The Position of Hinduism in America's Higher Education

11-27-2000, 10:01 AM

Arial">The Position of Hinduism in America’s Higher Education
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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">By Rajiv Malhotra
italic">© The Infinity Foundation
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Arial">While the recent construct of Hindutva is the voice for many Hindus, it
does not speak for all Hindus. The West and India’s secular left have condemned
it, but have not offered an alternative that would be sympathetic to Hindu
identity nor proposed a non-threatening environment for ordinary Hindus to
regenerate their faiths after a thousand years of subversion. Rather, many
mainstream Hindus feel that an alliance by multiple subversive forces is
engaged in intimidation: Proselytizers in India fight hard for market share to
harvest the Hindu’s soul; leftists successfully secularized India’s education
system for 50 years to try and obliterate Sanskrit, Hindu epics, yoga,
meditation and other Indic traditions from India’s own education system; and
Western academicians spun new kinds of Orientalism in the garb of anthropology,
South Asian Studies and Religious Studies, and influenced a new breed of
‘honorary white’ Indian thinkers. Till this day, the West and India’s left have
failed to delve into the pre-Hindutva psyche of ordinary Hindus so as to
appreciate what led to the intellectual vacuum that Hindutva has tried to fill.
A deeply spiritual population felt cornered with few choices if it did not wish
to convert to Christianity, and did not wish to lose its religious expression
with respect in its own country. This intellectual vacuum in the Hindu
renaissance offered an opening for leadership built on populist sensationalism
in a reactionary sense.
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Arial">This essay focuses only on one aspect of the subversion – that by
America’s scholars - that facilitated this sense of being marginalized and
played into the hands of the very forces it now denounces. It does not go into
the preceding subversions of Hinduism by Islamic invaders, colonialists, or
India’s post-independence leftists, and nor the subsequent subversive revisions
by Hindutva itself. It examines how America’s higher education suppressed the
Hindu voice, reduced Hindu ideas to exotic anthropology, denigrated Hindu
practices, and neutralized or re-engineered Hindu identity. It attempts to
build a case for self-representation by Hindus that would be free from
political forces, proselytizers, and Western commercial or career interests.
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Arial">Most academic chairs on Hinduism, India Studies and Indic traditions,
and other faculty positions in these fields, as well as editorial boards in
university presses and scholarly journals are dominated and controlled by
scholars from outside these traditions. This is also reflected in the
asymmetrical representation on panels, and in journal articles and textbooks
about Indic traditions. No other tradition has such a low percentage of its own
scholars representing its portrayal than does Hinduism, even when compared to
Buddhism, but especially as compared to Christianity and Judaism. The result of
this imbalance has been to perpetuate the condition observed by W. Halbfass in
‘India and Europe’, First edition, p. 44: “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.”
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Arial">Indic traditions now seem poised on the response threshold as defined by
Eric J. Sharpe: “A ‘response threshold’ is crossed when it becomes possible for
the believer to advance his or her own interpretation against that of the
scholar. In classical comparative religion this was hardly a problem since most
of the scholars time was spent investigating the religions of the past and
often of the very remote past. Interpretations might have been challenged, but
only by other specialists working according to Western canons and conventions.
Today, by contrast, a greater proportion of study is devoted to contemporary or
at least recent, forms of living traditions. The study of religion often shades
into a dialogue of religions, in which the views of both partners are (at least
in theory) equally important. The response threshold implies the right of the
present day devotee to advance a distinctive interpretation of his or her own
tradition often at variance with that of Western scholarship and to be taken
entirely seriously in so doing.” (in "Study of Religion", in The
Encyclopedia of Religion [New York: Macmillan, 1987] Vol. 14, p. 85).
