India And Her Traditions
An Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal
S.N. Balagangadhara
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Dear Jeffrey Kripal,
This is my second letter to you. Unlike the first, which I wrote based on what I remembered of your writings, this time, before writing this letter, I went back and reread your book on Ramakrishna. I emerged more puzzled and more surprised. I achieved a better understanding as well: if not of his mysticism then at least of your efforts. There was also a degree of incomprehension: how was it possible at all that your doctoral advisor, renowned for her expertise on all matters Hindu, missed noticing the obvious? And so on. In this letter, I will not write everything I want to because there are constraints of size and readability. Therefore, let me tell you beforehand that this letter will merely express my perplexities: why you do not see what you do, why you say one thing and do its opposite, why while seeking knowledge you are so eager to embrace ignorance.
Let me begin with a long passage that sets the context. “(T)he literature on sexual trauma suggests that individuals who have experienced abuse often become adept at altering their state of consciousness, “split” their identities to separate themselves from the traumatic event, lose control of their bodily, and especially gastrointestinal, functions, experience visions and states of possession, become hypersensitive to idiosyncratic stimuli (like latrines), symbolically react to traumatic events, live in a state of hyperarousal, regress to earlier stages of psychosocial development, develop various types of somatic symptoms (including eating disorders and chronic insomnia), become hypersexual in their language or behavior, develop hostile feelings towards mother figures, fear adult sexuality, and often attempt suicide. The list reads like a summary of Ramakrishna’s religious life. Certainly it is not a matter of the saint manifesting one or two such symptoms, as is often the case with traumatized children and adults. Perhaps we could overlook that. But Ramakrishna manifests virtually all of them and displays them with an intensity that even the experienced psychiatrist might find alarming.” (p.298-99; italics mine.)
Ramakrishna’s religious life, then, can be described in terms of a cluster of pathological symptoms. Under the terms of this description, the saint is pathological – his pathology arising from the trauma of sexual abuse. Does not this description trivialise Ramakrishna, his religious life and his teachings? One would be inclined to say ‘yes’, but you deny it. You say (a) you are not reducing religious life to sexual trauma; (b) indeed, if anything, you do the opposite. You say that the uniqueness of Ramakrishna’s religious life lay in the transformation of the “dark natures” of these energies until they “began to glitter with the gold of the mystical”. Therefore, you claim you are not trivialising. Does this claim withstand scrutiny?
1. Let us deal with the issue of reduction and get rid of it quickly because it is actually a red herring. As a preliminary to this task, we will agree on the following about your partial use of Sigmund Freud. Whether or not a particular reading of Freud (or psychoanalysis) is defensible is not the issue. Let us assume that it is a justifiable reading of Freud and/or psychoanalysis. Let us also further assume that one could use the Viennese Master to understand the person from Dakshineshwar. Under these assumptions favourable to your project, let us examine what you do.
You provide interpretations: of the ‘secret’ passages in the biographies of Ramakrishna, of Kali’s form, and of some physiological and psychic symptoms of Ramakrishna. However, you cannot merely ‘interpret’; you have to explain. This move from interpretation to explanation is logically necessary because psychoanalysis is an explanation of the psyche. One does not have the freedom to choose a psychoanalytical explanation of the psyche and deny that one is providing an explanation of a psyche. In that case, what are you explaining and what does your explanation do?
1.1. There is a logical relationship between the explananda (that which requires explaining) and the explanans (that which does the explaining). In this relationship, as in any non-circular explanation, the terms in the explananda do not occur in the explanans. For instance, I cannot explain gravitation by using the notion of gravitation. I need other terms to do the explaining: mass, electromagnetism, nuclear attraction and such like. Similarly, if the religious life of Ramakrishna is the explanandum, then the explanans has to appeal to other terms and concepts. If it does not, the explanation would be circular: one would be explaining the religious life of Ramakrishna by invoking the religious life of the saint. Consequently, your psychoanalytical explanation has to explain the religious life of Ramakrishna by appealing to the trauma of his sexual abuse.
