon of final truths, as in the case of the Abrahamic religions. There are multiple legitimate sides to the truth, but Mr. Vedantam did not do justice to the counter-views to the thesis he had set out to promote.

Post ignores the debate:

I further suggested that Mr. Vedantam should contact both sides at Emory University who are engaged in the debate about the denigration of Ganesh by Courtright. A Diaspora group of successful corporate executives, entrepreneurs and academicians, called “The Concerned Community”, is representing the Hindu position, while Emory is being represented by Prof. Flueckiger and the Dean. (Neither side asked me to be included, so I was never present, even though I was told that both sides cited my writings on Sulekha.) Unfortunately, Mr. Vedantam’s article did not reflect that debate at all.

Is the Gita a “dishonest book”?

Wendy Doniger’s telling statement, as quoted in the Philadelphia Enquirer, that “the Gita is a dishonest book,” which sparked the whole matter, is not even mentioned by Mr. Vedantam. How are the Post’s readers expected to evaluate the “reaction” of the Hindus when they are not told what exactly Doniger said that caused their anger? Mr. Vedantam camouflages Doniger’s denigration of the Gita and many other hate-ridden statements by dignifying her work as “academic” and “scholarly” use of “Freudian psychoanalysis” of Hindu texts and symbols. The reader is left imagining a bunch of irrational and emotionally charged Hindus ganging up against some high-flown scholarship.

Post ignores academic criticisms of Doniger’s school:

Mr. Vedantam ignored several links that I sent him of the writings of Harvard’s Professor Michael Witzel, in which Witzel concretely and authoritatively criticized Doniger’s mis-translations of Indian texts. (See: Witzel debunks Wendy – examples # 1; #2)

Prominent psychology researcher, Dr. Alan Roland, has written extensively to explain the serious flaws in Doniger’s methods, but Mr. Vedantam did not refer to this or any other major criticisms from various important academic scholars. Also, I suggested that he interview Prof. Antonio deNicolas, Prof. Balagangadhara, Prof. Ram-Prashad Chakravarti, Prof. Shrinivas Tilak, Prof. Narasimha Sil and many others who have been involved in this controversy for years, and who are within the academic community.

For example, Mr. Vedantam interviewed Prof. Ramdas Lamb, a white American academic scholar of religious studies who is a Hindu. Prof. Lamb provided direct examples of prejudices against Hinduism and personal instances of being targeted as a Hindu scholar by the academic establishment.

Post ignores Doniger’s refusal to debate:

Mr. Vedantam also failed to point out that when my criticism of Doniger/Courtright was about to be published, Sulekha.com wrote multiple times to Prof. Doniger to invite her to write her side of the controversy on Sulekha. But she wrote back, refusing each time. Furthermore, I have saved about a dozen emails which I wrote to Prof. Doniger (that were copied to many of her peers), asking for her critique of my draft paper so that her side may be included as well, but she refused arrogantly and wrathfully.

Post ignores why Doniger was dropped by Microsoft:

Mr. Sankrant Sanu wrote a thoughtful critique of Microsoft Encarta’s treatment of religions by comparing how it portrays Hinduism, Islam and Christianity on specific topics. Mr. Sanu’s comparison led Microsoft to reach a carefully informed decision to discard Prof. Doniger’s article on Hinduism, but the Post concludes with the suggestion that there was racial bias because Doniger’s name is not Sharma. However, Prof. Doniger’s article should have been removed even if she had changed her name to Wendy Sharma. The objections were to the validity of her scholarship, not to her last name.

It is telling that Prof. Doniger is defended not on the basis of her positions but by attacking those who raise objections to her scholarship. The suggestion of racial bias is a repugnant, convenient ploy to divert attention. If Prof. Doniger were secure in her scholarship, controversy about her background would not be an issue.

Post rationalizes Courtright’s “limp phallus”:

The Courtright controversy is about that author’s fabrications, such as his claim that Ganesha’s trunk represents a “limp phallus” so that Ganesha would not have sex with his mother, Parvati, in competition with the “hard penis” of his father, Shiva. Without pointing out that there was no authentic basis for this, Mr. Vedantam tries to rationalize Courtright’s claim as legitimate “scholarship” and caricaturizes me as being emotionally “offended.” He is also wrong in stating that “Malhotra’s critique produced a swift and angry response from thousands of angry Hindus” who wrote to Emory University’s president. In fact, it was two years after my article that the Atlanta Diaspora wrote to Emory, and their action was precipitated by evidence that the Baltimore museum had used Courtright’s views to interpret Ganesha’s imagery in their exhibit and book used to educate American schoolchildren about Hinduism.

Post confuses unrelated matters:

The Laine book controversy is entirely unrelated to the Courtright controversy, and Mr. Vedantam’s use of the former to frame the latter is an act of irresponsible sensationalism. To help Mr. Vedantam on the complexities of the Laine issue, I had sent him a link to a set of balanced articles in Outlook India (India’s leading left-of-centre magazine – also see latest update), along with the following perspective:

“The ban on the [Laine] book, international prosecution of the American author, and tacit support for the violence came NOT from BJP-affiliates but from the Congress affiliated NCP which runs the state government in that given state…Maharashtra’s politicians are fuelled by local cultural sentiments just as in USA or elsewhere. Shivaji is hero #1 no matter which party wants the votes…It’s interesting that in framing this issue, the point noted above…has been ignored in all the discourse on RISA lists about this controversy and in other Western media coverage.”

It is important to distinguish between ethnic chauvinism and religious chauvinism, even though both are bad. Ethnically speaking, just as there is Texan chauvinism, French chauvinism, Chinese chauvinism, Japanese chauvinism, so also there is Bengali chauvinism, Punjabi chauvinism, Tamil chauvinism, Kashmiri chauvinism, Maratha chauvinism, and so forth. The Sambhaji Brigade, which was accused of the attack, is not a Hindutva group but a Maratha (ethnic) group opposed to the BJP and Hindu Brahmins, and their vandalism of priceless Sanskrit manuscripts cannot be portrayed as a “Hindu” act. This was recently explained to me by Maharashtrians who classify themselves as leftists, and who saw the book as a distortion of Maratha’s secular history. So the Post is blatantly wrong in insisting on a narrative of Hinduism causing vandalism, and also in claiming that Hindus consider Shivaji’s parents to be divine.

Similarly, the attack by Wendy’s Children against Sri Ramakrishna angered Narasingha Sil, a leftist Historian, who made it clear that he is not a Hindu but that his Bengali sentiments were hurt by what he regarded as academic fraud.

Post ignores similar protests from non-Hindus:

I am not in favor of banning any books, because I prefer that the opposing voices should be given comparable distribution channels to express their side. Regardless of one’s position on this, the principle of consistency and symmetry should be applied to all religions. Therefore, Mr. Vedantam should have contextualized his story by mentioning the West Bengal state’s Communist government’s ban on Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, Dwikhandita, because that book was offensive to Indian Muslims, and the US media’s decision not to show a controversial documentary on Ronald Reagan because of public sentiments.

Just this past week, M.F. Hussein, India’s best-known artist, completely withdrew his movie, “Meenaxi,” with no more than a graceful remark that “some Muslims took exception to one of the songs.” The fierce objection from many powerful Muslim groups was on a relatively mild problem (as compared to the academic scholarship that Ganesha represents a limp phallus), namely, that the name of one song was a phrase that refers to Allah in the Quran, and that its use to honor the heroine was an act of blasphemy. Unlike Courtright, Hussein did not make any attempt to turn this into a campaign to be seen as a “victim.” Nor did Indian writers protest against any of these violations of “intellectual freedom,” because the institutional scripts they followed did not encourage them to do so.

Good journalism for Post to learn from:

One must note that The New York Times also had similar Hinduphobic tendencies for years, until it replaced Barbara Crossette and Celia Dugger with Amy Waldman. Ms. Waldman has started to write with balance and understanding of Indian culture. Unfortunately, Dugger seems to have recently returned to the Times, and the same old India/Hindu denigration has resumed. Perhaps, the Post should consider hiring Ms. Waldman to upgrade its knowledge of India.

Post’s selective branding

Sankrant Sanu, whose critical review got Wendy Doniger’s article thrown out of Encarta, is described by the Post as a “Hindu activist.” By labeling him in this way, Mr. Vedantam diverts the focus on the critic’s “branding” rather than on the substance of his position.

While I prefer that a person’s intellectual positions should be evaluated only on their own stand-alone merits and not framed by the individual’s personal affiliations, any labeling or absence of it must be applied consistently for everyone. Furthermore, even when the protagonists might be engaged in name-calling, a journalist of a respectable paper claiming to report from a neutral position cannot be biased in the use of labels.

Post fails to label Vijay Prashad as “communist activist”:

Vijay Prashad, who is quoted to oppose me, is introduced by Mr. Vedantam simply as a college professor from Trinity College, whereas it is his non-academic affiliations that are more relevant to his intellectual positions on these issues. To be equal in labeling all the individuals he quoted, Mr. Vedantam should also have labeled Vijay Prashad as a communist activist, because he is the most prominent US-based advocate for the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Furthermore, Mr. Prashad’s widely read article, “An Afro-Dalit Story,” has generated awareness and sympathy for leaders of the Afro-Dalit Project, which is a politically charged revisionist history claiming that Dalits are Indian blacks and that non-Dalits are Indian whites, and that Dalits are slaves of Indian whites. Under the umbrella of fighting racism, the project (supported by segments of the Christian Church in its attempt to divide Indians) superimposes the US black/white racial tensions onto Indian society. Potentially, this is a dangerous tool to sow the seeds of discord and violence between African-Americans and Indian-Americans because such communal divisions are already proving to be deadly within India. The violent Dalit Panthers group in India and the Dalitistan separatists are all based on this bizarre “academic” account of history. In fact, some Dalit leaders are very critical of Vijay Prashad, because they see him as a high-caste communist opportunist and find his methods of championing the “downtrodden” to be inauthentic. Mr. Prashad has denied supporting the Afro-Dalit Project, but he is in the midst of several controversies and Post’s readers would be able to situate his remarks better if they had his background.

Nor did Mr. Vedantam introduce Mr. Prashad as co-founder and leader of FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists), a role that is widely promoted and one that Mr. Vedantam knows from my debate with Mr. Prashad to I had referred him. Clearly, if Mr. Vedantam wanted his readers to think of Mr. Sanu as a “Hindu activist” while evaluating the critique of Encarta, by the same token, he should have also made sure that his readers would know of Mr. Prashad’s Communist Party’s fights and FOIL’s fights against Hinduism.

