There are two fundamental reasons why I not only wrote this column but wrote it the way

I did. The first, of course, was to invite Jeffrey Kripal for a discussion: not on his
knowledge of Bengali, not about the accuracy of his interpretation of texts, not even
about the scientificity or otherwise of psychoanalysis as a discipline. The issues have
deliberately been framed in more general terms, so that one can discuss whether what
Wendy and her children produce could, under any charitable interpretation, at all be
considered as knowledge. Whether or not he participates in such a debate will tell one
much regarding his own convictions about what he is doing in the academy.
There is a second reason, which is far more important in my eyes. Many, many Indian
intellectuals have often repeated the western claims about our traditions. At the beginning
of the last century, this illustrious list was headed by Raja Rom Mohan Roy. Today,
many other some less well-known, some better-known have joined the parade. In the
discussions of the last few weeks, we have had some people (like Gaurang Bhatt, for
example), who use western atheistic arguments to challenge the Indian traditions. Well,
I have accepted the challenge: I was a student of the Natural sciences, I do believe that
the research I am doing is scientific in the best sense of the term. Precisely *because* of
this, I do not accept that my sisters (or any one elses, for that matter) dedication in going
to temples, having the Archakaas do the puja by reciting Aashtottaramas or
Sahasranaamams in such temples, exhibit either superstition, blind belief or stupidity. I
am willing to defend my point of view on strictly rational grounds, not by giving an
interpretation of their beliefs but by putting across interesting ideas about western and
Indian cultures.
On this column, we are not restricted to discussing Kripals writings, which we were on
his. I have cast my net wider because I think the time has come for us to re-examine
many of our pet-beliefs in a different light. Whether my aim will succeed or not, I do not
know. At least you should know that I am not waiting for Jeffrey Kripal to grace our
discussions.
Friendly greetings

If you or anyone else wants to get an idea about the kind of project I have now been
working on for nearly two decades, an e-mail would suffice. Thanks to Arun Gupta, the
immature version of the project is now available as a Word document. Please keep in
mind that it is the first hesitant formulation (I have not got down to writing a newer
version as yet) of a project, which has so far resulted in one book and another (whose
final version is being drafted) that, I hope, will come out soon. The *only* obligation that
you or any other interested person is under, if you want this document, is this: please
write back your responses, if and when you have any. Be kind when you react: it is an
immature version; be critical in your comments: I still stand behind much of it, even if I
were to formulate many things differently.
No, I am not pleading the cause of any kind of relativism. This is a bit complex to say in

a few lines and yet make myself understood. Let me try nonetheless. In the African case
you speak of, there are three issue involved: (a) some *kind* of a description of what you
see; (b) some kind of *evaluation* that you presumably want to make; and (c) the issue
of whether you contribute to human knowledge by doing either of the above.
Ad (a). To keep the discussion simple, let us call these kinds of descriptions facts. Are
your facts a contribution to human knowledge? In one sense they are; the way any
description of anything by any body is a fact and thus knowledge. One needs, and one
has, a way of not wanting to call every piece of fact as knowledge. Hence, we can
reformulate the issue: does it contribute towards building a scientific theory of cultural
differences? Do your observations in some African country tell us what *makes* their
drinking habits and body decorations into a cultural difference? And how these and other
differences allow us to say what the African culture is? In other words, not every fact,
because it is a fact about people from another culture, is interesting from the point of
view of building a scientific theory.
Ad (b). The evaluations you make is interesting only because it might tell you or
someone else about the evaluative standards you use. Unless ones study is about such
standards, it is pretty uninteresting what or how exactly you evaluate.
The point of trying to understand people from other cultures is not to compare or evaluate
them, but to understand why and what interesting ways we are different. Comparisons
and evaluations are mostly uninteresting even at an individual level. (X is more
intelligent, or more handsome, or more rich than Y. So what?) How could they then be
interesting at a cultural level?