When some phenomenon Y is explained by another phenomenon X, then one is reducing the description of Y to the description of X. (This is one of the meanings of ‘reduction’.) Such a reduction is total, even if the explanation is partial because the terms in the explanans replace the terms occurring in the explananda. If it has to be an explanation, however partial it might be, a reduction has to take place. Consequently, in the partial explanation you provide, you have to reduce Ramakrishna’s religious life to his sexual abuse. Yet you claim that you are not ‘reducing’ religious life to sexual abuse. All explanations reduce, you claim to provide us with an explanation, and yet, you say, you are not ‘reducing’. How can one understand your protest? Either you are not explaining (hence you are not reducing) or you have a different notion of reduction in mind.
1.2. Consider another example, which might illustrate this different notion of reduction. Suppose that we are able to psychoanalyse Albert Einstein and come up with an explanation of his creativity. Could such an explanation of creativity ever predict the ‘meaning’ and ‘content’ of either the special theory of relativity or the general theory? It could not. The explanation of creativity will be a theory of the unconscious of Albert Einstein, whereas his theory of relativity is a theory in physics. At the stage our knowledge is in, we have no idea how we could go from a theory about unconscious to a theory in physics. Therefore, one cannot derive his theories of relativity by reducing his creativity to his unconscious. Is this what you mean when you say that you are not reducing the “meaning and content of Ramakrishna’s religious experience” to his sexual abuse? Even here, one’s fear of reduction is misplaced. The non-derivability of the ‘meanings and content’ in both these cases (Einstein’s theory and Ramakrishna’s religious experiences respectively) have nothing to do with human creativity or the meaning of human freedom or the nature of reality. Rather, it has to do with what reduction is, and what it can and cannot do.
1.3. What conclusions could we draw from the foregoing? There are four logical possibilities. One possibility is that you explain but you do not reduce. On conceptual grounds, we can rule this out. So can the possibility that you neither explain nor reduce. This leaves us with two other realistic possibilities: either you explain and reduce or you do not explain but reduce. If you explain and reduce, your apprehensions about reduction are misplaced. Reduction is not a problem in this case. However, if you do not explain but merely reduce Ramakrishna’s religious life to sexual abuse, then there is a problem. In this case, your protests about not reducing covers up the fact that you are reducing without explaining. In both these cases, the issue of reduction is a red herring. In the first case, your explanation requires reduction; in the second case, your protests are not genuine. In other words, the real issue is the following: do you reduce Ramakrishna’s religious life to sexual abuse without providing an explanation or do you explain his religious life?
2. In order to tackle this issue, we need to see how you frame your explanandum. How do you describe what you want to explain? What is striking about your descriptions of this is their triviality. In describing the phenomena that you claim you want to explain, it seems as though you feel the need to trivialise them. I am not observing your psychology but noticing the results of its exercise. In your book, you spend umpteen pages trying to establish that Ramakrishna was a tantrika who rejected Vedanta. Because this issue is central to the “life and teachings of Ramakrishna” (a part of the subtitle of your book), let us see what you make of the Tantrik and the Vedantic traditions.
2.1. Let me begin with the “boring Vedanta”, as you put it. (Even if Ramakrishna used this phrase, do not presume to know what he meant.) According to your account, Vedanta claims that the world is an illusion and that only the Brahman is real.