An example of FOIL’s anti-Hinduism is its rejection of Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite spiritual song that was specifically meant to syncretise Hindu-Muslim names for the Supreme Being, i.e. Ram and Allah, respectively. FOIL activists write:

“FOILers had made the request that we not sing bhajans such as Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram among our group chants…Several anti-communalism efforts possess a very romantic notion of Hinduism in their condemnation of violence…Besides, many expressions of patriotism have become indistinguishable from Hindutva discourse – for instance, the phrase ‘Jai Hind’…Without de-centering Hindu idioms and Indian nationalism, we will remain only nominally, not genuinely, a South Asian group…”

The mindset reflected in the above quote deepens the separation between Hindus and Muslims rather than fostering their integration into one community. Since Hindus would not object to Muslims singing Islamic songs that would also include respect and praise for Hindu deities, it would be better to equalize through mutual inclusion rather than exclusivism. Furthermore, the term “Hind” was how the Mughals and the more recent 20th-century Muslim scholars (including Iqbal) referred to the sub-continent that the US State Department has re-named as “South Asia.” One wonders why all these anti-nationalists accept the redefinition of identities forced by India’s partition (an act of “nationalism”) and by US foreign policy towards non-Western “areas” (another act of “nationalism”). Is the Hind that was so dear to the Mughals and to Iqbal being rejected just because the scholars work for Western institutions?

Post ignores India’s Evangelism-Left axis:

To fully understand what is behind the so-called objective scholarship and reporting about Hinduism, one must see this as an extension of Indian politics. A good example is the recent reporting on Hindu schools spreading in India’s tribal areas, which is a four-part issue in which most reporters and scholars conveniently omit the parts that contradict their personal politics:

• 1) Part 1 is the decades of foreign-funded Christian evangelism in India’s tribal areas. Texas-based “Gospel for Asia” is one example: Its fund-raising video tapes proudly advertise its aggressive sales campaigns against Hinduism. These tribal conversions to Christianity have created vote banks for Indian Communists who collaborate with the missionaries in a deal whereby the missionary harvests the soul while the Communists harvest the vote. This over-aggressive evangelism has utilized the spread of false information about Hinduism. There have been many reports that these forces are promoting separatists in India. No treatment of India’s religious tensions can legitimately skip this religion-politics-globalization axis and jump straight to the Hindu response as though it were the first cause.
• 2) Part 2 is the Hindu response, as recently explained in NDTV’s article. This response has consisted of establishing Hindu equivalents of Christian missionary schools, and this has succeeded in taking votes away from India’s Communist parties which collaborate with Christian missionaries for religious vote banking. The RSS has been called the “Baptists of India.” For centuries, Christians have promoted education as their entry strategy into heathen territory worldwide, and now Hindus are merely using the same strategy in reverse.
• 3) Part 3 is the propaganda in US mainstream media and academia in which Part 1 is completely ignored, and the story is contextualized starting with Part 2 as “Hindu fundamentalists” conning NRIs to send money to these Hindutva schools. (See example.) There has been a massive US campaign led by Vijay Prashad against the Hindu educational response in tribal India, without ever mentioning his own conflict-of-interest: His Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the major recipient of the votes of Christianized Indian tribes.
• 4) Part 4 is the missing balanced analysis that could only come from writers who are not politically invested in the left/right dichotomies and who have taken the time to honestly research all sides of these complex matters. An unbiased analysis would have to compare: (i) the tribal “Hindu education” with the “Christian education” by missionaries, (ii) the role of tribal education to construct political constituencies (i.e. vote banking), and (iii) the role of global funding sources in each, including the quantities of funds involved. One must understand the axis between religion and all political parties in India, between political power and the distribution of bribes, and between global religions and internal centrifugal forces. Indian Left’s strange role in all this, unknown to Western readers, is explained inRamachandra Guha’s critique of the Indian Left as identity politics with caste as the “fundamental axis of Indian society.” Those who try to resist these foreign-funded centrifugal forces are being simplistically branded as “fundamentalists”, “nationalists,” and other pejoratives.

Post ignores evangelism’s role:

Furthermore, given his style of labeling certain individuals, Mr. Vedantam should also have explained that Emory University is run by the Methodist Church, and should have given the backgrounds of some of Emory University’s powerful faculty who have pulled strings on the Courtright controversy. A prominent figure in this has been Prof. Joyce Flueckiger, Director of the Program in South Asian Studies, where Paul Courtright works.

Mr. Vedantam failed to report that Ms. Flueckiger was born and brought up in a family of fundamentalist Christian evangelists in India, as explained in the following Atlanta magazine article: “The relationship she shares with India seems to be genetically inherited as her parents were Christian missionaries there, and spent 41 years of their lives in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh. Her dad ran a boarding school of higher secondary education and also trained Indian Christian ministers and pastors, while her mom worked on development projects for women.” (Atlanta Samachar, July 3 – July 9, 2003, page 10.)

Ms. Flueckiger specializes in doing “field work” in India’s backwaters, in the heart of the politically charged tribal areas where foreign-sponsored Christian evangelists and Maoists confront authorities in what often leads to violent clashes. The “field data” about such clashes may be presented in Washington, DC, before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, to prove human rights violations by India against Christian evangelism. The public description of her specialty is to “research on modern Indian attitudes on religious traditions, women and the role they play in religion.” She has conducted many year-long projects in India, presumably to discover innovative ways to “save” the poor heathens who are suffering under the burden of Hindu culture. She is reported to be “passionate about India” and has a great “fondness” for it.

When she reached age 18, Ms. Flueckiger moved from India to the USA to attend Goshen College, a Christian fundamentalist college whose website describes it as “a four-year residential Christian liberal arts college rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. The college’s Christ-centered core values…prepare students as leaders for the church and world.”

Her college goes on to describe its core values as follows: “We are led by Christ in our search for truth. Corinthians 3:11: ‘For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ’…As a learning community, we foster a journey of lifelong learning, encouraging one another to seek truth with fervor. This spirit of academic excellence enriches our relationships, our world and our faith in Jesus Christ.” The college authorities then invoke further Biblical quotations to tell students that “we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” The college’s education mission statement lists “Christ-centeredness” as its primary core value.

Prof. Flueckiger now serves on the prestigious Executive Committee of the US Government’s American Institute of India Studies, making her a politically powerful person in this field.

Scholars like to have their work seen as separate from their personal lives and ideologies and are most uncomfortable when the potential biases implicit in their personal lives are exposed. Mr. Vedantam’s introduction of her and Mr. Prashad as “college professors” is a common way of hiding all personal biases behind the aura of objective truth.

Post should level the playing field:

Ms. Flueckiger must instruct her PR people that they should not drag into the discourse the “Hindu activist” branding of others, because it would invariably boomerang against the scholars and their institutions, since they would also be exposed as being neck deep in political-religious agendas. Hopefully, scholars shall focus on the intellectual positions of others as being stand-alone propositions worthy of critical examination, in the same way as they want their own work to be treated.

It would be interesting to evaluate to what extent some of these India Studies scholars are academicians with political/religious beliefs and to what extent they are politicians or evangelists who have infiltrated academics as an ivory tower for distributing their ideologies.

The personal affiliations of Vijay Prashad, Joyce Flueckiger, Wendy Doniger and Paul Courtright must be given the same kind of branding as the article gives to those being labeled as “Hindu activists”, “Hindutva”, “fundamentalists”, and so forth. Hence, because Prof. Arvind Sharma is referred to as a “practicing Hindu,” Mr. Vedantam should have introduced Vijay Prashad as a “Communist activist,” Emory University as being a Methodist Church institution whose South Asian Studies department is being run by a “fundamentalist Christian evangelist with family-run conversion programs in India’s tribal areas.”

Alternatively, he should follow my advice, ignore everyone’s personal beliefs, and take their intellectual positions seriously. The cardinal principle that I asked for and that Mr. Vedantam denied is symmetry of portrayal.

For the removal of doubt, I wish to clarify that I am not troubled by Ms. Flueckiger or anyone else being a Christian fundamentalist or by Mr. Prashad being a Communist. Each of these ideologies has many positive things in it, while I disagree with many other aspects. In fact, I have been involved in an internet debate with Vijay Prashad, during the course of which I have gained an appreciation for many of his positions and activities. We agreed to avoid personally labeling each other and to debate only the issues and positions on a stand-alone basis. I do not wish to pry into any scholar’s private life, and all the facts given here are from public sources on the Internet.

My point in citing personal ideologies of scholars is only to show inconsistencies in the style of Mr. Vedantam.

Post ignores academic dissention:

Finally, to reduce the feeling of polarization between the academy and my positions, I must mention the breath of fresh air that comes from certain scholars who dare to dissent, such as the email on risa-l by Prof. Pratap Kumar, an Indian Christian settled in South Africa, who criticizes the privileging of Christian approaches in the study of Hinduism in the so-called “secular” institutions:

“Christianity is the only religion that is taught at Universities with so many sub-disciplines such as New Testament, Christian Theology, History of Christianity, Old Testament, Practical Theology, Christian Ethics, Missiology and Evangelism and Christian Education…[T]he theological method that has dominated the teaching of Christianity has somehow been introduced to teach all the other religions…[Furthermore,] most of the religions in the west are taught by non-Hindus, Non-Muslims and so on…Christianity should be taught in the same way as any other religion would be. The study of religion would be liberated when Christianity is taught by non-Christians, just as any other religion would be at the universities. This would then not only level the playing fields, but also address the rather awkward question as to who speaks for Hinduism or Christianity or Islam…”

Prof. Young from Canada was even more direct:

“Hindu studies are the only example I know of where a religious tradition is taught primarily by outsiders, and while it was at some points in the past hard to know how to remedy that, we owe Rajiv Malhotra a small bit of recognition for making us see how very odd that really was.”

‘Activism’ or ‘Public Relations’

Mr. Vedantam characterizes my dissent against the India Studies establishment as an act of “public relations” for India, Inc. He uses a quote from Mr. Prashad that such PR should be exclusively the job of the Indian government.

To appreciate how ridiculous this position is, consider that an equivalent proposal would be that criticisms of mis-portrayal of blacks in America should be a PR job solely for African governments. Besides being impractical, if it were implemented, it would undermine the hard-earned progress in African-American Studies.

Post ignores Hinduism as an American religion:

Mr. Prashad also fails to consider that Hinduism is an American minority religion, just like Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Wicca, etc., are, and that Americans have every right (and responsibility) to defend it against false stereotypes. His blind spot is the result of South Asianizing the discourse wherein Hinduism is denied legitimacy outside its ethnic South Asian contexts. While Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism are treated as world religions, many scholars continue to limit Hinduism as exclusively a study of South Asian geography (alongside snakes and monsoons) with no universalizable value.

But an increasing percentage of American Hindus are born in the USA and are not South Asians as such. Besides the second-generation NRIs, there are 18 million white Americans who practice yoga as a physical and/or spiritual discipline, meditation, vegetarianism, Ayurveda and other Hindu practices. Within that number are white Americans who call themselves Hindus. Unfortunately, the view of Hinduism as an ethnology, which is brought about by conflating the anthropology of South Asians with Hinduism, permeates India Studies. This robs American Hindus of active participation in contemporary American civic life as practitioners of a universal faith.

Furthermore, India’s secular constitution makes it tough for the Indian government to do what Mr. Vedantam calls “PR,” for Ganesh or any Hindu deity. If the Indian government were to do this, one may expect Mr. Prashad to attack it as “saffron” policies of the government. So his position is self-contradictory. Also, should Mr. Prashad’s own “activism” be viewed as PR for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), operating from US campuses?

