By Shana Sippy
Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed an increasing tension between certain voices in North American Hinduism and the academic community that studies Hinduism. As time has progressed, this tension has emerged within the academic community itself. There have been a number of attempts by scholars to bridge the gulf that has emerged between communities and perspectives, and this volume represents one such effort. The primary issue at stake involves who possesses the right to represent Hinduism and Hinduism’s history. My own research, focused on transnational articulations of Hinduism, has afforded me opportunities to both document these tensions and to experience them first-hand.
In the fall of 2008, I was involved in organising a panel called Representing and Misrepresenting Hinduism in North America for the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference.1 After I posted an announcement about the panel on RISA (the listserv for the Religion in South Asia group of the AAR), I received a string of anonymous emails, which became increasingly personal and harassing as the conference neared. The emails suggested that the panel and the composition of it—including scholars presumed to have non-Hindu backgrounds—was itself an act of misrepresentation. All of this was said with no real knowledge of the panel’s content, the topic of my paper or the actual backgrounds of the panellists. The irony that the critics sought a type of authenticity and truth from the panel when their own criticism was based on a lack of truthful information was not lost on those of us involved.
Although the emails produced in me more anxiety about giving a paper than I could think possible, I tried to look on the bright side of getting hate mail; how often does fieldwork come right to your door, let alone right into your very own computer? There was no need to make appointments, no driving and getting lost on the way to new locales, no recording or transcription required. While I cannot go so far as to thank these people (whoever they are) for providing material to augment my research, I will admit to having learned something significant from the experience.
As I read the emails, I noticed something. It is the same thing that I see in much less aggressive attacks on scholars of Hinduism and the academy generally. I am hesitant, of course, to make any connection between cowardly bullies who send untraceable emails attacking my right to speak and make assumptions about my ethnic and religious background and those who have levelled their criticism of scholars in much more civil and respectful ways. However, I want to suggest that the extreme perspectives that arrived in my inbox are found as shadows in the attacks on scholarship that have come from more reasonable critics, and they are notable in articulations of Hindu experience and identity that are heard throughout North America.
This impression was further supported by the presence, at the conference session, of a man who called himself a journalist. All things considered, those of us who had worked on the panel were relieved that he was the only person of his type in attendance. The AAR organisers ordered security for the session because of tensions that had erupted in previous years over similar issues with respect to the representation of Hinduism. This man did not spout the rhetoric of the emails but he did come with an agenda that was not all together distinct from that articulated in them. He asked a few aggressive questions, but what was most illuminating was that he handed out free copies of Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America (Ramaswamy, de Nicolas and Banerjee, 2007) to anyone who would take it. The book’s primary agenda is emblematic of a larger trend in contemporary Hinduism, both in the diaspora and in India, which involves asking and trying to regulate who and what represents Hinduism and how such representations are perceived by non-Hindus and Hindus alike.
Endeavours such as this emerge from a larger milieu in which we have become, since the late 1960s, increasingly more aware of the power of stereotypes and the politics of representation. In his book Representation, Stuart Hall reflects on Edward Said’s assertion that conceptions of the ‘Oriental’ were developed out of ‘a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections’ (Said, 1978: 8). He suggests that there are not only ‘strategies and practices’ at work in racialised/‘otherizing’ representations but also in the contestations of these representations. Counter-representations often involve taking the meanings embedded in a specific representation, ‘reappropriating’ them and turning them into new ‘positive’ meanings and representations through practices of ‘trans-coding’ (Hall, 1997: 264, 270). Some transcoding strategies, according to Hall, include: reversing stereotypes, the substitution of ‘positive’ images for ‘negative’ ones and the contestation and complication of these representations from within (Hall, 1997: 270–75). Each of these strategies can be seen in contemporary responses to both scholarly and popular representations of Hindus and Hinduism.
In reversing what are perceived as prevalent stereotypes—that Hindus are idol-worshippers, all Hindu widows commit sati, Hindu women are oppressed, India is a country of slums and poverty beset primarily by the caste system and that all Hindus are passive, having been dominated by waves of foreigners throughout history—many Hindu advocacy groups have sought to promote an alternative, although often equally singular and stereotypical image: All Hindus truly believe in one God, with many manifestations; Hindu women are more valorised, powerful and liberated than their Western counterparts, devi and Indira Gandhi are prime examples; in 2010, eight Indian companies made it to the Fortune 500 list (Kroll and Miller, 2010; Hindu, 2010) and, as ‘model citizens’, Hindus are among the most successful entrepreneurs, evidenced by the fact that Mukesh Ambani and Lakshmi Mittal are among the top 10 wealthiest men in the world; Hindu history is full of great warriors and rulers; and the world is indebted to it for spiritual, philosophical, scientific and mathematical wisdom. These representational reversals are employed by Hindu groups seeking to substitute ‘positive’ images for ‘negative’ ones. In such cases, pride is a primary goal and, in order to foster it, not only are the binaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ often maintained but also an idealised and fetishised image is put forth. Hall’s work suggests that we may also find examples of other strategies, which place themselves within the ‘complexities and ambivalences of representation,’ playing and struggling with these representations to accept ‘the shifting, unstable character of meaning’ and representation. In these struggles over representation there is an acknowledgement that ‘meaning can never be finally fixed’, and, ultimately, there can be no ‘final victories’. (Hall, 1997: 274). Not only have these strategies been at play among Hindu groups but also among academics, as they began to look at their own image and the impact of their scholarly productions more closely.