If the world is an illusion, Vedanta has to deny the reality of the world. To it, in the way you construe Vedanta, the world is the empty set. That is to say, all experiences are on par because they are all illusions. One cannot distinguish between experiences unless one introduces the notion of a differentiated reality. From this, it follows that a vedantin should not be able to discriminate, say, between the following: the pain you have by stubbing your toe, the pain you have when your arm is cut off without anaesthesia, and the pain you feel when your loved one dies. If he does draw a distinction between them, he is distinguishing one illusion from the other and the only way of doing that is to ascribe to these illusions the status of reality: this is ‘less illusory’ than… this is ‘more real’ than… this ‘pains more than’… this pain is ‘different from’…and so on. If he does not distinguish, and insists there is no difference between falling in a lake and bumping his head against a tree, who would take him seriously? Do you believe that Indians are such cretins that they would simply accept such inane stories? Surely, if ‘Brahman’ is all there is to Vedanta, all vedantins must be perfect imbeciles. In that case, we do not need heavy-duty tantric stuff to shoot them down; a simple dose of commonsense will do.
2.2. Shankara was a vedantin, as you know. If you had glanced at his writings, say his Mayapanchakam for example, you would have known that what you say does not make sense. In this poem, he describes the power of maya and ascribes agency to ‘her’. He speaks about those whom she spellbinds: they are a plurality of creatures including the learned, the human, the animal, and, of course, the Brahman. How could he talk about the ‘power’ of maya, her incredible abilities to control creatures, if both maya and the plurality of these creatures and their experiences were not real? Maya makes sense only if the world and its richness are real. Maya does not imply the absence of the experiential world but presupposes its reality instead. To say that maya is the nature of reality makes sense. It is, however, linguistic nonsense to say that illusion is the nature of reality. How could the vedantins discuss with each other if they spouted semantic nonsense?
2.3. It is obvious where the problem is to be partially located. You translate ‘maya’ as ‘illusion’. This translation does not work, when you are talking about one of the central categories that many Indian traditions use. To understand why it could not be a translation of maya, consider the following argument. After all, Vedanta claims that when one realises the unity of “oneself” and the “Brahman”, one achieves enlightenment. If ‘everyone’, except the enlightened, is under the sway of ‘illusion’, what causes it? Vedanta claims there are causes. If there are causes, they cannot be ‘illusionary’ entities. If causes are real, so are their effects. ‘Illusion’ is an effect. Therefore, ‘illusion’ is also ‘real’. In that case, Vedanta would become flatly nonsensical. Whatever else Vedanta is, it is not semantic nonsense. Surely, one should understand what Vedanta denies and what it does not, before indulging in silly contrasts.
2.4. Indeed, you do draw silly contrasts. For example, you seem to suggest that there are two different Ramakrishnas: Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna who is content with the undifferentiated Brahman; the other, your Ramakrishna, who needs the manifold world. If Ramakrishna was an enlightened person then his attitudes, both towards “the Brahman” and towards the world, are parts of such a person. By distinguishing these attitudes as ‘vedantic’ and ‘tantric’, surely you are not claiming that you are in a position to differentiate between an advaitic enlightenment and a tantric one. Are you? You glibly talk about the two Ramakrishnas as though one could talk like this without talking nonsense. One could: only if the notion of enlightenment is rendered into a trivial adjective, which qualifies nothing.
2.5. Instead of reflecting on these issues adequately, you moralise: the tantric tradition challenges the mores of the middle class Bengalis (though, I must confess, they look more like middle class Americans of today than the Bengalis of yesterday); hence the defiance and the ‘secrets’ of the saint. What, if any, is the relationship between morality and the paths to enlightenment? In all the Indian traditions, the quest for enlightenment begins when ethical questions and answers cease to satisfy. In most cases, a person’s need for enlightenment is directly proportional to the degree his/her daily life becomes dissatisfying. Ethics directs the manner in which the person goes about in his/her daily life. Dissatisfaction with daily life also implies dissatisfaction with what ethics is and what it can do. In this sense, all paths to enlightenment ‘challenge’ the ethics of daily or worldly life. In fact, the most radical challenge to ethics itself comes from these paths to enlightenment. The tantric tradition follows a path that is different from every other path, Jeffrey. (The same claim is applicable to each path.) Consequently, the tantriks too radically ‘challenge’ the ethics of daily life (and not just middle class morality) but do so in a manner that is different from every other path. Are you really qualified to recognise enlightenment, differentiate between the states of enlightenment, and assess the quality of these paths independent of their value to the practitioners who followed them? If you cannot, what urges you (as a layman ignorant of all these things) to take up cudgels against the assessment of a Vivekananda, who appears to be an enlightened pupil of Ramakrishna?
