CHAPTER 23
CHRONOLOGY
1863-1902 Swami Vivekananda lives
1875 Helena Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society
1893 Vivekananda attends the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago
1897 Vivekananda founds the Vedanta movement in America
1896-1977 A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Swami Prabhupada (founder of ISKCON), lives
1918-2008 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation) lives
1931-1990 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) lives
1970- Hindus in Europe, United States, and Canada start building temples
During the Chicago riots in 1968, Allen Ginsberg chanted “om” for seven hours to calm everyone down. At a certain moment, an Indian gentleman had passed him a note telling him his pronunciation was all wrong.1
Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India
The question of the degree to which other Americans too have gotten a lot more than the pronunciation of “om” all wrong, and who is the best judge of that, is what drives this chapter.
REVERSE COLONIZATION
There are many ramifications of American imperialism in India—the devising of beefless Big Macs, the outsourcing that guarantees an Indian accent on the line when you call to complain about your Visa bill—but here we will concentrate on the reverse flow, the process by which Hindus, and various forms of Hinduism, came to America and colonized it. This was colonization not in the negative and material sense of economic and political exploitation (the old sense, in which the British colonized India), but in a new positive and intellectual sense of making major contributions to American culture. We might call this reverse colonization, reversed in both direction (from rather than to India) and will (voluntary rather than coerced). At the same time, we must consider the more problematic ways in which Americans have appropriated aspects of Hinduism, new ways that retain the bad odor of the old Raj colonization.
POSH AND PUKKA AMERICAN HINDUS
American Hindus constitute yet another of the many alternative voices of Hindus. They are an important presence in America, where, in 2004, there were 1,478,670 Hindus (0.5 percent of the total population); and in a land where over a quarter of the population has left the religion of its birth, some of them to take on forms of Hinduism, Hindus convert from their religion less than any other religious group and are the best educated and among the richest religious groups (according to one survey).2 There are more than two hundred Hindu temples in America, three-quarters of them built in the past three decades. In Lilburn, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, one of the fastest-growing South Asian communities in the United States raised more than nineteen million dollars to build one of the largest Hindu temples in the world, where about six thousand worshipers come on festival days. Called the Swaminarayan Mandir (the New York Times article about the temple defined mandir, the Sanskrit word for “temple,” as “a Sanskrit word for the place where the mind becomes still and the soul floats freely”), it was modeled on a temple not in India but in London, Raj inspired and already one remove from the mother country.3
Long before they came to our shores in large numbers, Hindus contributed many things to American culture, beginning with the very words we speak, some of them transmitted to us through Anglo-Indian words that entered the English dictionary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An alphabetical list of just a few of such words conjures up a vivid scene: bungalow, calico, candy, cash, catamaran, cheroot, curry, gymkhana, jodhpur, juggernaut, loot, madras, mango, mogul, moola (British slang for “money,” ultimately from the Sanskrit mula, “root,” as in “root of all evil”), mosquito, mulligatawny, pajama, Pariah, posh,ky pukka,kz punch,‡ pundit, thug, tourmaline, veranda—why, any writer worth her salt could turn that list into a film script in an hour (“After he lights his cheroot on the veranda of the bungalow, and changes from pukka jodhpurs to posh pajamas . . .”). More recently, words about religion rather than “loot” and “moola” have entered through American rather than British sources, such as dharma from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (more Buddhist than Hindu) as well as yoga and tantra, guru and ashram, and above all, karma.
INTERRELIGIOUS INTERACTIONS IN CHICAGO
We can trace the path of Hindu religious movements more precisely than that of the words; the movements entered through Chicago.
In 1890 an amateur magician published, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, a story that put a new twist on the sort of magic trick that had been practiced in India, and reported by gullible visitors to India, for many centuries.4 Two men, one named Fred S. Ellmore, claimed to have witnessed this scene:
A fakir drew from under his knee a ball of gray twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end. . . . [A] boy about six years old . . . walked over to the twine and began climbing it. . . . The boy disappeared when he had reached a point thirty or forty feet from the ground. . . . A moment later the twine disappeared.5
The two witnesses sketched it (there was the boy on the rope), photographed it (no boy, no rope), and exposed the trick: “Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn’t hypnotize the camera.” The story was much retold until, four months later, the newspaper admitted that it had all been a hoax; the author (John Elbert Wilkie) had made up everything, including the telltale name of Fred Sell-more (get it?). And that was the origin of the Indian rope trick—which turns out to have been not Indian, or a rope (twine), or a trick (since it didn’t happen).
