Now why would he say this because Hindus are asserting
ownership on their culture, a culture that Mr. Menon would
also like ownership on.
History of Indian culture is written by Indologist like Wendy Doniger
who use modern secularist mores to define 3000 year old stories.
So when Yoga was domain of Brahmins to search for God is turned
around and portrayed as not friendly to Hindus.
Same way his friends want to say about Indus culture because
Pakistan has no sense on history or anything for else that matters.

Wendy Doniger is still hawking AIT when you give scientific evidence
to the contrary, she just scoffs at it.

http://legacy.lakeforest.edu/about/sesq/events/lecture.asp

the Doniger lecture in question?

(I am aware that it is very possible that I’m just being grouchy about a history that is intended for a broader audience. For perspective, I also got a little upset when the New York Times started coming out with color photos, mumbling, “If I wanted USA Today, I would have ordered it.”)

While I think the marketing of this book has been a little garish, I hear you on this point:

Wendy has been on the receiving end of such Hindutva misogyny and hate for a long while and I have always marveled at her unflagging courage and persistence in facing the hate-machine.

And I suppose when you are trying to get people to buy an 800-page history, a little marketing is probably in order…

As for erotic sprititualism , you don’t need an outsider to enlighten us for that . there is a big treasure in Indian spiritualistic literature .

To say that Draupadi would have made the ideal basis for an alternative vision of Indian womanhood is really be asking that the history of the last 3000 years and social structure be very different!

I should also add that Valmiki’s Ramayana tends to portray Sita in a more restained light but even here her anger at her treatment by Rama clearly outlines the injustice that she felt has been done to her simply because she was a woman and her anger at what she sees is Rama’s typical male concern with his reputation over the feelings of his wife. In other versions of the Ramayana like Krittbas’s 15th century Bengali version, this has serious consequences where the sons take revenge on Rama for their mother’s exile in the forest.

The problem with this is that, taken to its logical extreme, no one could critique anything except from “within” that “frame.” Thus, even within Abrahamic religious traditions, one could argue that Islamic religious practices could not be critiqued because “outsiders” just don’t “get” the culture etc. etc. In fact people make this argument all the time, and not only is it not very tenable, one suspects it is often being made in bad faith (e.g. those who parry complaints about Saudi laws regarding women by resorting to “hey that’s the culture” arguments aren’t generally outraged by those laws to begin with).

In Doniger’s case, the point is even more clear-cut: because she isn’t criticizing a belief system, she is analyzing it (presumably she has some empathy for the subject, given that she has spent years studying it, but obviously her books aren’t advocacy pieces of the sort in my examples above; you refer to her “judging” Hinduism, but where’s the evidence that she is condemning in the way you seem to suggest? One might oneself believe that references to sexuality, etc. are per se pejorative, but that speaks to one’s own views, and says nothing at all about whether Doniger or any other academic so believes. Certainly I do not: I’ve always found accounts of the eroticism of Shiva and Parvati deeply engaging — sure, “erotic terms could be metaphors for spiritual or mystical experiences”, but the question why x as opposed to y metaphor? Surely the intensity, the ecstacy, and the communion of the sexual act illustrates, like no other metaphor could, spiritual/mystical experiences? Stated differently, in mythology/art/literature, sex CAN be “about” a lot “more” than sex, but it is surely never about “less” than sex. And of course my point applies not just to Hinduism, but to the vast quantities of Sufi poetry that orthodox Muslims try their best to airbrush awa). Thus, extending your point to this sort of situation would mean that not only could one not criticize unless one were “within the frame”, but one couldn’t even study, write, think about something unless one were “within the frame.” Such an approach would lead to the death of scholarship, which would be replaced by more or less reverential recyclings of orthodox positions and received wisdom that we are all already familiar with.

But I would love to read the perspective however cliche and stale it is .

No, Kaplan’s article in the Atlantic was awful. He’s trying to upgrade himself into an expert on the “Greater Middle East” , which he call the region from Istanbul to Rangoon. His first South Asia article was an op-ed in the NYT, which started with:

No longer will we view South Asia as a region distinct from the Middle East. Now there is only one long continuum stretching from the Mediterranean to the jungles of Burma, with every crisis from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west to the Hindu-Muslim dispute in the east interlocked with the one next door.

Yet this elongated Greater Near East does not signify something new but something old.

My comment at the time: Probably the stupidest op-ed published in the NYTimes since … the last time Kaplan had an op-ed in the Times

Also, Kaplan has now called Indo-Islamic architecture “Indo-Saracenic” twice, once in the NYT and once in the Atlantic. I suppose there is no money for fact-checkers any more. The Atlantic article even linked the term to the wikipedia article (which correctly has links to the Gateway of India, not the Taj Mahal).

Let me Quote few non Hindutva Elements

Professor Michael Witzel of Harvard University has claimed that Wendy Doniger’s of Vedic Sanskrit is severely flawed. When Witzel was publicly challenged to prove this claim, he published examples of Doniger’s mistranslations and termed her translation as “UNRELIABLE and idiosyncratic”.[8][9][10] Nicholas Kazanas, a European Indologist, also criticized Doniger’s works and wrote that Doniger seems to be obsessed with only one meaning, the most sexual imaginable.[11] In the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Kazanas wrote, “[Doniger] seems to see only one function … of fertility and sexuality, copulation, defloration, castration and the like: even bhakti ‘devotion’ is described in stark erotic terms including incest and homosexuality (1980:87-99:125-129). Surely, erotic terms could be metaphors for spiritual or mystical experiences as is evidenced in so much literature?”.[11]

The above doesn’t sound like a BBC quote at all. BTW, I have read Siva: The Erotic Ascetic, and it is a very good book, an engaging, empathetic and imaginative study that certainly furthered my understanding of Shiva and Shaivite worship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Doniger