Letters to the Editors

To the Editors:

The Los Angeles Review of Books has done a great service in reviewing Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana's Interpreting Ramakrishna. I believe the book will come to be seen as an important marker for religious studies in the American academy, where, as Philip Goldberg correctly points out, Hinduism continues to be poorly represented.

Tyagananda and Vrajaprana do vigorously contest Jeffrey Kripal's Freudian misinterpretation of Sri Ramakrishna in Kali's Child. Their book, however, is far greater in scope, pointing to larger issues in cross-cultural studies and situating Ramakrishna studies within that context. With regard to Kripal, however, the critique is far more fundamental and devastating than Goldberg allows: They allege that Kripal barely knew Bengali, the language of the original source material referenced in his book, and that his mistranslations were employed, deliberately and erroneously, in support of a questionable theory. Even more disturbingly, since most of them were ignorant of Bengali, reviewers and Hindu studies scholars simply assumed that the translations were accurate. They would proceed to celebrate the book's "discoveries," giving the book near-canonical status despite the fraud underlying it.

An emerging concept in media studies is that of "fairness bias": the notion that, when there are two sides, objectivity lies in presenting both sets of arguments, the "truth" lying somewhere in the middle. While its presence is most familiar to frequent viewers of cable news, one expects better of a more elite forum like the LARB. There is nothing wrong with choosing "someone who stands outside both traditional religion and academia" to review a book that critiques religious scholarship, so long as he or she is capable of evaluating its claims. While Goldberg might well be, there is no evidence of it in this piece.

Instead, using abilities that are admittedly far more impressive than the mere knowledge of Bengali, Goldberg first clears Kripal of racism and cultural imperialism and then absolves Vrajaprana and Tyagananda of fundamentalism and homophobia. He then goes on to tackle the issue of mistranslation, concluding that, "To the lay reader, each side can sound convincing on these issues of textual fidelity" and that "the larger issue is the ambiguity of translation itself."

We can all agree that this is a "larger issue," and that "a lay reader" can't examine competing claims. That is the very purpose of the book reviewer: someone competent who can sort through claims and provide analytical perspective. Otherwise, one could have Nancy Grace or Dr. Phil review Elaine Pagels's next work. Interpreting Ramakrishna's claim, after all, is that Kripal's translations are wrong, as in inaccurate, not merely slightly different interpretations. If I may be so bold as to use the example of fruit among Freudians, this isn't "I say 'po-tah-to,' you say 'po-tay-to.'" It's "I say 'potato', you say 'pineapple'."

To take a minor, less controversial example, Kripal turns "Time (kala) is Brahman. One who sports with Time is Kali, the Primal Power! She moves the Unmovable" into "Kali is Brahman. She who has sex with Siva is Kali, the Primordial Power! She arouses the Unmoving." Herekala, incontrovertibly, means time. How did it become the proper name of a deity Kali? How did Siva and a sex act even enter a translation when neither appeared in the original? This is not about "a boatload of assumptions." It is not even about an instance of textual ambiguity where reasonable people can disagree and which can be the focus of a productive academic exchange. Rather, Kripal's translation, here and on countless other now documented occasions, is flat out incorrect.

As a well regarded scholar in Christian historical and literary studies told me recently, "Theorists have to do their philological homework. Have they learned the original languages? Once they have, they can use any interpretive framework they wish. But not otherwise."

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace predicts that by 2050, India will rank 3rd in world GDP. The increasing penury faced by American humanities faculties (already evident now) and increasing wealth of Indian philanthropists practically assure us that American universities will soon place a far greater emphasis on South Asian studies. The consequent increase in scholarly competition, coupled with a change in universities' financial incentives will, on their own, will inevitably result in more serious scholarship. Therefore, I have little doubt that Kripal's work will ultimately be seen as a footnote in the history of religious studies.

But while Kripal's work may be a blip, it is also a blot. Future intellectual historians will hardly be dumbfounded that a scholar sought fame through trendy mistranslations. Fads and ambitious young up-and-comers are, after all, the nature of scholarship in every field, including the sciences. They will, however, be amazed that a fraudulent translation was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by Kripal's fellow scholars and by the major publishing houses they themselves policed.