Post ignores American multiculturalism dynamics:

Mr. Vedantam should research how other minority cultures are representing themselves positively in the US. As exemplars of cultural ambassadorship and as potential role models, I pointed out to him that I had studied the work being done by the Japan Foundation, China Institute, Korea Foundation, Tibet House and various others. Many Europeans, including the French, Germans, Italians, English, Irish, etc., also play a far greater role in their cultural portrayals in the US education system and media than do Indians.

Post ignores the example of Japan Studies:

One finds that Japan Studies chairs, programs and academic faculties greatly outnumber those established in India Studies, demonstrating that American political and commercial interests have driven the humanities, and not a purist or “objective” criteria. Why should India be considered less important than Japan, which has one-tenth of India’s land and population? Why does Japan have a massive academic division all for itself, whereas India is lumped alongside several other countries into a tiny “South Asian” category?

The emphasis on Japan in the Asia Society and various universities’ Japan Chairs was largely corporate-funded. Academicians are uncomfortable acknowledging that their institutions are not entirely driven by “academic freedom” but are powered more by the strategic interests of the American polity and also by the financial clout of a given nation in international economics. Aren’t these scholars who are supposedly leftist/liberal, anti-imperial, anti-colonial, etc., operating with double standards? Mr. Prashad should rethink his advice.

In fact, one could argue that there is less change going on in Japan than in India, and hence, the latter deserves more funding for research and teaching in order to replace the old school thinking. Furthermore, if India’s geopolitical/economic importance today could be approaching that of Japan’s 25 years ago, then why do we not have the same kind of groundswell of support for India Studies today as we saw for Japan Studies 25 years ago? Why is there no massive rethinking and realignment of academic India Studies?

Most serious professions periodically subject themselves to such critical self-reflection and bring in outside consultants for evaluation, rather than becoming defensive when reasonable issues are raised. The academy must correlate the trends in country-specific themes over the past 25 years with US geopolitical and economic interests at a given time. An objective report would also point out that many “India experts” today are simply in the wrong kind of speciality – i.e. they are in the “caste, cows and curry” kind of scholarship – and that their re-training in mid-career might not be easy. So, a real problem causing angst in the academy against independent watchdogs could be its unwillingness to address the issue of deadwood amongst academic peers.

Post ignores Pakistan Studies:

Indians would be even more surprised to learn that Pakistan has a stronger positioning in many South Asian Studies departments than does India, despite the fact that Indian faculty and students far outnumber Pakistanis. For example, the Pakistani website, Chowk, proudly reported: “The highly acclaimed Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley held its 19th South Asia Conference...It appears that the ‘short list’ has finally arrived from Pakistan as to the choices from amongst which one person will be the first academic to hold the new Quaid-e-Azam Chair of Pakistan Studies at U.C. Berkeley.”

Some Indian-American scholars attacked me on the H-Asia internet list of Asian Studies scholars because I had suggested that there was a Quaid-e-Azam Chair at UC Berkeley and that the selection was influenced by Pakistan’s government. My whistle-blowing angered the scholars, who insisted that they had only “objective” and “academically independent” programs and that there was no such Pakistani chair. However, the above quote from Chowk clearly proves them wrong. (I suppose, because of my whistle-blowing here, Pakistan’s government and the US academy will stop mentioning these ties publicly!)

Another prominent example of US-based influence is Farooq Kathwari, a businessman and Chairman of Ethan Allen, who is a hardcore pro-Pakistani lobbyist and who is funding a Kashmir nationalist group in the USA with considerable political backing from certain US politicians and from South Asian Studies scholars, including many Indian-Americans. For example, Gauri Vishwanathan, Director of Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University, is amongst the academic leaders who facilitate academic forums where Mr. Kathwari and others, such as Saeed Shafqat, Quaid-e Azam Distinguished Professor of Pakistan Studies, Columbia University, get their political positions legitimized as “objective scholarship.”

Post confuses education with PR:

A good example of positive re-education about Islam in USA is the new course on Islam prepared by Prof John L. Esposito of Georgetown University. The motive there is the opposite of denigration under the guise of “academic freedom.” Rather, it is to reduce the level of Eurocentrism and Christian-centrism that is sweeping the nation. One is hard pressed to find very many such examples about teaching positively on Hinduism on a large scale.

A different trend that is disturbing is that the US Congress is considering a new bill that would further expand the teaching of “Western Civilization” at all levels, implicitly equating patriotism with Eurocentrism. Its dangerous effects of xenophobia at home, in foreign policymaking, and in the global economy must be considered carefully. The traditional strength of America has been its assimilative quality, which is now taking it away from its European/Western origins towards Asian and other cultures. This must not be reversed, or else America could become stifled as another Japan-like homogeneous aging population that would lose its innovation and global competitiveness.

Freedom and censorship

At a recent conference in Ohio, I was delighted when Prof. E.C.G. Sudarshan, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, and the event’s honoree, mentioned in his acceptance speech that he very much appreciated my work against academic monopolies of knowledge, and that he wanted to lend his support to me. He went on to explain that in physics, it was perfectly okay to criticize scholars’ work in order to point out possible errors. He was horrified by a paper that had been presented on the previous day (by a young Indian-American scholar from UC Berkeley), in which the unfortunate ban of Laine’s book was somehow conflated with my work that was completely unrelated to Laine, and in which my criticism was being labeled as an attack on “academic freedom.” Academic freedom, explained Prof. Sudarshan, did not give immunity to lie and get away with it. It was not at the expense of anyone else’s right to criticize.

In anticipation of any accusations that this Sulekha article “censors” the Washington Post, I wish to say the following: Only those in power over the institutions of knowledge production and distribution have the capacity to censor, and clearly, the Post enjoys overwhelming superiority in readership and brand credibility over any medium available to argue my side. Whistle-blowing and bringing attention to prejudices is not censorship.

In light of this accusation by some scholars that my criticism denies them “academic freedom”, I present two lists of activities below. The first list shows the academic system’s techniques, which I feel result in their controlling the knowledge flow. The second list contains what I advise dissenting voices to do in order to try to change the established discourse. I believe that the first list limits the discourse while the second expands it. But each reader must decide which of these two would expand the discourse and hence freedom, and which one amounts to censorship.

List #1 – Power over India Studies:

There are many methods being used by those in power to control the content and channels of information. These methods include the following:

1) Funding of India-related studies is dominated by the US Government, Christian Churches, certain Christian private foundations (such as Pew Trust, Templeton Foundation, Luce, etc.), various “secular” Western foundations that are rooted in Western frameworks and categories (such as Ford, Macarthur, etc.), and Western universities. These funds are also funneled through complex and often hard-to-track ways into India’s NGOs, higher education and English language media. Grant applicants know what to propose in order to maximize their chances of being funded.

2) Dissenting perspectives are at first discouraged by the established scholars, and if they persist, they are simply ignored. This could be either subtly applied, by including the dissenting perspective as a nominal side-show without mainstream coverage, or it could be blatant by organizing a formal boycott. For instance, it is common practice for many scholars not to show up at events where the speakers would include those critics who are outside the control of their coterie of peers.

3) The scholars in power rarely invite genuinely dissenting voices as equals on their own panels. When such voices show up in the audience, they get tagged once their direct and embarrassing questions become known, and the underground network rapidly spreads rumors about them as undesirables and trouble-makers. The result is that at future events, the moderator/chair tries not to even acknowledge such questioners from the audience.

4) A very common technique is to criticize dissenters in absentia. For example, Paul Courtright has been recently traveling to speak at half a dozen universities. I have been the main target of his attacks at these talks, and yet nobody in the system has had the decency of even letting me know of these events in advance, much less of inviting me to participate and be able to give my side of the facts. However, at one recent event by him, “Studying Religions in an Age of Terror,” in Chicago (1st April, 04), thanks to a couple of honest and courageous academic scholars, Courtright was confronted by the audience with some hard issues, and he felt stumped as he had not anticipated criticism. This hit-and-run tactic consists of first using a forum where the dissenting individual is absent or even disallowed membership, and second, by disallowing the dissenter the opportunity to respond in a balanced forum.

5) The branding-labelling of dissenters in pejorative ways serves to discourage readers from delving into the issues, because most people are too busy to be able to invest quality time on such matters.

6) Insiders who join or support the dissent often get blackballed, and their careers suffer. On the other hand, those who mimic the obedient Indian role models promoted by the establishment enjoy fast-track advancement.

7) Indian scholars engaged in postcolonial studies are usually ill-equipped to understand non-Western epistemologies, and hence, they utilize the very same Western epistemologies that they claim to criticize.

8) The academic system controls from within who is licensed to do scholarship (e.g., by admitting only those who have Western humanities credentials), and hence who is to be able to criticize.

9) When there is a closed circle (or cartel) of experts in a specialty, the peer-review process can itself be a form of censorship, as explained in my extensive article on The Peer-Review Cartel.

10) Many Western-based South Asian Studies scholars are members of or are affiliated with specific Indian political parties and/or political NGOs. These NGOs range from Dalit separatists, Christian proselytizers, Communist parties, etc., just to name a few. Western academic positions are used to provide forums of respectability, fundraising and travel sponsorship for their Indian political counterparts. This utilizes the credibility of the Western-based scholars’ institutional affiliations to bring credibility to their India-based political partners. Meanwhile, the Indian side of this axis provides filtered data to the Western-based scholar, as well as an organized channel in India to distribute the ideology of the Western-based scholar. In this regard, my suggestion a few months ago to Mr. Prashad that all such affiliations should be disclosed has yet to receive a response from him. Only such a transparent disclosure would tell the public the extent to which certain academic scholars double up as US-based branches of specific political parties and movements in India.

11) The movie, Schindler’s List, has a powerful scene in a Nazi camp: An SS guard is angry at the Jewish inmates because the construction work is not progressing well. So a young and confident Jewish woman walks up to the guard and says politely, “Sir, I am an engineering manager by profession and, if you allow, I could lead this project and get the work completed.” The guard instantly points his pistol at her head and shoots her dead on the spot. The lesson is that leaders of dissent are to be targeted, as they are considered dangerous because they have the capability to explain things to their people and to get them to revolt. I have been successful in bringing important issues to the attention of the general public in a language and style that is accessible and forthright. Hence, they asked Mr. Vedantam to portray me as the ring-leader to be targeted. In fact, Mr. Vedantam wrote to me implying that I was considered “dangerous” by Wendy Doniger, and he seemed to expect me to accept this characterization. But he has failed to provide a criterion or any evidence of being “dangerous,” and relies entirely on Doniger’s wrathful outpourings.

12) Different yardsticks are being applied to Hinduism as compared to other religions, when loaded terms like “fundamentalism” or “intolerance” are used. A Christian’s or Muslim’s tolerance is not expected to include his/her willingness to withstand insults against his/her religion, but a Hindu is declared as intolerant if he protests when his faith is insulted by zealots. Similarly, religious fundamentalism should mean exclusivism, especially when it is based on a literal interpretation of religious texts. By this definition, the vast majority of American Christians and the Muslims of the world are fundamentalists, as per surveys by Pew and Gallup. Hindus have no requirement for exclusivism or evangelism, and do not need the de-legitimization of other religions as a precondition to legitimize their own. However, the term “fundamentalism” is routinely applied to dissenting Hindus without any critical review of what they are dissenting about. When such flaws are pointed out, the individual is demonized as a fanatic, simply for speaking up and challenging the discourse.

