Erich Neumann in his work on the ‘great mother’, which is now a Princeton classic, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955), unfortunately writes of Maa Kali as comparable with a witch: 

At the negative pole…stand all goddesses whose nature is that of the Terrible Mother: Kali of India, Gorgon of the pre-Hellenic age, and Hecate of Greece, as well as terrible Ishtar, Isis, Artemis, and innumerable goddesses of the underworld and the dead. To this group belong such negatively demonic figures as the Erinyes, Furies, and lamias, the Empusae, witches, and so on. Their plurality usually indicates that they belong to a stage of the human consciousness prior to the configurative phase in which they appear as goddesses; or else they may be figures that, superseded by the dominant gods, have regressed to a more primitive and anonymous, preconfigurative state. (Neumann n.p., epub used )

Further, in the book Neumann makes puerile observations about the Holy Mother; albeit the puerility now has been normalized by Neumann so that our understanding of the Holy Mother becomes warped to the extent that now scholars after him cannot easily decentre his observations because all such efforts at representing the Mother as she will be construed as sanitization of Kalikula:

The most terrible of the three images of Kali is not the one with the inhuman many arms, hideously squatting amid a halo of flames, devouring the entrails that form a deathly umbilical cord between the corpse’s open belly and her own gullet. Nor is it the one that, clad in the nocturnal black of the earth goddesses and adorned with the hacked-off hands and heads of her victims, stands on the corpse of Shiva—a barbaric specter whose exaggeration of horror makes her almost unreal. The third figure seems far more frightful because it is quieter and less barbarous. Here the hands strike us as human. One is extended, the other strokes the heads of the cobras almost as tenderly as Isis caressing the head of her child; and though the phallic animal breasts are repellent, they recall the similar breasts of the African mother goddess. But with its hooded head, the cobra that is twined round her waist like a girdle suggests the womb—here in its deadly aspect. This is the snake that lies coiled in the lap of the Cretan snake goddess, forms the snake robe of the Mexican goddess Coatlicue, and girds the loins of the Greek Gorgons. And the hideous bloody tiger’s tongue of the goddess is the same as hangs down flame-spewing between the tusks and bestial striped breasts of the Rangda witch, or darts from between the gnashing fangs of the Gorgons. (Neumann n.p, epub used)

Notice Neumann’s marshalling of references across continents and cultures to form a concrete but non-fluid  understanding of Maa Kali; all to bring her to conform to the unidimensional mythic trope of  “the nocturnal black of the earth goddesses” giving way to similarity with the African mother goddess. Notice also how Neumann repurposes the snake icon which is Kundalini Shakti into a cobra “in its deadly aspect”. It is not belief worthy that Neumann did not know from Jung about the iconography of the Kundalini Shakti as snake. Yet Neumann certainly was no missionary as most Hindus would understand missionaries. He was a Jungian psychoanalyst who certainly influenced generations of Indologists in American and European academia. He is perceived as so important by Princeton University that this and other books by him have been revised and republished by Princeton University Press as classics, as has been mentioned at the beginning of this blogpost. It is as it were, an effort to canonize a text which is misguided to say the least, and one has to concede that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark (Hamlet). 

The trickle-down effects of Neumann are quite insidious. The field of comparative religion becomes superficial. To compare the Holy Mother to a female fertility Goddess is absurd and meaningless though anthropologists have been doing this from the inception of that discipline. It is as absurd as measuring skull circumferences as mocked by Joseph Conrad in his novella, Heart of Darkness. The greatest error is to conflate the fertility goddess archetype with Maa Kali. This shows a lack of etymological knowledge on the part of Neumann and others before him. The textual register ‘Kali’ gestures towards the infinite, the One transcendental Being, one who is time itself and beyond time. This is a horrible misreading of our Shastras. The ‘misreading’ motif destabilizes Neumann’s entire project since through Harold Bloom, we now question whether Neumann was naïve enough to not know the etymology of Kali, or for that matter, whether he wanted to further monotheist aims. Even in the 1950s, when Neumann drafted this book,  the information that Kundalini is represented as a sleeping snake at the base of the spine was certainly available to him. Let us not forget that the German Idealists were well aware of Hindu sacred texts and Sir John Woodroffe had written extensively on Kundalini Shakti in English by the time Neumann sprang into the scene. Therefore, even contextually Neumann could not have been naïve enough to write that Maa Kali was akin to the Rangda witch or to the Medusa in any manner. We must be mentioned here that the aim here is not to demean African totemic figures, but to show how Hinduism’s most central tenet of seeing God as a woman, a Mother, is twisted through either insufficient exegesis or, through perhaps deliberate misreadings. Neumann was an avowed Zionist. To understand the nature of violence and destruction associated with monotheism, one can read Jan Assmann’s The Price of Monotheism (2003), translated into English by Robert Savage in 2010. Assmann writes that:

