The news that Penguin India agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger's book 'The Hindus: An Alternative History' and destroy all copies in India is very disturbing. Penguin and Wendy Doniger must have every freedom to publish what they choose on Hinduism.
Another reason it is disturbing is that apparently some Hindus are not confident that academics like Wendy Doniger(WD) can be challenged authoritatively in academia or elsewhere.
To explain further - WD and other academics employ a practice of sexualizing Hindu texts and claiming that these sexualizations are legitimate alternate interpretations of objects, symbols and characters in Hindu tradition. The question is are these exercises in sexualization, authentic readings of Hindu tradition?
These are certainly authentically WD's interpretations. But a student of Hinduism goes to a scholar of Hinduism like WD to learn, do WD's alternate interpretations authentically represent anything in the history of Hindu tradition? This legitimate question is however deemed by many to be irrelevant and a sign of intolerance.
An illustrative example on sexualization goes as follows. Say a student A wants to know more about his own mother's origins back to ancient times. A historian 'WD' obligingly reads tomes of Sanskrit texts and provides a great deal of detail about where his mother's ancestors came from, where they lived, what were their professions, what they ate. She writes a paper.
Reading it, the student A is immensely grateful and enthralled. Here is WD illuminating so much he didn't know about his own family history, and doing it authentically, backing everything with references, research and well-developed perspective.
Then, he reads WD asserting that all males in his mothers family including he himself had an Oedipus complex towards their mothers. This does not ring true to his knowledge of himself, and of his predecessors. However, he respects WD's scholarly ethic, and reads on, expecting that she will provide scholarly basis from the ancient texts for her assertion.
WD writes that her basis for the assertion is the text stating that his mother breastfed him, and that her entire female line made it tradition to breastfeed their sons. Hence, she writes, that given the sustained family breastfeeding tradition, the student and all males of his mother's line must necessarily have had an Oedipus complex.
The student thinks this is insufficient factual and logical basis for her drastic assertion and says so. WD replies this is an authentic alternate interpretation from the point of view of women and lower castes who were oppressed by the Hindu upper caste male who composed and transcribed the Sanskrit texts she is interpreting.
The still-respectful but still-puzzled student asks- on what basis does WD claim authenticity on behalf of women and lower castes? WD replies that the writers of the texts were oppressive upper caste Hindu males and WD is a renowned scholar of those texts. Hence, the alternate interpretation is authentic. The student is also upper caste Hindu male, hence his questioning her is an example of suppressing alternate interpretations.
Moreover, the student has never written peer-reviewed academic papers on his family and neither did his mother. They have no legitimate reason to question WD's authority on his Oedipus complex.
The confused student is now left with some possibilities. So that he can hold on to his respect for WD's scholarship, he can:
1. Accept WD's fact-based research and say her conclusion about his Oedipus complex has insufficient basis.
2. Accept WD's fact-based research, and find other interpretations to place beside WD's interpretation of his Oedipus complex.
It now becomes public that a student is questioning the basis of WD's assertions about his Oedipus complex. People write articles in the 'Guardian', and the 'The Hindu' decrying the rise of student fundamentalism and expressing admiration for WD's stellar academic work. NYT publishes a expat Indian writer ruing how middle class Indian male students are unwilling to listen to anything negative about themselves and their origins. The NYT op-ed holds up the Delhi rape and widespread female foeticide as the inevitable outcome of this intolerance.
The student, still pursuing the truth, is now at a further loss. He feels he has authoritative alternate interpretations of the Sanskrit texts to argue that WD is not necessarily right about his and his ancestors' Oedipus complex. But academically it is impossible for him to present these alternate interpretations because all academia on the student's origins require using same psycho-sexual methodology as WD did. One academic does jump in and disagree with WD. He says that his reasearch indicates it was the student's maternal ancestors who had an Electra complex.
Unfortunately, WD's report on the student and his origins is withdrawn from publication in India, though it is still read all over the world. Now a large number of the student's family in India are even less empowered to offer authoritative alternatives to what WD wrote about their family history.
Meanwhile, in recognition of the 'fundamentalist' opposition to her work, WD's paper wins an international award.
PS: A movie/TV version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was once ruined for me by similar 'sexualized alternative interpretation'. This interpretation was somewhere justified on the lines(paraphrasing from memory) 'Jane Austen lived in an oppressive patriarchal society; women and blacks were suppressed;the text that her uncle owned estates in West Indies and traveled there is sufficient to conclude the uncle was a sexual sadist who raped female slaves while there. Hence, we will have the heroine Fanny stumble across scenes of his raping female slaves because this is the most authentic interpretation of the uncle and the text'.
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol25no1/groenendyk.html
