A book, a scholar and some thoughts - part 1

There is a lot of hot debates and discussion over certain scholar’s “scholarly” depiction of Hinduism. There has been much heartburn over it and now the publisher has withdrawn the book from Indian market.

In the past 5000 years or more of Indian history there have been thousands of such scholars who have attacked and denigrated Hindu religion in particular and India in general. Did anything earth shattering happen? In the past two hundred years many European intellectuals and scholars unearthed a lot of hidden meanings, mostly with sexual connotation in the various symbols of Hinduism. Their findings were based on what they saw and what they wanted to believe – stories in Puranas with tales of adultery etc, famous temples with erotic curving, the devdasis in the Soutern temples, the worship of Shiva Linga or phalanx and Yoni or the Shakti principle, the Tantras, esp. the Vamachara with explicit sexual practices prescribed by the aspirants, the Rasa Leela with its apparent erotic side, the yearning of Gopis for Sri Krishna, the Madhur bhava of the Vaishnavas and the practices of some Vaishnava sects like Sahajiyas, and so on. The list was endless. Western scholars were full of adulation for Buddhism, and rightly so in its pure and pristine state, while they conveniently forgot to tell the readers that many of the so called erotic practices, esp. the cults were actually derived from Buddhism in a degenerated form. This has been pointed out by by Swami Vivekananda. When many barbarian races joined its fold, Buddhism, now decadent and diminished, had no other alternative than to embrace them, and these races brought their own local cultures, many of which were not strictly pure and moral. The Mahayana Buddhism encouraged Tantra which developed into Vajrayana and Sahaja Yana cults under its protective wings, with practices originating in Tibet and other regions beyond the Himalayas. When Islam persecuted the Buddhists, such practices came under the broad, protective and catholic wing of Hinduism.

Scholars also attacked the caste system, forgetting that the caste system was a social order and not a religious one. They attacked Vedas as rudimentary figments of practices bordering on ancestor and nature worship. Some even went to the extent of claiming that the entire Bhakti concept was brought to India by the advent of Christianity, an outrageous claim, which was put to rest with the discovery of Heliodorus column. They despised what they saw as idolatry, condemned the rituals and practices as hideous and often exaggerated them beyond all proportions to get money for conversion and preaching activities from sympathetic people who were intent on saving the souls of the Hindus. They often disregarded the Advaitic principles as figment of fertile imagination forgetting that their own Christian mystics like Meister Eckhardt as well as noted Sufi saints, had the same experience, not to mention about Spinoza who intellectually arrived at the same conclusion.

Along with the scholars Christian Missionaries as well as some reformist sects like Brahmo Samaj had also contributed substantially to the vilification campaign. While this was not always unjustified given the treatment meted out by the so called tolerant Hindus to the weaker sections, to the women, to the poor and untouchables, it was unreasonable to blame everything on the religion and philosophy while totally ignoring the contributions of the philosophy and the reasons for some of the practices adopted in later stages of its evolution. Many of the so called evils of Hinduism, in the words of Swamiji, had their necessity but the major problem was that the Hindus refused to change themselves when their society outgrew that necessity.