Regarding your first point. Of course, there is a difference between being born in some
culture and trying to understand the same while coming from another. But that does not
mean that one cannot understand a culture unless one is born into it. It is like saying that
the only way to understand neurosis is by being a neurotic oneself. Obviously, I cannot
buy it: why can I not understand Christianity without being a Christian? If I cannot, even
a process such as religious conversion would be impossible. History would be impossible
too, as well as the possibility of social sciences. One needs to give extremely good
reasons why one cannot understand a culture without being born in it.
Regarding your second point. I think you have *misread* me. Here is what I say: I do
*not* accept that reciting Aashtottaramas exhibit(s) superstition, blind belief or
stupidity. That is to say, I am saying *just the opposite* of what you think I am saying.
You had me worried there for a moment, you know!

Personally I was wondering how long it would be before this question came up. I am glad
it has. Welcome to the discussion LittleBearBhakta!

You ask: Is this truly a case of cultural forgetfulness? Dr. Balu, is it possible that by the
time you were a teenager, the post-colonial "Victorian" ethos was already so much a part
of you that you HAD to be ashamed? In other words, doesnt your shame say more about
your westernization than it does about Indian mores and religion?
The questions are complex; they are wrongly posed; there is at least one right answer.
And it will be longish. Here goes.
1. I *did not say* I was ashamed. I said I was *embarrassed*. (I said my brother was
ashamed after reading Rajiv Malhotras article.) A very important difference - a
difference that makes a difference. The feeling of embarrassment was tied to the
explanation: it made me and others appear *foolish*. It embarrassed us by trivialising
our experience. The embarrassment was also partly tied to the inability to say why this
description was wrong.
2. In many cultures, especially in the Indian case, it is important to understand that stories
are *not* explanations. They are neither true nor false because they do not describe
factual events; they do not claim that they do either. Unlike the Bible, the Puranas do
not have to be true or known to be true for them to play the role they do in the Indian
culture. The Indian myths neither allegorize virtues nor are they disguised histories. In
other words, the presuppositions of your question (common ones in the western
scholarship since the Enlightenment) are *false* and based on ignorance about the genre
of the myth and the roles they play. (I can only assert these claims having argued them
elsewhere.)
3. As an example, consider a group performing a rain dance. When you ask them why,
in all probability you will get to hear a story. The most frequent explication (whether
given by anthropologists or from philosophers or whoever) that one gets to hear is this:
this group is providing an explanation about the performance of their rain dance. Assume
for a moment that this is indeed the case and see what happens as a result: you are
transforming the members of that group into a bunch of idiots. Is one to really think that
*they believe* that their jumping up and down in some specific manner is the *cause* of
the rains? Do you really think that if they were such fools, their culture could have
survived at all? Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his reflections on Sir James Frazers The
Golden Bough, posed the same issue in the following way: why then is the rain dance
performed *only* during the rainy season? Perhaps, you would do well to think
Wittegensteins question through.
4. Let me sketch you a context where the story about Shiva and his Linga would be told.
Imagine, just to anticipate a point I will shortly make, a *family gathering* in India, and
a *child* asks this question: Amma (mother), why is it that Shiva is worshipped (done
puja to) only in the form of Lingam, Brahma not at all, whereas Vishnu has so many
different temples with so many avataaras? The mother, assuming she was at home with
her traditions, would tell her the *exact same story* you cite. She would perhaps use
formulations like Shiva mixed with the wives of the sages or some such thing. If the
child wants to know what this mixing