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Arial">To appreciate the implications of Indic traditions having reached the
response threshold, it is important to examine the conditions pertaining to its
scholarship in American academics. Western style academic study of India’s
traditions was started in the 19th century colonial era as the field called
Indology - the study of India by the West for the West. Even today, Indians
seeking to advance in the study of their own traditions face the conventional
power structures that survive decades after colonialism. They must at the very
least ‘prove’ their objectivity sometimes by alienating themselves from Indian
ways of thinking, including having to adopt the use of Western categories and
language for their work. Given the natural ambitions of many Indians to study
about India, numerous Indian scholars became ‘Macaulayites’; or if they already
had such latent tendencies these got enhanced, so as to enter, survive and
advance in the field of Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, or
Social Studies. Those who have tried to stand up to such a hegemonic situation
have often been blatantly declared as fundamentalists, or else marginalized in
subtle ways. There were many personal accounts of this at the AAR 2000
Conference, as explained by panelists on ‘coming out as a Hindu’. Hindus find
it appalling that the litmus test of India’s secularism is the level of
Christian proselytizing it can endure, and it is often subject to this burden
of proof. A good Hindu, it is portrayed, is an obedient one or at least is easy
to ‘manage’. Muslims have insisted on a fair and even positive presentation of
Islam in the Western academia with considerable success, but the same cannot be
said about Hinduism. If Judaism were subject to a mild version of the
Hindu-bashing that is normal on campuses, there would be charges of
anti-Semitism.
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Arial">Antonio de Nicholas, now retired as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and
Religion at SUNY writes: “Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, even Shinto
studies have found a place in the American Academy and are being taught by
scholars of those traditions. All
but Hinduism, the earliest of all ancient cultures recorded in writing, the
store house of our own internal habits of soul, mind, society, mortality,
immortality; the reference of later cultures and mystics, the mother,
literally, of our own human possibilities has neither found an autonomous voice
in the Academy nor have the children of this culture, Hindus, allowed to
represent themselves in the American Academy when Hinduism is taught by
non-Hindus, or patronized or vilified or simply ignored.”
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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Issues of this nature are
now beginning to be discussed openly by many kinds of Hindu scholars: (a)
American Hindus such as Ed Bryant, Ramdas Lamb, Stephen Philips, Antonio de
Nicolas and Yvette Rosser. (b) Young Hindu scholars being raised in the West
such as Deepak Serma, Paramil Patil and Sushil Mittal. (c) Senior academic
scholars such as Arindam Chakrabarti, Arvind Sharma and T. S. Rukmani. Also
important is the new trend among non-academic Hindus asserting their faith
through building temples in America, participating in public affairs, and
supporting activism against Hindu-bashing, while at the same time avoiding the
extremes so as to preserve the pluralism within the traditions.
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10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">My definition of a Hindu is
liberal and fuzzy in the true spirit of the tradition, and includes those born
outside the tradition that embrace it as free spirited explorers. But I would
not include anyone bonded by allegiance to an incompatible historic dogma of
exclusivist claims, especially anyone linked to a proselytizing tradition
targeting Hindus. In claiming a dual identity, one must not have a conflict of
interest. Specifically, I have difficulty acknowledging as Hindus those whose
other affiliation include scriptures declaring Hindus (even by implication) to
be ‘damned’, ‘sinners’, ‘pagans’,
‘condemned’, ‘heathen’ and the like. That
would be analogous to inviting the wolf dressed in grandmother’s clothes to sit
at the head of the family dinner. This definition does not eliminate a liberal
Christian or Muslim whose Bible/Koran interpretation is not literal, who
rejects the exclusivity claims of dogma, and most importantly, rejects
proselytizing.
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Arial">Within India’s long tradition of debate amongst its darshanas, the
healthy encounter and skepticism was very constructive in shaping every one of
its systems. So it is certainly true that both the etic (outsider) and the emit
(insider) views are important to include in scholarship.
color:black">But here we have a competing religion, namely Christianity, with a
clear proselytizing agenda, controlling much of the criticism through use of
its categories and/or its scholars. Therefore,
10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"> the current asymmetry
between the positions of Hinduism and that of Christianity has two aspects:
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12.0pt;font-family:Arial">(i)
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Christian emit scholarship is large in quantity and
therefore is a strong voice in balancing the etic, whereas in the case of
Hinduism, the scholarship has been dominated by etic for the past 150 years.
The best evidence of this is that Indic traditions are commonly portrayed using
language and categories of the West rather than its own.
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12.0pt;font-family:Arial">(ii)
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Christian etic scholars are themselves Christians,
albeit assuming a ‘secular’ posture. The analogous situation would be if the
etic studies of Christianity were done mainly by Muslims and Hindus, rather
than by secular Christians. But Hinduism’s etic scholars are mainly Christians,
which is not the same thing as if they had been Hindus adopting a ‘neutral’ and
‘secular’ methodology, especially since Christianity and Hinduism are now
pitted as competitors for market share in intense campaigns in India. Scholars
of Hinduism are not merely outsiders to Hinduism, but even more importantly,
they are sometimes insiders of the tradition Hindus see as predator, namely
Christianity. It is also important to note that Christianity has not had a
history of giving any other religion a peer status. Because of historical
factors, Christianity has been to do its own criticism in its own environment
by Christians themselves, and this discourages non-Christians from criticizing
Christianity, as it is declared that Christians themselves have done whatever
criticism could be done and that no more would be possible or required.