In the mid-1990s, scholarship on South Asia in the fields of religion, history and anthropology became increasingly focused on tracing genealogies, an endeavour deeply linked to work in postcolonial studies and post-structuralism. In this regard, studies of Hinduism took on a new emphasis in which categories long taken for granted were scrutinised and called into question; the designation ‘Hinduism’ was historicised and deemed, by many, an 18th century innovation. In a process of self-reflection and historical inquiry, scholars have been increasingly concerned with how Hinduism has been presented and misrepresented over time. Furthermore, the scholarly community has been forced to consider the cultural, civic and political implications of their representations. A critical turning point for scholars of South Asian religion was the communal violence that erupted in India in the mid-1980s and then again in the early 1990s. The violence has continued and the community of scholars who study the religions of India has had no choice but to pay greater attention to ethical considerations. Wherein older methods of religious studies sought a ‘non-judgemental’ approach to religious belief and experience, such attempts at scholarly distance are today not simply seen as passé or unrealistic but they are, quite frankly, dangerous. We know all too well that what we assert about the history of a place or religious practice can impact what is taught in the classroom, how land and voting rights are adjudicated in a courtroom or how political and civil rights are interpreted by governments. The challenge that emerges from our focus on historical constructions and power relations is that the boundaries that once upheld a pretence of scholarly objectivity and protection are now exploded. Boundary breaking, as well, is the fact that those of us with South Asian heritage have increasingly emerged as Western academic scholars of South Asian religion—the perceived distinction between scholar and subject, ‘West’ and ‘East’, has been disrupted. And as such a sense of perceived alliances has also been challenged (see Warrier, Chapter 3 in this volume).
At the same time—be it coincidence or part of the cause, or most likely some of both—a plethora of Hindu organisations, websites and publications were created for the express purpose of representing Hinduism and India both to Hindus themselves and to the world at large. It is these umbrella organisations—which can increasingly be found throughout the globe and in India as well—to which this volume partly draws its attention. Of great concern to the founders of these organisations is the idea that Indians and Hindus should have the opportunity to speak for themselves, to present their own stories and to give voice to their own texts and histories.2 Such organisations have been focused on two main goals: first, that of disseminating what they deem authentic, historical and glorious Hinduism to those who have long misunderstood the complexity, richness and truth of its teachings; and second, defending Hinduism from a Western culture that has exoticised and commodified its sacred symbols and customs.
Furthermore, Hindu groups, in places like North America, the UK and Australia, have sought a more prominent voice in civic, political, academic and cultural life, wishing to shape the perceptions of Hindus and Indians by both those within and outside of the community.
It is crucial to note that the politics and perspectives of these newly formed Hindu organisations are actually quite varied, as are the politics and perspectives of those in the academy. It has become somewhat common practice, among many who study the Hindu diaspora, to paint all ‘Hindu umbrella’ organisations with the same brush, representing all of them as Hindu nationalist groups of the Sangh Parivar. I am sensitive to such readings because I believe it is this same type of sweeping generalisation that has been used to attack scholars of Hinduism, as though all scholarship that is non-Indian in origin is suspect and as if anything remotely critical of Hindu narratives is an offence. In reality it is only a nuanced look at these organisations, their motivations and their impact that will allow us to do the scholarly work to which we aspire. It is not uncommon for us to look at the political implications of specific organisational narratives without considering the affect that is being tapped, cultivated and mobilised by such articulations and the other motivations that are at play for individuals who may only be tangentially connected to these organisations.
We often focus on the extreme margins—on hateful emails, communalist protestations or the rhetoric that suggests that all Hindu religious endeavours are inherently chauvinistic, oppressive and anti-Muslim. Those who study the Hindu right wing are often quick to argue that all Hindu advocacy groups—involved in debates over the history of India as taught in public schools, or who signed petitions complaining that the 2009 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) series, The Story of India had ‘missed the mark’ in its portrayal of the Aryan Migration Theory—subscribe to the same unified Hindutva ideology and agendas. It is clear that such discourse supports some Hindu right-wing agendas and how it does so needs to be carefully documented and interrogated. However, we must also ask, what else, besides an Hindutva agenda, is at stake when Hinduism is historicised?3 What desires, fears, beliefs, investments and emotions are at play?4 Why do relational and contextual readings of Hindu texts and practice by scholars, in particular, elicit a feeling among many that dharma is under attack?
As has been well established, writing history is one among many discursive strategies that is employed in identity construction and nation building. It is used to establish authority and support truth claims. We are more than willing to see how these strategies function among groups, such as the Hindu right, to establish, fortify and authenticate communities, and to establish the dominance of some over others, but I think it behoves us to look, as well, at how the writing of history in the academy is itself a discursive formation from which new discourses and even new identities and communities, unintentionally or intentionally, are constructed.