entails, the mother would continue without embarrassment or without being perturbed:
you will know about it, when you grown up. If the child did not know what lingam
meant, the mother would say what your brother has between his legs. No one in the
audience would either feel shame or embarrassment with *this* story, my friend. I have
been both the listener and the bard in my *own family* on many such occasions that I
am pretty sure that any number of others would resonate with this sketch. In other words,
there is *no* cultural forgetfulness involved, any more than not knowing that linga
*also* means penis.
5. It is important to keep in mind the question to which this story is an answer: why is
Shiva worshipped in the form of Lingam, unlike Vishnu? It tells us how something came
to pass, provides intelligibility to doing the puja of lingam. The most important point here
is this: *this story is not censored* in the Indian traditions. This dovetails with an
extremely important question that Venki raised in his post (#43) on The Tantric Truth of
the Matter: If indeed there exists a paradox between the Bengali texts and the
translation, how do you explain it? Why are the "unspeakable" secrets acceptable in
Bengali but not in English translation? Why censorship only in English? I leave it to
you, my LittleBearBhakta, to ponder on these questions. I cannot hope to provide you an
answer in the confines of this post.
6. In other words, there is no cultural forgetfulness involved here. If the mother tells this
story without shame or embarrassment, the Victorian values are not involved in this
situation. What are involved are questions like: what are stories in the Indian culture?
How are they told? What do they do? Etc. To do cultural hermeneutics, one needs to do
this *kind* of research *before* writing books.
7. About the possibility that I was already westernized by the time I became a teenager.
Even this question is wrongly posed. I am not claiming that there is some authentic
Indian culture, which lives somewhere or lived somewhen in India. Such a culture, even
if it exists or existed, does not concern me. I am interested in the Indian culture as it
*exists* today: including the aftermath of the Islamic and the British colonization. I am
child of *this* culture, and this is the one I am trying to understand. The Indian
Diaspora in the US is *as much* Indian as some peasant living somewhere in a far-off
village in India; they both belong to the Indian culture. Neither this peasant nor the
Indians in the US is more Indian than the other. My problem is not: who is the
authentic Indian or what is the authentic Indian culture? My question is about the 21st
century India, and its present culture, which has absorbed many things, adapted many
things from other cultures in many different ways. It is this set of Indian traditions that
interests me. Was I westernized by the time I was a teenager? Who knows, or even who
cares? What would it mean to say that I was authentically Indian or that I was quasiwesternized? Surely, the issue is not about some kind of purity here. What else is it?
Consequently, when I speak of my past, I speak of the past of those who were brought up
like me. If we were all partly westernized, then the culture I am talking about is this
partly westernized Indian culture. An age long gone by, if it ever existed, does not give
me sleepless nights; what does is what is happening now. Thus, when I say I want to
understand Indian culture, I am not harking back to some golden age, my friend, but

India as I know it today. To understand this India, I need to understand how her traditions
are *lived* today, not what they perhaps meant one thousand years ago.
8. Therefore, let me sum up my answers to your questions. I was not ashamed. The story
you cite is known to many, but it does not embarrass them. It is irrelevant whether I was
partly westernized or not. My embarrassment tells something about my culture (i.e.
what stories are, etc), something about the inability to answer the trivialization, and so on.
I hope this answer is sufficient to provoke a thoughtful answer from your side
In a way, and in some sense, I do agree with you that ones acquaintance with a culture is
useful in writing about that culture. It is not sufficient, of course (think of the nonsense
written by most anthropologists during the last 100 years on other cultures); nor are there
any compelling reasons to believe that it is a sine qua non to understanding cultures.
However, I am not challenging the claim that the context of the person might be relevant
to producing knowledge.
However, the reason why I want to bend the stick the other way has to do with another
question that often, not always, underlies this debate. That is about who the authentic
Hind or the authentic Indian is. The greatest strength of our culture lies in the fact that
this is a non-question as far as our traditions are concerned. Even though I have now
spent nearly as many years outside India as I have spent inside, I do not feel an outsider.
Nor am I considered as one by the members my family, for instance, most of whom have
never left India in their lives.
This is not just a question of my family alone. Outside of Bangalore, there is a swamiji
with an ashram and all that. People from different parts of India come to have his
darshan and he gives upadesha almost every day. Most people do not know his name,
and he is simply called the Belgian Swamiji. He is from Belgium, came to India about
two decades ago, and set up his ashram there. The Indians, who come to visit him do not
consider him any less of a swamiji because he is a Belgian, and me any more of an
Indian because of my looks. It does not make any sense, in such a context, to ask the
questions: who is the authentic Indian? Me or the Belgian swamiji? Both of us are
Indians; both to ourselves (I suppose) as well as to the others. It is this strength that we
should not sacrifice, when we challenge people from other cultures when they study us
and write their tracts.

