RANDOM MUSINGS

Audrey Truschke is at it again. The Pashupati Seal is “not Shiva”, she explains, and quotes a paper from Doris Srinivasan originating from the West (1984) to support her claim. She asks the miffed Indians to “gird up their loins” while reading the paper, because there is a lot of “phallic imagery.”

Wendy Donger, Jeffrey Kripal, Michael Witzel, Truschke, and several other Indologists typically attack Indian culture by making sweeping statements, and the responsibility falls on Indians to disprove the claims. Behind a closed scholarship that quotes one another, the attack on Indian culture is incessant, and anyone who outrages becomes quickly termed as a Hindu fundamentalist. This phenomenon is precisely what Dr SN Balagangadhara talks about in his extremely important book, a must-read for every Indian, Reconceptualizing India Studies. This summary of his chapters comes from the book Decolonising Bharat the Balu Way.

Understanding India and Her Traditions: An Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal

Jeffrey Kripal, a professor in the US, in his book Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, employs Freudian psychoanalysis of Ramakrishna and suggests that the latter’s sexual trauma and unconscious homoerotic tendencies somehow generated his religious life. Kripal also states that there are two different Ramakrishnas: one Vedantic and the other Tantrik. Many Indians expressed outrage, but this became an instance of prejudice and fundamentalism.

Balu writes a letter to Kripal, demonstrating why the Hindu response makes perfect sense. Kripal, by re-describing Ramakrishna’s religious life in terms of sexual pathology, trivialises, distorts, and denies the experiences of the saint’s followers. For Kripal, the only framework from which to view other cultures is his own, even as he denies that Indians too can have an equally valid and legitimate experience. These explanations, by fundamentally denying the experience of another culture, cause violence. A sense of wrongness prompts a few to respond strongly and quickly acquire the label of fundamentalists, while the majority remain silent due to their lack of cognitive response to such trivialisation and distortion.

Kripal describes Ramakrishna’s religious life as a transformation of the ‘dark natures’ of psychic energies into the ‘gold of the mystical,’ which is fundamentally a reduction rather than an explanation. Balu writes strongly that Kripal’s ideas of a ‘boring Vedanta’ or tantriks as an infringement of middle-class morality are sheer ignorance on the part of Kripal and a failure to understand Indian culture and the Vedantic ideas of Brahman, Maya, or Enlightenment. Thus, as Balu writes, “In trivializing the phenomena that Kripal wants to explain, he renders his explanations trivial.”

Kripal’s use of psychoanalysis to evaluate Ramakrishna is finally mischief and gossip, and so is the use of empty terms like ‘somehow’ and ‘almost alchemically’, which are placeholders for any future explanations. Kripal’s understanding of the word ‘secret’ in Indian traditions is flawed. ‘Secret’ mantras (like the gayatri) in India’s guru-shishya traditions make little sense to Kripal. Balu says that using Freud’s stories to understand Ramakrishna is similar to using creationism to portray Darwin’s theory. Balu sums up his reaction to Jeffrey Kripal’s efforts: “I am ashamed and upset by the trivialization; I feel disgust and loathing at the gossip; I react with horror to the violence you inflict.”

Are Dialogues an Antidote to Violence?

A colonial attitude, assuming the superiority of Western narratives, persistently generates literature, both from the West and India, which causes violence to Indian culture and traditions. Is a dialogue possible? The attempts become futile as the dialogues too become skewed in favour of the Western intellectuals. Balu argues, in an important section, that the basic structure of dialogue is such that it paradoxically increases the hostility and violence. Similarly, because of the skew favouring the West, political liberalism, with its notions of fairness and justice, fails to decrease violence in intercultural encounters.

Karl Popper says that reason and dialogue are the only alternatives to violence. Balu disagrees and shows that it is not a poor understanding of the participants, but the requirements of reason as embodied in such dialogues that generate violence. There is historical evidence for the simultaneous violence and dialogue of ancient Christianity and Roman religio; the religious wars; the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; and so on.

Balu explains this by looking at two controversial books authored by Paul Courtright and Jeffrey Kripal on Lord Ganesha and Ramakrishna Paramhansa, respectively, which generated calls for apologies and withdrawals. Balu addressed Kripal previously. The problematic Freudian interpretations in the former transform Ganesha into a symbol for the Indian psyche, which performs rituals for this god. Finally, an interpretation of psychoanalysis functions as an explanation of the Indian psyche. For example, Indians offer puja to Shiva Linga because… (it is a symbol for fertility, it represents the phallus, and blanks filled in by other suitable psychoanalysis). Such an explanation requires evidence, which the author fails to provide, says Balu.