Then, in 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions brought Vedanta to Chicago. Among the people who attended the event was Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902), a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1834-1886). Ramakrishna, a devotee of Kali at the Temple of Dakshineshvar, north of Kolkata (Calcutta), was a member of neither the Brahmo Samaj (which was represented by B. B. Nagarkar at the World’s Parliament) nor the Arya Samaj but attracted a different sort of educated lay follower. His studies and visions had led him to conclude that “all religions are true” but that the religion of each person’s own time and place was the best expression of the truth for that person. And his respect for ordinary religious rituals gave educated Hindus a basis on which they could justify the less philosophical aspects of their religion to an Indian consciousness increasingly influenced by Western values.6
Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s disciple, was the first in a long line of proselytizing gurus who exported the ideals of reformed Hinduism to foreign soil and, in turn, brought back American ideas that they infused into Indian Vedanta. Influenced by progressive Western political ideas, Vivekananda set himself firmly against all forms of caste distinction and advised people to eat beef.7la He made a powerful impression at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and returned to India in 1897 with a small band of Western disciples. There he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, whose branches proclaimed its version of Hinduism in many parts of the world. Other Hindu or quasi-Hindu movements also began to thrive in America. Before Vivekananda, Helena Blavatsky, a Russian, had founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875; after she had journeyed to India in 1879, she set up her headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, and from there she and her followers, incorporating aspects of Hinduism into their doctrines, established branches in many cities of India. But the activities of the now Vedanticized Theosophical Society in the United States began only after Vivekananda had paved the way, and it prospered under the leadership of Annie Besant (1847-1933), who founded Theosophical lodges in Europe and the United States.
A second wave of Hindu imports began in the second half of the twentieth century, the age of the Hindu Hippie Heaven. In 1965, in Los Angeles, A. C. Bhaktivedanta (Prabhupada) founded the Hare Krishna movement, officially known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and tracing its lineage back to Chaitanya. In 1974 followers of Swami Muktananda established the Siddha Yoga Dharma Associates (SYDA) Foundation, teaching their version of Kashmir Shaivism. In 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later Osho) moved his headquarters from Poona (later Pune) to Oregon. Shri Shri Ravishankar, Mother Meera, Amritanandamayi Ma, Shri Karunamayi Ma, Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj, Shri Ma—all these (and many more) have routinely visited the United States, many of them since the eighties, and several of them women. Amritanandamayi Ma, known to her followers as Amma (“Mother”), came from Kerala to the world (arriving in the United States in 1987) and specialized in Vedanta and hugs; from fifteen hundred to nine thousand people attend her programs in the United States (closer to thirty thousand or forty thousand in India).8 Amma was one of the speakers at the 1993 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
In 1999, a century and a bit after the first World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago city officials placed 340 life-size cow statues along city streets. The cows, which had nothing to do with Hinduism (their referents were the [bullish] stock market and the stockyards), were a huge success. They brought Chicago $200 million in additional tourist revenue and $3.5 million for local charities from the auction of the cows when the exhibition ended. Other cities jumped on the animal bandwagon. New York copied the cow idea, working with a Connecticut company, CowParade, which imported the concept from Zurich, where it had originated. Cincinnati commissioned pigs, and Lexington, Kentucky (home of the Derby), went for horses.9 But during that summer, Chicago was like Calcutta, in this regard at least; everywhere you turned, you met a cow.
