The portrayal of Indian culture (predominantly of Hinduism) in the West has long been a story of a negative depiction of caste dominations, worship of weird and unsightly pagan gods in primitive and grotesque ways, patriarchal domination where women face daily bias, the existence of Sati, rampant corruption, lack of hygiene, etc. Beyond Buddha and Gandhi, it seems the West found nothing appealing in Indian heritage and culture, and this notion of India was fed to the West for many generations through various academic discourses and discussions. While most of these false views on India were propagated by Western academicians, some Indians, too, were and are still a part of this group that continues to denigrate India and Hinduism.
Until recently, the majority of the Hindus, fed on the British-created anti-Hindu educational system that was unfortunately continued in the post-independence era under the Nehru regime, had no way of countering the blatant bigotry and hatred that was being propagated worldwide against Hindus and Hinduism. While after independence there is little doubt that India faced various issues of under-development and poverty, primarily because of wrong political decisions by the erstwhile governments, the current generation is no longer willing to take the insults lying down and meekly. With the rising powers of India as a global player in world politics, the current generation has the confidence to fight back the Abrahamic propaganda against Hinduism.
Taking into context the recent controversy where Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence tweeted a picture of Goddess Kali in a demeaning manner, my article will examine how the West has been insulting our gods for many decades now.
Definition of Shiva in The LibreTexts libraries as taught in the US:
“Shiva embodies the apparently contradictory aspects of a god of ascetics and a god of the phallus. He is the deity of renouncers, particularly of the many Shaiva sects that imitate him: Kapalikas, who carry skulls to reenact the myth in which Shiva beheaded his father, the incestuous Brahma, and was condemned to carry the skull until he found release in Benares; Pashupatas, worshippers of Shiva Pashupati, ‘Lord of Beasts’; and Aghoris, ‘to whom nothing is horrible’, yogis who eat ordure or flesh in order to demonstrate their complete indifference to pleasure or pain. Shiva is also the deity whose phallus (linga) is the central shrine of all Shaiva temples and the personal shrine of all Shaiva householders; his priapism is said to have resulted in his castration and the subsequent worship of his severed member.”
[Source: The LibreTexts libraries are supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, and the California State University.]
Definition of Devi Sakti- Durga/Kali in The LibreTexts libraries as taught in the US:
“As Durga, the Unapproachable, she kills the buffalo demon Mahisha in a great battle; as Kali, the Black, she dances in a mad frenzy on the corpses of those she has slain and eaten, adorned with the still-dripping skulls and severed hands of her victims. The Goddess is also worshipped by the Shaktas, devotees of Shakti, the female power. This sect arose in the medieval period along with the Tantrists, whose esoteric ceremonies involved a black mass in which such forbidden substances as meat, fish, and wine were eaten and forbidden sexual acts were performed ritually.”
From the two definitions given above, it is very clear the author has no knowledge on the concept of either Shiva or the Devi; doesn’t know anything about the Vedas and Puranic stories; and his or her primary focus is on certain words, such as skulls, sect, phallus, blood and flesh, esoteric and erotica of forbidden sexual acts, everything that gives an ugly grotesque appearance to Hinduism.
In the book ‘Awakening: An Introduction to the History of Eastern Thought,’ Dr Patrick Bresnan writes, “Entering the world of Shiva worship is to enter the world of India at its most awesomely mysterious and bewildering; at least for the non-Indian. In Shiva worship, the Indian creative imagination erupts in a never-ending multiplicity of gods and demons, occult rituals, and stunning sexual symbolism…Linga/yoni veneration was not the whole of it…Young women, known as devadasis, were commonly connected with Shiva temples, and participated in the rituals, sometimes only in a symbolic fashion; sometimes not. In a degraded form, the devadasi became nothing more than temple prostitutes. These extremes were more often to be found among the practitioners of Tantra, that enigmatic antithesis of conservative Hinduism that developed in northeastern India. Some Tantra temples became notorious for all kinds of extreme practices, including ritual rape and ritual murder. In Calcutta, at the Temple of Durga (one of the forms of Shiva’s shakti), there was an annual festival at which many pigs, goats, sheep, fowl, and even water buffaloes would be slaughtered and ritually burned before the statue of the goddess.”
These extremely distorted and perverse descriptions of Shiva, Durga, and Tantra are given in a textbook on Eastern Religions by a so-called authority on Shiva, and that book is used in undergraduate studies on World Religions and Asian Studies in the US. This is how white “Indologists” and “experts” with their own distorted minds and perverted thinking that only focuses on sex, rape, occult, blood, and gore have interpreted and presented Hinduism to the common people in the West. It is these horribly distorted images of Hinduism that most common Westerners carry lifelong in their minds, and if one is active on social media and has read some of the comments on Hinduism by the Abrahamics, it will not be difficult to relate to what is being stated here.