Vrajaprana and Tyagananda are correct to state that there is nothing wrong with any academic approach to religion, so long as it is rigorous. One would have high methodological and philological expectations of a scholar who wished to focus on, say, phallocentrism and the Cross, or signs of a torrid affair between St. Francis and St. Claire. Such studies, of course, are the exception rather than the rule among those who study the history of Christianity. One must wonder, then, why exoticism and sexuality are such a major focus for scholars of Hinduism. Future scholars will indeed wonder how this Orientalism writ large remained unchallenged for so very long. And it is they, too, who will recover Interpreting Ramakrishna, recognizing its call for full freedom with rigor as a representation of classic, universal scholarly ideals in a field that had become an academic wasteland.

Goldberg states that "[f]or the millions who continue to draw inspiration from Ramakrishna's life and work [...] the sage's sexuality - whether conscious or unconscious, acted upon or sublimated, homosexual or heterosexual - is about as relevant as Michelangelo's or Bach's." In the religious world, particularly in religions with monastic traditions that emphasize poverty and chastity, it most certainly matters whether a spiritual teacher's lived up to his teachings. Marcial Maciel may have founded the Legionaries of Christ and been a favorite of a pope, but he is most unlikely to be beatified at this point in time. There surely is a difference between Michelangelo and St. Benedict, from a religious point of view. To say otherwise is to profess utter ignorance of religious life. Less so, of course, if you believe that Hindus are too ignorant to recognize pedophilia in the founder of a religious order, or are so exotic that they would celebrate it.

Lacking Goldberg's ability to see into the hearts of others, I can't say if he read Interpreting Ramakrishna or not. But his effort, however well intentioned, is a great disservice to an important debate. It is my hope that, in the future, the LARB assigns articles on India's religion and culture with the same degree of seriousness that it would to review pieces on Europe's or America's.

Srinivas Gandhi

Cambridge, MA

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To the Editors:

What is needed, in regards to Jeffrey Kripal's Kali's Child and Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana's Interpreting Ramakrishna, is a reviewer willing to put in the time and energy to take a stand on what is actually contained in the books. Kripal makes some outrageous claims in Kali's Child, seemingly well documented, but in Interpreting Ramakrishnathose claims are shown for what, in my opinion, are shabbily researched assumptions about a subject by a person who evidently comes to the task with baggage of their own.

World religion scholar Huston Smith rightly asks: Who reviewed Kripal's original thesis, what qualification did they have, were the translations checked by anyone who has expert knowledge of 19th Century Bengali language, culture, religious rituals, humor and slang? Were the original texts consulted, or were Kripal's version of them accepted as gospel? Smith was so upset by the fact that the University of Chicago Press published Kali's Child that he resigned his alumni membership.

Interpreting Ramakrishna by Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana meticulously dissectsKali's Child, almost line by line, and shows a pattern of misquotations, mistranslations, and outright fabrications to support a dubious thesis.

I don't know what exactly motivated Kripal to write Kali's Child; perhaps a doctoral advisor looking for something saucy to publish, perhaps a bad reaction to the well documented homosexual abuse within Kripal's Catholic Church, or perhaps a personal leaning to a spiritual path that seems more concerned about the quality of orgasms than true spiritual transcendence. No matter: The book was published, and what needs to be brought to light by a brave reviewer is to weigh the claims and rebuttal, and provide readers with an unbiased, objective opinion.

Kali's Child was published in 1998 and in 2000 Swami Tyagananda published an online rebuttal titled "Kali's Child Revisited or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation?" as a first step to a full analysis of the book. You can read that piece here. After that rebuttal was published, Kripal made some concessions that there may be mistakes in Kali's Child, and even corrected a few of them for the second edition.

However, some of the errors were in plain English, not a matter of subjective translations of archaic terms. For instance, Kripal claims that Ramakrishna had homosexual tendencies and that noted homosexual and Ramakrishna devotee Christopher Isherwood supported the claim. However, if you go to the page footnoted in Isherwood's My Guru and His Disciple, it specifically disputes Kripal's claim:

I couldn't honestly claim him as a homosexual, even a sublimated one, much as I would have liked to be able to do so.