Arial">
Arial">This situation might be compared to the study of Afro-American culture
and history, which until the civil rights laws of the 1960s was entirely in the
hands of whites. It was claimed that the portrayal was authentic as the white
scholars involved had excellent credentials. After civil rights were enacted,
Afro-Americans had to fight hard to get included in their own portrayal, and
they were told initially that they simply did not have the qualifications to be
able to do so. This was eventually remedied as Afro-Americans entered
faculties, wrote books, and participated in their own portrayals. Today, it
would be unthinkable to have a program on Afro-American studies dominated by
white scholars. It was whites such as Hubert Humphrey who helped blacks win
their civil rights, and likewise, there are many Jewish and Christian scholars
and leaders who express sympathy for Hindus gaining a greater voice in their
own representation.
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Arial">A similar situation also existed in the case of women in America prior
to the feminist movement. But once women demanded, they did receive their
legitimate position to control the discourse concerning women’s studies. One
would consider it unthinkable today to have a women’s studies department or to
have secondary school textbooks about women’s issues that were written mostly
by men. Yet, I clearly remember that in the 1970s in corporate America, even
highly educated women had to downplay their feminine identity and pretend to
enjoy the sexist jokes by men for fear that they might be labeled as extremists
or marginalized otherwise. Then came the other extreme of feminism, at which
time it became dangerous for a man to joke at all for fear of being labeled a
male chauvinist pig. But as women gained control over their own identities,
gender relations relaxed and matured as a result. Today, a woman can bring her
baby into the office with great pride – something unthinkable in the 1970s,
except in rare instances.
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Arial">Jews had to negotiate their position in America to be classified as ‘white
people’. Given their well-organized mobilization, today they control their
tradition’s portrayal very successfully. The best scholars, most faculty
positions, most powerful boards and committees concerning Judaism, and most
textbooks about their history, are largely in the hands of Jewish people.
Compare this with the situation today where Hinduism’s major scriptures, the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are now being translated by mainly non-Hindu
scholarly teams sponsored by powerful university presses and under the aegis of
well-entrenched academic interests. Can we imagine a hypothetical scenario in
which popular translations of the New Testament came mainly from Muslim, Hindu
or Buddhist scholars?
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Arial">It might be claimed by the current academic power structure that there
simply are not enough qualified Hindus in the field. However, that situation
also faced women, blacks and other minority groups not so long ago. India
gained independence earlier than Afro-Americans and women finally received
their equal legal standing, and yet Hindus have been unable to climb to
positions of importance in sufficient numbers to alter the discourse into their
own linguistic categories. The question asked should be why initiatives similar
to those found in the case of blacks and women were not implemented in the case
of Hindus in order to promote higher education, research and teaching from
within the community? Why are there no grants specifically designed to
encourage Hindus to advance in the higher education of Hinduism? There was a
time when American corporations’ response to pressure from minority groups was
to appoint one minority face to their top management symbolically as good
public relations in their annual report. But genuine self-representation makes
a community more responsible once it is respected in peer terms.
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Arial">Is it that while blacks and women are considered as American minorities,
Hindus are considered as a far away, exotic and foreign people with whom
Americans have little to do, except to pity. Did American scholars in positions
of power use the Hindus to construct their own superior self-image, as rational
Westerners compared to mystical Indians, and as progressive Judeo-Christian
people specially chosen by God as compared to world negating Hindus? But the two
million Hindus in America are in the classrooms where teachers are using
stereotypes to describe their traditions. They are in America’s offices as
engineers, doctors, scientists and businessmen, and are tired of being viewed
from a patronizing, self-congratulating and condescending attitude. In American
neighborhoods, they are asked to define their beliefs in the Judeo-Christian
categories of monotheism and polytheism – a dualism that does not exist in
Hinduism - and told that they are idol worshippers. They are anxious when their
children come home and ask whether they have been saved, when in fact Hindus do
not accept that they were damned to begin with.