2.6. You say you are trying to understand. I am with you on this. You further suggest that we need to ‘dig’ with the best tools we have to understand people like Ramakrishna and states like the enlightenment. I am your companion here. We need not cease our enquiries for the fear of discovering unpleasant secrets, you hint. I could not agree more. However, we part company when you trivialise in order to understand. You trivialise the vedantins when you speak of their ‘boring Brahman’; you trivialise the tantriks when you see in them an infringement of middle class morality; you trivialise both when you try to contrast them with each other.
3. If you trivialise the phenomena you want to explain, they take their vengeance. They will render your explanation trivial. That has happened to your ‘explanation’ of Ramakrishna’s religious life.
3.1. Here is how you put it yourself: “In effect, Ramakrishna took the “anxious energies” of his early sexual crisis for which he almost killed himself, and “turned them around the corner”, where they revealed their essentially mystical natures…he took what were regressive symptoms and, through Kali and her Tantric world, converted them into genuine experiences of a sacred, mystical realm.” (p.324.) There are, however, certain consistency problems here. The first consistency problem arises because you say Ramakrishna ‘did things’ with the psychic energy. To do what he did, it requires that he had a grasp about the nature of his conflicts and some idea of how to “turn them around the corner”. Yet, as you are at pains to point out, his conflicts were a ‘secret’ to himself. He could not even know, according to your story of ‘secrets’, that he had a conflict. He was aware that he did certain things. There were things about his actions that he could not explain. Even if he was ‘anxious’ about explaining them, or asked other people repeatedly for such explanations, these do not establish that he experienced a conflict. I am sure he did not know why milk turned sour or how the birds fly, or why he lost hair; perhaps he even ‘anxiously’ asked his pupils to explain these and other sundry matters. None of them need generate a conflict. In other words, consistency requires that you do not say that Ramakrishna actively managed his psychic energy.
There is a second consistency problem. You speak of “the radical passivity” of Ramakrishna in the following terms: “Ramakrishna’s belief in the complete inability of the human being to initiate actions was total. Human agency is a pernicious illusion.” (p.68) You might think otherwise about human agency; but to keep the saint minimally consistent we should not ascribe agency to him.
A third consistency problem arises due to your use of psychoanalysis. Because we are talking about the unconscious, its conflict and its structure express themselves in a cluster of symptoms. An individual can ‘sublimate’ this conflict, if he gains an insight into the nature of the conflicts. (The psychoanalytical practice tries to provide an individual with such an insight.) Ramakrishna did not have this insight, as far as your story is concerned. Consequently, if ‘sublimation’ occurred then it will have to do with the manner in which this unconscious was dynamic: apart from expressing itself in certain symptoms, it also resolved its own conflict. This resolution took the form of the religious life of Ramakrishna.
In fact, many other problems arise when you speak of Ramakrishna managing his conflicting energies in the above citation: “…he took what were regressive symptoms and, through Kali and her Tantric world, converted them into progressive symbols, into genuine experiences of a sacred, mystical realm” (p.324; my italics.) I will not be able to speak of all the problems such a stratagem engenders. Suffice to note in the present context that, apart from facing consistency problems, you are also begging the question. You have to explain, remember, Ramkrishna’s religious life. Kali and her world are parts of Ramakrishna’s religious life. If you explain his religious life (visions of Kali, ecstatic trances etc.) by using his religious life (visions of Kali, ecstatic trances etc.), you will have simply begged the question. The “anxious energies” of Ramakrishna are just about as relevant to this enterprise as the saint’s indigestion problems.
