Wendy Doniger, who of
late is very much in the news, is the intellectual grandmother of Peter Heehs.
Wendy Doniger begat Jeffrey Kripal, who did his “research” on Sri Ramakrishna
for his P.H.D. dissertation under her guidance at the University of Chicago.
Jeffrey Kripal wrote the blurb on the back of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (2008) by Peter Heehs, who gave a soft copy
of his book to his “venerable guide” prior to its publication – Kripal’s book
on Esalen (2007) contains references to the MS of the Lives. Esalen is an institution founded by Michael Murphy, who is
more or less in the same business of misinterpreting spirituality. He in fact
paid for the trips of both Richard Hartz and Peter Heehs to America in order to
attend a conference in California. This is the lineage of the so-called
scholarship that we are presently dealing with, and of which most of the disciples,
followers and intellectual admirers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are totally
unaware. Now that Wendy Doniger, the grandmother of falsehood (she has a
veritable brood of children who have followed the path of outright denigration and
erotic misinterpretation of Hinduism) has been exposed and her publisher Penguin Books has capitulated to a humble
headmaster (hats off for Dinanath Batra, the octogenarian hero and his courageous
lawyer Monica Arora), it is time that the followers of Sri Aurobindo rethink and take stock of the situation at the
Ashram: Why did the Managing Trustee of the Ashram encourage Peter Heehs in his
denigration of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother? Why did Manoj Das, the award
winning writer justify this incomprehensible action of the Managing Trustee,
who will certainly go down in history as perhaps the only Trustee who has gone
against the interest of the spiritual institution he was entrusted with?
Meanwhile, it is
time to rejoice a great victory for all those who stand for the spiritual values
embodied in Hinduism. We publish below a few objectionable extracts from Wendy Doniger’s book,
The Hindus: An Alternative History in order to give the readers an idea of her so-called
scholarship and the academic tag attached to her erotic misinterpretations of the
sacred symbols of India. The extracts along with critical comments on them are
part of an online petition that was circulated for canvassing against her book.
The petition at one point of time fetched 11009 signatures as opposed to the meagre 3500 claimed by a group of
leftist scholars fighting for her cause. The full petition, which also has a
list of factual errors, can be accessed at:
