American scholars of Hindu religion and culture say recent efforts in India to suppress the work of a prominent academic are having a chilling effect on their field.
After years of fighting lawsuits brought by a Hindu nationalist group, the Indian publisher of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History agreed in February to withdraw the book and pulp all remaining copies.
Ms. Doniger, a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, herself warned of the consequences of the attacks on her scholarship in a speech last week to the Association for Asian Studies. “This sort of bullying and the resultant self-censorship,” she said, “has indeed caused many scholars, especially young scholars without the armor of tenure, not only to bite their tongues and hold back their true judgments on many sensitive issues but even to refrain from tackling such topics at all.”
Other academics contacted by The Chronicle echoed Ms. Doniger’s concerns. Many said they would advise graduate students to carefully think through the consequences of pursuing research subjects that could inflame Hindu conservatives and other critics in India. Some said they knew of colleagues who had quietly changed the focus of their research to less-contentious questions. Several had done so themselves.
Nor is the attack on Ms. Doniger’s work an isolated incident. Rather, it is the most recent effort, in a line stretching back nearly two decades, to censor the work of scholars that detractors say mischaracterizes Hindu beliefs and traditions. The result, as one scholar said, is to put a “cold chill on Indology"—one that could become only more biting with the political rise of Hindu nationalists in India.
Jeffrey J. Kripal was a young professor in 1996, when conservative critics sought to ban Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, his doctoral dissertation-turned-book on the Hindu saint and mystic. A second effort to ban the book, which uses psychoanalytic methods and suggests that Ramakrishna was homoerotically oriented, was organized in 2001 and eventually reached the Indian Parliament. (It ultimately failed.)
After six years of protests against his work, Mr. Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, decided to leave the study of Hinduism—worn down, he said in an email message, by the bruising attacks. He has since gone on to write about subjects including mysticism, esotericism, and superheroes.
“It was more the vicious hatred, gross misrepresentations of my work, and general culture of censorship and fear that made life miserable and finally triggered the decision for me,” he wrote. “I simply did not want to live like that anymore.”
Rift Between Scholars and Believers
Observers say the campaigns against the work of Mr. Kripal, Ms. Doniger, and others often arise out of a tension between scholars and believers. The academic study of religion is a particularly Western field and is largely unknown in India, said Paul B. Courtright, a professor of religion at Emory University.
“There’s the idea that only committed practitioners have an authentic voice. Others are not valid,” said Mr. Courtright of conservative critics. “Scholars who are not practitioners are seen as interlopers.”
A decade ago, Mr. Courtright’s book on Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, raised hackles because, he said, he stepped across an interpretative boundary. Protesters—including Indian expatriates in the United States—demanded that Emory fire him; a few threatened his life. His Indian publisher pulled the book from its inventory and apologized.
Mr. Courtright said he had been “stunned” that his opponents focused little on the substance of his work, but rather simply on the fact that it had offended them. The nature of the attacks left him with little ability to respond.
“The language of offense and the politics of sentiment are not something that operate in the academic community,” he said.
Richard H. Davis, a professor of religion at Bard College, said the approach of scholars is at odds with how Hindu nationalists conceive of their religion.
“Hindu nationalists want to construct a particular view of Hinduism,” he said, “while historians of Indian religious work are interested in the messiness of Hinduism.”
But Mr. Davis—whose book on the Bhagavad-Gita, the Hindu classic, will be published by Princeton University Press this year—said he does not think that conflicts between religious adherents and scholars are in any way exclusive to the study of Hinduism, but rather can be found with religions including Islam, Sikhism, even Christianity.
“Where there is anxiety and strong debate about the historical tradition of a faith community, there is going to be some concern about historians’ looking into its past,” he said.
What is unique to the debate over Hindu scholarship is India’s legal code, some of it a vestige of colonial British law, which contains a provision that outlaws acts “intended to outrage religious feelings.” That means, as Mr. Courtright and Ms. Doniger discovered, authors can be convicted for publishing work they have reason to believe might offend someone.
Ms. Doniger’s case also comes as Hindu nationalists are flexing their political muscles—the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is widely expected to win the coming general elections in India.
Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, compared the current state of political discourse in India to the American culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
“There’s this kind of political orthodoxy that’s just hostile to scholarship,” he said, while the “the free-speech camp speaks out of the secular camp. There’s real polarization between the secular left and the religious right.”
Problems for Graduate Students
In an interview, Ms. Doniger said she was concerned that not just scholars but also publishers will become more cautious. Her publisher, Penguin Books India, she noted, is part of a multinational company and yet decided eventually to settle her case. “Who is going to take on books that are more controversial?” she said.
Ms. Doniger also remains concerned for her graduate students. The controversy over her book means she cannot return to India, “but I’m old and tough and hardened to it.”
For younger scholars, the inability to get a research visa, issued by the Indian government, could be more devastating. One of Ms. Doniger’s graduate students now in India is doing work that could prove controversial. She took her name off his paperwork, and when he returns “we’ll have to do some soul searching” about what he writes, she said.
“These kids are having enough trouble getting jobs, anyway,” she said. “I can’t really in all good conscience encourage him to publish something that will get him kicked out of India.”
Another of Ms. Doniger’s graduate students, Nabanjan Maitra, said he did wrestle with such questions. A second-year student, he plans to focus his graduate work on Hindu identity, through examining commentaries on one of the earliest Vedas, or Indian scriptures. To do so, he is likely to have to work with conservative religious schools.
“I have to be careful how I represent myself in doing research,” he said, noting there could be “guilt by association” because Ms. Doniger is his adviser.
Still, he said, he feels more protected from pressures than he would if he were planning to teach at an Indian university, like some of his colleagues.
In 2003, James W. Laine, a professor of religious studies at Macalester College, found himself the target of groups seeking to ban his book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. The lawsuits against him, eventually thrown out by the Indian Supreme Court, meant that he couldn’t return to India for research.
But more troubling, he said, was the impact on scholars he had worked with in India. Protesters, he said, went through his acknowledgments, threatening all the scholars he mentioned. One was beaten up; the others had police guards for weeks.
“We have to think, What will be the attitude there of scholars to work with Americans in the future?” Mr. Laine said.
Critics of Mr. Laine’s book were not Hindu nationalists; rather, his work was caught up in the caste politics of Western India. But like Mr. Kripal, he decided to change the focus of his scholarship and now works more broadly on questions of religion and power in world history, a topic that he can study without returning to India.
He remains concerned about the impact of attacks on the scholarship of Hinduism itself. Will academics resort to what he calls “appreciate-ism?”
“What I think is the danger,” he said, “is that we move away from a critical approach to an approach where scholars only say nice things or things that are palatable.”