A VIRTUAL INDIA IN AMERICA
America often becomes India in other ways too. Sometimes Hindus in America rework local topography, so that the three rivers in Pittsburgh become the Ganges, Yamuna, and Sarasvati, just as South Indian kings had declared that the Kaveri River was the Ganges. Now some have devised a practice of religious outsourcing that lets them bypass American Hinduism entirely, by conducting their worship lives (virtually) in India. The Internet enables them to be in two places at once, a technique that Hindus perfected centuries ago (recall Krishna present to each of the Gopis at the same time, in different places). If you are a Hindu in America, it is now possible for you to make an offering on the banks of the Ganges without leaving Atlanta or wherever you are; you pay someone else in India to do it for you. (This too is an old Indian trick, a form of transferred merit or karma; recall the Hindu satire on the “Buddhist” satire on the Hindu argument that “if the oblation to the ancestors that is eaten by one man satisfies another, then people traveling abroad need not take the trouble to carry food.”) One Web site that offers this service is shrikashivishwanath.org; another is www.webdunia.com/kumbhuinfo (written in Hindi and run by the government of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh); yet another, bangalinet com/epuja.htm, bills itself as “a home away from home.” Eprathana.com will send someone to any temples you choose, and most of them are small local temples, suggesting that people far from home miss the little shrine at the end of the street as much as they miss the big pilgrimage temples.
When you log on to some of these Web sites, you can view various puja options, for which you can register online and pay. For instance, you can perform a “virtual puja,” a cartoon puja in which you burn electronic incense and crack open a virtual coconut. If you are unable to make it to the Ganges River for the great festival of the Kumbh Mela or just for the daily absolution of cumulative misdeeds, you log on, fill out a questionnaire (caste, gender, color, body type—slim or portly—and choice of auspicious days), and attach a passport-size photo. On the selected date, you can go to the Web site to see virtual representations of yourself (your photo superimposed on a body chosen to match what you described in the questionnaire) being cleansed in an animated image of the Ganges River. At the same time, someone who is actually (nonvirtually) there at the river dips your actual photo in the actual (nonvirtual) river, which is what makes the ritual work; it can’t all be done by mirrors.10 Recall the Chola and Rashtrakuta kings who brought real Ganges water south to their temples. Here the worshiper is transported, photographically and electronically, to India in order to make contact with the real river.
Thus American Hindus, despite building grandiose temples here, need not replace the traditional sacred places of Hindu ritual practice with new ones in America. “The reach of the local” is extended by new media that allow ritual observance to center on those locales even at a distance. You can have prasad (the leftovers from the gods’ meal in the temple) delivered to you, in America, from an Indian temple, by courtesy of the Indian postal services. You can hire a Brahmin priest to perform a special sacrifice for you in Varanasi (see www.bhawnayagya.org). You can even have access to the real goddess Kali, the Indian Kali, at Kali Ghat in Kolkata, virtually.
THE AMERICAN APPROPRIATION OF THE GITA AND THE GODDESS KALI
But Kali is here too and so is Krishna.
When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, on July 16, 1945, he realized that he was part of the myth of doomsday but not his own Jewish doomsday. (The remarks of others present on that occasion, such as General Thomas F. Farrell, also tended to employ mythical and theological eschatological language, but from the Abrahamic traditions.) Oppenheimer, who liked to think that he knew some Sanskrit, and who had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket at Los Alamos, said that as he watched the bomb go off, he recalled the verse in the Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita in which the god Krishna reveals himself as the supreme lord, blazing like a thousand suns. Later, however, when he saw the sinister clouds gathering in the distance, he recalled another verse, in which Krishna reveals that he is death, the destroyer of worlds. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s inability to face his own shock and guilt directly, the full realization and acknowledgment of what he had helped create, led him to distance the experience by viewing it in terms of someone else’s myth of doomsday, as if to say: “This is some weird Hindu sort of doomsday, nothing we Judeo-Christian types ever imagined.” He switched to Hinduism when he saw how awful the bomb was and that it was going to be used on the Japanese, not on the Nazis, as had been intended. Perhaps he moved subconsciously to Orientalism when he realized that it was “Orientals” (Japanese) who were going to suffer.