3.2. Therefore, we need to rewrite your explanation, if we have to keep you consistent. Ramakrishna’s trauma resulting from sexual abuse and his unconscious homoerotic tendency ‘sublimated’ themselves into his religious life. In even more simple terms: Ramakrishna’s homoerotic unconscious ‘sublimated’ itself into his religious life. Very well. One can accept this ‘explanation’ if you explain the how: how did such a transformation occur? How did the unconscious resolve the conflicts and ‘sublimate’ them? What were the mechanisms? Here is how you answer these questions: “(F)or the homoerotic energies themselves, freed from the usual socialized routes by the ‘shameful’ nature of their unacceptable objects, were able to transform themselves, almost alchemically, until their dark natures began to glitter with the gold of the mystical.” (p.322; my italics.) These energies were “able to transform themselves”. How? “Almost alchemically”. In other words, ‘somehow’. Not only do these energies ‘somehow’ transform themselves but also they ‘somehow’ continue with this transformation until they reach a certain stage, where they begin to “glitter with the gold of the mystical”. ‘Somehow’? ‘Almost alchemically’?
3.3. You might want to say that we are not clear about the mechanisms. And that the ‘somehow’ and ‘almost alchemically’ merely function as place holders for a currently non-existent but a possible future explanation. And that this is merely a hypothesis you are putting forward. However, do you realise the price you pay for giving these possible answers? You render your explanation both trivial and ad hoc. To appreciate the charge of triviality, consider the following: Ramakrishna’s neural structure ‘somehow’ generated his religious life; Ramakrishna’s genes ‘somehow’ interacted with his environment to enable his religious life… and so on. Do such claims advance our knowledge of anything? They do not. They are trivially true: all things happen ‘somehow’. Only knowledge tells us which do not happen ‘almost alchemically’, as it were.
However, considered as explanations, they are ad hoc in the sense that you literally suck explanations out of your thumb to explain his ‘symptoms’. Apart from the story you pen, here are a few more: Ramakrishna had a currently unidentified rare disease, which caused his religious trances; Ramakrishna had a currently unknown brain affliction (a tumour growth), which caused the symptoms he had; Ramakrishna exhibited a currently unidentified behavioural syndrome… With just a little patience and a bit more inventiveness, one could conjure up many more explanations, which satisfy the ‘facts’ you have gathered. Each is as bad as the other is. The upshot of this is the following. Unless you specify the mechanisms involved in the ‘transformation’, your explanation is both trivial and ad hoc.
4. Instead of recognising what has happened, you go to great lengths to hide this ‘trivialisation process’ (if I may term your attempt thus) from yourself and from your readers. From the many ‘strategies’ you employ, let me take two at random to illustrate my observation.
The first is your continuous use of the word ‘secret’. The word plays multiple roles in your text: it signals both a deliberate ploy to hide some truths (the ‘secret’ passages in the biographies of Ramakrishna hide his homoerotic experience) as well as expressing some others (Ramakrishna’s ‘secret’ of placing his leg on the laps – the genitals as you translate it – of young, male disciples reveals his homoerotic tendency). It suggests the ‘unspeakable’ (the suggestion that the Tantrikas could have indulged in cannibalism) and symbolises deeds (like the sucking on the toes, where the toes become the phallic symbol). And so on. An uninitiated reader gets the impression that you are the ‘digger’, who uncovers not merely some secrets but the very nature of secrecy itself. However, a careful perusal of your book suggests that you have very little understanding of what ‘secrecy’ could possibly mean in the Indian traditions, or why Indians talk of secrets. For instance, did you know that the Mahavakyas (e.g., statements like ‘thou art that’, ‘I am Brahma’) are prototypical ‘secrets’ in the Indian traditions? Did you know too that, during the Upanayanam (the ‘sacred thread ceremony’), the father whispers a secret in the ears of his son, and that ‘secret’ is the Gayathri Mantra? Do you have any idea why either of these two is a secret? If you do not, there is no way on earth you can decipher the ‘secret’ of the tantric world. You do not even make the distinction between what Indians consider secret (and why they do so) and your own Freudian construction of events as secrets. Caught up in your own fantasies about secrets and their nature, and by kicking up so much dust while ‘digging’ into the ‘secrets’ of Ramakrishna, you have ended up throwing dust into your own eyes.