It is always a pleasure to read those who call a spade a spade. Invariably, the issues get
formulated in such a way so that a good discussion ensues. If I have any complaints about
your post, it is that you are still a bit unclear. I will come to that, but first things first.
1. Your ire focuses on the issue that I usurp the right to speak for the community. Let me
lay this fear to rest: I am *not* speaking for the community. To the question, Who
speaks for the Indian traditions? my reply is simple: *anyone, everyone, whoever feels
like.* (Of course, I do not consider the question very sensible, but that is a side-issue for

the moment.) I have said as much in my posts on this column (e.g. #26 and #31) and I
wish you had read them before indicting me.
Having said this much, let me also say that my discussion with Jeffrey Kripal and you is
not about the moral right to speak in the name of the community but whether such
speeches *constitute knowledge*. In other words, I *evaluate* what someone says about
the Indian traditions for its veracity and it is here that I find Kripal falling way short. And,
unless some arguments are forthcoming, I am afraid, so do you.
2. If I understand you well, this is what you are saying in your third paragraph: In ancient
India, there was a fertility cult; our ancestors *knew* that it was a fertility cult; Lingam
was a symbol for the phallus then; it continues to be one even when may millions are
ignorant of this now; and that the Modern Indians attitude to sex is inhibiting because of
which they do not see the symbolism.
To keep the contrast between us stark, here is what I say: Lingam is not a symbol of
anything or anybody. Lingam is *how* Shivas puja is done (as against, say, how we do
puja to Vishnu) by the Indians. You tell me that this *factual claim* is wrong and that by
saying what I have just said, I project my present to explain the past. Very well.
2.1. In the first place, I want to draw your attention to the issue that I am not providing
any interpretation, whereas *you are*. You are the one who tells me that I doing
something *other than* doing puja to Shiva, viz., I am doing puja to a symbol that, in
its turn, belongs to a fertility cult. Therefore, I am justified in asking you why you think
so. Why did our ancestors take to doing puja to a symbol instead of saying straightaway
that they do puja to the penis, irrespective of whose penis it is? It could not be because
they were prudish or repressed. You point out that, in fact, they were not and that *we
are*. If women did move about bare-breasted then, and we gave the world the Kama
Sutra, surely they would not have been inhibited in saying that they worshipped penis?
Why did they have to invent a symbolism for the penis, deny that it was merely a penis
and cook up the utterly fantastic story that it was the Shiva linga? If the modern day
Indians were to cook this story up, one could understand it within *your* framework. Yet
you say, most Indians do not even *know* they are worshipping a symbol, whereas or
ancestors did. Well, my friend, you need to make this plausible to me and to the others:
why ever did our ancestors take to symbolisms, cook up fantastic camouflaging stories
that hide the true meaning, instead of simply saying what I say? Why this devious route
and not a direct insistence that one worships penis irrespective of its form or size?
Until you come with a satisfying story that explains the deviousness of our ancestors, I
think I am justified in saying this: we do what our ancestors did too, i.e. do puja to Shiva
in the form of the lingam. Because this simple story does not satisfy you and you need the
complicated talk of fertility cults and symbolisms, I am justified in my scepticism until
that stage when you come up with a satisfactory story. At this moment, no one has; I do
not believe you will either. But I am and remain open. (You will, of course, understand
that I am adopting a scientific and rational attitude here: when two explanations of the
same phenomenon exist, one chooses the simpler to the more complicated. They call

this the Occams razor argument.)

