Indic Religions

The academic world is flooded with books and so-called research monographs by American scholars, especially from Chicago and Harvard Universities. No Hindu gods and goddesses are spared.  The language, the contents, and indeed the graphic descriptions, leaves one wondering whether he is reading a book on religion, mythology and about gods and goddesses or pornography wherein each and every object, each and every word, and in each and every description, the only thing visible is sex, sex, sex and more sex in all its manifestations possible through imagination. Not that there is no criticism on the issue in the academic world, but the defence of such gutter literature is much more vociferous, shrill and strong in the name of what they called peer reviews.

Unlike all other major world religions, Hinduism does not have its own home team, by which we mean a combined group of academic scholars who are both practitioners of the faith and well-respected in the academia at the highest levels.  Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism each have their respective home teams in the academics – in fact, multiple homes representing different denominations of these religions. Even China has recently established numerous well-funded Confucius institutes around the world that teach Chinese civilisational approaches to human issues on par with western models.

There has been virtually no protest from Indian academia. It has behaved in most cowardice and impotent manner. In fact, Indians themselves have contributed to the problem in significant ways. While American universities have major programmes for studying world religions and cultures, Indian universities do not offer similar programmes and provide the intellectual inputs to the world.  Indeed, the discipline of Religious Studies does not even exist in most universities in India due to the particular myth that positive knowledge about, and intellectual involvement with, religion breeds communalism.  Many Americans are shocked to learn that there is a deep prejudice among India’s intellectually colonised intelligentsia, according to which secularism implies the exclusion from, or even condemnation of Indic religions in, civic society – which is exact opposite of the respectful place given by American secular civic society to its majority Judeo-Christian traditions. 

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