The Hindus (111 page)

“Karma,” which Americans often confuse with
kama
(watch your
r
s!), 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 cyberspace
²⁴
). 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.org
welcomes 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.

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 Californication
^ld
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.

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 wrong
^le
—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 powerlessness
^lg
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.