It appears that Sir Isaac Newton was frequently complimented for being the greatest genius the world had ever known. One of his replies is alleged to have been the following: “Even a pygmy sees further than the giants if he stands upon their shoulders. And I, Sir, stand upon the shoulders of giants.” The extraordinary humility apart, there is something very important to what Newton is saying: his …

Let us begin in a very intuitive way and ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter ‘cultural differences’? In human contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? In inter-individual contacts. That is, we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with individual human beings. You do not meet ’the western culture’ but individual Americans, Germans, …

I do not believe that any cultural practice (i.e. a practice that has survived and been transmitted through successive generations) should be explained by attributing beliefs to its practitioners in such a way that the beliefs make the practitioners come out stupid. Why do I say this? There are primarily two reasons: our ignorance and the principle of ‘charity’. Let me explain. (a) Our ignorance. …

The first point is the difficulty involved in specifying what the “real meaning of an experience” consists of. Asking an insider would not help us here: the insider may or may not know what the real meaning of his/her own experience is or even how to go about putting it in words. Assuming that the first problem somehow gets solved, the second problem lies in the multiplicities of such meanings: …

The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children (including Jeffrey Kripal) systematically portray the Indian traditions in an unfavorable light, even when compared to how religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are true or false, whether they …

To begin with, there is the feeling that scientific explanations, with their emphasis on rationality and objectivity, are reductive in nature. Wherein lies the root of this feeling? Let us say that some physical theory describes the motion of a snow flake gently floating down to earth or a rose petal lazily spinning in the air. Or that some branch of human genetics computes the probability of a …

Someone, let’s say her name is Wendy Doniger, comes along and sniggers ‘when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus’. I do not identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. I say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do. Here is what I say: “I am doing Puja to Shiva.” No discussion about ‘Lingam’ or its many meanings. This is a wrong way …

Before addressing this writing to Jeffrey Kripal, I would like to very clearly stipulate some of my basic stances so that the discussion does not get derailed into these issues. (A) Even though the communication will be directed to the person of Jeffrey Kripal, it is not ad hominem but issue-oriented. However, I will eschew making some kinds of qualifications academics are prone to make, so that …

Question: “In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in particular “phallus”? A Wendy says “Yes”, a Balu says “No”. For some person, not on this board, there is not a dialog; it is a reading of Wendy, a reading of Balu - how to decide between the two answers, which one represents the truth about Hindus?” Depending on the patience of the visitor, a number …

Let us begin with one of the minimal conditions for inter-cultural (verbal) communication. And that is: people should be able to have conversations with each other. It is legitimate to claim that one does not need to know what a ‘conversation’ is in order to have a conversation. Therefore, whatever else we may want to say, it would be very difficult to maintain that there is no conversation in …

1.1. The inherent logic of such an enterprise forces one, as it were, to build alternate theories to the existing, ‘western’ theories. Instead of explaining this statement in the abstract, let me take a concrete example to illustrate what I mean. 1.2. In the University of Chicago, there is a certain Richard Shweder. He practices ‘Cultural Psychology’, and is (was?) professor of ‘Human …

I would like you to consider the following four kinds of answers, each pitched at a different level of generality and at a different level of description. One could provide more, but these four should be enough to give a taste of the kind of wine you might care to drink. Suppose that one were to ask you: how to go about doing ‘science’ (in general) or, say, doing ‘physics’? What kind of an answer …

I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyze what Rajiv portrays about Wendy and her children in the field of religious studies; (b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about (c) how we should not analyze this situation. Given that all …

This site hosts a collection of posts and articles (both publish and unpublished) about many things related to India, her culture and her traditions. Today, whatever descriptions exist about Indian culture is a product of labors of generations of western intellectuals. These descriptions are laden with many common sense themes, which are taken as true, because the whole western culture believes in …