List #2 – Satyagraha methods:

To break these monopolies and to decensor the field, the following list gives some of the techniques that dissenting humanities scholars and public intellectuals should consider adopting:

1) Indian-Americans who have become successful in a non-academic field, and who are assertive, articulate and autonomous thinkers, are perceived as a threat to the humanities’ establishment when they start to get involved. This is partly because the system cannot control such persons by using its normal carrots and sticks, and partly because such individuals are self-assured because they have succeeded in competing with Westerners in their professions. The humanities lag behind other professions where Indians have pierced through the glass ceiling, such as information technology, medicine, engineering, science, finance, corporate management, and entrepreneurship. The Western Grand Narrative does not yet have standard scripts for Indians in India Studies to be challengers of established theories and positions, in the same manner as Indians in these other professions have rewritten the scripts (and in some cases the trajectory of the professions themselves) of the American Grand Narrative to make themselves equals. This is what the humanities must learn from other professions, where Indians have broken through walls and ceilings. So we have a tale of two kinds of NRIs in America: shiners and whiners. The whiners are in professions that (i) pay less than the shiners make, (ii) are still under the Eurocentric glass ceiling, but (iii) are very influential as writers, journalists and humanities scholars of Indian culture and identity. The shiners’ kids are nowadays being mentored by the whiners to become South Asians in US colleges.

2) Gandhi’s satyagraha method shows us how to intellectually challenge in a defiant tone, yet from a position of moral authority and intellectual competence. Those with academic tenure should join the non-academicians in satyagraha, as their service to their own profession, to their traditions, and to the American nation. Unfortunately, few so far seem to have the required combination of selflessness, clarity and courage.

3) Product innovation can overcome monopolistic controls over distribution channels. (See an example of one such project.) Also, one may identify new target audiences that the academic establishment has ignored and develop new distribution channels to reach them: Diaspora adult education, children’s education through animation and computer games, and web-based education are some examples of considerable potential.

4) Direct criticism of the establishment in front of the financial donors would result in a decline in donations to abusive programs: This is reported to have happened at Emory University already, causing the establishment to take this matter very seriously and to launch its counter-offensive using PR to plant articles in the mainstream press. (Harvard also faces resistance in its $15 million fundraiser from Indians, given the community’s awareness about some of its biased work. A growing number of NRIs see Harvard’s South Asia program as one of the top sepoy academies, in sharp contrast to the positive role of its business school and other programs.) Such financial pressure forces the promoters to pay closer attention to the issues being raised, rather than flippantly dismissing these complaints or turning them over to hired public relations firms to influence journalists.

5) Young academic scholars who are not yet on a sepoy-in-training track should get briefed on these various moral and intellectual issues from a variety of perspectives so they can act as independent thinkers.

6) India-based pandits, native informants, journalists, and NGOs should be briefed on these issues so that some might refuse to be appropriated. Those who continue to be appropriated would at least negotiate higher compensation as their price to sell out, and this would adversely impact the system’s ability to procure a large army of such resources.

7) The most important point to bear in mind is what not to do: Under no circumstances should a dissenter encourage or endorse, even implicitly, anyone who advocates the use of violence. Besides legal and dharmic breaches, this would surely backfire against any legitimate goals. Rather, one should constantly use Gandhi’s method to raise the moral and intellectual standard and compel the other side to match.

Censorship is the enforcement of a monopoly over knowledge. Only a party with power and authority over the system of knowledge production and distribution is capable of censorship. Dissenting voices lack the required systemic authority to be able to censor. Therefore, no amount of protests from outside the gates of power can be considered censorship.

Hinduphobia

Is Post unaware of Dotbusters?

The Infinity Foundation has recently sponsored a research project for two college professors to document the history of the “Dotbusters,” a violent crime gang in the 1980s that specifically targeted Hindus in New Jersey. (The “dot” in the name with which they signed their criminal acts referred to the bindi on Hindu women’s foreheads.) Preliminary examination of the archive shows that this gang was largely driven by Hinduphobia involving ignorance and stereotypes.

My Chinese-American and Japanese-American friends were surprised that there had never been a serious US academic study of the Dotbusters, whereas the academy has studied other Asian minorities’ struggles. While it is fashionable for South Asian Studies to have media events, conferences, seminars, PhD dissertations and courses on human rights violations in India (especially those where Hindus get accused), ironically, the land which exports human rights and studies others’ violations has not studied the killings of Hindu Americans right here at home.

This new research project will allow us to compare today’s media Hinduphobia with that which informed the Dotbusters.

Little India magazine’s November 2003 issue gives statistics on an enormous increase in hate crimes against Indian-Americans – crimes that are specifically against ethnic/religious identities. Recent research available from Pew Trust shows a disturbing trend, namely, that Americans believe Islam to be the highest and Hinduism to be the second highest cause of religious violence, while rating Christianity as the religion that is least prone to causing violence. In another recent survey cited by Prof. Wuthnow of Princeton University, 25% of Americans associate Hinduism with “fanaticism.”

Such false stereotypes reflect poorly on the media’s performance in informing the public.

The American public badly needs to be positively re-educated about minority American religions, but the Washington Post seems to have unintentionally spread Hinduphobia.

The term “Islamophobia” has been successfully coined by academicians and public intellectuals who are keen to expose and dispel the biases against Islam. A Google search on “Islamophobia” gave 27,300 hits. By contrast, a Google search on the category “Hinduphobia” gave only 29 hits. What does this lack of public awareness about Hinduphobia tell us?

Indian writers’ inferiority complexes:

Until I came across the Indian-American author, Richard Crasta, I had believed that such prejudices were being caused mainly by Westerners. However, Crasta explains that these biases are amplified by a mindset that afflicts many Indians because of their own inferiority complexes. In his provocative book, “Impressing the Whites: The New International Slavery,” he writes that “ethnic shame is a phenomenon that is particularly intense among Indians abroad and particularly those in the U.S. and U.K… Ethnic shame is the opposite of ethnic pride…”

Crasta goes on to explain the role of certain well-known US-based organizations in cultivating this Indian identity shame and Hinduphobia:

“Indeed, many of these immigrants are so terrified of voices that may offend the Masters that they will themselves act as filtering devices, as local policemen of thoughts. Organizations like the Asia Society, South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), and many ethnic newspapers regularly act as cheerleaders for those Indians who have impressed the whites, and as bouncers to keep their scruffy and impolite brethren from disrupting the harmony: on one occasion even trying to drop a ‘trouble-making’ Indian author from the program at the Asia Society.”

Once I became open to examining Richard Crasta’s perspective several years ago, I started to examine the evidence carefully and realized that his courageous thesis had merit. He shows that Hinduphobia is often a subconscious conditioning of Indians: “The carrot and stick are so discreetly transferred by Third World writers onto their internal censor that they are often unconscious of their own self-censorship.” Ironically, this coterie of self-alienated Indians is being deployed by the academic/media establishment to attack the dissenting voices. Might Mr. Vedantam be an unwitting victim of this malaise?

Furthermore, the system has created career incentives to encourage Indian journalists into cultural self-castration. SAJA gives Mr. Vedantam importance partly because of his affiliation with the Post, as this helps to legitimize SAJA in the eyes of young journalists looking for media contacts and jobs. Mr. Vedantam, in turn, consults SAJA friends and adopts their biases, such as the biases reflected in his article, and so becomes a hero for them. Like any system built on power, it is a closed and self-sustaining system to control the information channels and to perpetuate itself.

After her New York trip with SAJA journalists, Tavleen Singh wrote an excellent analysis of Indian journalists’ inability to interpret India, much less to be able to predict future trends. She explained how these Indian journalists often have serious blind spots in their understanding of India. Because Western and often Indian media look at SAJA as a credible source for referrals, SAJA’s new leaders should do some introspection.

SAJA’s tilts on content/framing and on who gets the awards and various speaker spots are a projection of the systemic biases, often unconsciously applied. The trend has been to pander to the Celia Duggers and Barbara Crossettes of the media world as credible authorities on India, even though they tend to be unimportant in the mainstream American media and have poor educational backgrounds on India.

Journalism and Hinduphobia: The principles on which such hatchet jobs are done in the mainstream may be summarized as follows:

1) It is assumed that most readers do not have the time or wherewithal to delve into the details for themselves. Therefore, given the credibility of brand names like the Washington Post, readers will believe whatever is dished out to them—a case of credibility by association. This means that Western biases are most dangerous when planted into the minds of Indian writers and when such Indians get planted into jobs in mainstream academia and media.

2) Given that this asymmetric power resides in the hands of a few, they can and do take liberties with the facts. This is often done by the tilted manner in which they: (i) contextualize the issue, (ii) frame and brand certain individuals while placing others on pedestals as being objective, and (iii) use a juxtaposition of unrelated data that is cut-and-pasted into a guilt-by-association scenario. As demonstrated in the Post’s article, serious intellectual discourse gets conflated with the angry outbursts of a few unrelated Hindus, so as to make all Hindu dissent appear as fanaticism.

3) Each time this exercise is repeated successfully, the negative brand management program (i.e. Hinduphobia) becomes stronger, thereby making the next episode of cultural demonology that much easier to construct and sell. The system is self-replicating and can lead to catastrophic consequences.

Hinduism and Stockholm Syndrome:

Hinduism is squeezed both from the American right and from the Indian and American left. The right backs the Christian fundamentalist goals of converting India and targets Hinduism as the last remaining and most resilient bastion of pagan culture in the world. The intelligentsia of the left is more complex and diverse in its reasons for the thoroughgoing bias against Hinduism and Hindus: (i) there is a holdover from an era of allegiance to pro-Communist movements; (ii) there are fifth-column opportunist double agents; (iii) there is a fundamental discomfort due to misunderstandings that Hinduism runs counter to modernity; and (iv) there are social stigmas that article’s such as the Post’s promulgate.

The net effect of this is that many Hindus are intimidated into accepting every insult that is hurled at them, for fear of being subjected to further harassment. This may be viewed as a sort of societal Stockholm Syndrome. The case for Hinduphobia as an instance of societal Stockholm Syndrome is supported by the following facts:

1) Most Hindus deny the existence of Hinduphobia, and many interpret the episodes that are pointed out as positive markers of their tolerance. Since many NRIs feel lucky to be able to enjoy lifestyles which their parents lacked, they do not wish to rock the boat. Hence, they prefer to hide their Hindu shame behind complicity or outright support of Hinduphobia.

2) The lack of available research materials on Hinduphobia, as contrasted with Islamophobia (even before September 11, 2001) and on other kinds of xenophobia, indicates disinterest or even suppression of the phenomena on the part of the academic scholars entrusted with Hinduism Studies. This could partially be guilt or fear that the scholars might be responsible for their complicity.

3) The few individuals, such as myself, who do speak up and point out instances of Hinduphobia get fiercely attacked by the academic establishment, especially if they locate the causes in the intellectual discourse.

