HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, Spring 2004: “Religion in the News” produced by Trinity College and the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, has been publishing quarterly issues since the Summer of 1998. The spring 2004 edition features an article on “Hindus and Scholars – Don’t Mess with Ganesh” by Arvind Sharma, professor of Hinduism at McGill University in Canada. Sharma examines several incidences where Hindu religious leaders or beliefs have been slighted by Western scholars.
The most recent scandal occurred in January of this year when James W. Laine was forced to apologize for the remarks in his book called “Shivaji – A Hindu King in Islamic India.” The article explains, “On page 93 of his book Laine wrote that Shivaji had an absentee father and this is revealed by the fact that Maharashtrians tell jokes, naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadoji Konddev was his biological father.” The reaction to the book was so severe that scholars working on the book were harassed and the book was withdrawn from the Indian market.
In 1995, Jeffrey Kripal published the book “Kali’s Child”. The article says, “This book made the sensational claim that Ramakrishna (1836-1886), one of the most revered swamis, or holy men, of modern India, who was known for being a life-long celibate, was actually a latent homosexual.” When Swami Tyagananda, a member of the Ramakrishna order, produced a tract about the book where Kripal’s linguistic competence in Bengali is pointedly questioned, Kripal did not bother to respond.
Adding insult to injury, Paul Courtright’s book on the elephant god Ganesha described Ganesha’s trunk as a limp phallus. The article says, ” Many Hindus began to wonder if what appeared to them to be nothing more than methodologically sophisticated slander of Hinduism was fast becoming an American academic pastime. Petitions against the book, drafted by Hindu groups in Louisiana and Atlanta, began to circulate.” However, Courtright did visit India last December to attend a conference of the International Association of the History of Religions.
In conclusion, the article summarizes, “For their part, Western academics should understand that depicting Hinduism in a manner perceived as provocatively demeaning by the Hindus themselves does nobody any good. Nor is the cause of civilized intellectual discourse advanced if Western academics decline to respond to informed critiques simply because the critics do not happen to be academics.”
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