Those who write history possess the power to name experiences and to control representations. For this reason, political struggles often ensue when historical narratives are revised. Both the Indian National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and California textbook controversies remind us of the significance of historical discourse and the grave political consequences that can emerge when the already fraught distinctions between church and state, parochial/private and secular/public education are further blurred. Such controversies serve as a reminder that historical narratives can distort how communities, nations and religious traditions are seen both by themselves and others. The scholarly community has, for a long time, been aware of the power inherent in representations of history. Relatively new, however, is the collective awareness of this power among Hindus living outside of India. To illustrate this, I will turn briefly to consider recent rhetoric involving dharma’s defence and Hinduism’s history in three different contexts.
When the debate over the adoption of certain narratives in California textbooks (see Chapter 16) ensued, from 2005 to 2007, it did not simply galvanise groups identified with ‘Hindutva’ but many Hindus—without specific political agendas or anti-Muslim sentiment—were moved to engage because of their complex personal relationships to and investments in telling India’s history. Certainly, these sentiments were triggered by the political campaign waged by umbrella organisations, like the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, but the agendas of these organisations cannot fully account for the phenomenon. For many North American Hindus, simply encountering the representations of what they perceive to be their own culture in proposed public school textbooks was enough to inspire deeply felt responses.
To explore this, I wish to consider what some Hindus living in Northern and Southern California said to me—both before and after the controversy California textbook—about their perception of Hinduism’s history and its place in shaping their religious experience and identity. These voices represent a perspective I heard echoed by the writers of diversity and awareness curricula for public schools, non-Hindu and Hindu religious organisations and advocacy groups, teachers in Hindu children’s programmes and by devotees and pandits at temples and Hindu centres.5
In 2007, when responding to the ongoing debate over the distinctions between Indian and Hindu history and Vedic traditions and Hinduism, Anju, a teacher and mother in Los Angeles, told me:
I am not stupid. I know we didn’t always use the word Hindu or that what we call Hinduism today is the same as what our religion was at the time of the Vedas or when Mira and Ravidas and the other saints were alive, but it is all my heritage, and my connection to God is tied to all these people, from the first words of the Vedas to the teachers today. Why do people want to take that away from me? Why take it from my children? It is their pride and their lineage. (Personal communication: 17 May 2007)
Anju’s assertion that even though the terms ‘Hindus’ and ‘Hinduism’ may be modern, there is still historical continuity from the time of the Vedas to the Hinduism of the present is emblematic of the issues we find at the crux of textbook controversy. While many of the suggested edits, proposed by advocacy groups, were connected to larger political agendas and projects that seek to conflate India and Hindu history and whitewash the complexities of caste and gender inequities, many of those who became invested in the textbook debate did so because they wanted a ‘positive’ history of Hinduism and India, which reflected their own understanding of the story to be told in their children’s classrooms. Although designations of ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ tend to raise suspicions for academics, an abiding sense of inaccuracy and inability to find their own traditions represented in the textbooks became a source of concern for many California Hindus. Thus, while representations of the past are not usually intended to mirror the present, the fact that students routinely employ these fixed narratives of history in order to interpret the Indian and Hindu present was troubling for many Hindu parents and textbook-edit advocates.
In 2004, Bani, a public school teacher and diversity education consultant in Fremont, CA spoke about her frustration that academics emphasise the sectarian divisions between Hindus and the ‘strife between groups’ because she wanted children to learn another type of narrative as well, one that she believed Hinduism could offer. She said:
It is God’s beauty in this history. I am a pacifist. I want you to know this because I hate these people who spit out all this hate like it was chewed up supari…. When I talk about this history don’t think, please, that I am one of them…. I don’t want to seem like one of those people. My family is Bengali and when I grew up in Calcutta we mostly worshipped Kali-Ma and when we moved to Hong Kong and then came here, we started to spend more and more time with people from other parts of India and we came to appreciate everything, even many South Indian customs and devas I didn’t really know about. I feel connected to all of it, it is all of it a way to praise God…. Why is it bad to say all of this is Hinduism? Why do people want to say, oh all the variety and division in India is real, and what we do, appreciating every aspect of the tradition, finding God in everything, why is that a new bad Hinduism? I think it is just the opposite. Instead of thinking—as I was raised—that just by being Bengali we were better Hindus, I am more open and I judge less. (Personal communication: 20 October 2004)
Prithi, a temple-goer in Fremont, CA, explained that she became involved in the textbook debate because, as a feminist, she was disturbed by the thought that public school children would only see Hindus as oppressive to women and lower castes. She argued that the textbooks just ‘pick and choose’ histories based on convenience. ‘If the chapter on Ancient Rome has something on social divisions, then the chapter on Ancient India has to as well.’ She felt that other ‘true’ stories could be told but that the textbooks focused on the same ‘old male-dominated’ ones. For her, history is not simply about the past but is ‘a blessing for the future’. She said:
It is what helps me to breathe every moment, to get up in the morning and praise God as women have done for centuries. Without the history it would just be mindless, empty, made-up ritual. Our history gives our beliefs, our puja, even our very lives, meaning. (Personal communication: 14 November 2005)
Amirtha, another teacher of an informal living room Hindu Sunday school in Pleasanton, CA, told me:
I understand that there are some things people say that are really horrible, making out all Muslims to be evil rulers and such. We ignore that…. What I teach the children is the wonderful stories of our gods and goddesses, and the beauty of our beliefs. It is so important that our children know that we are not just all about worshipping in temples, which is, of course, very, very important, but our sons—in particular—find a lot of connection to the fact that we have long traditions of science and maths. We have some curriculum that quote Einstein and Mark Twain speaking of the great knowledge and teachings of India. Our civilization didn’t only come from the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians—who our children learn about in school—but it also came from us, from our Indian Heritage. What is the problem with teaching this to our children? I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a part of what is taught to every child about our history. Should they only learn about the poverty and the corruption? (Personal communication: 29 October 2006)
In classroom presentations, on podcasts and in conversation, North American Hindus’ attachments to the proud history of India and its contributions in the fields of language, art, science and mathematics emerge as more than solely a communalist strategy. In other work, I have explored the new constellation of concepts, values and practices defining Hinduism that are found in curricula, public relations materials and temple discourses. The perspectives of the teachers and mothers I cite here both produce and are produced by these modern conceptions of Hinduism. The desire to engage with and teach their children about Indian and Hindu history is complicated by the hotly contested line between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ narratives. Among many people I spoke with over a period of nine years, I continually noted a persistent desire that historical and public representations of Hinduism resonate not simply with their personal conceptions of the tradition but also with what they sought for their children to know about themselves and their heritage.