2.2. In the subsequent two paragraphs, you talk about the Greek, the Nordic and the
Indian mythologies to make a point, which escapes me. Is it to say, to cite you, incest,
rape, human sacrifice, and so on are all presented painted over by some brush in antiquity
that sought to depict these things in kinder light.? If it is, I face two problems. (a) One
problem is a carryover from the previous one: why did they need to? I mean, why a
kinder light? You need to have some theory of the growth and development of human
civilizations to make the claim you do. I await the reading of this theory. Again, I know
of no such theory, which is even remotely interesting but I am willing to give you the
benefit of doubt: perhaps you have succeeded in doing something that others before you
have failed in doing. (b) Why do you assume what you have to prove? I mean, you
*assume* that myths are disguised histories: these early societies practised incest, rape
and human sacrifice and that the myths spoke of them indirectly. Why did people from
these societies take to writing about these actions, which must have been rather
common those days if one were to follow the drift of your argument, in the form of
myths instead of simply writing histories of their own cultures? Why the disguise again?
In other words, since you are claiming that myths are oblique narrations of social
practices, you need to make plausible why *all human cultures* (as you put it) take to
such oblique narrations? I have briefly touched on what I think stories are on this very
thread (#28), so it is up to you to show where I am wrong and why you are right.
3. In your last paragraph, you invite us to realize the immensity of the deception practiced
by Ramakrishna if, as Kripal is made to claim in your story, the saint turned out to be
paedophile: If he was, think of the magnitude of deception that has taken place to keep
this fact from being revealed to the public. Kripals evidence comes from the Bengali
texts, which have been reprinted in their millions. Who is practising deception on whom?
It is not at all obvious to me what you want to say.
4. There are, finally, your claims about the static nature of Indian society (and culture?)
and the Indian tendency to transform human beings into gods. I simply take these
statements for what they are: table-thumping and flag-waving. Should you want to defend
these positions with arguments, I would be willing to enter into a discussion where I will
defend an *opposite* point of view. But I await your arguments on this score.

(a) To do justice to the complexity of your first question, it requires more than a single
post. Consequently, you will have to be satisfied with a brief answer. Is there a wannabe
Indianism in our attempts to understand our tradition? I am not sure: may be there is,
may be there is not. Of course, the question is why is this relevant? Whatever the motives
or the contexts of any individual writer why should that be an argument for either
accepting or rejecting or even putting his opinions on hold? The way I see it, the nature of
the phenomenon is of another level altogether: I think that the intellectuals from India
will increasingly be confronted with the question of what it is to be an Indian. There are
many reasons for it: the political, the social, the economic as well as cultural. In fact, I
think that this is not merely an Indian phenomenon but an Asian one. Today, the centre of

gravity (in economic, geo-political terms) is slowly shifting towards Asia, a non-white,
non-Christian culture. That is why you and I (and many others like us) are discussing
these issues passionately on Sulekha. To us, these issues are not abstract; it is very much
a part of our daily life (in the appropriate sense of the term). When I was started working
on these issues some two decades ago, I could count the number of interested people on
the fingers of my one hand. Today, two decades later, look at what is happening: we are
discussing, with a passion born out of our daily experiences, what appears from the
outside as *esoteric* issues. But it is not esoteric to us, is it? I think the scale, depth, and
the intensity of these discussions (both in India and outside) transcend any wannabe
Indian motive.
(b) If you want the document I wrote some 17 years ago, all you need to do is send me an
e-mail. I will send the document by return post. This applies to everyone, and not just
you.
(c) Is Sulekha planning on collecting my posts? I do not know, I suspect it will not
happen for some time. Thanks for your interest in any case: who knows, one day it might
just happen!

It is a bit difficult to figure out how to answer your questions without writing a long
disquisition. However, let me try.
1. The first point is the difficulty involved in specifying what the real meaning of an
experience consists of. Asking an insider would not help us here: the insider may or may
not know what the real meaning of his/her own experience is or even how to go about
putting it in words.
2. Assuming that the first problem somehow gets solved, the second problem lies in the
*multiplicities* of such meanings: if people differ on what any particular experience
means to them (for instance, what doing Puja to Ganesha means to my brother does not
mean the same to my sister), which should we choose and for what reason? This problem
is virtually unsolvable, especially when you take the interpretations of the past into
consideration as well.
3. This is not an insider/outsider issue. If we emphasize the real meaning of lived
experience, it confronts the insiders as well as the outsiders because neither will have
a privileged access to the meanings of *other* lived experiences. (I might *assume* that
I have a privileged access to my brothers experience. But this is a just an assumption. By
the same token, Jeffrey Kripal might argue that he has spoken to thousands of people and
that, therefore, *assumes* he has a more privileged access than I have. Both our
assumptions are just that; unjustified assumptions. In my view, they are also
unjustifiable.)
4. If we have to get out of this quandary, we need to do something radical with respect to
what counts as knowledge and what does not in the field of social sciences. My

