“I set out to grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein, may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them, transform them—in short, no longer submit to them.” Michel Foucault
Apparently Hindus are hurt at Doniger’s book and at American academia. They want the American academy to be fair and balanced in its portrayal of Hinduism. This is a naive aspiration. Once we understand the dynamics of power, we may even conclude it to be undesirable. We locate American academic writing about Hinduism as part of the dynamics of power and knowledge. When does the mass of opinion emanating from the Western academy shift to praising something and when is it disparaged? Without understanding the power relations that create the stage for Doniger penning thisop-ed in the New York Times[1], when scholarly criticism of her work is all but absent from academia and mainstream American (and Westernized Indian) media, is to labor under the illusion of Hinduism and South Asian studies in American being a place for “fair play” rather than as an extension of the institutions of imperial power.
To see this we examine the case of another set of "Indians", the Native Americans. For many centuries, when the lands of the Natives were being conquered and their destruction was part of Manifest Destiny, the overwhelming thrust in the depiction of Native Americans in Western media and academia was decidedly negative.
From the first images and descriptions available to Europeans in the early sixteenth century, the Natives were depicted as “savages.” The best of these created the image of the “noble savage.” One of the early works in “establishing the early conception of the Indian was an oft-reprinted tract of Amerigo Vespucci.” In Vespucci’s Mundus Novus, Indians are graphically depicted as without religion (and therefore without morals) lecherous cannibals. These images became popular in European literature as in the Dutch pamphlet “And they ete also on[e] another[.] The man eteth his wife[,] his chylderene…”[2]
These quotes are “Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the present,” by Robert Berkhofer. The book shall itself became an artifact in our study.
Before we return to Doniger and the Hindus, we have to understand that both the “left” and the “right” of American scholarship created their separate demonization of the Natives. The “left” branch of Western academia moved on to ”Scientific” Racism in nineteenth century social sciences in its depiction of Native Americans, created theories of the “Idea of Progress and the State of Savagery in the History of Mankind” and extended the theories of Evolution to classifying “Primitive Peoples” in nineteenth century anthropology.
From the “right” the picture was obvious. God had given “true religion” to His people and everyone else was in the clutch of Satan. This imagery is still alive, though in a hidden form in Doniger’s narrative.
To understand the Indian context of this, we have to remember that the left and right are aligned in this demonization; just the vocabulary is slightly different. One flavor may cite the influence of Satan and the other the “natural inferiority” of the race. As those expressions become politically incorrect, alternatives terminology such as “third world” or “developing countries” and “restoring human rights” are now preferred. We will dig into these in a future work. The image creation serves a similar objective of primitive, backward savages.
Without diving too deeply in the modern image creation of the “savage Hindu”, the pertinent question for this thesis is when does Western scholarship about Native Americans start to change?Western scholarship towards the Natives starts to shift once they are seeing as a dying race and the threat perception from them has decreased. The first shift is romanticizing the erstwhile “demon” as the “noble savage.”
“To pity truly the poor dying Indian, American authors and artists had to transform him from a bloodthirsty demon into a Noble Savage. That transformation occurred late in the United States compared to Europe. Except for a few examples among eighteenth-century accounts, the Noble Savage in the United States is really a nineteenth-century fashion. Just as it has been said that the Europeans could easily ennoble the Indian because of their remoteness from savage warfare, so commentators have argued that American authors and artists of the Eastern United States only conceived of the Indian as noble after that section of the country had eliminated its Indian problem. Even so, the number of truly Noble Savages in book or painting was relatively few and relegated to the far away or the long gone.”[3]
Spotty instances of the “noble savage” start to appear because even though the savage was dying, he still had the ability to put up a fight. The end of the nineteenth century see the death of “Sitting Bull” and the massacre at Wounded Knee where over three hundred Natives, including women and children were killed after they had surrendered their weapons. Wounded Knee was the last armed resistance by Native Americans against extermination. Soldiers responsible for the massacre were given the highest US Army award, the Medal of Honor; twenty were given out for this battle alone.
The dead Indian can be a good Indian
Western scholarship towards Native Americans starts to shift once they have, for all practical purposes, been exterminated and no longer pose a threat. Still as late as the 1960’s, official reports were being written about the “Indian problem.”When it is clear that the “Indian problem” is largely solved through a combination of extermination and disenfranchisement, “liberal” scholarship can now resurrect the nostalgia.
“If Whites regarded the Indian as a threat to life and morals when alive, they regarded him with nostalgia upon his demise— or when that threat was safely past…”[4]
Of course, this book written by Berkhoferin the 1970s’s, despite its good intentions cannot emerge till the late twentieth century. I call it “oops we were mistaken” scholarship. The Western civilizational impetus would simply not allow it to become mainstream before its time.
The interesting point is when does “oops we were mistaken”scholarship emerge. It emerges when the civilizational genocide of Native Americans is complete. Christianized, confined to reservation and dis-armed the Native American poses no threat. There is no danger in extolling his civilization. In fact, praising him helps in reinforcing the self-image of the contemporary enlightened non-prejudiced liberal academic, no longer consigning the other as Satanic. Except for the next civilization that is not yet quite dead.
| Locating Doniger in the discourse of power |
| Author(s) : Sankrant Sanu |
