On pulping books on Hinduism

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

Crypto-imperialism of the Pakistan Elite

It is not easy to make sense of Pakistan's persistent acrimony with India, Afghanistan and the USA, its intractable international disputes, its versions of history, its attitudes towards terrorists operating at home and abroad, and more recently its reactions to Bangladesh's trials for atrocities in the 1971 civil war. Some Pakistani discourse on these subjects is very reasonable, liberal and enlightened. But for most part, Pakistani opinions appear to be angry, demagogic and tending to promote historical grievances.

A plausible explanation for this apparent appetite for discord lies in the mental hang-ups of the Pakistani elite. By 'elite' is meant the influential class of decision- and opinion-makers at the higher levels of Pakistani society, which include leading lights of political parties, big landowners, hereditary Pirs, and people who have risen to success in business, bureaucracy, military and media. For various reasons, they cultivate a self-image of being direct descendants and ideological heirs of medieval empire-builders and torchbearers of religion; in short, modern-day remnants of grand empires and religious conquests.

Thus, Pakistan's elite, are at best aspiring feudalists and at worst, frustrated imperialists. They rule over what they see as nameless faceless multitudes in Pakistan and have, on multiple occasions, declared it moral necessity to rule without a constitution, or to suspend the public’s right to vote or to suppress regional autonomy, economies and even languages.   

The aforesaid hang-ups of Pakistan elite have ensured that whenever a question of democratic or political rights of any group has been raised, it only deepened feelings of injustice and betrayal in these frustrated imperialists. Any calls for mutually respectful co-existence by others have been seen as conspiracies to sap the will of the Pakistani elite, who already suffer because the unjust modern world order does not offer them due deference.

For example, one hears repeated statements to the effect 'we ruled over the Hindus for a 1000 years and India was a just society then.' Pakistani elite feel they were tricked by Indian National Congress (INC) out of their patrimony of ruling over the multitudes of India. In particular, the absence of elite Muslim rule over the lower caste Hindu multitudes is an ongoing human rights violation epitomized by the Indian state, fraudulently established in 1947 by an illegitimate elected majority of the Congress. Poseurs such as Gandhi tricked the Indian population by staging a faked mass independence movement in sinister defiance of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's strong disapproval. The misled Indians were then incited by INC to illicitly break their legally mandated feudatory relationship with the British and the Pakistani elite whose forefathers had won their right to rule India in the battlefield.

Take the Ayesha Jalal school of Partition history. Even ostensibly liberal Pakistanis feel that INC betrayed Muslim League (ML) in 1947 by conceding ML's own longstanding demand of Pakistan and depriving ML of its right to veto the Indian Constitution indefinitely as it had done since 1939. Instead, INC should have suppressed its own elected majority, sunk the hopes, wishes and rights of its millions of constituents and refrained from declaring a sovereign India in 1947. INC should have allowed ML to veto the Indian Constitution and State until ML chose to secede as Pakistan at a time of its choice. When INC chose to settle for full sovereignty and partition in 1947 by asserting its elected mandate, its undeserving leaders essentially usurped the dispossessed Muslim elites’ rights over India. The INC’s electoral mandate, whether as majority or minority, was unauthorized and illiberal.

Consider recent outrage over Bangladesh's execution of Abdul Quader Molla, convicted for the killings of hundreds in 1971. The Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the hanging and Imran Khan asserted that Molla was innocent. Many Pakistanis think that in cahoots with the malign Indian state, East Bengalis betrayed the right of 'racially and spiritually superior' West Pakistan elite to rule them, with or without a constitution. They deprived West Pakistanis of power to deny East Bengalis a just share of the revenues that East Bengalis contributed. On being massacred, East Bengalis unjustly fought back, and cravenly chose to exercise their elected mandate, snatching West Pakistan’s power to deprive them of it.

Pakistan's frustrated imperialists thus feel unjustly deprived by their neighbors of extraterritorial populations to rule over, and extraterritorial resources to harvest. More recently, outrage is expressed about USA, Afghanistan and India raising the issue of jihadi militias attacking soldiers and civilians. In demanding that Pakistan rein in jihadi fighters without offering any quid pro quo, these countries are denying Pakistan its legitimate power to coerce and kill citizens in neighboring countries. The US has also been threatening to deprive Pakistanis of billions of US taxpayers' dollars. This is seen as extremely unfair, because Pakistanis feel they are on the side of justice in all three cases: Afghans do not deserve to choose their own government, Indians do not deserve to live free of attacks, and Americans do not deserve to spend their wealth elsewhere.

Lately, the Pakistani elite feel that fellow Pakistanis, namely Baluchis, Sindhis and Pashtuns are also betraying them by raising questions about Pakistani Punjab's right to deprive them of their fair shares of river waters and revenues from natural gas. The elite are also in conflict with jihadi militias, who were previously obedient, over who should exercise absolute power over the other.

In summary, the Pakistani elite being hidebound by their lineages and religious adherence, feel they are owed limitless feudal and imperial over lordship over others. But others, being small-minded and self-serving, have denied it to them; hence force must be used to achieve it.

If no way can be found to get through this mammoth sense of entitlement and betrayal of the Pakistani elite, any individual or group or nation, small or large, can forget about achieving co-existence with them on mutually respectful, equitable, and peaceful terms.