Kali's Child

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Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, was a 1995 psychoanalytic study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna written by religion scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal.[1][2] It was received with acclaim by academics, but created controversy in India after a scathing review written by a historian was published in a Calcutta newspaper.

Contents

[edit] Contents

Kripal adopted a Freudian approach to uncover the connections between Tantric and psychoanalytic hermeneutical traditions. The book theorises upon an alleged homoerotic strain in Ramakrishna's life, practice, and teachings. Kali's Child's primary thesis is that a great deal of Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were generated by the lingering results of childhood traumas, and sublimated homoerotic and pedophiliac passions. Kripal argues that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic."[3] Kripal also argued that the Ramakrishna Mission has suppressed biographical material relating to Ramakrishna's erotic life, including Ram Chandra Datta's Jivanavrttanta[4], and an 850-page diary by Mahendranath Gupta.[5], although these claims were later withdrawn.

[edit] Reception

Kali's Child won the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995[6]. Controversy erupted when The Statesman published a review of the book by historian Narasingha Sil in its Calcutta edition in January 1997. Sil had previously written Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. A Psychological Profile a psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna, which suggested that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were pathological and originated from alleged childhood sexual trauma. According to an article by Hugh Urban in The Journal of Religion, "Narasingha Sil...decried Kripal as a shoddy scholar with a perverse imagination who has thoughtlessly 'ransacked' another culture and produced a work which is, in short, 'plain shit'"[7] This provoked a flurry of angry letters to the editor. The Asian Age also published a negative review by Sil in the same year. Kripal soon found himself and the book embroiled in a long-running disputation. Censoring the book was even debated (unsuccessfully) in the Parliament of India. Kripal maintains, however, that less than 100 copies have been sold in India, and that few of its opponents have actually read the book.

The book received reviews in major academic journals of religion. Malcolm McLean, a Bengali scholar who has translated the Sri-Sri-Ramakrishna-Kathamrta and the poetry of Ramprasad, wrote in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, "This analysis will be controversial particularly among the followers of Ramakrishna, who have sought over the years to deny, or at least to downplay, the Tantric elements. But Kripal's treatment of it is very thorough, his case is very well documented, and I find his argument convincing.[8] In the Journal of Religion, Hugh Urban wrote, "Kripal's book penetrates the layers of pious obfuscation and reverential distortion surrounding Ramakrishna, to recover the original Bengali texts...which had been mistranslated and censored by later disciples.[9] In the journal History of Religions, John Hawley wrote that "Kripal offers ample proof that Ramakrishna...had a very significantly homosexual side.[10] In the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, William Radice wrote that "[Ramakrishna's] homosexual leanings and his horror of women as lovers should not be the issue: there was plenty of evidence before the exposure of the guhya katha ["secret talk"].[11]

In Autumn 1997 edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Gerald James Larson wrote:

Moreover, from the time (1942) of the publication of Swami Nikhilananda's English translation and version of Mahendra Nath Gupta's Bengali Sri-Ramakrsnakathnmrta entitled The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the eccentric sexual fantasies and practices of Ramakrishna have been well-known, including transvestitism, transsexuality (longings to become a girl widow), oral and anal sexual fantasies (both heterosexual and homosexual), castration fantasies of one kind or another, and what psychoanalysis generally refers to as the "polymorphous sexuality" characteristic of the earliest stages of human development. None of this has been much of a 'secret.'[12]

However, he also wrote that "none of the evidence cited in the book supports a cause-effect relation between the erotic and the mystical (or the religious)...."[13]

In November of 1997 edition of Asian Studies Review, Narasingha Sil wrote that in order to prove his theory, Kripal "manufactures evidence by distorting the meaning of sources."[14][15]

In 2000, Swami Tyagananda, minister of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Society in Boston, wrote a 173-page rebuttal, entitled "Kali’s Child Revisited, or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation?"[16] It was published his personal website and was not published in any academic journal. Tyagananda criticized Kripal's translation of Bengali phrases and alleged that Kripal tends to quote selectively and deceptively from Mahendranath Gupta’s Kathamrita in order to create evidence for his interpretation. Tyagananda also alleged that Kripal has made at least 191 translation mistakes and/or deceptions. He alleged deliberate ignoring of evidence that contradicts his thesis. Additionally, Tyagananda accused him of having only an elementary knowledge of the Bengali language, and no understanding of Tantra. Since both the translation of Bengali terms and Tantra play an important role in Kripal’s argument, this was a serious allegation.

In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Huston Smith derided Kripal's work as "colonialism updated";[17]

Kripal's psychology credentials and his use of psychological analysis was questioned by Somnath Bhattacharyya, a practicing psychoanalyst who has taught psychology at Calcutta University. Bhattacharya's remarks appeared on a website and have not been published in an academic journal.[18] In the 2007 book Invading the Sacred, Ramaswamy and de Nicolas asserted that the American Academy of Religion, formerly the National Association of Biblical Instructors, does not have a well-informed understanding of Hinduism.[19] Ramaswamy and de Nicolas argue that the errors in translation continued into the second edition.