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Arial">While icons of Western rational, scientific and progressive development,
such as Bill Gates, consider Indians to be amongst the finest rational and
progressive thinkers in the world, and they are putting their money on that
judgment, it is strange that religious studies scholars, who are not as
qualified technologically, scientifically or in rational training, view their
own culture as more rational than the Hindus’. By the West’s own standards and
history, religion experts would be the last persons considered qualified to
pass judgment on who or what comprises rationality. Why is it considered that Hindus
could not adequately do scholarship about their own heritage when they can do
so brilliantly in modern literature, on Wall Street, in medicine, and numerous
other intellectual disciplines that are more demanding analytically and
rationally than religious studies is? Amazingly, when I discussed this with a
well-respected Christian academic scholar of Hinduism, his response to me was
that ‘Hindus learnt their rationality only recently from the West’. The field
would be better served if religious studies scholars such as this professor
would learn the Indic darshanas more thoroughly before they are allowed to get
their PhDs. It seems that Orientalism continues to be spun in ever more
elaborate webs and under different guises.
Arial">
Arial">Thurman, Staal, Cordona, Tubb, Potter and many other eminent Western
scholars have rigorously documented that India originated a significant portion
of the world’s mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, linguistics, ethics,
psychology and technology until 1000 C.E. Yet, this is largely ignored by the
mainstream’s portrayal as it challenges the Western dominance narrative. India
made a heavy influence on the development of European and Asian languages and
linguistics. The entire field of linguistics in Europe was born when Europeans
found in India a highly advanced civilization with a rich language and
literature. Pannini’s grammar from 500 B.C. (with over 4,000 precise rules)
became the inspiration and model for the entirely new fields of philology and
linguistics in the West. In East Asia and South East Asia, India exerted great
influence on literature. Furthermore, India’s influence on modern and
post-modern literature in the West has included the famous works of Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman, Browning, James, Eliot, Isherwood, Huxley, Hesse, Ginsburg,
Kerouac, diPrima, among others. This Indic influence, which was so
enthusiastically celebrated by these literary geniuses, now verges on being
subverted in the general curricula on American literature. Indic ideas have
profoundly shaped modern philosophy, psychology, Western spirituality and its
emerging worldview, including the influence on thinkers such as Schopenhauer
(philosophy), Schrodinger (physics), Jung (psychology), Teilhard de Chardin
(Christianity), among others. But most educated Americans are never told this.
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Arial">Many Western thinkers have gone through the four-stage U-Turn from Indic
traditions: (1) discipleship; (2) distancing and situating the know how into
‘secular’ language; (3) re-labeling it into Judeo-Christian tradition; and in
some cases, (4) denouncing the source Indic tradition to become ‘free’ from it.
I have been examining cases of such U-Turns from Jung on to contemporary
scholars, and have developed a few questions to help the process. For example,
might the stage 1 discipleship appear in hindsight to have been the
anthropologist’s method of getting close to and even inside the subject’s
culture so as to get a more intimate peek? Are these U-Turns the result of
blaming India’s poverty and social issues on its own tradition without adequate
understanding of its history of external oppression? Or are they the
manifestation of underlying samskaras of collective cultural identity of the
scholar, previously not expressed for lack of self-esteem, but later empowered
by the experience of Hinduism? Finally, might there also be the factor of
enhanced commercial success if Indic ideas are recast into a more popular
Judeo-Christian framework and/or into modern ‘Western’ science? Subversion
might have especially facilitated the plagiarism by this final category.
However, there is no single pattern or set of factors applicable to all cases.
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Arial">While Judeo-Christians have strategic control over the scholarship of
Hinduism in the West, Hindus have seldom been concerned about the scholarship
of Judeo-Christianity in Hindu categories. The result of this asymmetry has
been devastating. Under this control, which began during colonial times,
Hinduism has acquired the image of meaningless superstitious rituals. Kali and
other scary images are deployed to indicate a negative and violent religion.
Simplistic logic is used – Shiva is evil because he is the destroyer and
because destruction is evil. Animal symbolism is interpreted to indicate animal
worship, or worse still, some form of animism. The whole subversive enterprise
has been to depict an unscientific tradition lacking rational tendencies,
compared to European superior intellectual traditions.