response has so far been to *accept* the best criteria of rationality and scientificity that
the study of the history and philosophy of (natural) sciences has brought forth. Not only
do I believe that it is possible to build theories in the field of humanities that answer
these criteria; in fact, I claim *I already have*. In my book, I have developed hypotheses
about religion that can be tested the way you test any hypothesis in, say, physics. (Of
course, I also have an explanation why it had not happened so far. But that is another
issue.)
5. In the book I am now currently writing on ethics (it develops an understanding of the
Indian ethics and contrasts that with the western normative ethics), the same attitude is
present. As far as I can see, my theory about ethics can be tested in exactly the same
way as well.
6. With respect to what stories are to a culture. This is a question of having some kind of
a theory about cultural differences, the ways in which, say, the Indian culture differs
from the western one. Accounting these differences will include, inter alia, such issues as
the role of stories in that culture. One of the crucial tests for evaluating your claims about
any culture, including the Indian culture, is the extent to which your theory makes
*sense* of the experiences of the Indians without denying, distorting, or transforming
those experiences. To come back to my favourite example: such theories about the Indian
culture must do what Galileos theory did. Not tell us we are hallucinating or wrong about
our *experiences* (as though the experiences could be false!), but show us *why* we
experience the world the way we do.
7. Such a stance places a high *demand* on an intellectual: not everyone who writes
about some culture or another is *capable* of producing knowledge. Stands to reason.
Not everyone who studies physics is capable of doing research in physics either. The
exact same thing is applicable to the humanities and the social sciences. Wendy and her
children, in this sense, are not producing knowledge just by reading some books, going to
India on extended holidays, and picking up some random nonsense and say that it is an
interpretation of Indian culture. There is a difference between being erudite (or
appearing to be one) and producing knowledge. My quarrel with Jeffrey Kripal, as I make
clear in my column, is whether he *has* produced knowledge. I have argued he has not
and that he cannot. It is up to him to show that contrary is the case. As you no doubt
know, he has not.
Beloo, I do not know whether this answers your question or not. I hope it does. If it does
not, please do not hesitate to say what you disagree with. And, when you do so, may I
request you to just address me as Balu and not add titles to my name? As I told someone
sometime ago, I know I am ancient and ready to be a fossil in a few years time. Until
then, please let me feel merely old! Adding titles remind me uncomfortably of the future
that awaits me!

(a) At the moment, the dispute is not about the *correct* answer as yet. If you were to ask
100 knowledgeable Indians about the thondam of Ganesha, you are probably likely to

get 50 different answers, all of which are satisfactory in some sense or the other. From
this situation, you can go one of the two ways. One is what *appears* to us as the more
familiar way: which of the 50 answers is the right one? The second is to ask ourselves the
questions: why do all these answers appear acceptable? What does this tell about what a
question is and what answers are in the Indian traditions? In other words, we take the
facts that our cultures present us with as problems that require solutions.
(b) Why do we want to do this? It is because how we understand our culture is thickly
overlaid with what other cultures have told us about ourselves. Consequently, we
misunderstand ourselves. We need to do research and yet more research in order to
understand ourselves and the others. What is taking place on this board is an attempt to
create a space for research and not prematurely close it, as it has happened so far.
(c) You ask: Will there be a situation where this body of knowledge steers itself beyond
academic doubt? If you mean by this, whether a situation will come, where this study
can be called scientific, my answer is yes.

