WASHINGTON, D.C., April 10, 2004: The Washington Post, one of America’s leading newspaper, published this informative article on several disputes in the academic arena regarding the study of Hinduism. There is a growing movement in the US for Hindus to gain control of the academic treatment of Hinduism at the university level, just as women, Jews and African Americans have so done over the last 40 years. One excellent model is Emory University’s Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies (http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/JewishStudies/index.html) which has a faculty of thirty, including three ordained rabbis. The Hindu-American community can explore means of funding chairs in Hindu studies and even entire institutes of Hindu studies.
We reproduce the article in full below:
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Folklore has it that elephants never forget, and Paul Courtright has reason to believe it. A professor of religion at Emory University, he immersed himself in the story of Ganesha, the beloved Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Detecting provocative Oedipal overtones in Ganesha’s story — and phallic symbolism in his trunk — he wrote a book setting out his theories in 1985.
Nineteen years later, thanks to an Internet campaign, the world has rediscovered Courtright’s book. After a scathing posting on a popular Indian Web site, he has received threats from Hindu militants who want him dead.
“Gopal from Singapore said, ‘The professor bastard should be hanged,’ ” said Courtright, incredulous. “A guy from Germany said, ‘Wish this person was next to me, I would have shot him in the head.’ A man called Karodkar said, ‘Kill the bastard. Whoever wrote this should not be spared.’ Someone wanted to throw me into the Indian Ocean.”
Other academics writing about Hinduism have encountered similar hostility, from tossed eggs to assaults to threats of extradition and prosecution in India.
The attacks against American scholars come as a powerful movement called Hindutva has gained political power in India, where most of the world’s 828 million Hindus live. Its proponents assert that Hindus have long been denigrated and that Western authors are imposing a Eurocentric world view on a culture they do not understand.
That argument resonates among many of the roughly 1.4 million Hindus in North America as well.
In November, Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago professor of the history of religion who has written 20 books about India and Hinduism, had an egg flung at her by an angry Hindu when she was lecturing in London. It missed.
In January, a book about the Hindu king Shivaji by Macalester College religious studies professor James W. Laine provoked violent outbursts: One of Laine’s collaborators in India was assaulted, and a mob destroyed rare manuscripts at an institute in India where Laine had done research. The Indian edition was recalled, and India’s prime minister warned Laine not to “play with our national pride.” Officials said they want to extradite the Minnesota author to stand trial for defamation, and the controversy has become a campaign issue in upcoming parliamentary elections.
Doniger, a 63-year-old scholar at the center of many controversies, is distressed to see her field come under the sway of what she regards as zealots.
“The argument,” she said, “is being fueled by a fanatical nationalism and Hindutva, which says no one has the right to make a mistake, and no one who is not a Hindu has the right to speak about Hinduism at all.”
U.S. Cradle of Backlash
The recent controversy began not in New Delhi but in New Jersey.
In an essay posted on a Web site called Sulekha.com, New Jersey entrepreneur Rajiv Malhotra argued that Doniger and her students had eroticized and denigrated Hinduism, which was part of the reason “the American mainstream misunderstands India so pathologically.”
Malhotra criticized in particular a book for which Doniger had written the foreword — Courtright’s “Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings.” The book drew psychoanalytic inferences about Ganesha, also known as Ganesa or Ganpathi, the son of the Hindu god Shiva and his wife, Parvati.
Malhotra’s critique produced a swift and angry response from thousands of Hindus. An Atlanta group wrote to the president of Emory University asking that Courtright be fired.
“The implication,” said Courtright, “was this was a filthy book and I had no business teaching anything.” He said the quotes had been taken out of context and ignored the uplifting lessons he had drawn from Ganesha’s story.
Salman Akhtar, an Indian American psychoanalyst, said the disagreement sprang from different worldviews. “Are religious stories facts or myths?” he asked. “Facts cannot be interpreted. Stories can be interpreted.”
The book was withdrawn in India, where the local edition’s book jacket, which Courtright had neither seen nor approved, depicted Ganesha as a child — in the nude.
“It was very painful reading,” said T.R.N. Rao, a computer science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who advises the university’s branch of the Hindu Student Council, a national group with Hindutva roots. “It makes Ganesha a eunuch . . . It was very vulgar.”
Rao and the council started an Internet petition against the book. Seven thousand people signed within a week — and among their comments were 60 threats of violence.
The petition was swiftly removed. “We condemn any threats to the author and the publisher,” said Rao. “We wanted to get the book corrected and replaced. . . . We are not asking for banning the book. I am a professor and I know the value of academic freedom.”
Insider vs. Outsider
Courtright was not the first to find Oedipal overtones in the Ganesha story. But his book became a rallying point for devout Hindus in the United States who say the academic study of their religion is completely at odds with the way they experience their faith.
“For the past five years, our field has been in turmoil,” said Arvind Sharma, a professor of comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, who sides with the critics even as he disavows the violence. “There may be a Hindutva connection in what happened in India and the death threats and the person who threw the egg, but there also is a Hindu response.”
Sharma was asked to write an essay on Hinduism for Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia to replace a previous essay written by Doniger. The switch came after a Hindu activist, a former Microsoft engineer named Sankrant Sanu, charged that Doniger’s article perpetuated misleading stereotypes and asked for a rewrite by an “insider.”
“For pretty much all the religious traditions in America, most of the people studying it are insiders,” said Sanu. “They are people who are believers. This is true for Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. This is not true for Hinduism.”
In January, fresh controversy along the same lines erupted over a book by Macalester College’s Laine, “Shivaji:
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