From an academic perspective, the goal of writing a history in order to reflect what we desire seems absurd. Yet, from the position of a parent or pandit seeking to instill cultural and religious connections, it makes sense. We need only look at ourselves to gain insight into this basic idea; as a feminist and mother of a daughter, I want my daughter to have a positive self-image, to see beauty in herself, not in images of Barbie dolls and on television. I try to limit, as best as I can, the messages that she gets about how women’s bodies should look and try to make her appreciate the idea that beauty is not simply physical. I feel similarly about teaching my children about their South Asian heritage; I want them to love the food, the languages, the art, the stories and the rich history that is theirs as well. This has involved sweetening their association with India through mango lassis and kulfi and exposing them to the particular stories and music that I love, and which I hope they will as well. This does not mean, of course, that I want them to be blind to the complexity, messiness, violence and oppression in South Asia’s past and present, or to the richness that is found in the history of others. However, the desire to selectively cultivate associations and attachments, pride in one’s history, religion and ultimately self, motivated many of the Hindus who became engaged in the California textbook controversy.6
While I am hesitant to draw any connection between those whom I have just quoted and the abusive individuals who wrote vitriolic emails to me, in the hopes that it will help shed some light on the underlying motivations, desires and fears that are at play in the defence of dharma against the historicising of Hinduism, I will take the risk. The emails were sent from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses throughout the country and came from a range of, subsequently defunct, email addresses, such as dharmadefense@sanatanaworld.com; hindustogethereternally@hindustogether.net and hinduusindia@hinduswithgod.com. A selection from them is quoted here.
We will have no more of people like you. Hinduism is TRUTH! Hinduism has lasted 8000 years and you can not destroy it with your lying representation! Hinduism ki jai! [A pairing of words, English and Hindi that I have not seen before.]
Mrs. Shana Sippy: Again we will hear these supposed scholars of Hindu Dharma trying to say that our Hinduism is an invent of the British. It is time that these Academy people knew that our religion is 8 thousand year old and will survive their attacks as it survived all the others before.
If you are a white Christian, as I suspect, who are you to judge what a misrepresentation of Hinduism really is? But if you are Hindu, which I doubt, what I say to you is that with Hindus like you, we don’t need enemies! We will fight your kind and stop you from defaming us anymore!
Hindus speak for Hindus. Why do you keep saying that our Sanatana Dharma was invention? Why do you question the true history?7
Among these emails, certain refrains appeared:
1. A persistent sense that dharma is under attack and in need of defence.
2. Anger and anxiety about the possible suggestion that Hinduism was invented and the implication that historicising Hinduism inherently calls into question the veracity of Hinduism’s ancient teachings.
3. A belief that Hindus should be the only people to represent Hinduism.
4. An assertion that Hinduism is thousands of years old and could endure scholarly attacks.
5. A focus on the notion of the singularity of truth and the desire for that truth to be acknowledged and affirmed by Western scholars.
When I consider the refrains in these emails, it is impossible to ignore the discursive resonances with a wide range of Hindu groups and endeavours.8 There is an ironic dissonance between the simultaneous assertions of Hinduism’s enduring strength and dharma’s need to be defended. Somehow, however, among certain Hindu groups, the collective, constructed and oft-repeated memories of colonial and Mughal rule and oppression inform rhetorical and emotional discourses as if they happened yesterday. Along with this is the concern, expressed by groups like the Hindu American Foundation and Hindu Human Rights group (HHR) that Hinduism, Hindus and images of Hinduism need to be protected in civic and commercial contexts. Such concerns are not reserved, of course, to North America. In 2005, in response to the images of Lord Rama on shoes manufactured by Minneli, 1,000 Hindus gathered to protest in front of the French Embassy in London. Shelia Maharaja, the spokesperson for HHR, said:9
Bathed in the afternoon sun, Hindus from all walks of life joined us in a growing Hindu awakening to make it known that we will no longer stand for defamation of our sacred Lord Rama and the persecution of Hindus anywhere in the world. (Hinduforum.org, 2005)
Blog postings and commentary about the rallies tended to emphasise the feelings of Hindu collectivity that emerged during the protest. Maharaja and other Hindu leaders such as Ramesh Kallidai, of the Hindu Forum in Britain, viewed the shoes as a symbol of much larger problems involving discrimination against Hindus in France in particular and the ‘negative’ public representations of Hinduism and ‘misuse and abuse of Hindu icons’ in general (Hinduforum.org, 2005).
