AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        I found the articles by Aditi Banerjee in Section III of the book “Invading the Sacred” particularly fascinating and illuminating. In this Section we get an interesting view of both the community activism by the Indian-American Community and the actions and reactions of many scholars, from the academic establishment in USA in the context of several issues relating to Hindu religion and culture discussed in this book. It brings out the exciting drama of how the debate got started, derailed, started again and still continues today. The Indian diaspora and a few courageous members of the academia, inspired and emboldened by the initial lead given by Rajiv Malhotra, have attempted to start a serious, no-holds barred debate on the merits of the issues involved. But on the other side of the platform are many Western scholars who insist that they know Indian culture even better than practicing Hindus themselves. What is disturbing—even disgusting—to note is that all attempts at debate by Indian diaspora members have been branded as 'Hindutva' or 'Saffron' or 'Hindu fundamentalism' without any basis. It is clear that mere act of intellectual defiance against the American institutional establishment can bring down wrathful condemnation. To quote the succinct words of Aditi Banerjee: “The remaining two Sections of this book examine how the RISA Establishment and the mainstream media sought to hijack and recast the substantive challenges made by public intellectuals as an 'attack' on scholars and as a 'threat' to academic freedom. In this re-telling, the RISA scholars whose works were critiqued were portrayed as 'victims' of a conspiracy from dangerous and violent 'OTHERS'. Due to the power imbalance between the RISA cartel and the diasporic public intellectuals, and the cultural complicity of the main stream media with the academy, this strategy succeeded in distorting and thwarting sincere efforts to re-evaluate the academic objectivity and credibility of RISA scholarship.”

        Aditi Banerjee advances a clinching argument about the academic assumptions and presumptions of the RISA establishment. According to her the RISA scholars who have cast themselves as victims are actually tapping an institutionalized mythology of the 'Savage versus the Civilized', also known as the 'Frontier Myth'. It is an accepted historical fact that this Myth has long formed the collective subconscious of white Americans and “has given them meaning and direction ever since they first established colonies at Plymouth Rock and gazed covetously across the vast North American continent. A famous historian of the American Frontier explains as follows:

        “The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characterstic Myth, expressed in a body of literature folklore, ritual, historiography and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this Myth—Historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and 'progressive civilisation'.

        Scholars like Wendy Doniger, Jeffery Kripal, Sarah Caldwell and Paul Courtright, with their virulent anti-Hindu bias view their own writings as legitimate weapons to be deployed against the works, writings and academic responses of the Indian diaspora whom they would love to exterminate and conquer as the 'Myth of the Savage Frontier'.

        I fully endorse the magisterial finding of Aditi Banerjee that Hindus are the latest in a long list of 'savage' minorities to be pitted against the 'civilizing' force of the America's Manifest Destiny. Unlike the frontier struggles of the past, this is not a physical battle with literal bloodshed, but a battle of ideas, where indigenous traditions and ways of knowledge are sought to be decimated by Western tropes and ontologies (brought forth by academic 'Pilgrims' venturing into foreign and exotic intellectual and cultural territory!), where the 'dead Indian' is not a physical body, but a deity (Ganesha, Shiva, the Goddess—victimized by the psychoanalytical weapons of the academic battalion) or a saint like Sri Ramakrishna, defamed as a paedophile. It is only when we start looking at the ongoing raging controversy in terms of this paradigm that we can make sense of the war cry being sent out by the RISA Cartel against the indigenous Hindus re-staking their claim over their own intellectual and philosophical territory. No wonder Rajiv Malhotra is being viewed by American Indological scholars of the Chicago School as a Red Indian leader from the 'Savage Frontier', who has to be exterminated at all cost, in spite of all 'Hindu terror' and however long and hard the road may be!!

        Wendy Doniger and her friends when they get worsted in any academic debate, they resort to vitriolic abuse and character assassination. Right from the beginning Indian intellectuals like Rajiv Malhotra tried to engage Wendy Doniger in a public debate to discuss her ideas on Hindu Religion and Culture. She dismissed all such overtures and attempts as being 'unfit' to debate or discuss, calling them inferior. When Rajiv Malhotra wrote his landmark essay RISA Lila-1 Wendy's Child Syndrome in 2002, he indicated his aim as a sincere attempt to “synthesize, summarise, and simplify” RISA's scholarly perspectives which ought to give the Hindu diaspora a voice. Since more than seventy percent of his Wendy's Child essay merely summarised critiques by others, he asked the question: “What is wrong with an Indian journalist who covers Indologists for the benefit of his community? This is merely reverse anthropology.” Everyone would agree that Rajiv Malhotra has become a pioneering path-breaker, opening new ground in educating the Indian American community regarding the biased anti-Hindu academic portrayals concerning them.