Oppenheimer was one of the last generation of Americans for whom the Gita (flanked by the Upanishads and other Vedantic works) was the central text of Hinduism, as it had been for Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. For later generations, it was the goddess Kali (flanked by various forms of Tantra) that represented Hinduism. Kali became a veritable archetype for many Jungian, feminist, and New Age writers; Allen Ginsberg depicted Kali as the Statue of Liberty, her neck adorned with the martyred heads of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.11(Paul Engle later said, simultaneously insulting both India and Ginsberg: “He succeeded in doing the heretofore utterly impossible—bringing dirt to India.”12)
Soon the goddess Kali became a major Hollywood star. Her career took off with the film Gunga Din (1939), in which Sam Jaffe played the title role (Reginald Sheffield played Rudyard Kiplinglb), with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., buckling their swashes against Kali’s dastardly Thug worshipers, led by Eduardo Ciannelli, who usually played Chicago gangsters. (The film begins with a solemn statement: “The portions of this film dealing with the goddess Kali are based on historical fact.”) The 1965 Beatles film Help! included a satire on Gunga Din, with an attempted human sacrifice to an eight-armed Kali-like goddess.lc Kali also appeared in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and The Deceivers (1988), starring Pierce Brosnan as Captain Savage, who ends up converting to the worship of a particularly violent and erotic form of the goddess as queen of the Thugs.13
Kali made her mark in American literature too, if literature is the word I want. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) was a sci-fi novel based on Hindu myths and peopled by Hindu gods, including Kali. Leo Giroux’s The Rishi (1986) was a lurid novelization of Colonel Sleeman’s already insanely lurid Rambles and Recollections (1844), updated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975; gruesome garrotings are carried out ritually at Harvard and MIT, where “a beautiful half-Indian girl is tormented by visions that urge her to participate in the most unspeakable rites,” as the jacket blurb promises us. Claudia McKay’s The Kali Connection (1994) describes an intimate relationship between two women, a reporter and a member of “a mysterious Eastern cult.” In Forever Odd by Dean Koontz (2005), the villainess, named after the poisonous plant datura, is “a tough, violent phone-sex babe, crazy as a mad cow,” “a murderous succubus,” and a living incarnation of Kali (“the many-armed Hindu death goddess”). In a story titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), which really is literature, when a nice American girl gets caught up with U.S. commandos in Vietnam, she is seen wearing around her throat an icon of Kali: “a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.”14 Other manifestations of Kali followed apace, further still from the spirit of Hinduism, such as a lunch box on which Kali dances, her lolling tongue suggesting her eagerness to get at the box’s contents.
Particularly offensive are the many porn stars who have taken the name of Kali, presumably in vain. One, who admitted that she based her sexual therapy on Masters and Johnson, still claimed that it was Tantric because, she explained helpfully, “Tantra is a Sanskrit word that means expansion of consciousness and liberation of energy. It is about becoming more conscious and when applied in love-making deepens intimacy, intensity and orgasmic orgiastic experience heading in the direction of full body orgasmic feeling.”15 So now you know. Another self-proclaimed Hindu goddess appears on her Web site (which gives new meaning to “.org”) dressed as Kali, with sex toys and bondage gear in her many hands.16 The upscale British superstore Harrods stopped the sale of bikini underwear bearing images of Hindu goddesses (some of it allegedly with Shiva on the crotch) but apologized only after Hindu Human Rights, a group that says it “safeguards the religion and its followers,” lodged a formal protest. Another department store had to apologize for selling toilet seats with images of a Hindu deity, and a third for selling slippers with Hindu symbols. An article reporting on these complaints remarked, “A number of designers have been attracted by the richness of Hindu iconography and the fad for exotic ethnic patterns.”17
Hindu Human Rights also protested against a musical film that the Muslim filmmaker Ismail Merchant was making in 2004, called The Goddess, in which the rock singer Tina Turner (allegedly a Buddhist) was to play the role of the goddess Kali (or, according to some reports, Shakti). Merchant and Turner traveled to India to visit a host of holy cities and were blessed by a Hindu priest, and Merchant insisted that, “contrary to the accusations, “nobody is going to sing and dance on the back of a tiger. The Goddess is not going to be half naked or a sex symbol.” (He also insisted that the goddess in his film was not just Kali but “Shakti, the universal feminine energy, which is manifest in Kali, Durga, Mother Mary, Wicca, and each and every woman on the planet.”) We will never know; Merchant died in May 2005 and apparently didn’t finish the film. Nor did Stanley Kubrick live to finish Eyes Wide Shut (1991), which aroused the wrath of the American Hindus Against Defamation because the orgy scene in it was accompanied by the chanting of passages from—what else but the Bhagavad Gita? Surely the deaths of the two film directors was a coincidence?
Clearly the non-Hindu American image of Kali and other goddesses is very different from her image among Hindus in India.