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Arial">These assumptions make the missionary activity and the economic hegemony
easier to justify morally. To dismiss Hinduism, it is often portrayed as 'world
negating' and socially backward, compared to the ‘rational’ West. It is said to
exploit the underclass. Karma theory is interpreted as fatalism and as
accepting one's plight rather than taking responsibility. Hindu society is
depicted as having been intrinsically poor throughout its history, without
factoring in the massive destruction its academic institutions suffered during
multiple foreign invasions and the decimation of its infrastructure by colonialists.
Women’s issues are common stereotypes that are politicized. They are often out
of context and are rarely compared to women’s conditions in poor Christian
countries or Western nations. Environmental problems in contemporary India are
seen as rooted in India's traditions, rather than a phenomenon over the past
150 years only. The focus is on caste, cows and curry rather than on Indic
ideas presented in a sensible respectful way. The motive is to justify the
Western case that globalization equals Westernization - the indigenous cultures
are positioned as chronically and systemically flawed.
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Arial">But such portrayals fail to delve into history, and to properly explain
the economic and ecological problems. Whereas the past 500 years of history of
the West has been a 'development' tale from the dark ages to modernity, India
for a thousand years was plundered, subjugated and drained of its economic
surplus, by those very civilizations that now proclaim their superiority over
it. Islamic and British records are emphatic and voluminous about the enormous
material wealth of India, its higher literacy rate than Britain's up to the
19th century, and its massive manufacturing export base that was later
transferred into Britain's industrial revolution. Many of India's social
problems have economic roots, which in turn originated or were exacerbated
during Islamic or colonial rule. The Western lens therefore presumes that
India’s condition today reflects its intrinsic civilization at its highest;
hence, its poverty, social issues and pollution are seen as chronic and
systemic problems unsolvable from within and in need of Westernization -
including Christianity - as cure.
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Arial">Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington writes in ‘The Clash of
Civilizations’ that in 1750, India had 25% of the world’s manufacturing output
while Europe and America combined had less than 18%. But in 1900, India’s
economy had collapsed to less than 2% whereas America and the West had 84% of
the world’s economic share. He writes: ‘The
industrial revolution of the West was done at the expense of
de-industrialization of the colonies’. The material wealth of India
and its industries were legendary for millennia, and were the very reason for
the obsessions of the Europeans, Arabs and Persians to go to India – they were
not desperate to go there to save souls. To survive, any society requires
self-renewal and growth through knowledge, institutions, values and resources.
In the case of India, these institutions and assets were systematically
destroyed, either by design or by neglect, and the harvested resources were
deployed to build empires elsewhere. But few educated Americans seem to know
any of this.
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Arial">Gandhi's statement in London, in October 1931, criticized the British
subversion of India’s traditional learning: “India is more illiterate than it
was fifty or a hundred years ago . . . because the British administrators, when
they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to
root them out.” Gandhi accused his colonizers of destroying the ‘beautiful
tree’ of the indigenous system of village schools by digging up the roots and
leaving them exposed. William Adam’s survey of the state of education in Bengal
in 1835, found “that almost every village in Bengal had a pathshala [school]
and estimated that there were about 100,000 such schools in existence at the
time in Bengal and Bihar.” He reported that pupils were taught mainly through
the oral tradition. Pathshalas were popular with all classes of people,
“irrespective of religion, caste, or social status,” as the “curriculum was
designed towards meeting the practical demands of rural society. Such
pathshalas had functioned for centuries, providing practical instruction to all
classes of children and meeting local needs by teaching traditional subjects in
the traditional way.”
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Arial">However, in 1854 the British initiated ‘modernizing’ the education
system. All pathshalas were provided British books, traditional gurus were
turned into bureaucratic administrators of attendance and standardized punishments.
Exams were instituted to evaluate the gurus as well as the pupils. These
changes “had a negative impact on the enrollment of the pathshalas. Pupils
belonging to the lower classes could not comprehend the utility and began to
drop out from the improved pathshalas.” This was noted in Government of Bengal,
Education Proceedings, General Department, no. 64, October 1860: “In the former
[original schools] I found the naked children of the cultivators, and boys of
the lowest class that has ever been reached by instruction of any kind with a
rare specimen of better class of villagers; in the latter [modernized schools]
I found (as a rule) only the Brahmin and writer-cast boys. To my enquires, made
from everyone I met, there was but one answer, namely that the lower-class boys
had retired altogether from the patshalas.”