once it is realized that the intolerance inherent to monotheism…initially appears in a passive or martyrological guise—that is, as a refusal to accept a form of religion known to be false, and a concomitant willingness to die rather than yield an inch on this point—then the problem of “monotheism and violence” can be seen to have as much to do with enduring violence as with perpetrating it. The same can be said of hate. To say that hate came into the world with the Mosaic distinction in the form of hatred for the “pagans,” who were first recognized as despicable and excluded as such in the light of this distinction, is to tell only half the story. Of far greater importance than hatred for the excluded is the hatred nursed in their hearts by the excluded themselves. in the Babylonian Talmudic treatise sabbat 89a, the question of the meaning of the word “Sinai” is posed. “Sinai” is so called, the answer goes, because it is the mountain on which hate (sin’ah) descended to the peoples of the world. (Assmann 21, commercial PDF version used)

Thus, we need to access Neumann and his disciples from the point of view of Judaism. And Zionism, to put it mildly, is not exactly fond of non-monotheistic religions. It is entirely another matter that Hinduism is monistic and henotheistic; it is not polytheistic. 

Neumann’s kind of misinformation has a trickle-down effect within the academic study of religion. Later scholars start thinking that the central tenets of Tantra are “hideous” and the foci of worship both within Tantra and daily Hindu worship “belong to a stage of the human consciousness prior to the configurative phase in which they appear as goddesses; or else they may be figures that, superseded by the dominant gods, have regressed to a more primitive and anonymous, preconfigurative state”. Thus, pan-Indian religious rituals observed during Navratri and Durga Puja become mapped as worship of totems and taboos in the untrained mind. Hindus too are not immune to this perversion of our Dharma; Hindus fall prey to the biased narratives of scholars like Wendy Doniger, Jeffrey J. Kripal, and Hugh Urban. All three transform the patrimony of our Faith into stories, metaphors, synecdoches and ultimately, myths.

This does not mean that religious language is devoid of metaphors, synecdoches and other rhetorical devices. It means that religious language is not merely metaphoric, synecdochic and mythic. Religious language should be approached through reading strategies which were perfected by Henri de Lubac and Paul Ricoeur. I mention de Lubac and Ricoeur since Indian acts of reading through our commentators like Sayanacharya and Vijnanabhikhsu or earlier, Sri Avinavagupta will open my reading strategies to charges of religious bias. Hinduphobia is so rife that any interpretative strategy without mentioning Hans Gadamer, Jacques Derrida and even Gayatri Spivak would be open to scrutiny by neo-Kantians and logical positivists.

No wonder then, that Doniger’s own autobiography gives the game away. She calls it For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist, a very entertaining book indeed. Doniger by her own account is a storyteller, so the narratives she spun about Hinduism in her corpus is mostly her imagination running amok. To  imbibe her style in her autobiography: Doniger has a bee in her bonnet about Hinduism. With Jeffrey Kripal, we are nowhere within the economy of the sacred. He projects his self into what he thinks is scholarship: from the economy of the sacred; he jumps into the economy of the libidinal. And Hugh Urban is a product of this toxic culture created by the American Academy of Religion and other such august bodies which confer degrees on their patrons not always on the merit of their works, but sometimes as quid pro quos. Urban in his tellingly titled latest book: The Path of Desire: Living Tantra in Northeast India (2024, first Indian publication, 2026), mentions that during Ambubachi in Kamakhya, the Holy Mother is not shown to anyone. Urban construes this as a result of “conservative religious and political sentiments” characteristic “of contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse” ( Urban 156). One wants to ask Urban, unless one is a pervert, which daughter or son wants to see her mother naked and in menstrual pain? This approach to our religion is disgusting to say the least. In all fairness, the likes of Neumann have not spared even the relationship between Mother Mary and Jesus Christ. Neumann has this to say about Mother Mary and her child:

the fecundating light within her [Mother Mary] as a son born of her, and that mother-son incest forms the secret background of this spiritual experience [i.e., of Christianity]. (Neumann n.p., epub used) 

A Christian will certainly protest against this kind of assault to her Faith; similarly, it is high time that we Hindus protest against what is being propagated about our religion. One wonders what they are studying about Hinduism in Divinity schools; one is certain that they are trusting books like The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth and Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts. The harm done by political and thus, temporal powers against our Faith can be recalibrated through policy changes. But how does one stop this propaganda in the name of scholarship? Once I reviewed a book by Bihani Sarkar for Prabuddha Bharata; it was all gobbledygook presented in scholarly abracadabra. If today, in the here and now, we do not counter this scholarly representation of Hinduism; then we as a Faith community are allowing neo-Kantians and materialists of all types to hijack our future as a religious community in process. I am not discussing process theology here since then the blogpost would be more like an unending glossary of digressions. I cannot help but write that digressions, footnotes, and endnotes bring as much joy to me as they are necessary for the study of our Dharma.

Hinduphobia is very real and it is partly because of our enmeshed interest in furthering our own careers in the developed world. We hanker after endowment chairs; we hanker about getting doles from foreign governments. These last bring us fame and academic recognition within India. Very few care that they are selling their Dharma for their handfuls of silver and fifteen seconds of fame. Now we will discuss at some length how deep Hindu-hatred has entered our universities and society. Hinduphobia has given way to Hindu hatred. This is colonial mimicry at its very worst. 

Brahma Prakash who teaches performativity and theatre at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, has gone all out to attack Hinduism. In his book Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture (2026), Prakash sees fanaticism and uncouthness throughout the length and breadth of our nation. Of the Kumbh Mela, which he unfortunately equates with the “Theatre of Mass Spectacle” and goes on to write that through nomenclature alone, Yogi Adityanath’s “Hindutva Government” transformed Prayagraj “as sacred to produce authenticity of cult traditions” and turn it into “an ancient Hindu city” (Spectacle State 45). In other words, Prakash desacralizes the Kumbh mela and following Walter Benjamin, dismisses the holiest of holy Sanatana gathering as merely a drama for mass consumption. Further, he dismisses the works of scholars like Diana L. Eck who had extensively studied the sacred geography of Varanasi, as sush. He never mentions Eck but the entire focus of his book is about the degraded nature of Hinduism. In page 46 he tellingly comments that the “spectacle of the Kumbh has become a metaphor” for “massification”. This ‘massification’ leads to what Prakash terms the country now: “A theatre state” (60). He does not even spare music with religious content: he sees Hindu devotional songs which assert the primacy of our Faith as being all and only about “freezing the status quo and hardening distinctions” (117) and is just “Sonic Hindutva” (118) birthing “a new subjectivity born out of the empty noise and performance” (118). And we need not even read the chapter derisively titled “The Angry Hanuman: Anger as an Expression and Aesthetic Attitude” (pp. 154-182) where he sees “Hanuman and other Hindu deities” as infinitely angry” (155-156) and “looks more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than our monkey god” (157) . The last straw comes when he writes of the ochre, the saffron symbolizing renunciation, as just being “a sign of the times” (157). It is against this horrifying disregard for our Dharma that we need to understand the effects of Hinduphobia and brainwashing mediated through Western materialist ideologies…Prakash’s misunderstandings and misreadings of the supposed theatricality of the State needs an answer without which our youth will believe in the colonial hatred against Hinduism that this book and other books engender. Near the end of the book, he concludes that Hinduism is “[t]he religion which remains very intolerant of other religions” (212). Earlier, in p. 14, he found “the figure of Adolph Eichmann…[everywhere today]…from the judiciary to the bureaucracy and beyond” (14). It is this metanarrative of Hindu-hatred that we find on the ground by the CJP. If Prakash is teaching this at JNU, what then is the future of our nation and Dharma? The point here is that this did not begin with Prakash but with an entire eco-system radiating out of the American Academy of Religion and other woke funding agencies. 

On the other hand, we hardly talk about the late Dr. Georg Feuerstein, the late Dr. Mark S. G. Dyczkowski and the prolific Kashmiri Shaivite who respects Bede Griffiths without giving up her Trika heritage; Dr. Bettina Sharada Baumer. At the level of realpolitik, we have a lot of activism to preserve our Dharma. We have wo/men of Faith to live out our Dharma. But when it comes to accurate scholarship about our Dharma and especially Tantra, we need to critique misinformation even when they are by well-intentioned scholars. One exception to this is Dr. Christopher Wallis. He continues to present to the world Hinduism as it is. While he is a great and rigorous scholar like Dr. Edwin Bryant and Dr. Jonardon Ganeri; Dr. Wallis is also a practitioner of Trika. Yet we in India refuse to engage them for our cause in the warfare of the sovereign good against radical evil. We need women and men of the calibre of Drs. Wallis, Bryant, Ganeri and Bettina Sharada Bäumer to be widely known and taught. Otherwise, we might lose the intellectual battle to the bigots who want to destroy our Dharma from within and without. We need to counter the poison spreading in our country through many institutes of higher learning because it is our youth who is the most susceptible to anarchic propaganda which ontically severe their connection to Bharat. One can no longer study Nyaya and Navya-Nyaya without referring to Dr. Ganeri’s works but how many philosophy departments in India and abroad have Dr. Ganeri’s works in their syllabi? No wonder, our theology and philosophy seem to be stagnating. Our scholars are getting their humanities’ degrees, their philosophy degrees and their social sciences’ degrees without even knowing the works of Dr. David Frawley; leave alone Drs. Wallis and Bryant. Very few in India have even heard of Vijnanabhikshu or, for that matter, the late Dr. T.S. Rukmani. 

Our students are made to parrot Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek. The UGC conducts examination to various tenure track teaching positions where future professors are quizzed about Lacan, Derrida, Spivak and Zizek. Instead, they should be asked about the contributions of Sri Avinavagupta to philosophy and aesthetics; they should be asked about the corpus of Dr. Alfred Hiltebeitel. For instance, our students are not being taught to question the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure in regard to his work on the signifier and the signified in linguistics. We are teaching de Saussure disregarding how our seers took an entirely opposite view from Saussure’s theory of arbitrary relations between the signifier and the signified. I had written on the fallacy of Saussure being taught at greater length in my essay The Refutation of Saussure’s Signification Theory as a Foundation for Interreligious Dialogue in Indian Catholic Matters. I have shown there how Catholic higher educational institutions are teaching Saussure’s theory without realising it is opposed to the Catholic Church’s own patrimony of Faith. We are, as a nation, obsessed with all the wrong people --- Saussure, Doniger, Lacan and Zizek. Add to this shameful roster of names which we celebrate at every seminar and webinar, we must add the name of that paedophile who could not counter the charges against him brought in connection with the Epstein files. We are speaking of Noam Chomsky who pretended for decades to be the gatekeeper of the world’s conscience, all just to peddle his own work in the global woke market. Unless we start serious studies and overhaul our education system to train students in true Indic knowledge, we might open ourselves to intellectual annihilation in the coming years. 

The current central government has introduced a compulsory paper on Indian Knowledge Systems in colleges, but what I find after attending national webinars is sad. Speaker after speaker say we had better technology in the past, better medicines in the past, in short, we glorify a past which should not be the aim of studying Indian Knowledge Systems. If AI can solve the Reimann Hypothesis and 700 similar problems in mathematics within a few days, then how can everything in our past be solely good? I mentioned process theology earlier: rather we should teach our students why we must study historiography; why we need to return to glossing our sacred scriptures and why there is a need to understand how the nine planets encountered in astrology are not literally the nine planets as we know them. Dr. David Frawley has written on this extensively. We need to teach all our students whether they are studying science, commerce, or arts, how to see the inherent dialectics of materialist biases in say, subaltern historiography. No serious historian is now bothered with E. H. Carr or G.M.Trevelyan ; but they blindly buy into the archaeology of knowledge that Romila Thapar has woven over many decades, slowly contaminating Indian historiography with the poisons of materialism and nihilism. Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar’s narrations are strangely silent on wrongs perpetrated against Hindus. For, instance what happened in Moplah and Marichjhapi and to Anandamargis are never told from the vantage point of Hindus to this day. 

The antidote is not to harp on the differences between ‘itihasa’ and history. That might just be a reductionist tactic to avoid the problems of history and historiography that we as a nation must reckon with. Rather we must ferret out spurious history and learn from Alf Hiltebeitel, mentioned earlier, how to study the Mahabharata including the controversies of its timeline. The study of Indian Knowledge Systems should be to understand how for example, tribal beliefs are integral to Bharat and Sanatana Dharma; they are not beyond the six classical systems of Indic philosophy. They do not worship demons or continuously perform black magic on others. They are as Hindu as can be unlike what the new Netflix series, Shaque, shows. Maa Kali in her fierce forms, as Maa Tara, Maa Neela Saraswati and Maa Dhumavati have their origins in the jungles of ancient eastern India. The first and some of the greatest practitioners of Tantra come from West Bengal, Assam and Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. These Mothers (‘Matrikas’) were essentially worshipped  by tribal communities. Indian Knowledge Systems should teach students this and not merely who wrote what and when. It astonishes me that students, devotees, and scholars do not see the various schools of Indic philosophy as one integral whole; not piecemeal as they are taught. For the convenience of teaching philosophy, it is important to distinguish one school from the other. For all practical reasons, all the Indic schools lead to the same conclusion --- self-knowledge and mukti. Carvaka’s hedonism and rejection of the transcendental is not within Hinduism. 

While we cannot agree with the Buddhist concepts of dependent origination, no soul (‘anatta’), and an erasure of God qua Brahman qua Shakti, we do agree that the telos of our existence is nirvana and mukti. Here I cannot get into the differences between nirvana and mukti even though as I stated earlier, I love digressions. Similarly, our Faith does not allow us to agree to the Jain views of anekantavada which Adi Shankaracharya rejected for being philosophically untenable, of Karma clinging to our souls and of the idea of no Ishwara; we do nonetheless see the similarities between Jain ford-makers with Samkhya Yogis, and appreciate the Jain effort to have mukti from samsara. In short, the teleologies of both Buddhism and Jainism are compatible with the Hindu worldview to an extent, but we need to be cautious about our boundaries of Faith informed by our Vedas, Agamas, and Tantras. The point of the study of Indian Knowledge systems is to preserve our heritage which has to sensitize our youth about the pitfalls of logical positivism, materialist ideologies leading to violence, the great bluff that Western scholars of Hinduism are pulling off with the aid of Ivy League Presses and spurious historiography which insists that there was no concept of Bharat when the ‘janapadas’ and ‘Mahajanapadas’ were coming into existence. We need them to understand that what most mean by Yoga is Hatha Yoga and not real Yoga. We must teach them to distinguish New Age fads from our classical traditions. This requires returning to our indigenous roots and bringing contemporary science into dialogue with our ancient heritage. New Age zealots must know that meditation is helpful for the average person. But large cohorts have shown that it is harmful to mentally ill people till they achieve euthymia leading to the remission of disease.

One more example will suffice: we know empirically that mental ill health arises from biological, psychological, and social stressors. Yet we miss the point that Arjuna suffered a mental breakdown bordering on panic attack in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The entire Bhagavad Gita is therapeutic in the sense that Boethius more crudely calls ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’. The Bhagavad Gita is the primary text of Indian medical humanities. Our students are caught up with interdisciplinary studies between medicine and the arts and yet they are oblivious to the fact that the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is about a man who is terrified about performing his duties (‘swadharma’). The entire Bhagavad Gita then is talk-therapy in process. The sessions between Sri Krishna and Arjuna get extraordinarily intense.

This knowledge that our ancient texts and collective traditions are still relevant today and need updated commentaries to accommodate our zeitgeist, is what Indian Knowledge Systems should be about. How will one counter Saussure without reading Andre Padoux’s Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras? Or, for that matter Neumann? We cannot wish Hinduphobia away. We need to counter it with scholarship which is more holistic. We need to draw insights from de Lubac and Ricoeur mentioned earlier, not because we do not have our own hermeneutics; but because the sub-specialty of interpretation studies have moved on. And frankly, we have a lot of catching up to do within Hindu studies. Unless we have this intellectual humility, we will never even have a Religious Studies’ Academy rooted in India. Unless we have such a Religious Academy rooted in our Shastras in India, we will keep ceding the religious narratives to those whose aims are to destroy Bharat from within. 

These are initial thoughts for a bigger project on understanding the Holy Mother, the Ten Mahavidyas and reconfiguring them within the ethnography and living traditions of Tantra.