In this regard, Hindus are very different from all other American minority groups. The overwhelming majority of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, blacks, gays, Hispanics, etc., publicly claim their identities with pride, and they protest when falsely stereotyped. In doing so, these other groups enhance America as a powerful multicultural society, a responsibility that Indians have yet to understand because of the vast differences between the nature of Indian and American approaches to secularism: While Americans publicly celebrate their many distinct religious identities, Indians were raised after independence to fear distinctions based on religion, seeing distinction as a cause of conflict because such conflicts were exploited by the colonial masters.

Xenophobia and violence:

In order to appreciate the seriousness of cultural branding, readers must introspect on the following question: Does the Western media’s and public’s apathy towards Iraqi civilian casualties (which has nothing to do with one’s views on the war against Saddam’s government) correlate with perceptions of Iraqi culture, and did Western media’s choice of images of Iraqi culture play a role in creating these (mis)perceptions? In other words, if the war had been against a white Christian country (say France, hypothetically), might things have been different?

Furthermore, history shows that genocides have usually been preceded by the denigration of the victims’ identities – showing them as irrational, immoral, unethical and/or worshipping “false gods” and “idols”, i.e. as not deserving of the same human rights extended to “good” people. How does today’s Hinduphobia (such as Hindus worshipping limp phalluses, pushing women to do sati, killing “innocent” missionaries, and nowadays “attacking” erudite scholars) compare with the Eurocentric scholarship in earlier times about Native Americans, Africans, Jews, Roma, and others, who were subsequently victims of genocide?

Educating the Washington Post:

Given the seriousness of American Hinduphobia, the Washington Post must review research data about the prevailing stigmas against Hinduism in America, and should also conduct surveys amongst its own readers (and its journalists and editors) to gain a better insight into the level of misinformation that exists even amongst well-educated Americans. This would enable it to better strategize its own portrayal of Hinduism and to avoid inadvertently fueling more hate crimes similar to the Dotbusters. Given the emerging global role of India’s democracy, its developing economic resources, and its war on terrorism, The Washington Post should also consider the negative consequences of its anti-Hinduism bias on Washington’s law and policymakers.

While responsible institutions like the Washington Post are probably horrified at the thought of unintentionally spreading Hinduphobia, many Indian writers would rub their hands in glee for having hammered one more nail into the heart of Hinduism, because this enables them to disown an identity that has the stigma of being a scourge. Unfortunately, many such Indians are chowkidars (gatekeepers) manning the gates of the academic and media establishments and are deeply invested in them.

Call for introspection

Meanwhile, the Hindu global gurus and most Diaspora leaders are on such lofty clouds that they are easily fooled by simplistic double-talk of every religion being the “same”, with a few garlands put around their necks at public events, and with short-term personal popularities. They have superficial insights into the global processes at work, and are no match for the sophisticated intellectual machinery that has evolved over centuries by the more extroverted and expansive traditions.

Many well-meaning Indian Leftists need to seriously rethink, starting from global and not local issues, because globalization overrules and controls every localized issue today and this will increase further. Those opposing globalization should engage in a renegotiation of globalization rather than boycotting it. A reinvented Indian Left would have much to offer India and the world.

Finally, US policymakers on South Asia Studies should evaluate my thesis that any meltdown of India’s integrity as a nation-state would quickly facilitate Osama Bin-Laden’s successors’ mission to Talibanize South and Southeast Asia.

Journalists must ethically portray Hindus as an important American minority. To teach negative stereotypes about Indian culture would also be a disservice to the American generation that will deal with self-confident Indians in the USA and in India’s global commerce.

The Washington Post’s article adds pressure to Hindus not to complain for fear of being tagged as “fundamentalists.” For if Hindus ever raise their voices, someone like Mr. Vedantam will write an article about violence and threats involving Hindus, no matter how unrelated, and then juxtapose the given Hindu who is complaining so as to give the impression of guilt-by-association. This is analogous to blacks being made to fear that every time they complain, some journalist will write about black crime and include them in the narrative as though they had something to do with it. Repressing victims of denigration is unhealthy for society, and journalists or scholars who engage in this bear moral responsibility.

Concluding remarks:

The thoughts proposed in this article are a work in progress. They are intended to provoke discussion and are expected to be changed and corrected. They are presented here in their current state of flux because of the urgency of the problem caused by the Post, i.e. with respect to exacerbating the Hinduphobia that permeates beneath the surface and yet remains deniable. The best way forward is to talk about these uncomfortable issues in the same manner as blacks forced discussions on racism in the public arena, and women made male chauvinism into a new category for study. Let us examine instances and theories about Hinduphobia with an open mind.

REFERENCES:

[1]Toffler, Alvin, 1990, “Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century,” New York Bantam Books. p.18.

[2] Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1992, “The Culture of Contentment,” Boston, pp.97-98.

[3] Visit these links:

1) The Uses (and Misuses) Of Psychoanalysis in South Asian Studies: Mysticism and Child Development by Alan Roland

2) Love’s Child: The Way Of The Gods by Antonio T. de Nicolas

3) India and Her Traditions: A Reply to Jeffrey Kripal by S. N. Balagangadhara

4) Kali’s Child: Psychological And Hermeneutical Problems by Prof. Somnath Bhattacharyya

5) Are Hinduism studies prejudiced? A look at Microsoft Encarta by Sankrant Sanu

6) When The Cigar Becomes A Phallus

7) Limp Scholarship and Demonology

8) Courtright Twist And Academic Freedom by Sankrant Sanu

9) On Colonial Experience and the Indian Renaissance: A Prolegomenon to a Project by S. N. Balagangadhara

10) Taking Back Hindu Studies by Shrinivas Tilak

11) The Dominance of Angreziyat in Our Education by Madhu Kishwar

12) Hinduism In American Classrooms

13) Think Before You Eat Sweets

14) ‘Secularism’, Colonial Hegemony and Hindu ‘Fanaticism’ by Arjun Bhagat

15) Could The Emperor Just Be Buck Naked? by V. Chandrasekhar

16) The Groan-I: Loss of Scholarship and High Drama in ‘South Asian’ Studies by Yvette C. Rosser

Published: 2004

THE WESTERNIZED SIDE OF MY BACKGROUND:

Since this matter keeps getting raised by some very narrow-minded Hindus in the middle of any and every kind of column, here is what I have to say:

My upbringing in my family, education, professional circles, and social circles have been and shall remain a combination of Indian and Western influences. I deny neither, and I am glad to have the gift of both. I synthesize them into a coherent worldview that I am happy with.

This is consistent with the globalization era and the reality of my educational (=Western) and spiritual (=Indian) experiences that are a part of me. So it’s also a pragmatic matter of accepting what is a given.

To complicate matters for the narrow-minded people here, I have worshipped in every major religion in the world, have dear friends in each, have read their spiritual books, and have had numerous brainstorms with theologians in each in the spirit of learning. Furthermore, I intend to continue these practices.

My sadhana is adhyatmika-centric and is neither history-centric nor ritual-centric. However, I respect both and harmonize themes into my views while focusing my sadhana on adhyatmika. I learned much from Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh sources and practices. I was also influenced as a child by a Sufi. I have gained a lot from some Christian mystics whom I came in contact with years ago.

We have an ancient Indian tradition of engaging the ‘other’ using a technique called purva-paksha. You must first study the other’s viewpoint very seriously and become an expert. Only then can you debate against it.

But today, I cannot find swamis who know the Western ‘other’ well enough to do purva-paksha of Western thought. This is why their followers are lost, confused about identity, and unable to effectively respond to the dominant culture. In the past, in India, the ‘other’ would have been Buddhist, Jaina, Nyaya, Mimamsika, Vedantin, etc., and each had to be studied, but today, the ‘other’ is typically Western-dominated culture that must be studied.

To understand Western thought, one must master its three branches: Christianity, Enlightenment, and Post-Enlightenment. Most Hindu preachers admit that their education did not include any of these. (Some do it as a matter of great pride.) So they lack a purva-paksha of the ‘other’ that matters so much in today’s global culture. Hence, by the methods of our tradition, they are unqualified to be able to debate in the mainstream, and they are the blind leading their followers – the result is today’s catastrophes facing Hindus.

On the other hand, the West has invested serious resources in studying Indian culture and thought rather than ignoring it. RISA is merely one example that proves my point. This started with the Jesuit College about 500 years ago, which translated Sanskrit works into Latin (including many in science/mathematics still not declassified by the Vatican). Later, it became more sophisticated Indology in the 19th century: EVERY major European university had Sanskrit text studies as a large department. Today, this is done not by the British Empire but mainly by the US Government, the churches, and various US private foundations funded by MNCs’ wealth. Today’s South Asian Studies replaces colonial Indology as the West’s purva-paksha of Indian thought and culture.

This means the West has extracted knowledge from Indic sources and developed sophisticated positions about us. In many cases, the most qualified scholar available at a university about some Indian text or tradition is a Westerner. That most swamis and their followers do not even know this shows how out of touch they are with the world.

So, rather than attacking me for my background, one might also see in it a rare ability to do purva-paksha of the West from the Indian perspective: I have invested most of my time since the mid-1990s in studying all three strains of Western thought from works of serious thinkers. Rather than being a handicap, I can debate the ‘other’ with authority and confidence.

Just as a team needs specialists of many kinds and not all members with the same speciality, the Indian Enlightenment Project needs both the St. Stephens graduate and the DAV graduate, not either/or. So why is Platonist so insecure with a sense of inferiority complex? Is it his lack of knowledge of his own tradition that makes him fear that the winds of Western influences will sweep him off?

Furthermore, how is his mentality different from that of fundamentalist Islamists? His comments are evidence that Hindu fundamentalism does exist as a serious menace today.

What this narrow mentality has produced is 800 Hindu temples in North America at a cost of about $2 billion, but lacking in intellectual content in most of them. They come across to the NRI youth as voodoo centers, doing some exotic ritual with no meaning. The pandits are ill-trained for 21st-century discourse; many cannot communicate for nuts. Any sincere visitor who wants to appreciate Hinduism would be well advised to stay away from them and instead spend quality time with someone knowledgeable in discussions first. Hindu temples have failed to project Hindu culture to mainstream society. Proof: in all these controversies we have been engaged in here on Sulekha, the temple-wallahs are lost, disinterested, and ignorant. They have failed to educate our own youth in ways that would equip them to face the issues with confidence and not to run from Hindu identity as being shameful.

They have failed because of the mentality exemplified by Platonist and others like him.

Many swamis told me point-blank that they are disinterested in teaching about the sociopolitical realm as they find it irrelevant or even un-Hindu-like. While I respect that (especially since my sadhana is adhyatmika), I point out to them that Krishna’s teachings were in the kshetra (i.e. theater) and not in the clouds. The Avatar enters the theater of mundane life to teach how to live in the mundane kshetra.

So today’s teachings must be for today’s kshetra, which happens to be Western-dominated. Krishna starts with a SWOT analysis (SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) of both sides of the war, when he explains to Arjuna the capabilities of each of the main participants. This is called competitive analysis, an example of knowing the kshetra – a very practical thing. No swami has yet been able to give a rejoinder to me that would show teachings to live in the modern kshetra (based on purva-paksha) to be improper or un-Hindu.