10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Colonial documents such as
the Education Commission Report of the Bengal Provincial Committee (Calcutta,
1884), and the Report of Public Instruction in Bengal (Calcutta, 1863-64),
describe how the students were made to study the administration of Warren
Hastings, Lord Cornwallis and Lord William Bentinck. Under centralized control,
teachers had to teach what was deemed worthy by the colonial state, moving away
from indigenous knowledge which was intimately embedded in the local culture
and emphasizing the needs and deeds of a conquering elite. Education became a
hegemonic tool. Bayly concluded: “The knowledgeable man of the Indo-Islamic
order was remade in the course of a generation to become the 'native servant of
government' educated in Milton and Shakespeare, friend to Copernicus, and
reader of The Times.” Yet, few scholars reflect this history when explaining
why India has high illiteracy, jumping to the hasty blame on Hinduism.
Arial">Anthropologists fail to explain that, despite it poverty, India's crime
rate is small compared to the US’ on a per million population basis, in every
major category. India’s problems are labeled as ‘Hindu’, yet Western scholars
would not label the US' very high incidence of child abuse, rape, massive
prison population, drug and other addictions, and high incidence of clinical
depression as 'Judeo-Christian' problems. Western scholars emphasize caste as
the defining characteristic of Hinduism, often to the exclusion of other
qualities. However, if they called it 'class' rather than 'caste', it would
compel students to compare with the US' own racially segregated churches, white
supremacy groups, racial profiling, economic stratification, and civil rights
issues. In fact, the very foundation of the American prosperity has been
historically based on white and Christian supremacy over blacks and Native
Americans. America’s caste system is implicit and subtle rather than explicit
and publicly acknowledged, but it is no less harmful. Americans label their
social categories as demographic groups rather than castes, but this does not
make the problems disappear. Historically, the West’s encounters with other
ethnic groups resulted in genocide or slavery – an occidental method of resolution
rather than social hierarchy for co-existence. The West should not be exempt
from examination under the same microscope for a comparative analysis by
students. Often, social science and religious studies scholars place the West
above such ‘primitive’ practices so as to ridicule Indic traditions.
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Arial">Monotheism was practiced in India well before its articulation by the
Semitic religions. Ironically, Judeo-Christian ideologies, whose
distinctiveness is that they are monolithic and monopolistic, have claimed
monotheism as their gift to civilization. The monotheism vs. polytheism debate
needs to be re-phrased to more accurately describe the divide between
historically situated dogma vs. a religion that emphasizes freedom to
experiment with processes and direct experience. Rarely do educators mentioned
that this intellectual freedom to seek spiritual self-realization resulted in
the know how that gave rise to the world’s first universities, built in India.
Students from around the world flocked to India for higher education. When
invaders inspired by Islam destroyed the great cultural centers of India,
including its famous institutions of learning in Takshashila, Vikramashila,
Nalanda and other places, they also destroyed the expression of free-spirited
genius that was the basis for India's science. In Europe, Christian dogma
destroyed the great free-spirited Greek Civilization. The natural progression
in the historically frozen dogma-based West has been from canonical absolutism
to fanaticism - the result in the 20th century was Communism, Fascism, Nazism,
and Proselytizing. Ironically, Indic traditions are portrayed as being fixed in
fossilized texts and the West is shown to have the capability to renew itself,
to generate diverse ideologies and debate, without acknowledging the fact that
these open traditions existed in India since many millennia.
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Arial">It is sad to note that Indian kids in American colleges often tell of
being embarrassed in class when their heritage is portrayed in a demeaning
manner. Many choose to deny their identity, just as Jews did a century ago in
Europe. What is ironic is that these Indian kids are often majoring in
‘rational’ disciplines such as science, finance, law, medicine, or business.
The religious/social studies teacher looking down below the glass ceiling at
these ‘less rational’ people might often have less academic training in
rational disciplines. Furthermore, many such kids come from highly educated
Indian families and find it nonsensical to see their heritage downgraded.
Arial">
Arial">There seems to be an obsession on the part of many Western scholars and
Westernized Indians to select precisely those issues about India which enable
them to develop a posture of pity and patronizing sympathy from above the glass
ceiling, while filtering out rational, progressive and superior elements of
India’s civilization under the excuse that these would not represent the ‘real’
India? Could it be that the scholarly emperor is without clothes - and the empress
too? Might this be some scholars’ way to boost their own self-esteem, using
cultural membership to compare themselves with poorer and lower others? Many
scholars are disinclined to interact with well-educated, economically mobile
and assertive Hindus, as they do not fit the stereotypes that have become so
central to the scholarship.
