THE AMERICAN APPROPRIATION OF THE GITA AND THE GODDESS KALI
But Kali is here too and so is Krishna.
When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, on July 16, 1945, he realized that he was part of the myth of doomsday but not his own Jewish doomsday. (The remarks of others present on that occasion, such as General Thomas F. Farrell, also tended to employ mythical and theological eschatological language, but from the Abrahamic traditions.) Oppenheimer, who liked to think that he knew some Sanskrit, and who had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in his pocket at Los Alamos, said that as he watched the bomb go off, he recalled the verse in the Sanskrit text of the Bhagavad Gita in which the god Krishna reveals himself as the supreme lord, blazing like a thousand suns. Later, however, when he saw the sinister clouds gathering in the distance, he recalled another verse, in which Krishna reveals that he is death, the destroyer of worlds. Perhaps Oppenheimer’s inability to face his own shock and guilt directly, the full realization and acknowledgment of what he had helped create, led him to distance the experience by viewing it in terms of someone else’s myth of doomsday, as if to say: “This is some weird Hindu sort of doomsday, nothing we Judeo-Christian types ever imagined.” He switched to Hinduism when he saw how awful the bomb was and that it was going to be used on the Japanese, not on the Nazis, as had been intended. Perhaps he moved subconsciously to Orientalism when he realized that it was “Orientals” (Japanese) who were going to suffer.
Oppenheimer was one of the last generation of Americans for whom the Gita (flanked by the Upanishads and other Vedantic works) was the central text of Hinduism, as it had been for Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. For later generations, it was the goddess Kali (flanked by various forms of Tantra) that represented Hinduism. Kali became a veritable archetype for many Jungian, feminist, and New Age writers; Allen Ginsberg depicted Kali as the Statue of Liberty, her neck adorned with the martyred heads of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.11 (Paul Engle later said, simultaneously insulting both India and Ginsberg: “He succeeded in doing the heretofore utterly impossible—bringing dirt to India.”12)
Soon the goddess Kali became a major Hollywood star. Her career took off with the film Gunga Din (1939), in which Sam Jaffe played the title role (Reginald Sheffield played Rudyard Kiplinglb), with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., buckling their swashes against Kali’s dastardly Thug worshipers, led by Eduardo Ciannelli, who usually played Chicago gangsters. (The film begins with a solemn statement: “The portions of this film dealing with the goddess Kali are based on historical fact.”) The 1965 Beatles film Help! included a satire on Gunga Din, with an attempted human sacrifice to an eight-armed Kali-like goddess.lc Kali also appeared in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and The Deceivers (1988), starring Pierce Brosnan as Captain Savage, who ends up converting to the worship of a particularly violent and erotic form of the goddess as queen of the Thugs.13
Kali made her mark in American literature too, if literature is the word I want. Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) was a sci-fi novel based on Hindu myths and peopled by Hindu gods, including Kali. Leo Giroux’s The Rishi (1986) was a lurid novelization of Colonel Sleeman’s already insanely lurid Rambles and Recollections (1844), updated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1975; gruesome garrotings are carried out ritually at Harvard and MIT, where “a beautiful half-Indian girl is tormented by visions that urge her to participate in the most unspeakable rites,” as the jacket blurb promises us. Claudia McKay’s The Kali Connection (1994) describes an intimate relationship between two women, a reporter and a member of “a mysterious Eastern cult.” In Forever Odd by Dean Koontz (2005), the villainess, named after the poisonous plant datura, is “a tough, violent phone-sex babe, crazy as a mad cow,” “a murderous succubus,” and a living incarnation of Kali (“the many-armed Hindu death goddess”). In a story titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), which really is literature, when a nice American girl gets caught up with U.S. commandos in Vietnam, she is seen wearing around her throat an icon of Kali: “a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.”14 Other manifestations of Kali followed apace, further still from the spirit of Hinduism, such as a lunch box on which Kali dances, her lolling tongue suggesting her eagerness to get at the box’s contents.