Western scholars defend psychoanalysis in understanding religions while Hindus disagree. It is unreasonable to believe that Hindutva fundamentalism has brainwashed the emotional Hindus to such an extent that they do not understand academic freedom. However, this is one stand which scholars on a moral high ground take. Balu says an alternative stand could be that Kripal and Courtright might have initiated a dialogue with the Hindus about their religion by making the first move. What would now be the structural results of a rational dialogue?

Western scholars studying Hinduism inflict violence by denying the experiences of people whose religions they talk about. The scholar sways a rational dialogue in his favour by making many unproven assumptions and several cognitive moves that the Hindu cannot question: (1) the scholar attributes implicit premises to the Hindu; (2) these premises explain Hindu practices; (3) these explanations presuppose the truth of Freudian psychology; (4) this theory structures the phenomena requiring elucidation; and (5) the Hindu logically defends the scholar’s moves.

Unfortunately, the Hindu cannot refute the premises and offer alternative explanations unless he is an intellectual expert, knowing many facets of Indian culture. Thus, the onus of proof distributes unevenly between the participants in the dialogue. This violence in the experiential world makes Hindus react violently. The Hindutva movement draws well-educated Hindus into its folds because it can attach itself to this sense of violation. The scholar dismisses Hindu interpretations by calling them minority or fundamentalist opinions. The former switches between explanation and interpretation freely.

The Hindu can argue only against the interpretation but to do so he must challenge the psychoanalytical explanation. This would become a fringe opinion. The Hindu ultimately loses the debate and leaves the conversation. Thus, the asymmetric argumentation generates only anger, leading to either silence or violence.

Intercultural Encounters, Reasonable Dialogues, and Normative Political Theory

‘Normative liberal political philosophy’ also fails to critically examine the notion of rational dialogue (reasonable, transparent rules of discussion, and participant neutrality). It also fails in inter-cultural dialogues. The actual discussions between different cultures lead to results that undermine the claims of political liberalism, says Balu.

Western scholars (like Montesquieu, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, and Peter Gay), when they initiate a dialogue with other cultures, end up placing them as inferiors. Cicero, similar to some other Greco-Roman thinkers like Plutarch, Epicurus, and Lucretius, was a priest as well as a scholar and poet. Yet, the arguments against the existence of God and other liberal ideas in his De Natura Deorum became the arsenal for Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century against religion. Modern Western scholars, offering many explanations, thought that the ancient scholars were either inauthentic, dishonest, fearful, or simply prudent. Some wrote that the Roman thinkers could write which went against their public persona because most of the citizens were illiterate and didn’t know what the priests were doing in private.

Similarly, when the West typically comes across traditional practices—let’s say an African rain dance or the Ayudhapuja (worship of instruments) in Indian culture—instead of trying to understand the traditional practices of other cultures, they simply impute superstitious beliefs. Invariably, the structure of the dialogue ends up showing the non-Western culture as inferior or irrational. Balu says, “The process of understanding and exploring how ‘reasonable people’ could come to different ‘reasonable’ conceptions compels the modern Western mind to deny an entire culture and its people even an elementary understanding of social and natural events. Even though we have set up a ‘reasonable’ dialogue, the results of this process are anything but fair.”

In intercultural dialogues, a skew occurs when one culture (the West) makes assumptions about the beliefs of another culture (the East, or the Global South). An African believes that the rain dance actually causes rain. Such assumptions render the individuals of the non-Western culture incapable of engaging in dialogue. When the starting point is about the protagonists’ beliefs rather than human practices, intercultural dialogues are the cause of misunderstandings, not a solution.

The nature of these dialogues violates the rules of dialogue and compels one to accept a relationship between beliefs and behaviour. Political liberalism assumes independence from specific philosophical and metaphysical doctrines, but it clearly assumes the truth of Western cultural folk psychology, rooted in Christianity. Thus, the burden of proof is uneven between the participants in the dialogue.

A ‘reasonable’ discussion appears to take place only between people who share implicit common-sense conceptions or the same folk psychology. Political liberalism is tyrannical in demanding that only those members sharing a common Western history are competent to enter a reasonable discussion. Political liberalism is flawed because it implicitly calls its own cultural folk psychology a reasonable ‘comprehensive doctrine’. The West assumes this doctrine is true, while other cultural folk psychologies are false and unreasonable. Balu says, “Reasonable pluralism, which assumes the inevitability of reasonable people coming to different reasonable judgements, forcibly bows to the logic of its cognitive mechanisms and denies pluralism… It too affirms the familiar theme of Western superiority.” One advocate, Ackerman (Why Dialogue?), believes that political liberalism remains humanity’s best hope in a culturally diverse world. If true, this is more of a reason to despair than hope, says Balu.