In order to combat misrepresentations, Hindu groups have employed a number of strategies, including institutional and organisational development; political activism and lobbying; the creation of an increasingly large number of supplementary Hindu schools, educational programmes and temples; and the sponsorship of scholars, conferences and the commission of texts, which support their agenda. The text Invading the Sacred is one such example of a Hindu community response to perceived ‘misrepresentations’. The book is the outgrowth of desires to rescue Hinduism from the hands of scholars whose work threatens ‘authentic’, emic readings of the tradition. The length of this chapter does not afford me the opportunity to probe the nuances of Invading the Sacred (for this, see Chaudhuri, Chapter 24 in this volume), but overall the work suggests that scholarly interpretations disregard the ‘original’ and devotional intentions of scriptures, showing no reverence for the sacred customs and gods of Hinduism. Most notable is the belief that psychoanalytic, gendered and queer readings of Hindu texts, images and practice defame the holiness of the tradition. Along with the critiques found in the book, we can note the flurry of activism to counter Aryan migration theories, which are felt to threaten the very origins and glory of Hinduism’s past (Bryant, 2001, 2005). These efforts to defend dharma have been decidedly transnational in nature and the extensive breath of the debate is well illustrated by the participation of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha (HDAS) in the global discourse about scholarship on Hinduism, in general, and their association with the text Invading the Sacred, in specific.
The HDAS was founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in 2002 to act as ‘the apex unifying body that provides leadership, guidance and a collective voice for the Hindus’. In their resolution of February 2008, they expressed their concern about the ‘Distortion and Denigration of Hinduism by academicians’, stating that some Western scholarly works about Hinduism ‘are extremely ill-informed or purposely distorted … [and] denigrate things sacred to Hindus’.
These works do not remain within scholarly circles but find their way as recommended readings in schools and colleges in the US; besides giving a completely wrong picture of what is Hinduism and what their deities stand for, they impact the young minds of Hindu children and young adults in a deeply injurious manner—destroying their self esteem and pride in their own tradition and cultural roots…. TV media in India is dominated by non-Hindu interests, pseudo-secularists and Abrahamic religious leadership/institutions; the result is that Hindu youth does not get a correct picture of what Hinduism is and what is its stand on many contemporary issues amidst virulent propaganda against Hindu Dharma.10
The resolution covers a range of issues including: addressing who is a Hindu, guidelines on temple governance and entry, statements on conversion and ghar vāpasī (literally homecoming but translated as ‘re-conversion’), the preservation of Hindu manuscripts and documents and the proper conduct of ācāryas. In addition, the HDAS resolved that
the book, Invading the Sacred, which exposes in a scholarly setting these developments, should be widely distributed to encourage large-scale readership; an adapted summary version in different languages should be put out in the country and liberally distributed.11
The HDAS calls for the creation of departments and curricula of Religious Studies within India and seeks to encourage support for brahmacharis and brahmacharins to enrol in PhD programmes, in India and abroad, to help develop authentic Hindu positions on history and contemporary issues, and to expose and correct the ‘colonial constructs and colonized mind-set’. The HDAS’s endorsement of Invading the Sacred and call for the cultivation and financial support of Hindu scholars of Hinduism is emblematic of an increasingly significant trend over the past 20 years, in which Hindu umbrella organisations seek not simply recognition by the scholars in the academy but also wish to assume an authoritative voice and privileged place within it.
The case of Dharma Association of North America (DANAM) is yet another example of a Hindu discourse that emerged in relation to and out of scholarly discourse. Like the vast number of organisations that have been born to represent Hinduism in schools, in the courts and the public sphere, DANAM was founded, in 2002, both to speak to the academy and offer an alternative to it.12 Rather than simply walking away from the academic world, comfortable with the idea that academic and religious communities have different aims and might disagree, DANAM choose to remain engaged, holding its annual conference in the same place and time as the AAR. The founders were inspired, in part, by their desire to address the dissonance which they perceived between scholarly representations of Hinduism and their own lived experiences, wishing to build bridges between scholars, practitioners and scholar-practitioners of Dharmic traditions. DANAM’s website, until 2010, listed nine primary objectives, among them addressing ‘issues pertaining to Diaspora followers of Hindu Dharma as minority communities’ and empowering ‘members of the association to present the traditional Hindu Dharma in ways that are authentic to normative and historically accurate lived experience of the Hindu tradition(s)’.13 This aspiration for authentic representation is reiterated as a ‘unique feature’ of the organisation, in which scholars will ‘provide authentic [emphasis mine] Dharmic representation of Santatana Dharma and other Dharma traditions’.14 Many of the scholars involved in DANAM would certainly problematise the discourse of authenticity and normativity that is expressed in the mission statement. Yet, the underlying goal stated by DANAM, in its early years that scholarship should resonate with the experience of and representations deemed appropriate by practitioners, raises a host of complex questions for both the scholarly and Hindu communities.15 It also helps to illuminate some of the desires at play and persistent tropes in the debates over public representations of Hinduism.