Particularly offensive are the many porn stars who have taken the name of Kali, presumably in vain. One, who admitted that she based her sexual therapy on Masters and Johnson, still claimed that it was Tantric because, she explained helpfully, “Tantra is a Sanskrit word that means expansion of consciousness and liberation of energy. It is about becoming more conscious and when applied in love-making deepens intimacy, intensity and orgasmic orgiastic experience heading in the direction of full body orgasmic feeling.”15 So now you know. Another self-proclaimed Hindu goddess appears on her Web site (which gives new meaning to “.org”) dressed as Kali, with sex toys and bondage gear in her many hands.16 The upscale British superstore Harrods stopped the sale of bikini underwear bearing images of Hindu goddesses (some of it allegedly with Shiva on the crotch) but apologized only after Hindu Human Rights, a group that says it “safeguards the religion and its followers,” lodged a formal protest. Another department store had to apologize for selling toilet seats with images of a Hindu deity, and a third for selling slippers with Hindu symbols. An article reporting on these complaints remarked, “A number of designers have been attracted by the richness of Hindu iconography and the fad for exotic ethnic patterns.”17
Hindu Human Rights also protested against a musical film that the Muslim filmmaker Ismail Merchant was making in 2004, called The Goddess, in which the rock singer Tina Turner (allegedly a Buddhist) was to play the role of the goddess Kali (or, according to some reports, Shakti). Merchant and Turner traveled to India to visit a host of holy cities and were blessed by a Hindu priest, and Merchant insisted that, “contrary to the accusations, “nobody is going to sing and dance on the back of a tiger. The Goddess is not going to be half naked or a sex symbol.” (He also insisted that the goddess in his film was not just Kali but “Shakti, the universal feminine energy, which is manifest in Kali, Durga, Mother Mary, Wicca, and each and every woman on the planet.”) We will never know; Merchant died in May 2005 and apparently didn’t finish the film. Nor did Stanley Kubrick live to finish Eyes Wide Shut (1991), which aroused the wrath of the American Hindus Against Defamation because the orgy scene in it was accompanied by the chanting of passages from—what else but the Bhagavad Gita? Surely the deaths of the two film directors was a coincidence?
Clearly the non-Hindu American image of Kali and other goddesses is very different from her image among Hindus in India.
TWISTED IN TRANSLATION: AMERICAN VERSIONS OF HINDUISM
Nor are the goddesses the only Hindu deities appropriated in this way. In Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite (2007), a shrine to the monkey god Hanuman displaces a Muslim mosque (an inversion of the alleged displacement of a temple to Rama under the mosque at Ayodhya). Hanuman goes to Manhattan in a forthcoming film in which he helps the FBI battle terrorists. “Hanuman is the original superhero. He is thousands of years older than Superman, Spider-Man and Batman. He is a brand to reckon with among Indian children today,” said Nadish Bhatia, general manager of marketing at the Percept Picture Company, which coproduced The Return of Hanuman. He continued: “Every society is looking for heroes, and we want to make Hanuman global. . . . If the Coca-Cola brand can come to India and connect with our sensibilities, why can’t Hanuman go to New York?”18 Why not indeed?
Sita too has come to New York (and points west). In 2005, Nina Paley (an American woman previously married to a man from Kerala who left her), created an animated film called
Sitayana (www.sitasingstheblues.com), billed as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told” and set to the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. The episode titled “Trial by Fire” is accompanied by the words of the song “Mean to Me” (“Why must you be mean to me? You love to see me cryin’ . . .”). Rama lights the fire and kicks Sita into it; she comes out of the fire; he looks puzzled, then sad, then goes down on one knee in supplication; she calls him “dear” (and you see the golden deer) and jumps into his arms. In Alfonso Cuarón’s 1995 remake of A Little Princess, the young heroine tells the story of the Ramayana, in which Sita sees a wounded deer and asks Rama to go and help it . . . not kill it!