Fertility worship, as symbolised through yoni and linga worship, has been a part of all ancient religions and cultures, before the Abrahamic monotheistic religions appeared and wiped them out. Hinduism, being the only ancient surviving religion, still carries on with the concept of fertility worship, and not without a reason too. Fertility worship is the celebration of life, of birth, of conception; the very process through which the human population has been surviving for all these years! Sacrifice in the form of animal slaughtering is present in Islam (Eid), and Christians love their turkeys during Thanksgiving and Christmas, but somehow these “academicians” fail to write on those practices in a manner Bresnan has written about the ritualistic balis (sacrifices) in Hinduism.
“The essential rituals of the Bhagavati cult all point to the aggressive and fatal erotic drinking of the male by the female, the infamous orgy of blood sacrifice of male ‘cocks’ at the Kodungallur Bhagavati temple; the male veliccappatu’s cutting of his head in a symbolic act of self-castration… [Kali] is herself, first of all, a phallic being, the mother with a penis…she is the bloodied image of the castrating and menstruating (thus castrating) female…In this type of analysis, the phallic abilities of the goddess disguise castration anxieties ultimately directed toward the father as well as homosexual desire for the father’s penis. Following Freud, such analyses stress the father-son polarity of the oedipal conflict as the central trauma-seeking expression…” — Sarah Caldwell in her research paper, ‘The Bloodthirsty Tongue and the Self-Feeding Breast: Homosexual Fellatio Fantasy in a South Indian Ritual Tradition.’
For the above-given paper, filled with sex, lust, castration and various perversion-filled theories, Sarah Caldwell was awarded a prestigious award by the Western academic world. Here what is presented is just a short paragraph, and the rest is just too demeaning and horrible to read for any Hindu or for that matter any sane human being. Here, a symbolic sacrifice, an act of devoting oneself to the Devi, has been turned into an act of self-castration. It seems in the twisted devious minds of these academics, there are constant and obsessive thoughts of sex, orgy, blood, gore, castration, and erotica, which are reflected in their writings and are nothing short of pornography. Certainly, as a practicing Hindu with diksha of Devi Kali under a Tantric guru, I have no such twisted and perverse understanding of Hinduism and the rituals pertaining to the tantric form of worship. Perhaps, one wonders, if these very twisted and distorted thoughts that we see in these writings of the white academics have now somehow permeated into the white man’s daily lives, leading to what we now see in the USA as a transgender revolution, a movement that reeks of child abuse, sexual perversions, and severe mental disorders.
“The Bhagavad Gita is not as nice a book as some Americans think… Throughout the Mahabharata…Krishna goads human beings into all sorts of murderous and self-destructive behaviours such as war…The Gita is a dishonest book; it justifies war” — said Wendy Doniger, in ‘Philadelphia Inquirer,’ without understanding or more likely deliberately distorting the basic essence of the Bhagavad Gita that asks people to fight for dharma or righteousness. The Great Mahabharata War was not a call to fight religious wars to kill and convert non-believers like the Christian Crusades or the Islamic Jihad have been doing for centuries. The Mahabharata War was about destroying adharma (immorality) and reestablishing dharma or righteousness (within people of the same religion), but perhaps Doniger, with her Abrahamic upbringing, failed to understand the true meaning of dharma.
In the context of constant distortion of Hinduism, one question that automatically comes to mind is — Has the likes of academic scholars, like Wendy Doniger, written books and research papers about the actual religious wars carried on by Christianity and Islam that has killed, raped, and enslaved millions of people for centuries, and something that is still continuing? The answer of course is a big NO.
Has Doniger and her likes researched the atrocities of Christians on Hindus, in what is known as the Goan Inquisition, and how the European Christians wiped out entire native populations in many villages in the US after setting their feet there? The Abrahamics still love to discuss Sati-pratha, a practice that was never popularly followed and has long stopped, even as they conveniently forget about the horrific witch burning in Europe during and after the Black Plague episode. One would not be too far off in their conjectures to think the main objective of these “academics” is to work towards dismantling and destroying the only surviving ancient religion and culture that is Hinduism.
There are so many other such instances of blatant abuses of Hindu gods and Hinduism going on for decades that one can go on writing long enough to fill up a book. However, one must look beyond the disease, and search for remedies. The two ways that can provide a basic impetus/help in fighting the war against such blatant Hinduphobia, both in academia and on social media, are:
First: Indians (read Hindus and Indics in India) must read the old Hindu books, such as the Vedas, Puranas, and the Epics, in order to understand Hinduism better; practice the culture and traditions of Hinduism so that there is no break its continuity, and stop taking insults to Hinduism quietly. The Government of India needs to make fast changes in the school-level history books so that the focus is more on India’s Indic history, along with which the glorification and whitewashing of foreign Islamic and Christian invaders’ atrocities need to be removed and the true history is given. Once the common people are aware of their history and know their religion well, they can properly counter the media and social media’s false narratives to defame Hinduism.
Second: Hindu NRIs must work towards getting better control of Western colleges and universities through funding, just as the Chinese, Arabs, and Jews have successfully done. Since they are residing in countries from where these abuses and distortions originate, they are in a better position to fight back by writing counter-narratives, but for which they need to have some level of control in the academic world, which will come not only through funding and but also through strict monitoring/seeing that the Hindu funds are not going for anti-Hindu causes.
The author is a well-known travel and heritage writer. Views expressed are personal.
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