TWISTED IN TRANSLATION: AMERICAN VERSIONS OF HINDUISM
Nor are the goddesses the only Hindu deities appropriated in this way. In Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite (2007), a shrine to the monkey god Hanuman displaces a Muslim mosque (an inversion of the alleged displacement of a temple to Rama under the mosque at Ayodhya). Hanuman goes to Manhattan in a forthcoming film in which he helps the FBI battle terrorists. “Hanuman is the original superhero. He is thousands of years older than Superman, Spider-Man and Batman. He is a brand to reckon with among Indian children today,” said Nadish Bhatia, general manager of marketing at the Percept Picture Company, which coproduced The Return of Hanuman. He continued: “Every society is looking for heroes, and we want to make Hanuman global. . . . If the Coca-Cola brand can come to India and connect with our sensibilities, why can’t Hanuman go to New York?”18 Why not indeed?
Sita too has come to New York (and points west). In 2005, Nina Paley (an American woman previously married to a man from Kerala who left her), created an animated film called Sitayana (www.sitasingstheblues.com), billed as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told” and set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The episode titled “Trial by Fire” is accompanied by the words of the song “Mean to Me” (“Why must you be mean to me? You love to see me cryin’ . . .”). Rama lights the fire and kicks Sita into it; she comes out of the fire; he looks puzzled, then sad, then goes down on one knee in supplication; she calls him “dear” (and you see the golden deer) and jumps into his arms. In Alfonso Cuarón’s 1995 remake of A Little Princess, the young heroine tells the story of the Ramayana, in which Sita sees a wounded deer and asks Rama to go and help it . . . not kill it!
Mainstream or counterculture, once Hindu gods had become household words in America, it was open season on them; anyone could say anything at all. Sometimes it takes a very nasty turn: In Pat Robertson’s evangelical novel, The End of the Age (1995), the Antichrist is possessed by Shiva, has the president murdered by a venomous cobra, becomes president himself, and forces everyone to worship Shiva and thus to be possessed by demons. More often it is just stupid. An ad proclaims, “Many people worship the Buddha. Many people worship chocolate. Now you can do both at the same time.” Another advertises “the Food of the Gods: The Chocolate Gods and Chocolate Goddesses . . . Fine Quality Gourmet Handmade Chocolates that celebrate those gods and goddesses of love and luxury, joy and happiness, compassion, peace and serenity, healing, and fertility of the body and imagination.” It was only a matter of time before someone made “Kamasutra Chocolates,” replicating the mating couples depicted on the temples at Khajuraho. Even the folksy Ben & Jerry’s made a Karamel Sutra ice cream.
The Kama-sutra in general has been the occasion for a great deal of lustful marketing and misrepresentation; most people, both Americans and Hindus (particularly those Hindus influenced by British and/or American ideas about Hinduism), think that the Kama-sutra is nothing but a dirty book about “the positions.” Since there is no trademarked “Kama-sutra” the title is used for a wide array of products. Kama-sutra is the name of a wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. The Red Envelope company advertises a “Kama Sutra Pleasure Box” and “Kama Sutra Weekender Kit,” collections of oils and creams packaged in containers decorated with quasi-Hindu paintings of embracing couples. A cartoon depicts “The Kamasutra Relaxasizer Lounger, 165 positions.” (A salesman is saying to a customer, “Most people just buy it to get the catalogue.”19) There are numerous books of erotic paintings and/or sculptures titled Illustrated Kama-sutras and cartoon Kama-sutras, in one of which the god Shiva plays a central role.20 The Palm Pilot company made available a Pocket Sutra, “The Kama Sutra in the palm of your hand,” consisting of a very loose translation of parts of the text dealing with the positions. A book titled The Pop Up Kama Sutra (2003) failed to take full advantage of the possibilities of this genre; the whole couple pops up. In 2000, the Onion, a satirical newspaper, ran a piece about a couple whose “inability to execute The Totally Auspicious Position along with countless other ancient Indian erotic positions took them to new heights of sexual dissatisfaction. . . . Sue was unable to clench her Yoni (vagina) tightly enough around Harold’s Linga and fell off ...”21 Another satire proposes “a Kama Sutrathat is in line with a postpatriarchal, postcolonial, postgender, and perhaps even postcoital world.”22 Kama Sutra: The Musical23 is the story of a sexually frustrated young couple whose lust life is revitalized by the mysterious arrival of the eighteen-hundred-year-old creator of the Kama Sutra, Swami Comonawannagetonya. The swami reveals to them the titillating secrets that allow any couple to experience all the joys of a totally fulfilling sex life.