Mainstream or counterculture, once Hindu gods had become household words in America, it was open season on them; anyone could say anything at all. Sometimes it takes a very nasty turn: In Pat Robertson’s evangelical novel, The End of the Age (1995), the Antichrist is possessed by Shiva, has the president murdered by a venomous cobra, becomes president himself, and forces everyone to worship Shiva and thus to be possessed by demons. More often it is just stupid. An ad proclaims, “Many people worship the Buddha. Many people worship chocolate. Now you can do both at the same time.” Another advertises “the Food of the Gods: The Chocolate Gods and Chocolate Goddesses . . . Fine Quality Gourmet Handmade Chocolates that celebrate those gods and goddesses of love and luxury, joy and happiness, compassion, peace and serenity, healing, and fertility of the body and imagination.” It was only a matter of time before someone made “Kamasutra Chocolates,” replicating the mating couples depicted on the temples at Khajuraho. Even the folksy Ben & Jerry’s made a Karamel Sutra ice cream.
The Kama-sutra in general has been the occasion for a great deal of lustful marketing and misrepresentation; most people, both Americans and Hindus (particularly those Hindus influenced by British and/or American ideas about Hinduism), think that the Kama-sutra is nothing but a dirty book about “the positions.” Since there is no trademarked “Kama-sutra” the title is used for a wide array of products. Kama-sutra is the name of a wristwatch that displays a different position every hour. The Red Envelope company advertises a “Kama Sutra Pleasure Box” and “Kama Sutra Weekender Kit,” collections of oils and creams packaged in containers decorated with quasi-Hindu paintings of embracing couples. A cartoon depicts “The Kamasutra Relaxasizer Lounger, 165 positions.” (A salesman is saying to a customer, “Most people just buy it to get the catalogue.”19) There are numerous books of erotic paintings and/or sculptures titled Illustrated Kama-sutras and cartoon Kama-sutras, in one of which the god Shiva plays a central role.20 The Palm Pilot company made available a Pocket Sutra, “The Kama Sutra in the palm of your hand,” consisting of a very loose translation of parts of the text dealing with the positions. A book titled The Pop Up Kama Sutra (2003) failed to take full advantage of the possibilities of this genre; the whole couple pops up. In 2000, the Onion, a satirical newspaper, ran a piece about a couple whose “inability to execute The Totally Auspicious Position along with countless other ancient Indian erotic positions took them to new heights of sexual dissatisfaction. . . . Sue was unable to clench her Yoni (vagina) tightly enough around Harold’s Linga and fell off ...”21 Another satire proposes “a Kama Sutra that is in line with a postpatriarchal, postcolonial, postgender, and perhaps even postcoital world.”22 Kama Sutra: The Musical23 is the story of a sexually frustrated young couple whose lust life is revitalized by the mysterious arrival of the eighteen-hundred-year-old creator of the Kama Sutra, Swami Comonawannagetonya. The swami reveals to them the titillating secrets that allow any couple to experience all the joys of a totally fulfilling sex life.
“Karma,” which Americans often confuse with kama (watch your rs!), lost most of its meaning in its American avatar (if “avatar” is the word I want; “avatar” has been taken up by computer text messaging, designating the cartoon caricatures of themselves that people use to identify their virtual personae in cyberspace24). Take the 1972 Last Whole Earth Catalog: “[T] the karma is a little slower when you’re not stoned, but it’s the same karma and it works the same way.” A United Way billboard: “Giving is good karma.” And a voluntary organization called getgoodkarma.org welcomes you to Karmalot (get it?), gives you a simplified and entirely non-Hindu version of “what goes around comes around,” and signs you up. Other Hindu terms too have become distorted past recognition. In the film Network (1976), the character played by Peter Finch, gone stark raving mad, says, “I’m hooked to some great unseen force, what I think the Hindus call Prana.” In Michael Clayton (2007), both the whistle-blower lawyer, when he goes crazy, and Michael Clayton (George Clooney), when he is triumphant, shout, out of the blue, “I’m Shiva, the god of death!” High Sierra markets an Ahimsa Yoga Pack, to go with its Ananda Yoga Duffel. And now there is the American version of Laughter Yoga, which “combines simple laughter exercises and gentle yoga breathing to enhance health and happiness.” 25 There’s an energy drink called Guru. There’s a movement to make yoga an Olympic sport.