So far, I have made two points for being a successful Hindu today: follow the West’s purva-paksha and teach/practice according to the modern kshetra.

My next question is: Should we go back in time and try to recreate it, or should we advance into the future? Unfortunately, most Hindus and anti-Hindus don’t understand our tradition in this regard. It is falsely viewed that these are mutually exclusive options, namely, that one must be either an orthodox living in Vedic times or a “progressive” person who has rejected the past.

Abrahamic religions are based on discontinuous changes, each caused by a new prophetic revelation that overruled the past. Thus, they had to reject prior knowledge. Hence, they had this mutually exclusive choice-making forced upon them. Indian secularists brought this idea into India, and most orthodox Hindus (lacking in the proper purva-paksha of the West) simply accepted this way of thinking. So we have fights between Indian orthodoxy and progressives. Both are wrong.

Indian traditions give you a combination: Change is not discontinuous, but the new gets assimilated into the framework already in place. Notice how the internet, computers, satellites, etc, are being assimilated into Hindu culture. Notice how orthodox all this threatens Islam, and hence all its clashes with modernity. Hinduism is not anti-modernity. There was never a Shankaracharya who denounced scientific inquiry or progress, and hence, the 200 years of wars between medieval Christianity and science were simply unnecessary in India.

Sampradaya is a river that flows. It is neither a static pond (fixed in the past) nor a waterfall with discontinuities (“progressives’ idea of advancement). It is the same as the past (in terms of overall categories) and new (in terms of content).

Western religion fixed its followers in the past until a new prophet came to give them new instructions. Western science gave the people ongoing change without referencing their past. So even today, they are busy reconciling “science and religion,” whereas Indian culture never had this problem to begin with.

This is all because of the difference between history-centric religions and a-historical (Sanatana) dharma.

So I ask the reader, which is better for Hinduism’s future: my Indian-Western combined background rooted in an Indian framework, or a Platonist’s DAV-only education that makes him what I would call a Hindu fundamentalist?

Since he simply refused to leave our column thread about a completely unrelated topic and demanded that we deal with me and my “Stephens College background,” let us deal with his issues here. Why did he not post his position on a weblog and refer those interested to its URL so that the main thread would not get hijacked? What does this tell us about such a person’s intellect and intentions?

Also, he adopted the screen name “Platonist”, which is hardly Hindu. Should we go on his case unrelentingly, that he is unqualified to speak for Indian traditions, because he suffers from an inferiority complex and has adopted Western identities?

Each of us must play the hand as dealt to us, and neither try to undo the past (but focus on presently available choices) nor try to live someone else’s hand.

I have a heart condition, asthma since childhood, and various other conditions and must live accordingly. I had certain family circumstances and a certain sequence of experiences in my past. I must understand what is suitable for me to do today, based on my SWOT analysis of myself. So if my parents sent me to a certain school/college and Platonist went to a different kind, we must each live today based on what’s best for each individual. This personalized dharma is called sva-dharma and is more sophisticated than the notion of standardized “commandments” for everyone.

Dharma is based on Vedic “rta” (patterns of reality) and cannot be translated as “law” (which is based on an external law-maker that is absent in authorless Vedas).

St Stephens College is part of my sanskara, as DAV is part of Platonist’s. The question is how well each of us lives today by our personalized sanskara and doing our best for the common good.

JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” What has Platonist done for his culture, which he says is so dear to him? Why does he not worry about that, rather than being obsessed with what I should or should not do? He is not my wife or parent, so why is he nitpicking about me?

If he were Donald Trump, he could be saying, “You’re fired!” and then he would simply move on to read other authors instead of me. That would be good for me. On the other hand, if I were Donald Trump, I would tell him, “You’re fired!” and tell him to get lost.

The point is that neither lives for the other person. Neither person is in bondage to the other. I left business life permanently in my mid-40s (a very unusual thing to do) to be free and let inspiration drive me. Why would I accept the bondage of so-called “followers” whom I did not select or accept, after having left the bondage of the job-business rat race? If I wanted to be measured/evaluated by others and forced to pursue “commitments” and achieve “goals,” then why would I not do it in some lucrative business instead? Why would I pick a bunch of random individuals on Sulekha who have done little of their own on these causes and yet have massive expectations and even demands of me, and why would I make them the circle to be surrounded with?

I left behind ambitions, including politics, leadership of institutions, and fan clubs. These are forms of bondage. So those who do not find me, my life, or my work unacceptable do not have to hijack serious discussion threads. They merely have to abandon me and my writings. I shall be most grateful to them.

Thanks for this opportunity to explain my side. I hope this will convince snipers to allow me and others to refocus and to quit heckling on matters unrelated to a given column.

Regards,
Rajiv

Published: 2004

The History

In contrast with the clash of civilizations now being popularized, I would much rather propose a dialogamong them. But what are the historical reasons for lack of this dialog, and what prevents this from becoming the top priority for humanity today? I researched the writings of eminent scholars in a variety of specialties, such as history, multiculturalism, colonialism, Eurocentrism, to name a few. Serious work by many mainstream scholars abundantly establishes the mutual dependency between the asymmetry of power and institutionalized prejudices in research and education. These asymmetries of power and intellectual representation prevent genuine dialog among the peoples of the world.

Consider the following quotes from prominent scholars of inter-civilization studies:

Eurocentrism is the colonizer’s model of the world in a very literal sense: it is not merely a set of beliefs, a bundle of beliefs. It has evolved, through time, into a very finely sculpted model, a structured whole; in fact a single theory; in fact a super theory, a general framework for many smaller theories, historical, geographical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical. — J.M. Blaut [1]

The conquistador exerted his power by denying the Other his dignity, by reducing the Indian to the Same, and by compelling the Indian to become his docile, oppressed instrument. The conquest practically affirms the conquering ego and negates the Other as Other… [A]fter the innocent Other’s victimization, the myth of modernity declares the Other the culpable cause of that victimization and absolves the modern subject of any guilt for the victimizing act… Finally, the suffering of the conquered and colonized people appears as a necessary sacrifice and the inevitable price of modernization… Modernity justifies the Other’s suffering because it [allegedly] saves many innocent victims from the barbarity of these cultures… The myth of modernity perpetrates a gigantic inversion: the innocent victim becomes culpable and the culpable victimizer becomes innocent. — Enrique Dussel [2]

Notice, in particular, how academic scholarship in the humanities, far from being considered objective, is viewed as a central culprit, even today:

[T]he history which [the colonial scholar] writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. —Frantz Fanon [3]

…[T]he game is still going on, when ‘otherness’ of the other is used to legitimize the oppression and subjugation… The tensions and anxieties that we bear as members of distinct groups are now to be seen in their interconnectedness… It is indeed difficult to fight a battle whose goal is not to defeat anyone but rather that nobody is defeated. The battle is to be waged against a system that produces the oppressors and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited, the winners and the losers, cutting across race, gender, nationality or any other form of collectivity… The “institutionalization of universities into departmental structures” plays an important role in the cultural life of the West. This is precisely why when these departments do not represent the intellectual traditions of the East, they are not simply silent but they are helping to perpetuate the image of a mythical, mysterious, non-rational East. — Anindita Niyogi Balslev [4]

Focusing specifically on the misrepresentation of India, I found a wealth of research material. For instance, Wilhelm Halbfass, the Indologist at U-Penn (who unfortunately passed away a year ago) wrote:

“In the modern planetary situation Eastern and Western ‘cultures’ can no longer meet one another as equal partners. They meet in a westernized world, under conditions shaped by western ways of thinking.” [5]

Colonizers heavily sponsored scholars to research and represent their colonized subjects. For instance, the British Census of India was one such process to represent India in British categories, while superficially pretending to use Indian categories. This became the basis for re-engineering India’s society to fit into rigid ‘castes’, a representation that has continued after independence and has become the center of India’s politics today. The ‘essentializing’ of caste in the representation means that it is deemed an inherent and unchangeable quality that Hindus are frozen into forever. (Traditionally, jatis and varnas were independent of one another, and had mobility.) The more flexible language of describing certain communities as socially underprivileged, and implementing affirmative action programs strictly based on economic means, would have de-essentialized the jati, and over a period of time reduced its significance. ‘Dalit’ as a category by birth is self-perpetuating, unproductive and divisive, and the consequence of adopting a colonial representation system.

A representation system is a meta-ideology, providing the implicit frame of reference of the discourse, and acts as the subliminal playing field on which specific scholarship unfolds. The power of representation was explained very emphatically by Friedreich Nietzsche:

“The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for — originally almost always wrong and arbitrary — grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such.”

Huston Smith, one of the leaders of the western academy for religious studies, recently described Freudian psychoanalysis of Hindu saints, now a popular academic movement, as “colonialism updated.” [6]

The Challenge of Dialog

To have a genuine dialog of civilizations, the ‘other’ side must be present as itself and not via proxy, must be able to use its own framework to represent itself, and must be free to anthropologize and criticize the dominant culture without fear of undue censorship or academic reprisal. Balslev explains the importance of the process:

“…The challenge before us is not to validate a heritage or a culture at the cost of another but to perceive cross-cultural conversation as a mutually empowering dialogue that raises the consciousness of all the participants involved… [I]n a genuine dialogue, the dialogical partners are not merely “subjects” speaking to each other, but participants in the dialogue. The practice of dialogue is an art that must be cultivated… We must revise our prejudgments, modify our hypotheses, and then listen again. In this to-and-fro movement in which we (mutually) seek to understand each other, the dialogic partners cultivate the art of the hermeneutical circle.” [7]

Before proceeding to describe the asymmetries that prevent genuine dialog specifically between Indic traditions and the scholars, I wish to clarify at the outset that I represent neither pole of what has become a bipolar fight for the representation of Indian culture: I am not representing the Hindutva view, as Hindutva should not be conflated with Hinduism, because: (i) Hindutva is a political mobilization, (ii) it is a recent 20th century construct in response to contemporary situations, and (iii) it assumes a specific (reductionist) package of stances, whereas most Hindus pick and choose positions from an a la carte menu of choices [8]. At the same time, I do not deny the Hindutva their right to a position within the vast spectrum of Hinduism, as one of many ways to be a Hindu. At the other pole, is the theory of Hinduism defined as The Evil Brahmin Conspiracy. Most Hindus I know belong to neither extreme, although there has been a tendency for one pole to insist, ‘if you are not pink, you must be saffron’, and vice versa. The vast middle is un-essentialized, where creative dialog can take place, and it is in this middle space that I position myself and the observations below.