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Arial">The history of India’s encounter with European traders who turned into
colonialists demonstrates that control over the distribution of goods turned
into control over production. In this age, intellectual property is often the
currency for competitive success. Hence, it is the control over the
distribution of ideas that would result in eventual control over the
production, packaging and branding of ideologies. Therefore, educators in USA
should be charged to take seriously their role in engineering young minds and
public opinion, including the subversion of Hinduism. As one example, Indian
students who go through American campuses often transform their identity into
‘South Asian’ and some have even defined their religion to be ‘South Asian’.
Study about India is found across many diverse departments in American
Universities - South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Indology, Anthropology,
History, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, and Philosophy. In general,
few Indians have gone into higher studies for the humanities, preferring
sciences and more lucrative fields instead. Most Indians who have entered the
humanities as a serious career have had an ideological agenda, and over the
past 50 years, this was almost exclusively Marxist and/or Indian Christian. In
fact, it is amazing to see such a large number of Indian Christians in the
academic study of Hinduism, whereas Hindus seldom bother to study Christianity.
Here are some observations about specific university departments:
Arial">
Arial;font-weight:bold">Indology:
Arial">
Arial">With its origins in colonialism, this field is shrinking in size, the
more sophisticated Orientalism now being done by other humanities departments
noted below.
Arial">
Arial;font-weight:bold">Philosophy:
Arial">
Arial">Except for University of Hawaii and Austin, major universities'
philosophy departments do not offer a PhD in Indian Philosophy and many do not
acknowledge its existence. Those who attempt to approach philosophy from an
Indic perspective are aggressively attacked
yes"> - as happened in Rutgers University’s philosophy department
in 1996 to four eminent philosophers who dared to present an Indic view. The
American Philosophical Association has many special interest groups within it,
but not one on Indian Philosophy.
Arial">
Arial;font-weight:bold">South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Social Studies, and
History:
Arial">
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">To contain Soviet influence, the US government
allocated spy money to American universities for studying the non-Western
world, and the new field was called ‘Area Studies’. Under this rubric, the notion
of a ‘South Asia’ was born, along with far reaching consequences of balancing
India with Pakistan, and trying to ‘South Asianize’ the identity of Indians.
This grouping of countries is a politically correct way of referring to former
British colonies. It is the American equivalent of colonial Europe’s field of
Indology. Within these area studies, there are somewhere between three and five
faculty positions for East Asia (China, Japan, etc) studies, for every one
position for South Asia. The government’s funding was based on geo-political
importance at a given time based on its strategic interests.
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Japan understood the leverage of endowing chairs for
Japan studies to give its view at major universities, and today these Japan
chairs proliferate. They also endowed many influential institutions such as the
Asia Society, and hence controlled or at least influenced the selection process
of scholars and topics. While there is a Tibet House in New York, and similar
entities for so many countries’ or civilizations’ promotion, there is not even
an India House in New York. Funds for South Asia studies are very low compared
to China/Japan even in think tanks such as Brookings Institute.
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
Arial">The Pakistan government is very active in such educational
interventions, whereas India has not yet learnt the game. As one example, the
government of Pakistan announced in May 2000 that it is endowing the
Quaid-I-Azam Chair in Pakistan Studies at Berkeley in the South Asian Studies
department. A similar chair is also being created at Columbia.
Arial">
Arial">Partly as a result of this neglect by India, much of the coverage of
India in these departments is about social problems facing women, caste,
religious conflicts, nuclear bombs, pollution, …They are hardly the place where
a student would get a deep appreciation about the gifts of India's civilization
to the world, past, present and future potential. The mentality and agenda seem
to be of social re-engineering based on the scholar’s ideology rather than of
social studies. These departments are seeping with leftist and/or social
anthropological portrayals – India is seen as a land of problems with every
kind of strange and backward phenomenon. Academic Indians have not fought
against this and sometimes even facilitate it. It has become especially
fashionable for Indian women to trash India's heritage as being responsible for
all sorts of women's problems, thereby alienating many young Hindu girls from
their own heritage as a way to get liberated from its evils. Indian Christians
often co-opt these women to help trash Hinduism, perhaps for their own agendas.