“Karma,” which Americans often confuse with kama (watch your rs!), lost most of its meaning in its American avatar (if “avatar” is the word I want; “avatar” has been taken up by computer text messaging, designating the cartoon caricatures of themselves that people use to identify their virtual personae in cyberspace24). Take the 1972 Last Whole Earth Catalog: “[T] the karma is a little slower when you’re not stoned, but it’s the same karma and it works the same way.” A United Way billboard: “Giving is good karma.” And a voluntary organization called getgoodkarma.orgwelcomes you to Karmalot (get it?), gives you a simplified and entirely non-Hindu version of “what goes around comes around,” and signs you up. Other Hindu terms too have become distorted past recognition. In the film Network (1976), the character played by Peter Finch, gone stark raving mad, says, “I’m hooked to some great unseen force, what I think the Hindus call Prana.” In Michael Clayton (2007), both the whistle-blower lawyer, when he goes crazy, and Michael Clayton (George Clooney), when he is triumphant, shout, out of the blue, “I’m Shiva, the god of death!” High Sierra markets an Ahimsa Yoga Pack, to go with its Ananda Yoga Duffel. And now there is the American version of Laughter Yoga, which “combines simple laughter exercises and gentle yoga breathing to enhance health and happiness.” 25 There’s an energy drink called Guru. There’s a movement to make yoga an Olympic sport.
AMERICAN TANTRA
Perhaps the greatest distortions occur in the takeover of Tantra, which has become an Orientalist wet dream. The belief that the Tantras are in any way hedonistic or even pornographic, though a belief shared by many Hindus as well as by some Euro-Americans, is not justified; the Upanishads and Puranas—not to mention the Kama-sutra—have far more respect for pleasure of all kinds, including sexual pleasure, than do the Tantras. The ceremonial circumstances under which the Tantric sexual ritual took place make it the furthest thing imaginable from the exotic roll in the hay that it is so often, and so simplistically, assumed to be. Yet many people call the Kama-sutra, or even The Joy of Sex, Tantric. Some (American) Tantric scholars feel that, like Brahmins, they will be polluted by the Dalit types who sensationalize Hinduism, and so, in order to make a sharp distinction between the two castes of Americans who write about Hindus, they censure the sensationalizers even more severely than the revisionist Hindus do. Some have excoriated others who have “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of New Age ‘Tantric sex,’ ” who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition,” creating a “funhouse mirror world of modern-day Tantra” that is to Indian Tantra what finger-painting is to art.26
Does it make it any better, or even worse, that this sort of Tantra is often marketed by Indian practitioners and gurus? For many Indian gurus take their ideas from American scholars of Tantra and sell them to American disciples who thirst for initiation into the mysteries of the East. Here is what might be termed an inverted pizza effect, in which native categories are distorted by nonnative perceptions of them (as pizza, once merely a Neapolitan specialty, became popular throughout Italy in response to the American passion for pizza). The American misappropriation of Indian Tantra (and, to a lesser extent, yoga) has been reappropriated by India, adding insult to injury.
In an earlier age, the native sanitizing tendency was exacerbated by the superimposition of a distorted European image of Tantra—namely, “the sensationalist productions of Christian missionaries and colonial administrators, who portrayed Tantra as little more than a congeries of sexual perversions and abominations.”27 In their attempts to defend Tantra from this sort of Orientalist attack, early-twentieth-century Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Hindu and non-Hindu, emphasized the metaphorical level of Tantra, which then became dominant both in Hindu self-perception and in the European appreciation of Tantra. This school was made famous, indeed notorious, by Arthur Avalon, aka Sir John Woodroffe (1865-1936) and, later, by Agehananda Bharati, aka Leopold Fischer (1923-1991).
Today, too, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the literal level of Tantra (actually drinking the substances) never existed, that Tantra has always been a meditation technique. Indeed we can take the repercussions back several generations and argue that the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition since the nineteenth century and prevails in India today began in eleventh century Kashmir, when a major dichotomy took place between the ritual and mythological aspects of Tantra. For Abhinavagupta’s version of Tantra was pitched at a leisured Kashmiri class “arguably homologous to the demographics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century New Age seekers.”28 Moreover, the “no sex, we’re meditating” right-hand brand of Tantra that first caught the European eye turned upside down to become the new left-hand brand of Tantra: “No meditating, we’re having Tantric sex.” As this movement is centered in California (into which, as Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, everything on earth that is not nailed down eventually slides), we might call it the Californicationld of Tantra.