The five asymmetries, of which the first three concern academic translations of Indic culture, are:

Asymmetry I: Anthropologist Dominating the Native Informant

Karen Brown, the anthropologist of religion, recently proposed the following as the credo for western anthropologists: “The people and cultures that we Westerners study deserve our respect, reciprocity, and responsibility.” [9] However, scholars often unintentionally assume that distance (intellectual, cultural, geographic) produces objectivity, whereas reciprocity and not distance is the key to dialog. The dark side of contemporary anthropology is exposed bluntly by Edward Said:

“…[Western scholarship]… carries within it as a major constitutive element, the unequal relationship of force between, the outside Western ethnographer-observer and a primitive, or at least different but certainly weaker and less developed, non-Western society. …The real problem remains to haunt us: the relationship between anthropology as an ongoing enterprise and on the other hand, empire as an ongoing concern…. [A]nthropology is being seen as part of a larger, more complex historical whole, much more closely aligned with the consolidation of Western power than had previously been admitted. … Thus: think the narratives through together within the context provided by the history of imperialism….” [10]

“The fetishization and relentless celebration or “difference” and “otherness” can therefore be seen as an ominous trend. … “the spectacularization of anthropology”… cannot easily be distinguished from the process of empire. …. [I]n so many of the various writings on anthropology, epistemology, textualization, and otherness that I have read, which in scope and material run the gamut from anthropology to history and literary theory, there is an almost total absence of any reference to… imperial intervention as a factor affecting the theoretical discussion. … There are armies, and armies of scholars at work politically, militarily, ideologically…” [11]

And is echoed by Robert Young:

“…The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalizing system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism, and the constitution of the other as ‘other’ alongside racism and sexism.” [12]

Tzvetan Todorov analyzes anthropology historically using the term “new trinity” to describe “the old-style soldier-conquistador: it consists of the scholar, the priest, and the merchant”: The first collects information about the country, the second promotes its “spiritual annexation” and the third “makes certain of the profits.” [13]

Western anthropologists of India use native informants, who are typically poor and less educated villagers paid to produce the data, and who often place the scholar on a pedestal because of their own limited material resources and the glorification of India’s xenophile elite. Scholars mine such data, filter it through western lens, legitimize it with western peers who are part of their own academic system, and too often assert this Orientalist construction as ‘the truth’. Few today do this overtly or intentionally. However:

There is little counterbalancing information flow to help the villagers learn what was said and published about them by the scholar — except what the same scholar feeds them.

There are hardly any independent surveys or focus groups in the field to ascertain whether villagers disagree with the ethnographies that become standard descriptions about them, or to point out what was left out, distorted or improperly contextualized.

Villagers should be able to give their own opinions of the scholar as the ‘firangi’ from America, including her exotic or peculiar ways: the poor have agency. Researchers do include how villagers react to, admit, get used to, or query the scholar, but this itself is usually the dominant culture’s own filtered presentation.

All measurements disrupt. I am unaware of any controlled studies comparing a neighboring village that was not disrupted by a prolonged scholarly intervention, so as to evaluate the social re-engineering side effect of scholarship.

While there are also many sensitive researchers, there needs to be greater recognition of the need for reciprocity. This calls for dis-intermediation of the role of anthropologist as knowledge broker between the villagers and the American students. I do not claim to know yet how to achieve true ‘independence’, but a plurality of cross-cultural worldviews would be better than one dominant view. For instance, besides reverse surveys, native informants could get invited to panels via video phones that are now very cost effective, with translators. Perhaps, the scholar-as-broker feels threatened that the native informants would be found to have agency after all, and to challenge decades of research. This is especially severe when the White Woman’s Burden drives the scholar to impose her gift of agency on poor people presumed to have none.

Are the native informants becoming victims of the scholars’ violation of trust? I propose that an interactive dialog between equal civilizations become anthropology’s new hermeneutics, and that scholars expand their work to enhance validation and symmetry.

Asymmetry II: Western Scholar of Texts Dominating the Pandit

The use of pandits is another method by which the west re-maps Indian culture. Many pandits are simple and straightforward, not aggressive compared to many western scholars, not into power games or concern for royalty or intellectual property rights, and are trusting of western intentions. The misappropriation of basmati rice and other intellectual property may be used as an analog to appreciate that the Indian ethos does not emphasize personal ownership of know how (including spiritual knowledge), and that some of what the west does is unethical and exploitative as per the traditional Indian system of professional ethics. One must inquire whether the publish-or-perish syndrome and personal egos cause some scholars to try to own pre-existing knowledge and to reduce pandits to native informants, whereas in their own tradition they deserve respect as great humble teachers.

Furthermore, since pandits are rarely invited as respondents or co-authors when the work gets presented, they do not always find out what finally gets published, and their interpretation sometimes gets distorted along the way. For instance, when scholars write that Ganesha symbolizes the limp phallus, or when they over-interpret sati as a defining feature of Hinduism, should the reader not be told what the insider has to say also? Sanskrit terms that deserve thick descriptions often get reduced to simplistic Eurocentric and Abrahamic representations [14]. Even comparative religion is often framed in a paradigm of western superiority. Is it that scholars see pandits as not having western PhDs, and hence as not legitimate experts of their tradition?

Asymmetry III: Cognitive Scientist Dominating the Yogi/Meditator

The laboratory measurement of higher states of consciousness achieved by advanced yogis and meditators is at the cutting edge of transpersonal and humanistic psychology, mental health, neuroscience, and phenomenology. And some Indic theoretical models are at the center of the philosophy of quantum physics based emerging worldviews. But many ancient Hindu-Buddhist inner science discoveries are being misappropriated and/or plagiarized:

‘Lucid Dreaming’ is the western name for Indo-Tibetan nidra yoga, and Stanford’s Stephen LaBerge is nowadays the acknowledged discoverer.

‘Mindfulness Meditation’ is Jon-Kabat Zinn’s repackaged and trademarked vipassna.

Herb Benson repackaged TM into his ‘Relaxation Response’ and now runs a multimillion dollar business based at Harvard, claiming these as his discoveries. Numerous spin-offs in mainstream stress management and management consulting theories came from this source.

Rupert Sheldrake recently ‘came out’ in an interview acknowledging that his famous theory known as ‘Morphogenic Resonance’ was developed while researching in India’s ashrams.

Ken Wilber started out very explicitly as an interpreter of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy for the benefit of psychologists, but now places himself as the discoverer on a higher pedestal.

Esalen Institute appropriated J. Krishnamurti and numerous other Indic thinkers into what its contemporary followers regard as it own ‘New Worldview’.

Thomas Berry, Father Keating (in the footsteps of Bede Griffiths), and others have constructed the New Liberal Christianity, using Indic appropriations. Jewish scholars have likewise constructed the ‘non-dualistic Kabala’ based on Vedanta. While these pioneers recognize and admit the source, there followers are often ignorant and see these innovations as emerging entirely from Judeo-Christianity.

This is only part of a long list: the core of the emerging ‘western’ worldview and cosmology involving physics, cognitive science, and biology is being rapidly built upon recycled Indic knowledge, but too frequently the source is being erased and over time. Yogis and meditators, who should be regarded as co-discoverers, usually remain anonymous ‘laboratory subjects’ and native informants.

Does this remind us of the way America is said to have been ‘discovered’ in 1492, as though the millions of Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years did not matter? It became a bona fide discovery only when Europeans registered it as such. Because land owned by the natives had not been recorded in European registration systems, their ownership was declared illegitimate. Much of the Renaissance and Enlightenment of Europe was based on the appropriation of Indic and Chinese civilizations, and yet these civilizations were demonized to justify colonialism [15].

I have been told in private by some of the cognitive science misappropriators that they respect Indic traditions greatly and personally know them as the sources, but that in public the distancing is good for book sales and for securing research grants, and that the stamp of ‘western science’ is what legitimizes these traditions. Their position, stated quite openly in many cases, is that discovery occurs only when the west appropriates something. This appears to be a racist theory of knowledge, one that denies agency and rights to non-westerners. Also, while plucking the fruits, there is no attempt by these appropriators to nurture the roots of the source traditions.

A plausible theoretical model for this is: The west plagiarizes from Hinduism-Buddhism with one hand (e.g. cognitive science), while another western hand stereotypes the source as ‘caste, cows, curry’ exotica and worse (via anthropology/religious studies). The academic arson referenced here is merely a continuation of the age old ‘plunder while you denigrate the source’ process at work. It is a continuation of the paganization of pre-Christian religions while at the same time appropriating many central elements from the pagans into Christianity.

Asymmetry IV: Who Speaks as Insiders of Indian Culture?

In contrast with science, technology, business, and other professions where Indians now routinely occupy many high positions, Indology remains perhaps the last holdout of colonialism. However, Indians in the above mentioned fields, with successful experience in dealing with westerners, are seldom included as dialog representatives. The Diaspora that identifies with Indic traditions publicly and positively and the non-Indian Hindus in yoga-meditation centers are often not the ones who the western academe dialogs with as spokespersons for the tradition.

Instead, it is a layer of elites from within the colonized culture who are groomed to become proxies for the tradition. Frantz Fanon explains:

“The colonialist bourgeoisie… had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course.” [16]

In the case of Indians, such persons are commonly referred to as Macaulayites, after Lord Macaulay, who developed this strategy in 1835 as a way to create Indian intellectual sepoys serving the British rule. The program was highly successful and has now assumed a postcolonial life of its own. Eurocentric representation systems have been installed into the minds of elite Indians, who now function as the internal agents working from within Indian society, typically remote controlled by a western incentive system – of visas, jobs, foreign travel, grants, and various forms of career advancement. The Eurocentric mental representation is commonly applied subliminally, and often there is only slight self-awareness that this is being done. Many westernized Indians are radically convinced that the indigenous tradition is a backward one, and that their mission in life is to uproot it and replace it with a superior western import – often done with a passion as though to earn a ticket to neo-white status. They often consider biases against Indic traditions as a great compliment to their own sense of modernity, and also as a great western gift to the Indians, and volunteer as partners to facilitate this process. When this mental colonialism is pointed out to them, it often evokes severe anger and defensiveness.

Richard Crasta, a Goan Christian now living in New York, is rather blunt about the obsession to become a Macaulayite by trying to imitate the image of the dominant culture,

“…whether we be Bombayites trying to put on Oxford accents and fake a knowledge of cheeses and wines; or whether we be Delhi literati striving to make a favorable impression on Delhi’s western diplomats – minor potentates who have, either by their power to throw parties and patronize locals and soak’em up with Scotch and grant them visas, favors, or cultural junkets, or by their personal charm, become resident reminders of the superiority and the power of the white race.” [17]

He explains that the end result is a dislocation from the roots:

“…ethnic shame is a phenomenon that is particularly intense among Indians abroad… Ethnic shame is the opposite of ethnic pride… and it is a sublime example of the success of colonialism in co-opting us in our own subversion, and in our alienation from our culture and our earth, and ultimately the extinction of our own culture… [I]t contributes to our collusion with the forces that tend to make us invisible in a foreign society.” [18]

Eventually this turns into hate for the tradition as a way to assume superiority by proving one’s alienation from it:

“The India Haters Club is growing larger and larger, and its largest contingent is probably the millions ofIndians for whom a few bitter experiences of betrayal have pushed them over the edge into self-hatred:Yes, my skin is brown, but my soul is white.” [19]

Yet, the Macaulayites remain second class in the western space, notwithstanding whatever financial success and even prestigious positions they attain:

“This Western carrot of acceptance and riches is accompanied by a stick: Do not cross the boundaries. Always remember your place…the carrot and stick are so discreetly transferred by Third World writers onto their internal censor that they are often unconscious of their own self-censorship.” [20]

Along with Macaulayites, Indian Marxists — born again as ‘progressives’ after the Cold War — dominate India’s academe, and often power broker as strategic allies of western academicians. But there are many contradictions in these ‘experts on India’:

(i) Such Indian scholars, despite their Subaltern studies, are often alien to the masses and culture of India, and disrespect and caricaturize Hinduism in a reductionist Eurocentric way.

