Book: Invading the Sacred

Product Description

This book is an important and scholarly historical narrative regarding an ongoing debate about the portrayal of Indian culture in the American academia. With contributions from over a dozen scholars from around the world, it examines how poor standards of scholarship and peer-review in India studies and Hinduism studies have lead to narrow, distorted and essentialized interpretations of Indian religions and their icons and ideas. Adopting a politically impartial stance, this book, the product of an intensive multi-year research project, uncovers the invisible networks behind biased and sub-standard scholarship. It narrates the Indian Diaspora's challenges to such scholarship, and documents how those who dared to speak up - including academic scholars critical of such scholarship - have been branded as “dangerous”. The book hopes to provoke serious debate. For example:

· How do Hinduphobic works resemble earlier American literature depicting non-whites as dangerous savages needing to be civilized by the West?

· Are India's internal social problems going to be managed by foreign interventions in the name of human rights?

· How do power imbalances and systemic biases affect the objectivity and quality of scholarship?

· What are the rights of practitioner-experts in “talking back” to academicians?

· What is the role of India's intellectuals, universities and policymakers in fashioning an authentic and enduring response?