You begin your post #84 by speaking about dissent and being an Indian. As far as I
know, no one has been asked to prove his/her identity on this column, any more than any
labelling has taken place. (Besides, as Karna #85 points out, how do check the identity
of a poster on a board like this?) I wish you would not make these unfortunate
insinuations any more.
1. Regarding the point about you meandering (as you put it) through mythology. I still
have not got the point from this post. In my previous post, I asked you whether the point I
thought you were making is also the point you wished to make. If it was, I had raised two
issues. You have not tackled them.
2. You say: Balu questioned me about phallic symbolism. Why did the ancients not say
they worshipped a phallus directly, he asks? As I pointed out, phallic symbolism is a part
of most early religions. You do realise, I hope, that you are not answering my question.
You may point out whatever symbolism that takes your fancy. If you want a rational
discussion, however, you need to tell me (a) what the problem is; (b) what your solution
to that problem is; (c) what arguments you proffer in defence of the solution; (d) what
evidence there is for either the answer or the arguments. Simply providing a list of
interpreted sentences does not constitute arguments. I still await answers to my
questions.
3. I am not sure I understand you properly, when you say: The lingam and the yoni (the
curved shape around the lingam) in Hindu depictions represent sexual union and the
depictions are stylized. I do not see *how* this could *represent* sexual union. The
lingams head is in the *wrong* position to have a sexual congress: if it depicts anything
at all, one will have to say that it shows a penis growing out of the vagina and *not*
entering it. (Perhaps, it represents the penis envy, to use Freuds terms, of the female?)

4. You end that paragraph thus: Sex must have seemed as mysterious to the ancients (as
it does now to the moderns) and early cultures display the different attempts made to
capture its spirit. In all honesty, I do not know what you are talking about. What *is*
mysterious about sex? Are you talking about the modern obsession with what is called
sexuality, in which case this *is* purely a modern phenomenon, or are you talking
about sex? If anything, sex must have been the most natural thing to the ancients: as
normal as anything else, even less mysterious than the scarcities and bounties (of crops)
they encountered in their world. May I ask why you claim sex was mysterious to the
Ancients and how you argue for this? Equally, what is the spirit of sex that they tried to
capture? The mystery about the state and size of the penis?
5. You go on to say: We make gods men (and give them a birthplace), and make men
gods. Balu asked for evidence of this statement. I did not ask for evidence and besides,
as your next sentence says, you are providing evidence either: If he read between the
lines, the meaning would have been apparent. But let me be more explicit. Surely,
providing evidence is not the same as saying what you mean! And then you go on
about the ignorance of the masses and so on. I miss the relevance of this paragraph.
In sum, your post #84 does not contribute to any discussion in anyway. I *must* agree
with Karnas assessment (#85), I am afraid.
In your #95, you continue with a mode of writing, which is almost prohibitive of any
rational discussion. Let me show you what I mean.
6. In the tree of logic you want us to visualize, you say, whether fact or fiction,
mythologies/scriptures (your words, not mine) are either illustrative or non-illustrative
(whatever this phrase means) of a culture. Very well. And then you say: If nonillustrative of culture, there should be no argument that any depictions or representations
demean a particular culture, since it is non-representational by assumption. Who is
saying that Ramayana is demeaning the Indian culture? Or the Puranas? What does it
mean to say that the Bible is illustrative of a particular culture? What are you talking
about? When you want to do Logic, my friend, it is advisable that you are not so woolly
when you write. Ambiguities and equivocations will *not* provide you with theorems;
they merely provide a reader like me with headaches! Like this one: we come to the
conclusion that, all mythology/scriptures, whether based on facts or fiction/fictionalized,
are inherently representational or culturally illustrative. Am I to assume that
representational means culturally illustrative? Is this applicable only to
mythology/scriptures or to all fictions? Is it limited to the Ancients or can I include
Star Wars as well? Why one and not the other, and, if both, what is representational or
culturally illustrative in the Star Wars saga and whose culture is being represented
and why do you say so? Please, S B, instead of making sweeping statements that say very
little, could you focus on answering questions?
7. You say: Taking positions like, this is neither true nor false, other than being a cop
out, is to distance oneself from actually exploring the complex themes, the dramas played

