Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Archives
    • By Issue
    • By Article
    • By PDF (2008-14)
    • By PDF (1985-97)
    • All Articles
  • Sections
    • Current Research
    • Findings & Footnotes
    • On/File
  • Google Search
You are here: Home / Archive / Hindu activism challenges Western scholarship

Hindu activism challenges Western scholarship

May 1, 2004 by Richard Cimino

Print-friendly

A recent surge of Hindu activism is being felt in academia, with scholars facing protests and even violent threats over non-Hindus interpreting religious texts.

The Washington Post (April 10) reports that 19 years after a professor at Emory University used sexual imagery in writing on the story of Ganesha, the revered Hindu God with the head of an elephant, an Internet campaign was started by Hindu militants that included death threats. In January, Macalester College professor James W. Laine provoked similar violent outbursts over his book on Hindu king Shivaji.

One of Laine’s collaborators in India was assaulted, a mob destroyed rare manuscripts where Laine had done research, and the professor was even threatened with extradition and trial by the Indian government. Other academics writing about Hinduism have encountered similar hostility, often fueled by the view that only Hindus have the right to speak and write about the religion.

University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger, who has been at the center of these controversies and protests, says that the wave of protests is being fueled by Hindu nationalism (known as Hindutva), which charges that Hindus are denigrated by the West imposing a Eurocentric worldview on a culture they do not understand.

Others say that it is not so much Hidutva but just ordinary Hindus who are behind the new activism (though not the cases of violence and threats). They are borrowing a page from black civil rights activists and are claiming their own identity and history from what they see as a closed circle of American scholars who control the Hindu research and publishing field. But many Indian scholars have defended the American writers, saying these incidents are part of a larger pattern of attacks against scholars in India.

Print-friendly

Filed Under: Archive

Also in this issue

  • On/File: May 2004
  • Findings & Footnotes: May 2004
  • ‘The Passion’ gains popularity among Middle East’s Muslims, Christians
  • Moderate Muslim thinkers take new approach to modernity, Koran
  • Converts to radical Islam a new concern in Europe
  • Current Research: May 2004
  • Unitarians in the vanguard of new polygamy?
  • Praise music moves out of the churches
  • Mormon origins face scientific challenge
  • Alternatives to institutional religion find favor

Search the Site

Download the first issue of RELIGION WATCH (1980)

Download the first issue of RELIGION WATCH (1980)

Click on the image for downloading

© 2016-2020 Richard Cimino / Religioscope
·News Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress