The Hindus (110 page)

When you log on to some of these Web sites, you can view various
puja
options, for which you can register online and pay. For instance, you can perform a “virtual
puja,
” a cartoon
puja
in which you burn electronic incense and crack open a virtual coconut. If you are unable to make it to the Ganges River for the great festival of the Kumbh Mela or just for the daily absolution of cumulative misdeeds, you log on, fill out a questionnaire (caste, gender, color, body type—slim or portly—and choice of auspicious days), and attach a passport-size photo. On the selected date, you can go to the Web site to see virtual representations of yourself (your photo superimposed on a body chosen to match what you described in the questionnaire) being cleansed in an animated image of the Ganges River. At the same time, someone who is actually (nonvirtually) there at the river dips your actual photo in the actual (nonvirtual) river, which is what makes the ritual work; it can’t all be done by mirrors.
¹⁰
Recall the Chola and Rashtrakuta kings who brought real Ganges water south to their temples. Here the worshiper is transported, photographically and electronically, to India in order to make contact with the real river.

Thus American Hindus, despite building grandiose temples here, need not replace the traditional sacred places of Hindu ritual practice with new ones in America. “The reach of the local” is extended by new media that allow ritual observance to center on those locales even at a distance. You can have
prasad
(the leftovers from the gods’ meal in the temple) delivered to you, in America, from an Indian temple, by courtesy of the Indian postal services. You can hire a Brahmin priest to perform a special sacrifice for you in Varanasi (see
www.bhawnayagya.org
). You can even have access to the real goddess Kali, the Indian Kali, at Kali Ghat in Kolkata, virtually.

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 Kipling
^lb
), 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.

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 Musical
²³
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.