(ii) They know mainly western thought and hermeneutics. Few have education in Sanskrit or the Indian Classics, which were abolished in post-Independence India in the name of ‘secularism’ and to promote ‘modernity’ by eradicating ‘intellectual backwardness’. (By contrast, in the west most experts in the western humanities have a grounding in Greek Classics.) To get a good PhD in Sanskrit, Indology, or Religious Studies, one must go to a university in the west, as India’s own education system abolished these disciplines.

(iii) Yet, their personal careers are based on being proxies for the very tradition that they regard as a scourge.

The phenomenon of South Asianizing, which has emerged from this confluence of excessive ethnography and Indian Macaulayism, has subverted Hinduism’s universal truth claims. Contrast this with other world religions — for instance, Christianity is not defined in terms of Middle Eastern ethnography, although it is studied also in sociological terms. Furthermore, the Diaspora feels that the ethnographies of South Asia get superimposed as their image.

It is the ethnography of elitist anti-tradition Indians that would make a fascinating field of research. Defensive about their awkward position, these elitists often brand anyone speaking assertively for Indic traditions as Hindutva, saffronist, fundamentalist, fascist, fanatic, neo-BJP, nationalist, or equivalent [21]. In fact, the only way to be a good Hindu in the eyes of some is to behave in accordance with Orientalist images. This name-calling has now been picked up by many western scholars as well.

Asymmetry V: Politics of Representation and Power

There is asymmetry also in the license to criticize: western scholars control the vyakhya (i.e. hermeneutics, right to criticize, what is deemed important and interesting, etc.), manage the adhikara (i.e. appoint those in charge of gate-keeping the academic channels), and sometimes even field the persons who represent Indic traditions. When criticized by truly independent Indians (i.e. those who do not seek visas, PhDs, jobs, tenure, etc.), some academic scholars have resorted to intimidating name-calling to affect censorship. This attack on the messenger serves to deflect from the message.

Crasta’s reaction is an outburst:

“We refuse to perform monkey-dances for your pleasure. And what makes you think we cannot be spiritual and sexy at the same time? That is your own hang-up. We’ve become prisoners of your ideology. We are invisible to you. Either we are what you want to see in us, or we don’t exist.” [22]

Many culturally proud Indians feel disenfranchised and outcast in the academic study of their traditions, perhaps because of a smaller presence of the practitioner-scholar than in the case of Buddhism, for instance. Until two years ago, there was one-directional name-calling, only by the ‘licensed’ scholars. But then Hindus started several Internet forums which scholars could not control, and these have become vehicles to mobilize and develop counter name-calling, returning in kind the ad hominems used by scholars. Frankly, this is unproductive, and the time has come to move beyond rudeness and name-calling in eitherdirection.

My survey shows that representation systems and power are mutually interdependent. Many Indians blame the current world power structure, but that part is self-evident. It is simply a statement that there is a problem, but one must understand the mechanisms behind this power imbalance and how to alter them. Here is my model: Ross Perot pioneered ‘facilities management’, a field wherein the supplier takes over the entire ‘burden’ of information management on behalf of the client, including and especially the staff, the infra-structure and the total responsibility for results. As times goes by, the supplier gains greater control over the client, and the client loses freedom, independence, and even the know how to be able to get rid of the supplier at a future date.

In an analogous manner, the British did facilities management for India’s Nawabs and Rajas — operated their armies, collected taxes on their behalf, educated their citizens as they deemed fit, operated the courts, etc. — who had already become nominal second tier rulers under the Mughals. These local rulers were the ‘clients’ and the British East India Company (later to become the British Empire of Queen Victoria) was the facilities manager. Under the revenue sharing arrangements, the local ruler received a tiny fraction (usually under 10%) of the taxes collected by the British (often involving draconian tax rates). Additionally, the massive profit margin on trade between India and Europe was also Britain’s to keep, besides the transfer of textiles, steel and other essentials of the Industrial Revolution from India to Britain. The Indian ruler was a nominal figurehead in the arrangement, so as to preserve the appearance that the British were in fact there to help upgrade the level of civilization on his behalf. This facilities management was the greatest transfer of wealth between one place and another ever in human history.

As part of this facilities management ‘contract’, the British also became trustees of the scholarship and hence the intellectual representation systems of India. They researched Indic traditions, translated and interpreted the texts. They constructed the famous interpretation of the Manusmriti so as to be able to say that they were in fact enforcing Hindu law in ruling India. The sophisticated technique, still in use, has been to first master Sanskrit texts, so as to understand the native representation system; then to map Indic texts and re-interpret them using the western meta-narrative discreetly and invisibly, while maintaining the aura of authenticity by using enough Sanskrit terms. Hindus continue to accept a de facto facilities management arrangement by letting outsiders control Indic intellectual know how and identity. There is no other major world tradition so abandoned intellectually by its own people. Remedy: both the insider and the outsider view of a tradition must be represented in a balanced way.

The criticism of Hinduism in academe is done in a fashion that it appears to be fair. The evidence is presented as authentic Hindu understanding, and the motive is claimed to be the well-being of the oppressed Hindus — to save them from themselves. Never mind that no defense side is often practical given the above asymmetries, and evidence is often exaggerated. Hindus are co-opted as Macaulayites to make the kangaroo court seem legitimate, and there has been no shortage of such opportunistic Hindus. The trial of Sri Ramakrishna in absentia, with no defense side allowed except by way of a reaction against the verdict, is a recent example. [23] Most seriously, the representation system in which the discourse takes place, and in which modern Indians have been programmed to think, is of the west and by the west, and under the intellectual, financial and political control of the west.

Nicholas Gier used “Titanism” to describe Hindu gurus who are larger than life and assume unquestionable authority. But in the Indian mind, the West has a Titanic presence. There are western Scholar Titans now dominating Hinduism Studies, who have usurped the ultimate authority that traditionally belonged to the Vedas — a sort of colonialism.

The Gandhian Response

Gandhi’s innovation in reversing the massively asymmetric power that the British enjoyed was based on two profound insights: (1) The British self-identity was built on the deeply rooted belief that the British were highly civilized (and hence the White Man’s Burden to go around civilizing others.) (2) The British depended upon the Indians as consumers, having appropriated India’s centuries of supremacy in textiles and steel exports, and reduced Indians to poor consumers. On #1, Gandhi continually challenged them by taking the moral high ground, compelling them to respond as civilized people, which they could not refuse to do, until the moral standard he set became too high for the British and their system imploded. On #2, he initiated successful consumer boycotts and indigenous production.

Learning from #1: When asked what he thought of British civilization, Gandhi is said to have replied, “That would be a good idea.” I would have to give the same assessment of western objective scholarship. Being seen as objective is to the academicians of Indic traditions what being civilized was to the British. Hence, by compelling them to be objective — in receiving criticism, in acknowledging falsities that they have perpetuated, in re-examining the asymmetries — we have our best chance to change the very system of objective scholarship that they control. Since sat-chit-anand is everyone’s inherent nature, western scholars will of their own begin to distance themselves from their abusive cohorts. Learning from #2: A growing number of students in class nowadays are Indian Americans. Once these and other consumers of the scholarship de-legitimize the instances of abusive scholarship, the scholars will have to change.

Many western scholars have already been very sympathetic, have devoted their lives to positive and fair scholarship, and have had the courage to step out of the orthodoxy of scholarship. We need more truly independent scholars to stand up:

“It is indeed high time that independent, unattached scholarship… shed the constricting crutches of corporatist paradigms, tied to the newest fashion of academic respectability, to perform the simple, but signal, intellectual service required of a scholar — of thinking for oneself.” [24]

References:

[1] The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, by J.M. Blaut. The Guilford Press, New York, NY. P.11.

[2] The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, by Enrique Dussel. Translated by Michael D. Barber. The Continuum Publishing Company, New York, NY. Pp. 44; 64-67.

[3] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. P.120.

[4] Cross-Cultural Conversation, Edited by Anindita Niyogi Balslev. The American Academy of Religion. Pp.23-24.

[5] India and Europe, by W. Halbfass. First edition, Delhi, MLBD, P. 44.

[6] Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Spring 2001. P.2.

[7] Cross-Cultural Conversation, Edited by Anindita Niyogi Balslev. The American Academy of Religion. Pp. 24; 37-38.

[8] For instance: (i) I have criticized the introduction of astrology as a ‘science’ into the academic curriculum, and the notion that there is a ‘Vedic Science’. (I have argued that Newton’s Laws of Gravitation are not ‘English Laws’ or ‘Christian Science’). (ii) I have expressed concern that the Aryan theory controversy is overdone in its significance, at the expense of more serious issues. (iii) I do not subscribe to the literalist interpretation of the Puranas – neither to claim hi-tech accomplishments (that the Hindutva claim), and nor to literally interpret the verses suggesting social abuse (that westerners like to rub in). (iv) I have written about the general intellectual shallowness in many instances of Hindutva scholarship, at least in its current stage. (v) I am against the demolishment of mosques, even when there is compelling evidence (including from Muslim sources) of some of these having being built by destroying Hindu temples.

[9] Karen Brown, the anthropologist of religion, speaking at the World Conference on “Gender and Orality” — May 2001, Claremont CA.

[10] Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors, by Edward W. Said, Critical Inquiry, Volume 15 Winter 1989. Pp. 217-224.

[11] Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors, by Edward W. Said, Critical Inquiry, Volume 15 Winter 1989. Pp. 213-214.

[12] White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, by Robert Young. Routledge, London. 1990. P.4.

[13] The Conquest of America, by Tzvetan Todorov P. 175.

[14] Examples of terms deserving better treatment include: murti, deva, varna, lingam, tantra, agni, sati, atman, etc.

[15] See for example, J. J. Clark’s book, Oriental Enlightenment.

[16] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

[17] Impressing the Whites: The New International Slavery, by Richard Crasta. Invisible Man Books. Pp. 10-11.

[18] ibid. Pp. 100-103.

[19] ibid. P. 107.

[20] ibid. P.15.

[21] As one example only, those adopting a literalist interpretation of Indian texts are deemed fanatics, nationalists, and fundamentalists. But in Bible Studies, literalist interpretations are a well-respected hermeneutical approach. George Gallup’s book of surveys of Americans’ religious beliefs says that over 50% of all Americans believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. Yet, we don’t denounce the majority of Americans as fundamentalist-fanatics. In the case of Islam, the Koran is viewed as the literal history and not metaphorically by the mainstream. Personally, I prefer the metaphorical interpretation of all religious texts, but feel that literalist interpretations are a person’s right without facing abuses.

[22] Crasta. P. 79.

[23] See Swami Tyagananda’s criticism of the book, Kali’s Child posted at: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/s_rv/s_rv_tyaga_kali1_frameset.htm

[24] Breaking With The Enlightenment, by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1997. P. xv.

Published: 2001