Thus a major conflict between Hindu and non-Hindu constructions of Hinduism in America operates along the very same fault line that has characterized the major tension within Hinduism for two and a half millennia: worldly versus nonworldly religion, reduced to Tantra versus Vedanta.
HINDU RESPONSES TO THE AMERICANIZATION OF HINDUISM
Not surprisingly, the sensibilities of many Hindus living in America have been trampled into the dust by the marketing of Tantra and other aspects of Hinduism. Web sites and Internet contacts make Hindus in America an often united (though still very diverse) cultural and political presence, which has developed an increasingly active voice in the movement to control the image of Hinduism that is projected in America, particularly in high school textbooks but also in other publications by non-Hindu scholars and in more general popular imagery. The objections include quite reasonable protests against the overemphasis on the caste system, the oppression of women, and the worship of “sacred cows,” as well as the unreasonable demand that the textbooks be altered to include such patently incorrect statements as that suttee was a Muslim practice imported into India or that the caste system has never really existed.29
American Hindus have tried to challenge and correct what they perceive, often correctly, to be the inaccuracies and exaggerations of Hinduism in American popular culture. In February 1999, when Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) aired its “The Way” episode, with guest appearances by both Krishna and Kali, complaints poured in about subjects ranging from the lesbian subtext of the show to the very fact that a television program could portray a Hindu deity as fictional at all. The episode was pulled, revised, and then reissued within six months, this time with a public announcement to appease those who had been offended.30
It is useful to sort out three different sorts of Hindu objections to the American appropriation of Hinduism:
1. Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrong.
2. Even when they get Kali and Tantra right, they are wrong, because they have gotten hold of the Wrong Sort of Hinduism; they should have written about the Bhagavad Gita and Vedantic philosophy.
3. Even when Americans write about the Gita, they are desecrating and exploiting Hinduism, because only Hindus have a right to talk about Hinduism.
There is some truth, and some falsehood, in the first of these assertions, and mostly falsehood in the second and third.
As for the first—that Americans have gotten Kali and Tantra all wrongle—if we learn nothing else from the history of Hinduism, we learn that there is seemingly no limit to the variations that Hindus have rung on every aspect of their religion. Authenticity is therefore a difficult concept to apply to any representation of Hinduism, and some of the most outlandish aspects of California Tantra, for instance, closely mirror the antinomianism of medieval Indian Tantra. Yet Hindus throughout Indian history have made the subjective judgment that some (other) Hindus go too far, and it is hard to resist that judgment when confronting much of the Americanization of Hinduism, not to mention the more grotesque misconstructions made by people who have no commitment to any form of Hinduism but simply pick up pieces of the mythology or art and use them for purposes that are, at best, crassly commercial and, at worst, obscene. Hindus too are capable of desecrating Hinduism. In the Bollywood film God Only Knows (2004), in which characters speak a bastardized mix of Hindi and English, with (often inaccurate) English subtitles for the English as well as the Hindi, a fake guru goes up to a red fire hydrant with white trim, watches a dog urinate on it (recall the meaning of dogs in Hinduism), sits down beside it, and puts a garland on it, making it into a Shiva linga of the “self-created” genre; people immediately sit down and start worshiping it. I should think that many Hindus found this scene offensive.
The second objection—that America has taken up the Wrong Sort of Hinduism—also has roots in history. We have seen that Hinduism in America began, in the nineteenth century, with a philosophical, colonially venerated (if not generated) Vedanta and Gita but was then supplemented, in the mid-twentieth century, by a second phase of Hinduism, a transgressive, counterculture- catalyzed Kali and Tantra, brokered by megagurus (like Rajneesh) whose broad appeal was built largely on their exotic teachings and charismatic presence. Now the pendulum is swinging back again in a third phase, as many Hindus nowadays wish to go back to that first appropriation, or, rather, to an even more ultra-conservative, often fundamentalist form of Hindu devotional monotheism(though socially they may be more liberal than their parents; women, for instance, play a far more important role in the management of temples in America than they would be allowed to have in most of India).