For example, "In the first edition of his book, Kali's Child, Kripal translates the Bengali word for lap, kol, as meaning 'on the genitals'. In the second edition, he changes it somewhat, "It is clear that Ramakrishna saw 'the lap' as normally defiled sexual space."...In Indian culture—and Bengali culture in particular—the lap has an extremely positive and warm maternal association."[clarify][20]

[edit] Kripal's responses

Kripal believes that gender and spirituality are intricately linked, and that the history of mysticism in all the world's religions is often deeply erotic. He has strongly denied that Kali's Child was intended as a slur either against Ramakrishna specifically or Hinduism in general. By comparing the deeply erotic nature of Teresa of Ávila's mysticism with Ramakrishna's, for example, Kripal gave one of many examples of how, phenomenologically, European Roman Catholics were experiencing things quite similar to the raptures of Bengali ecstatics like Ramakrishna.[21] Kripal later devoted the entirety of his second book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001) to an in-depth study of the varied aspects (both homoerotic and heteroerotic) of mystico-eroticism, as found in almost all the world’s major religious systems.

Kripal’s response to Tyagananda was to apologize for his translation errors (many of which had already been corrected in the book’s second edition, 1998), but to maintain that they were not serious enough to damage the book’s central thesis. Kripal turned down suggestions to include a summary of Tyagananda’s rebuttal at the end of his book, in a new edition. Concerning the charge that he does not understand Tantra, he responded that Swami Tyagananda’s version of Tantra is the “right-handed” ascetic path, as expounded by neo-Vedanta, while the Tantra of Ramakrishna's milieu was the “left-handed” path, which integrates the sexual with the spiritual. In the second edition of Kali's Child, however, Kripal dismisses the "philosophical expositions" of Tantra as inauthentic because they are “designed to rid Tantra of everything that smacked of superstition, magic, or scandal” (28–29). He also noted that because Tyagananda questioned his personal motives for writing the book, the critique amounted to an ad hominem attack. Additionally, Kripal pointed out (following modern literary theory) that all interpretations, his own included, are products of the interaction of the reader’s horizon of understanding with that of the author’s.[22]

By late 2002, Kripal decided to discontinue the discourse: “But there comes a time when it is time to move on. After eight years of almost constant thinking, eight published essays, a second monograph, and literally thousands of paper and virtual letters, that time has arrived for me. Accordingly, I plan no future formal responses and have long since moved on to other intellectual projects and topics.”[23] He combined his primary replies on his website, and then moved ahead with other projects.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kripal, Jeffrey J.: Kali's Child
  2. ^ Kripal, Jeffrey J., Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 1998)
  3. ^ Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, p. 2
  4. ^ Kali's Child, 9
  5. ^ Kali's Child, 311
  6. ^ Kripal, Jeffrey J.: Kali's Child
  7. ^ Urban, Hugh (Apr., 1998). "Kālī's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna". The Journal of Religion Vol. 78, No. 2: pp. 318-320. 
  8. ^ Malcolm McLean Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1997), pp. 571-572. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0279%28199707%2F09%29117%3A3%3C571%3AKCTMAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
  9. ^ Hugh B. Urban The Journal of Religion, Vol. 78, No. 2. (Apr., 1998), pp. 318-320. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4189%28199804%2978%3A2%3C318%3AKCTMAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
  10. ^ John Stratton Hawley, History of Religions, Vol. 37, No. 4. (May, 1998), pp. 401-404. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2710%28199805%2937%3A4%3C401%3AKCTMAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
  11. ^ William Radice Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 61, No. 1. (1998), pp. 160-161. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0041-977X%281998%2961%3A1%3C160%3AKCTMAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
  12. ^ Larson, Gerald James (Autumn 1997). "Polymorphic Sexuality, Homoeroticism, and the Study of Religion". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/3: 661-662. 
  13. ^ Larson, Gerald James (Autumn 1997). "Polymorphic Sexuality, Homoeroticism, and the Study of Religion". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/3: 665-665. 
  14. ^ Sil, Narasingha (November 1997). "Is Ramakrishna a Vedantin, a Tantrika or a Vaishnava? An examination". Asian Studies Review Volume 21, Issue 2 & 3: 212-224. 
  15. ^ Urban, Hugh (Apr., 1998). "Kālī's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna". The Journal of Religion Vol. 78, No. 2: pp. 318-320. 
  16. ^ Kali's Child Revisited : Debate
  17. ^ Smith, Huston (Spring 2001). "Letters to the Editor". Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30/1: Letters. 
  18. ^ Bhattacharyya, Professor Somnath. Kali's Child: Psychological And Hermeneutical Problems. Infinity Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-03-15.
  19. ^ Ramaswamy, Krishnan; Antonio de Nicolas (2007). Invading the Sacred. Delhi, India: Rupa & Co..  p. 23
  20. ^ Ramaswamy, Krishnan; Antonio de Nicolas (2007). Invading the Sacred. Delhi, India: Rupa & Co..  p. 32
  21. ^ Ibid., p. 326.
  22. ^ (Russian) Kali's Child
  23. ^ (Russian) Kali's Child

[edit] External links