AMERICAN TANTRA
Perhaps the greatest distortions occur in the takeover of Tantra, which has become an Orientalist wet dream. The belief that the Tantras are in any way hedonistic or even pornographic, though a belief shared by many Hindus as well as by some Euro-Americans, is not justified; the Upanishads and Puranas—not to mention the Kama-sutra—have far more respect for pleasure of all kinds, including sexual pleasure, than do the Tantras. The ceremonial circumstances under which the Tantric sexual ritual took place make it the furthest thing imaginable from the exotic roll in the hay that it is so often, and so simplistically, assumed to be. Yet many people call the Kama-sutra, or even The Joy of Sex, Tantric. Some (American) Tantric scholars feel that, like Brahmins, they will be polluted by the Dalit types who sensationalize Hinduism, and so, in order to make a sharp distinction between the two castes of Americans who write about Hindus, they censure the sensationalizers even more severely than the revisionist Hindus do. Some have excoriated others who have “cobbled together the pathetic hybrid of New Age ‘Tantric sex,’ ” who “blend together Indian erotics, erotic art, techniques of massage, Ayurveda, and yoga into a single invented tradition,” creating a “funhouse mirror world of modern-day Tantra” that is to Indian Tantra what finger-painting is to art.26
Does it make it any better, or even worse, that this sort of Tantra is often marketed by Indian practitioners and gurus? For many Indian gurus take their ideas from American scholars of Tantra and sell them to American disciples who thirst for initiation into the mysteries of the East. Here is what might be termed an inverted pizza effect, in which native categories are distorted by nonnative perceptions of them (as pizza, once merely a Neapolitan specialty, became popular throughout Italy in response to the American passion for pizza). The American misappropriation of Indian Tantra (and, to a lesser extent, yoga) has been reappropriated by India, adding insult to injury.
In an earlier age, the native sanitizing tendency was exacerbated by the superimposition of a distorted European image of Tantra—namely, “the sensationalist productions of Christian missionaries and colonial administrators, who portrayed Tantra as little more than a congeries of sexual perversions and abominations.”27 In their attempts to defend Tantra from this sort of Orientalist attack, early-twentieth-century Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Hindu and non-Hindu, emphasized the metaphorical level of Tantra, which then became dominant both in Hindu self-perception and in the European appreciation of Tantra. This school was made famous, indeed notorious, by Arthur Avalon, aka Sir John Woodroffe (1865-1936) and, later, by Agehananda Bharati, aka Leopold Fischer (1923-1991).
Today, too, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the literal level of Tantra (actually drinking the substances) never existed, that Tantra has always been a meditation technique. Indeed we can take the repercussions back several generations and argue that the revisionist Hindu hermeneutic tradition that was favored by Hindus educated in the British tradition since t
he nineteenth century and prevails in India today began in eleventh century Kashmir, when a major dichotomy took place between the ritual and mythological aspects of Tantra. For Abhinavagupta’s version of Tantra was pitched at a leisured Kashmiri class “arguably homologous to the demographics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century New Age seekers.”28 Moreover, the “no sex, we’re meditating” right-hand brand of Tantra that first caught the European eye turned upside down to become the new left-hand brand of Tantra: “No meditating, we’re having Tantric sex.” As this movement is centered in California (into which, as Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked, everything on earth that is not nailed down eventually slides), we might call it the Californicationld of Tantra.
Thus a major conflict between Hindu and non-Hindu constructions of Hinduism in America operates along the very same fault line that has characterized the major tension within Hinduism for two and a half millennia: worldly versus nonworldly religion, reduced to Tantra versus Vedanta.
HINDU RESPONSES TO THE AMERICANIZATION OF HINDUISM
Not surprisingly, the sensibilities of many Hindus living in America have been trampled into the dust by the marketing of Tantra and other aspects of Hinduism. Web sites and Internet contacts make Hindus in America an often united (though still very diverse) cultural and political presence, which has developed an increasingly active voice in the movement to control the image of Hinduism that is projected in America, particularly in high school textbooks but also in other publications by non-Hindu scholars and in more general popular imagery. The objections include quite reasonable protests against the overemphasis on the caste system, the oppression of women, and the worship of “sacred cows,” as well as the unreasonable demand that the textbooks be altered to include such patently incorrect statements as that suttee was a Muslim practice imported into India or that the caste system has never really existed.29
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