In Jawaharlal Nehru’s now-famous speech at India’s independence he said “a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Whether 1947 was the time and Nehru and his colleagues were the people able to express the “soul of the nation” is a different debate. Let us gaze then at the waves themselves. Though this story has plenty of colorful characters from Rajiv Malhotra, the feisty entrepreneur who started Infinity Foundation, Balagangadhara (or Balu as he is called) the radical scholar and director of research group in Belgium that is developing a science of cultures, Wendy Doniger the reigning doyen of Hinduism studies occupying a prominent chair at the University of Chicago, Jeffrey Kripal, who traces a remote Indian ancestry and who wrote the book “Kali’s child” about Ramakrishna Paramahansa while allegedly struggling with his feelings and homosexuality and so on and so forth, that turn this academic quality book of scholarship into a must-read page turning thriller. Yet as in any historic story the characters and events are the nimitta, the vessels afloat on the ocean that allow us to see the movements of the enormous waves of change before they come crashing onto the shore. This publication of this book is a marker of change that has historical dimensions. Many people found each other through this debate forming a very loose community interested in this topic. A new book “ Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America” published by Rupa & Co chronicles this debate and raises serious questions about the state of Hinduism scholarship in the United States. About five years ago a New Jersey entrepreneur called Rajiv Malhotra wrote a column on Sulekha titled “RISA Lila 1: Wendy’s Child Syndrome”-a provocative critique of prominent academics in Hinduism studies in the US. This sparked off a rather unique debate that spanned tens of articles and thousands of comments on Sulekha over the last many years.
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