This passage was pointed out to Kripal in 2000; yet in a later book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion published in 2007, he repeats the claim.

Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana have challenged Kripal to a public debate to air the issues, but Kripal has declined, saying he's moved on, and has said as much as he is going to. I don't think that's good enough. An author ought to stand behind their work, or admit its flaws.

Thanks,

Jon Monday

Fallbrook, CA

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To the Editors:

Several of the LARB's recent articles of note reproduce troubling silences, both political and literary. The political silence concerns Latin America: In discussions of the Occupy Movementand the current crisis of capitalism, Latin America plays the part of what Greg Grandin, quoting Borges, refers to as "the camel not in the Koran," notable mainly for its absence. But just as a rising tide of rural resistance from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s - led by Plutarco Elías Calles, Augusto Sandino, and Farabundo Martí - helped reshape U.S. capitalism and empire before the great industrial strike wave of 1934-37, so, too, Latin Americans put revolution on the agenda years before Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square: witness Venezuela and Bolivia. The largest recent mass mobilization in the U.S. took place on May 1, 2006, when millions of immigrants across the country, led by Latin Americans, marched against the police state. Now might be an excellent time to begin seeing the camel in the Koran, particularly in that part of the U.S. which formed part of Mexico, and before that, New Spain.

The literary silence is no less predictable, since it concerns Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006), who is conspicuously absent from Loren Glass's history of Grove Press, and without whose editorial talents Grove would have been considerably poorer in the second half of the 1960s. Sorrentino worked on the The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), which is dedicated to "Gil." Publicity for Last Exit featured a full-page advertisement in the New York Times with a quotation from Allen Ginsberg likening the book to the explosion of "a rusty hellish bombshell over America"; the book was banned in Italy, charged with obscenity in the UK, and sold briskly in the U.S. When he left Grove in 1970, Sorrentino gave one of the best back-to-back performances in the history of U.S. prose fiction, with Steelwork (1970) and The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) - the latter of which immortalized Barney Rosset in the form of Horace Rosette, who would reappear, utterly transfigured, in the Sorrentino's Pack of Lies trilogy: Odd Number (1985), Rose Theater (1987), and Misterioso (1989). Remembering some aspects of Sorrentino's contribution to U.S. letters - and we have not mentioned his poetry or criticism - should be no more difficult than seeing Latin America from California, where Sorrentino taught for seventeen years before retiring to his native Brooklyn to write three more small masterpieces: Little Casino (2002), Lunar Follies(2005), and A Strange Commonplace (2006).

Forrest Hylton

Bogotá, Colombia

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To the Editors:

Richard Rayner's appreciation of Kipling is both persuasive and overdue (as appreciations of Kipling always are), but it contains one small injustice. Though the Jungle Books are generally left to children these days, they were not so ghettoized in Kipling's day, and they don't deserve to be. The pitiless and allusive "The Undertakers," for example, with its vision of the 1857 rebellion as a crocodile's feast, is the farthest thing imaginable from children's literature.

Michael Steinberg

Rochester, NY

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To the Editors:

Toward the end of his essay "An Invitation to Forgetting" Casey Walker hints at the true problem. It is not our need to and inability to remember everything. It is rather deciding what it is important to remember, and in what way. There are certain poetic texts we might wish to remember word for word. And many kinds of procedures and even literary texts we might wish to remember in paraphrase of different kinds.

Great literature, for instance, is, for most of us, not that which we remember completely. It is that which we choose to return to and re-encounter again.

So, once again, the real human problem is not the need to remember everything: it is the necessity of deciding what it is important to remember.

Shalom Freedman

Jerusalem, Israel

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To the Editors:

Hi. The first sentence in Casey Walker's review of Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything says: "When I was in college at UCLA, I worked at the Hammer Museum at the corner of Wilshire and Western, near the Federal Building."

I think he forgot that the Federal Building and the Hammer Museum are near the corner of Wilshire and Westwood.

Otherwise, a fine review, from what I can remember.

Cheers,

Jay Farrell

Riverside, CA