Consider now a very different strategy. This is how you describe your attempts: “I have located a pattern, but only a pattern. There is no linear argument here, no clear-cut revelation. There are only symbolic acts that connect up to symbolic visions, which in turn can be associated with symbolic acts, and so on.” (p.296.) And then you go on to announce that you will momentarily step out of the “symbolic web of texts to advance a clear thesis, a “linear argument”” (ibid). All scientific theories are a ‘symbolic web of texts’. One does not step out of this web to advance ‘a clear thesis’; these theories constitute a web precisely because they are spun by clear theses. The only contrast to a ‘linear argument’ that I can think of is a ‘circular argument’. A circular argument might also spin a ‘web’, but it is an intellectually pernicious trap. Why do you suggest that a linear argument (why do you use scare quotes?) is ‘somehow’ incompatible with the fact that human knowledge is like a web, where things appear not only interconnected but also mutually dependent? Linear arguments (as against circular arguments) advance human knowledge. A ‘clear thesis’ is indispensable to the web that human knowledge is. Why do you counterpose one to the other? In what way or fashion is one aspect of human knowledge opposed to the nature of the totality of human knowledge? Of course, you do not even pause to reflect on the claims you advance. You cannot any more step out of the web that human knowledge is than you can afford to be circular, if you intend to advance human knowledge. Yet, you appear far too caught up by the image of your own stepping out of a ‘web’ to become ‘linear’. In other words, your image of what you think you are doing (which assumes epic proportions at times) seems to blind you to what you actually do.
5. At this stage, the following charge can be reasonably levelled against you. You have not really explained anything. In that case, why are you using Freud? If you merely use him to show that it is also possible to describe Ramakrishna as a pathological person, you are indulging in mischief. You add to malicious gossip: ‘hey, did you know that Ramakrishna was ‘secretly’ a paedophile?’ ‘Hey, did you know he tried to enter Vivekananda through the ‘back door’ but that it remained shut?’ and so on. Such gossip is not trivial.
If this is what you do, you trivialise the experiences of another culture without doing anything to understand them and, what is even worse, in the guise of providing an explanation. Is not this what you in fact do? As I said in my previous letter to you, such an action is hardly without moral consequences. You inflict violence on those fellow human beings whose experiences you talk about.
5.1. You trivialise the traditions you speak about, you trivialise enlightenment, you trivialise the phenomenon you want to explain and your explanation is trivial. In short, your purported explanation trivialises experiences. As a member of the community that follows Ramakrishana, when one ‘finds out’ that all of them are merely following a homosexual paedophile the import of this ‘discovery’ is the following. (A) Hitherto, all one did was to follow this dirty old man; (B) One is a ‘fool’ to think that one was doing something else. Such a ‘discovery’ not only makes all earlier acts of paying homage to the saint look foolish, it also insists that one is doubly ‘foolish’ by not knowing this.
5.2. By virtue of this, experiences are transformed. What does the transformation consist of? Your purported explanation redescribes experiences by twisting or distorting them. As must be clear by now, you have not explained anything but have merely redescribed Ramakrishna’s religious life as a cluster of symptoms of a sexually abused person. Before reading you, people thought that Ramakrishna’s attitude to women (say) was an expression of the saint’s enlightenment. However, when they discover what such a practice actually is, viz., a development of “hostile feelings towards mother figures, and a fear of adult sexuality” arising from the trauma of sexual abuse, one does not recognise his act anymore for what it once was.
Of course, it is the case that scientific theories ‘correct’ experiences too: we see a stick appearing bent when immersed in water and see the movement of the sun across the horizon. Our scientific theories tell us that neither is true. In such cases, it is important to note that these theories preserve our experiences the way they are. In fact, scientific theories explain to us the necessity of such appearances. They do not distort them much less deny them.
5.3. But that is precisely what your purported explanation does: deny experiences. The ‘religious trances’ of the Saint was, in reality, a way of coming to grips with his attempt to deal with the sexual urges he felt for young boys. Or, this is how he ‘transformed’ the experience of a possible sexual abuse.
5.4. What happens when the experiences are trivialised, distorted, and then denied? If we accept the story of Ramakrishna’s penis, both erect and limp, or of the various ‘back doors’ that opened and shut, can one feel the same sense of reverence (or whatever else is appropriate) that one had, remember it too, without feeling a perfect ass? One cannot. Could one remember the earlier ‘enlightened smile’ of Ramakrishna, when one sees in the portraits of the saint merely the lecherous grin of a paedophile? One cannot. That is, your purported explanation also denies access to one’s own experiences.
5.5. Who or what is denying the access to one’s own experience? It is not a theory, but a theorising of someone else’s experience. Much before Freud wrote whatever he did about the religions of India, people from other religions (first from Islam and then from Christianity) had said the same thing: they thought that the Indians worshipped the cow, the monkey, the penis, the stone idol and the naked fakir. This is how these people experienced India and her culture. Their theologies had prepared them for such an experience much before they came to India. Of course, they ‘saw’ only what they expected to see. The descriptions the missionaries provided, the reports of the Christian merchants, the interpretations of the Muslim kings, the developments within Christian theology, etc. were the ‘facts’ that Freud sought to understand. What did he ‘theorise’ then? He theorised and elaborated upon the European experiences of India. Consequently, who or what is denying the access to one’s experience? It is the experience of another culture, or the theorising of such an experience. One’s experiences are being trivialised, denied, distorted and made inaccessible by someone else’s experience of the world.
5.6. Even this does not complete the story. One is also normatively compelled to accept that your experience is also one’s own experience of the world, whether or not this happens to be the case. In order to go about with the Ramakrishna you sketch, one is obliged to deny one’s experiences to oneself. Not only do you try to foist your way of going about the world on others in the name of gaining an ‘understanding’, the others have to also voluntarily accept it and actively cooperate with the process. Such cooperation is morally obligatory on them, if they are to remain ‘reasonable’ and ‘objective’. Otherwise, they are ‘dogmatic’ and/or ‘fundamentalist’. In this sense, they are compelled to become volunteers in the process of denying their experiences of the world to themselves.
If none of the above is violence, what else is?
6. Do not tempt yourself to misunderstand the above points. None of these charges could be made, if you had indeed provided us with a scientific explanation (Freud did think he was scientific) of the “life and teachings of Ramakrishna” (a part of the subtitle of your book). The point is that you provide no explanation of any sort except a trivial one. And you do that by merely redescribing the saint as a pathological person. You trivialise whatever you touch, including the experience of another culture. In the process, you inflict violence on your fellow human beings.
How should one look at such an effort and accomplishment? From one side of the Atlantic, where I am now, I look at it with “shame, disgust” and horror. I am ashamed and upset by the trivialisation; I feel disgust and loathing at the gossip; I react with horror to the violence you inflict. From the other side of the Atlantic, the contrast could not be sharper or so it seems. Here is how your doctoral supervisor, Wendy Doniger, describes her responses in her foreword to your book: “I found myself smiling often and laughing almost as often as I read it. …When I took chapters of it with me to the beach…people offered me to trade their novels…for a chance to read it, so evident was my pleasure in it. …I am very proud to have played a small part in this wonderful book.”
I leave you to munch on this image.
Friendly greetings
Balu
Note :The earlier letter is on the web: http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=248359. I have cited from the first edition of Kali’s Child.
another link to the earlier letter click here