The recently published book, "Invading the Sa-cred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America," demonstrates how the lack of vigilance and indigenous expertise has enabled a small group of western scholars to usurp and assume the Hindu authoritative voice and to use it for defaming, demonizing, distorting and eroticizing the Hindu/India image through Freudian psychoanalysis; and how technology like the Internet facilitated the mobilization of Diasporic voices against this trend in American academia.

The book (545 pages) summarizes the writings of independent scholar, Rajiv Malhotra, who first identified the Hinduphobic trend in American academia and who, for the past decade, has been mounting a challenge to this kind of Western scholarship.

Correcting disinformation

Contributors to the volume include renowned anthropologist Prof SN Balagangadhara (University of Ghent, Belgium); religion scholar, Prof. Arvind Sharma (McGill University); noted psychologist Dr Alan Roland, and educationist Dr Yvette Rosser, among others.

The contributors do not believe in censorship and are exercising their freedom of speech to participate in correcting the disinformation on the Hindu/Indic traditions in American academia, while calling for higher ethical standards in peer review in Hindu/India scholarship.

India’s image

This book is mandatory reading for all concerned about the integrity of India Studies and Religious Studies in academia, India's image and socio-economic autonomy, multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity, and basic civil and human rights.

Prof. Bal Ram Singh (Director, Center for Indic Studies, Univ of Massachusetts, US), notes that the civilizational portrayal of the over 20 million diasporas Indians has been controlled by outsiders for centuries and sees this book as making a path-breaking response to the biases and stereotypes in western scholarship.

The authors acknowledge that not all scholars in Hindu/India Studies in American academia are biased but the focus of the book is the Hinduphobic scholarship that paints the Hindu spiritual leadership, practitioners, and India as degraded, immoral, fraught with sexual pathologies, a hindrance to universal basic human rights and in need of western intervention for improving quality of life.

Dr Ramakrishna Puligandla (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Univ. of Toledo, US) chastises the American academic left for failing to defend the Hindu/Indian minority as they traditionally do with other minorities. He calls on "all fair-minded Americans and Hindus" to end this disease in academia.

For example, Jeffrey Kripal's book, "Kali's Child," tries to demolish Hindu saints and Hindu mysticism by equating mysticism with sexual deviancy. Kripal claims that he authoritatively established that the saint, Sri Ramakrishna, had homosexual tendencies and that he had sexually abused the young Swami Vivekananda.

Top choice

The Encyclopedia Britannica listed this book as its top choice for learning about Sri Ramakrishna. This book also won the Best Book Award from the American Academy of Religion. Although Indian scholars attacked the book for its many mistran-slations and other huge errors in scholarship, it continues to be used as an important reference work.

Traditionally, scholars of Hindu/India Studies do not give the subjects of their study with any feedback to ensure the veracity of their conclusions. They go to India and collect their data which can be faulty due to preconceived conclusions, language differences, ignorance of cultural nuances and the inability to interpret the multi-layered meanings in the richly symbolic Hindu culture. When they return to America their works remain far away from the gaze of their native informants, and they set themselves up as experts facing a very poor peer review process.

Indian Americans started "talking back" to these scholars - something that angered them. Prof. Anantanand Rambachan (chairperson of the Department of Religion at St. Olaf College, Minnesota, US, is a Hindu scholar who dialogues with global Christian groups for better understanding) sees the book as "a valuable historical resource," noting that "scholars should welcome a critical voice from the community that is the focus of their study, for a mutually enriching dialogue."

The scholars fired back at their critics with a plethora of fallacious arguments attacking people instead of issues, trying to demonize their critics as fanatics and saffronites, using fear and scare tactics and emotive appeal to insinuate that their critics wanted to kill them when Internet petitions by Indian Americans were hijacked with violent comments.

They painted themselves as innocent victims under attack from untutored savages, oversimplifying the issue as one of censorship and emotionalism, and claiming authority (that as scholars of religion they alone have the objectivity and scientific methodologies for research in the discipline).

They called on scholars to boycott an Indian publisher and used prestigious jargon to sound like experts and so on. Among some of the other ludicrous claims that these Hinduphobic scholars make are:

(1) Hindu mysticism is linked to sexual pathologies

(2) Ganesha is an incestuous son, a eunuch and homosexual; his trunk symbolizes a "limp phallus" while his broken tusk symbolizes an imagined Indian child's castration complex; and his large pot belly and love of sweets demonstrate the Hindu male's appetite for oral sex. (Paul Courtright)

(3) Shiva is an immoral God who is a womanizer and whose temples are seats of "ritual rape" of women, prostitution and murder.

(4) The Devi is a "mother with a penis."

(5) Hindu rituals represent sexual acts

(6) Sacred mantras are nothing by "nonsense syllables from the inarticulate moans that the Goddess makes during intercourse . . . ."

(7) The bindi worn on the forehead represents menstrual blood.

The leader of this Hinduphobia is Prof. Wendy Doniger whose prolific writings are hugely damaging to the Indian image. Though her translations of several Sanskrit texts into English enjoy huge popularity in the academy, her knowledge of Sanskrit has been openly challenged by competent experts.

Sexual psychoses

A BBC link describes her thus: "Professor Wendy Doniger is known for being rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts."

She once said: "The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think ... Throughout the Mahabharata ... Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviors such as war...The Gita is a dishonest book; it justifies war."(Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov 19, 2000).

Cynthia Humes, another scholar, recognizes the deficiencies in both Kripal's and Caldwell's research, but she, too, sees sexual psychoses in the people of Kerala with them being consumed by homosexuality, sexual trauma, and abuse.

Anthropologist, Stanley Kurtz, psychoanalytically claims to prove that Hindu mothers do not have an emotionally close relationship with their babies as Western mothers do.

David Gordon White, a protégé of Doniger seeks to strip Tantra of its spirituality, seeing it as a decadent form of South Asian sexuality that was practiced by Brahmins in order to dupe and oppress lower caste people.

Passionate plea

Nathan Katz (Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality, Florida International University, US) sees the book as "a thoughtful, reasoned, yet passionate plea that the perspectives and sensitivities of Hindus be considered in the presentation of Hinduism in scholarship, textbooks and the media. What is remarkable is that many western academics are so resistant to it."

(Pandita Indrani has written Section 1 in "Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America", edited by Ramaswamy, de Nicholas and Banerjee, published by Rupa Co., India, 2007. It will be released in NY on July 23 and has already been released in India in June. See www.invadingthesacred.com for more and to purchase)