The latest generation of Hindu immigrants to America have the same sort of traditional and conservative forms of practice and belief that the Indian immigrants in the sixties and seventies, indeed most immigrant communities, had, as well as the same goals: financial stability, education, acculturation, and the preservation of their traditions in some form.31 Now, however, they have the generational stability and financial backing to voice their opinions forcefully and publicly. Moreover, cut off as they are from the full range of Hindus and Hinduisms that they would experience in India, American-born Hindus are more susceptible to the narrow presentation of Hinduism offered by their relatives and friends.32
Unfortunately, the features of Kali and Tantra that most American devotees embrace and celebrate are often precisely the aspects that the Hindu tradition has tried, for centuries, to tone down, domesticate, deny, or censor actively,33 the polytheistic, magical, fertile, erotic, and violent aspects. American intellectuals and devotees generally turn to Hinduism for theological systems, charismatic figures, and psychophysical practices unavailable in their own traditions, Jewish and Christian traditions that already have, heaven knows, far more boring, monotheistic, rationalizing fundamentalism, as well as violence, than anyone could possibly want.34 But this Wrong Sort of Hinduism that the generally middle-class and upper-class spokespersons of the present generation condemn has been, throughout the history of Hinduism, and remains every bit as real to many Hindus—particularly but not only only lower-class Hindus and villagers—as any other.
This brings us to the third objection, which is that even when Americans do get Hinduism right, they desecrate and exploit it when they write about it, merely by virtue of being Americans rather than Hindus. This string of assumptions provides a kind of corollary to the first option (that Americans get it wrong). The same words about Hinduism that might be acceptable in the mouth of a Hindu would not be acceptable coming from an American, just as African Americans can use the n word in ways that no white person would dare do, and Jews can tell anti-Semitic jokes that they would be very angry indeed to hear from goyim. On the other hand, for Hindus caught up in identity politics, both in America and in India, a Hindu who makes a “wrong” interpretation of Hinduism is even more offensive (because a traitor to his or her own people) than a non-Hindu making the same interpretation.lf You’re damned if you aren’t and damned if you are.
As an American who writes about Hinduism, I am clearly opposed to this third objection, the exclusion of non-Hindus from the study of Hinduism, for reasons that I have already stated. I appreciate the hypersensitivity to exploitation and powerlessnesslg that is the inevitable aftermath of colonialism, but I believe that one cannot exploit texts and stories in the same way that one exploits people (or textiles or land or precious gems)—or horses.
The beautiful Marwari horses (and the closely related Kathiawars), with their uniquely curved ears, were bred under the Mughals. After independence, thousands of Marwari horses were shot, castrated, or consigned to hard labor as draft animals. Since only Kshatriyas could own or ride them, Marwaris, like so many horses in Indian history, had become a hated symbol of feudalism and oppressive social divisions. But eventually the Indigenous Horse Society of India and the Marwar Horse Society were established and took measures to define the breed and preserve it, making it available to middle-class, as well as royal, breeders.
Without leaving India, the Marwari horses became American movie stars, and they provide a rule-of-ear clue to determine whether a Hollywood film about India was shot in Rajasthan or in the deserts of Lone Pine, California (two hundred miles north of L.A.), for if the horses in the film have those curved ears, the film was shot in India. But Marwari horses now live also in the United States, where there has been, since 2000, a Marwari stud in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, reversing the age-old current of the importing of horses into India.35 There is an element of colonial manipulation here, for Euro-American ideas of breeding, and standards of equine beauty, influenced the choice of horses that were registered as pure Marwaris in India, and if, as seems possible, the best ones are exported, for extravagant prices, to America, the breed in India will be diminished.
I believe that stories, unlike horses, and like bhakti in the late Puranic tradition, constitute a world of unlimited good, an infinitely expansible source of meaning. An American who retells a Hindu story does not diminish that story within the Hindu world, even to the arguable extent that taking a Hindu statue from Chennai to New York, or an Indian horse from Kathiawar to Chappaquiddick, diminishes the heritage of India. On the contrary, I believe that the wild misconceptions that most Americans have of Hinduism need to be counteracted precisely by making Americans aware of the richness and human depth of Hindu texts and practices, and an American interlocutor is often the best person to build that bridge. Hence this book.