        Wendy Doniger wrote to Rajiv Malhotra: “I would be happy to speak with you as scholar to native informant... I would be very curious to know what prayers you recite, what rituals your grandmothers performed, what stories your aunts told you when you were a little boy... As a Hindu you do indeed have some authority with me on the subject of Hinduism.” Further she also wrote “I refuse to have a conversation with YOU, RAJIV MALHOTRA, because of the ill-informed, inaccurate and malicious things you have written about me and about Jeffrey Kripal, statements that disqualify you as a valid spokesman for anything at all, let alone the Hindu community as a whole.”

        These offensive and barbarous words remind me of the writings of Ms Catherine Mayo who came to India in the 1920s and savagely attacked India and her people. Mahatma Gandhi dismissed this report as a “Municipal Drain Inspector's Report”. Today I would like to say this about Wendy Doniger: “She is so coarse-grained that if you take her skin-smear, you can effectively use it as an industrial abrasive paper!!”

        Aditi Banerjee gives the correct and final judgement: “It is important to note that this is not Wendy Doniger's personal bias: she is swept away by the deeply embedded civilizational mindset inherent in White Culture while dealing with non-Euro-American cultures.”

        Sankrant Sanu in his essay “Is There Prejudice in Hinduism Studies? A Look at Encarta” brings out the biased nature of articles about Hindu Religion and Culture in the Microsoft Corporation's Encarta Encyclopaedia which is widely used as a reference source in American schools. He gives the following quotations from this book:

        * Judaism: “The God of creation entered into a special relationship with the Jewish people at Sinai”

        * Buddhism: “Karma consists of a person's acts and their ethical consequence”

        * Hinduism: “Rama and Krishna are said to be Avatars of Vishnu though they were originally human beings”

        Sankrant Sanu notes that the statement chosen to describe Hinduism above repudiates Hindu belief, while the statements for the other two religions reflect a balanced, positive or neutral stance. You should also notice the use of 'said to be' in Hinduism while the statement on Judaism is presented in the editorial voice as a presentation of fact. Keeping this in view, Sankrant Sanu draws up the following brilliant quote on Christianity to parallel the Encarta quote on Hinduism:

        * Christianity: “Jesus Christ is said to be the 'Son of God' though he was just a human”

        Sankrant Sanu has clearly proved that in the description of Christianity, Encarta approaches it from a point of humility—the problem being of the expository limitations of the author. No such humility is visible in the description of Hinduism, where the Encarta author quickly reduces any notion of complexity to an anthropological view point.

        In Section IV Krishnan Ramaswamy has exposed the unholy alliance that exists between leading newspapers like Washington Post and New York Times and the hired writers / scholars belonging to the American Academia represented by the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and RISA. To give just one example:

        In April 2004, the Washington Post published an article entitled “Wrath Over a Hindu God: US Scholar's Writings Draw Threats From Faithful”. In this article it is alleged that wrathful Hindus are threatening great Hinduism scholars like Wendy Doniger, Jeffery Kripal, Sarah Caldwell and Paul Courtright. In this context Krishnan Ramaswamy has rightly observed “Unfortunately the Washington Post completely evaded the range of issues explained to Shanker Vedantam, a staff journalist at the Post, such as the inadequate training of scholars, the politicized peer reviews, the parochial portrayals, and the asymmetries of power in the academy. Focussing instead on juicier offerings, the Post framed the story in the Mythic trope of savages (the Hindus) victimizing the civilized Whites (Scholars like Wendy Doniger, Jeffery Kripal, etc).”

        Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicholas and Aditi Banerjee, the editors and the other learned authors in this book have given a resounding rejoinder to the biased and prejudiced anti-Hindu and anti-Indian writers of America and the West. I have no doubt that these Western writers today, in their hatred for Hinduism and all things Hindu, are behaving like Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler who tried to eradicate Judaism and the Jews from the face of the earth. I would like to oppose these charlatans and quacks from the West by quoting the blazing words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the great Russian poet: “Mankind is essentially a single organism, a single body, a single soul. But can we imagine a body surviving if it were hacked into little pieces (even if in these little pieces artificial dams were to be constructed for normal blood circulation)? Would anybody withstand such bestial torture? Yet mankind endures, somehow; even hacked to pieces it somehow exists, and its separate little pieces pulsate, breathe, hope, strive to coalesce. Clearly mankind is a special kind of organism, a special kind of body and soul, possessing supernatural powers of survival” Hinduism is one such time-defying, world-defying, time-mocking, imperishable, Cosmic Universal Organism.