In the midst of a long conversation about the great significance of history in Hindu theology and philosophy, Kumar, a teacher in children’s programmes and active member of a temple in Sunnyvale, CA, argued passionately for changes in the textbooks and told me:
Knowing how long Hinduism has existed gives purpose to my life. All I am hoping is that we can pass on the authentic history—it is proof of the eternal truth that is Hinduism. It is like that story, you must be knowing, about the mango… the king asks the guru to tell him about the truth. The guru says: ‘Ah, wise king, how do you tell someone who has never eaten anything sweet what a mango tastes like?’ When the king struggled and failed to describe the mango, he asked the guru, ‘then, how would you explain it?’ With a big smile and laugh, the guru handed the king a mango and told him, ‘take a bite that is what sweet is.’ It is like the truth, you see? (Personal communication: 12 August 2006)
For Kumar, this story is proof that there is only one truth. There is authenticity and everything else. His belief, which was shared by many of the other teachers and parents in attendance that day, was that the truth is like the mango, you know it only when you experience it. Because the Western academics, who wrote the textbooks, as perceived by Kumar, did not have personal experience with Hinduism or India, they could not know the truth. Their viewpoint simply needed correction by those with a larger, more experienced, ‘authentic’ perspective. As is common in Hindu classrooms in the diaspora, Kumar then referenced the axiom, Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti (the truth is one, sages call it by many names) in order to suggest that while people might talk about things differently, there can be only one truth.
Like the mango story, however, it is all in the interpretation. We could note that a mango tastes different to everyone. In fact, some mangos are a soft-juicy-sweet, others a hard-sour-sweet, some are not sweet at all. Each one is an authentic mango but they are not all the same. North American Hindu organisations have, as of late, focused more on the ‘one truth’ part of the axiom and not on the multiplicity of many sages or many names.16
To be fair, however, it is not only the Hindu community who insists that everyone tastes and appreciates the ‘real’ mango. The desire for resonance, and acceptance of certain authentic narratives is not limited solely to North American Hindu groups. These desires can be found among the best postcolonial, deconstructionist scholars of religion as well. In very different ways, both groups—and there is overlap and movement between them, of course—hold up authentic visions of Hinduism and history.
The academy wants—and I believe Hindus in North America are responding to this desire on our part—to suggest that the Hinduism that emerged in the 18th century and the monolithic Hinduism that has increasingly taken centre stage in global movements, in Great Britain and North America, is somehow more inauthentic and a misrepresentation when it is compared to the older, more sectarian, regional articulations found in India. At the very least, many scholars wish to suggest that those regional, local and sectarian iterations of Hinduism are more benign than and more favourable to the Hinduism that is found in the diaspora. Scholars have focused on the ways in which modern Hindu articulations are ‘homogenizing’ and ‘totalizing’. The reason for this scholarly emphasis has everything to do with contemporary politics in which religious minorities in India have been under attack and in which the boundaries between national and religious identity, and secular and religious realms have been threatened by the intense climate of communalism.
Ironically, however, so focused on the way in which our scholarship may be interpreted and used, we too have become invested in our own authentic narrative about how and when Hinduism emerged and what constitutes the ‘real’ and nuanced Hindu traditions, which do not threaten the type of political, physical and cultural fallout that we fear most. We have no choice but be mindful of the political implications of our scholarship, but we also need to consider what types of ‘truths’ and conceptions of the authentic we are holding onto in order to support our agendas. While we cannot be in the business of demarcating the difference between ‘real’ Hinduism and that which is ‘fabricated’ for other purposes, we can try to understand the range of agendas, investments and desires at work in these different articulations.
For example, rhetoric about the defamation and distortion of Hinduism often resembles the language of those who evoked narratives of Hindu humiliation and domination by ‘foreign powers’ in their campaigns to destroy the Babri Masjid or incite riots against Muslims. Some might be tempted to argue for a rhetorical continuum on which we place those who write emails and those who massacred Muslims in Gujarat. Yet, as much as we need to note the linkages, we also need to note the difference between those who protest about shoes with images of a Hindu god on them, or raise concerns about the representation of Hinduism in textbooks, and those who engage in horrific physical violence. Noting these differences may enable us to understand the various motivations at play and find the space to address reasonable and important concerns about Hindu representation. It will also, hopefully, help to illuminate what representations we need to counter and when and where we should promote alternative narratives.
Just as certain members of the Hindu community in the US seek to be affirmed, to have their points and history acknowledged and to find resonance between their perspective and that found in academic representations, the academic community wants affirmation and acknowledgement of the narratives we seek to tell. We often believe, just as many Hindus groups do of theirs, that our reasons are justified and, ironically, even in our historicising/deconstructionist frameworks that our narrative is more accurate and closer to the truth than that of others.