The senior academicians in power, who are usually Americans, have encouraged
this, and in many instances, have pressured PhD students and even junior
faculty members against scholarly conclusions that run counter to the
stereotypes. Rarely are students encouraged to research the invasions by Islam
and colonialism as factors that caused or exacerbated India’s social problems.
Yet, these very scholars often don the human rights cloak to condemn other
cultures.
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
Arial;font-weight:bold">Religious Studies:
Arial">
text-autospace:none">
Arial">These departments are enjoying immense growth, as religion becomes more
popular among students. Unfortunately, despite Hinduism's pre-eminence as the
fountainhead of Buddhism and therefore much of Asian civilization, and its
intellectual contributions in the realm of religion in general, it is amazing
that THERE IS NOT ONE SINGLE HINDUISM STUDIES CHAIR in USA and the only one in
North America is in Concordia (Canada). There are a few specific chairs on
Sikhism, many on Buddhism, and of course literally dozens on Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. There are now even chairs for such obscure religions
as ‘Shintoism’, but still Hinduism has none.
text-autospace:none">
Arial">
text-autospace:none">
Arial">Most teachers of Hinduism in Western academic departments are
non-Hindus: the only major world religion with little representation from
within. I am told that the situation in UK is similar, and that the only person
from a Hindu background holding a post in Religious Studies at a major
university in the U.K. is Ram-Prasad Chakravarthi at Lancaster University.
Recently, Indians in Indiana raised money to endow a Rabindranath Tagore Chair
for India Studies. Its occupant is a well-respected scholar of Indian
philosophy and Hinduism, and is also a Christian minister. Lately, his support
for young scholars challenging the integrity of Hinduism (e.g. Richard King's
new book) has disappointed many who were surprised to see his U-Turn away from
being Hindu friendly. As one consequence of this situation analysis, we need to
re-evaluate the criteria of what it means to be ‘qualified’ for academic
positions in Hinduism: the Western religions’ notion is sometimes that texts
are fixed fossils to be interpreted in isolation, whereas Indic traditions
would also place great emphasis on the practical and experiential credentials
of a good yogi, or pundit, or bhakta.
text-autospace:none">
Arial">
Arial;font-weight:bold">Psychology:
Arial">
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">This discipline holds the greatest promise for
scientific and authentic portrayal of Indic thought in intellectual circles, as
many psychologists have begun to appreciate yoga, meditation, various
philosophies of India, Kundalini, tantra, charkas, and some even appreciate
bhakti in this context. The problem here is plagiarism, as nobody wants to be
associated with a tradition having such a bad social reputation. Therefore,
most Indic contributions are camouflaged as being recent Western discoveries by
‘science’ and/or syncretised into Judeo-Christian narratives. Since the
evidence of appropriation is still fresh in this field, the scholars can be
caught red-handed and made to acknowledge. It would be a very important task to
introduce Indian thought into psychology books explicitly as Indian thought.
This would bypass the Judeo-Christian religious language and the social/anthropology
stereotyping. It would position India’s heritage as the science of
consciousness rather than as ‘religion' in the Judeo-Christian sense. But
disappointingly, at every conference on consciousness studies that I have
attended over the past four years, the Indian participation is nominal, whereas
now there are hundreds of Judeo-Christians and secular psychologists in the
fray rapidly appropriating Indic ideas as newly discovered ‘science’ or as
liberal Judaism/Christianity.
Arial">
12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Without active participation, Hindus are merely
abandoning the scholarship in the hands of others, especially Christians who
are from a faith that is aggressively proselytizing against Hinduism and who
are very active in promoting their position in the interpretation and distribution
of Hindu scriptures. Hindu thinkers have failed to understand the importance
and power in ‘academic’ scholarship about religion, and continue to confuse it
with religious teachings to the community. Many Hindus sit on ivory towers
refusing to get involved, sometimes justifying this based on quoting some lofty
shlokas, or proclamations about being spiritual and not religious, or about all
religions being the same. Those who take the time to understand the situation
often think that it should be someone else’s task to remedy it. The situation
in America’s academics is the ultimate glass ceiling that Indians must
negotiate, having already pierced through other glass ceilings in scientific,
technological, business, medical, and many other fields. Academic Religious
Studies, being rooted in the historical dogma methodologies of
Judeo-Christianity and the narrative of Westernism, is fortressed as amongst
the last bastions of the superior West.
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