Scholars of religion have, for generations, offered up a different perspective from that of the churches or religious teachings they have studied. There has been a longstanding tacit agreement among North American scholars and practitioners of Christianity and Judaism that what is said in the academy need not, and in fact probably should not, be the same as that which is said from the pulpit or in Sunday school. What is taught in churches or synagogues about Jesus’ miracles or Moses parting the waters is not what we expect to hear in university lecture halls. The endeavours of religious education and secular critical education are decidedly different, as are the lessons we are to draw from them. However, in the case of North American Hinduism, over the past 15 years, there has been an increasingly strong desire for resonance, agreement and ‘accuracy’ on the part of both sides.
The desires have emerged, in part, because of the intense public and political issues at stake, be it in public school classrooms, in the funding of academic centres and endowed chairs in universities or at contested sacred sites in India. Obviously, with the vivid images of horrific and senselees violence, communal riots, trains set on fire and religious monuments destroyed in our mind, we, as academics and concerned individuals, cannot watch our words and interpretations too carefully. However, while I believe that there is very little chance of dialogue with Hindu extremists who engage in violence against Muslims or Christians, or those who simply send hateful emails, I do believe that we can and indeed must find some way to escape the representation/misrepresentation paradigm. The discourse does no justice to anyone and leaves us in a conundrum of binaries.
What I ask, and after getting those emails I feel even more strongly about it, is that we try to move from a hermeneutics of right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable representations to a different way of reading and relating. This does not mean, of course, that we should pursue moral relativism, but that rational-minded people on both sides try to engage a different mode of reading and interpreting one another.
What might that look like?
While I could turn to the innumerable examples from South Asia that offer up models of paradoxical reading and ask us to celebrate the ability of Hindu traditions to hold and honour contradictory commentaries, narratives, beliefs, texts and practices all at once, within the same tradition. I want to suggest that we consider adopting a model for dialogue that is offered by feminist theologians.
Why would I turn to feminist biblical scholars when there are so many other models, including ‘indigenous’ Hindu and Indian ways of thinking? I do so for very specific reasons. First, because I think the challenge of feminist hermeneutics is useful because the endeavour is precisely about how to accept the dissonance and hold the paradox as scholars engage traditions that have been understood to speak the truth. Second, I want to suggest that while Indian and Hindu ways of approaching plural perspectives, multiple truths and commentaries are significant, one of the things that distinguishes academic inquiry from religious inquiry is the bringing of a variety of perspectives—Hindu and non-Hindu—to the table in our analysis of Hinduism or anything else for that matter. Therefore, while it is significant and compelling to be mindful of South Asian religious traditions and practices as we engage in our interpretations, we need not look to them exclusively.
In approaching biblical texts, feminist theologians in the 1970s faced a crisis. How could they reconcile the misogyny inherent in the text with their religious and spiritual commitment to the text and tradition? Drawing on thinkers like Schliermacher, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza and other feminists, scholars sought to find some way to balance their critique, scrutiny and historical view of traditions with their desire to honour, respect, revere, preserve and relate to these traditions as central and even holy. There have been numerous ways that this complex hermeneutical approach has been described, but the tripartite hermeneutic theorised by Alicia Siskin Ostriker is particularly useful. She suggests that interpreters strive to employ: (a) a hermeneutics of desire, in which the reader finds in the tradition what s/he wants it to say or what they believe it to say from a reverential/respectful and, we might add, scholarly stance; (b) a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the cultural, political, strategic practices of a tradition are explored and critiqued; and (c) a hermeneutics of indeterminacy which stresses the ‘necessity for plural readings which won’t [inherently] cancel each other out’ (Ostriker, 1993: 57).
Of this last hermeneutic, Ostriker (1993: 123) writes:
The Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy is what seems to be potentially most significant for the future. Suppose we take seriously the rabbinic saying that ‘There is always another interpretation.’ If this is the case, then my interpretation, yours, his, hers, must always be contingent, never final. There is not and cannot ever be a ‘correct’ interpretation, there can only be another, and another…. Human civilization has a stake in plural readings. We’ve seen this at least since the eighteenth century when the notion of religious tolerance was invented [in part] to keep the Christian sects from killing each other. The notion of racial tolerance came later. Most people haven’t caught on, though. Most people need ‘right’ answers, just as they need ‘superior’ races. And groups tend to lose their enthusiasm for pluralism when they are no longer persecuted minorities but become dominant majorities … battling for cultural pluralism … is an activity we’re undertaking on behalf of humanity, all of whom would be the happier, I believe, were they to throw away their addictions to final solutions.
It is my belief that if we can hold the paradox and accept the dissonance that exist in our different perspectives, we may be able to rethink our conceptions of authenticity and truth, remembering that meanings are never fixed. I would venture to say that as the academic community has increasingly focused on historical–critical approaches to religious traditions, we have sometimes lost our appreciation and consideration for those aspects of human expression that used to animate the study of religion, ‘belief and experience’. While we can never go back from our critical understanding of the contingency of all categories and emotions, we can try to engage in a hermeneutics of respect and appreciation for desires and beliefs as we approach our readings. We can also seek to engage in a hermeneutics of indeterminacy, considering the contingency and pitfalls of our own work, as well as those in the narratives of others.
Of the Hindu communities concerned with academic representations, I want to ask that a new hermeneutics of criticism and suspicion that is mindful of both motives and impact be coupled with a hermeneutics of respect as scholarship is encountered. This depends, of course, on an acceptance of a hermeneutics of indeterminacy: a belief that hearing a variety of perspectives and histories need not erase or cancel the other. There can be scholarly interpretations and devotional ones and they need not always agree.
All sides have sought acknowledgement from one another. Scholars have been attacked, threatened and experienced suffering at the hands of Hindu groups. Many Hindus have been offended and hurt by scholarly interpretations and the representations of Hinduism found in textbooks, commodities and the media. Agreement may not always be possible but an acknowledgement of the emotions at stake and their validity would be a beginning. An engaged hermeneutics of indeterminacy need not contradict the idea that there is ‘truth’, but it resonates with the Vedic concept that people understand truth differently and speak of it in multifarious ways. Who are we to suggest that only we know what is authentic and truthful? Is not that the point of the phrase, Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti ? Or in other words, can we stop fighting over the ‘real’ mango? For those of us who love mangos, there really need to be more than enough to go around.
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1 The panel was sponsored by the North American Hinduism Consultation of the AAR and was held in Chicago, IL, and included papers by Tanisha Ramachandran, Leena Taneja, Richard Mann and myself. This was presided by Leslie Orr. I am grateful to all my co-panellists as well as Chad Bauman, Lola Williamson, Vasudha Narayanan, Corinne Dempsey and, my mentor, John Stratton Hawley for their support.
2 Of course, the problem is that some groups wish to assert not simply that Hindus have a voice, but that Hindus are the only people who can have a voice. This, naturally, results in an essentialist enterprise. Furthermore, in this ideological framework, it is not simply origin or birth that gives someone the right to speak but their adherence to a particular narrative of Hindu history. The complexities of who has the right to speak are further complicated by questions of authority, class, origin, caste and education. Who asserts the right to speak is imbricated in a host of communal and personal perceptions.
3 When we look at the founding of Hindu advocacy and anti-defamation organisations in North America, we need to note both the very important role played by the political forces in India and the communal strife that continues to swell therein, as well as contextualising these developments within America, particularly the long history of immigrant and minority groups founding such organisations since the turn of the 20th century. In addition, many of these Hindu organisations emerged after 9/11 in response to fear—grounded in perceptions and realities—that Hindus were under attack, in part, because Hinduism was being misunderstood and conflated with Islam. This new rationale for distancing Hinduism from Islam naturally feeds into communalist agendas at work in South Asian local and transnational politics, but it also feeds into and was fed by anti-Muslim sentiment and trends in discrimination at work in the US.
4 I have turned to the language of desire in the hope that it acknowledges both the importance of discursive formations (institutional, political and cultural) in shaping individual and communal desires as well as the more intangible, spiritual, creative, personal and even romantic motivations and drives that come from within the individual.
5 These voices are part of a larger project on the articulation of Hinduism in North America. From 2000 to 2009, I conducted hundreds of interviews. I also observed numerous Hindu classes, worship services, gatherings, community-wide celebrations and protests. The interviews cited here draw upon that work. For the purposes of this chapter, I have used only the first names of those I interviewed, with their permission, or I have given them pseudonyms.
6 I want to make clear that I do not mean to minimise, in any way, the power of writing history in feeding communalism and political agendas. It is critical that we arbitrate the historical narratives told in educational contexts very carefully, but I do not believe that we can do this if we fail to understand the range of motivations that inspired people to call for edits in the first place.
7 I received 10 additional emails before the conference, with a similar tone but with more abusive, personal and threatening language. I have not included them here. This is only a sample of the type of emails I had received. The emails stopped after the AAR conference.
8 This sense that dharma is under siege has increasingly emerged as a trope in organisations both in and outside of India.
9 This topic has been explored in depth by Tanisha Ramachandran (2008).
10 Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha Website. Available at http://www.acharyasabha.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 (accessed October 2007).
11 Ibid. The journalist who liberally distributed the text at the 2008 AAR certainly fulfilled the goal of the HDAS in this regard.
12 The panel, ‘Defamation/Anti/Defamation: Hindus in Dialogue with the Western Academy’, held at the 2001 American Academy of Religion Conference in Denver, CO, marked a significant moment in the discussions between the academic and lay community. The panellists’ remarks are available at http://www.barnard.edu/religion/defamation/index.htm (accessed 21 October 2008).
13 DANAM’s website. Available at http://www.danam-web.org/objectivepage.html (accessed 29 September 2008).
14 Ibid.
15 Since the time that this article was written, DANAM has changed their website, mission statement, and articulated vision. Participants and topics covered at DANAM conferences over the years have varied and included many well-respected scholars and scholar-practitioners. This brief discussion of DANAM’s mission statement is not intended as an analysis of DANAM, but rather as an illustration of what I have found to be a common trope—about the importance of ‘authenticity’ and ‘historical accuracy’, reflecting the lived experiences of Hindus—in a range of North American Hindu articulations.
16 This is also evidenced in the articulations of theology that are common in the Hindu disapora where God’s oneness, as opposed to multiplicity, is emphasised in temple discourses, public relations campaigns, textbook edits and Hindu curricular materials.