out, the pain and exultation behind the tales. Well, I have *argued* in my publications
that stories are neither true nor false (because they are models, as the word means in
Model Theory). If you disagree, I would like to see some *arguments* and not just handwaving.
8. You also say: The pattern Ive noticed in this column is this: deny the truth and
support the fiction. And what is your truth? Again, I maintain, to take a position of
neither true nor false, needs no explanation, is the sort of wash that we should guard
against. Why is it wash or why should we guard against? You ask rhetorically what you
have been doing. I do not know. But I can tell you what you have *not* been doing:
*provide arguments*. You can seek all the meanings you want from your
scriptures/mythologies but, please, do not pontificate. Whether a sap or a wise man,
neither characterization moves me either way. But I do dislike people preaching sermons.

The questions you are raising are much trickier than they appear at first sight. There are
several issues, none of which is very clear to any of us: the notion of meaning, the
structure of experience, the idea of multiple realities, and so on. Many gifted people
from all over the world are struggling (and have struggled) to say what all these things
are. I do not think that we will be able to find satisfactory answers on this thread for these
large issues. Therefore, let me scale them down to the proportion of this thread and the
articles that have generated my column.
1. Taking the best examples of knowledge we have (which are the theories from the
natural sciences), we would like to know whether there can be knowledge of cultures and
people. If it is knowledge, we would also like to know whether they could satisfy the
criteria of rationality, inter-subjectivity, scientificity, etc. There are two sub-issues here, as
they are relevant to us.
1.1. Assuming that our theories in Physics are not false, would there be gravitational
force in the Cosmos (or on our planet) whether or not there was a theory about it? This is
the question about the truth and objectivity of our theories. If we say yes, I do not see
how one can say the opposite, then the truth or falsity of, say, Aristotelian theory is *not*
dependent on the consumer of that theory. Of course, once upon a time, people believed
it was true but this belief does not *make* Aristotles theory true. (In Western Europe,
people once believed that witches not only exist, but that they also had sexual intercourse
with the Devil. There were eye witnesses, who provided graphic descriptions of the
sexual organ and sexual prowess of the Devil. We would be hard put to call it true today
in Europe or in India around the same time, irrespective of what these people thought
then.) That human beings believe different stories to be true, which later turn out to be
false, does not make truth relative to an audience. What it does is to make the belief-inthe-truth-of-a-theory relative to the consumer. This is the issue about the objectivity of
theories. That is: could we have theories about human beings and cultures that are
objective in this sense? I think so. That is why the discussion with Wendy and her
children: they are not producing *knowledge*.

1.2. Of course, if there were to be no different cultures or human beings, there would be
no theories of cultures either. But this does not vitiate my point. If there was no Cosmos,
there would be no gravitational force either. Presuming their existence, could we be
objective? Yes.
2. About the multiple meanings for the Puja of Ganesha. Of course, there is no one
meaning to this act either now, or before, or in the future, as far as Indians (and the
Westerners) are concerned. But that is not being disputed. The dispute arises when some
meaning is alleged to portray the experience of a culture, when all it does is distort and
deny the experience it is said to portray. However, there is an interesting question here,
which is best illustrated using a contrast. In the Catholic Mass, there are *limits* on what
it could be said to mean to a believer. These limits are set by the Catholic theology and
belief. (For instance, to a believer, it *cannot* mean celebrating the Devil.) The puja of
Ganesha does not set any such limits to the person who does this puja. (But if someone
comes and tells me that I cook sweets on Ganesha Chaturthi because it expresses my
subconscious desire for Oral Sex, I am justified in challenging this claim as an
explanation of my cooking the sweets.) Here is the question: what is puja in the Indian
traditions, if it does not have a particular meaning, and there are no limits on what it
means? One thing is already clear: it cannot mean worship! These are the kind of
questions I would like to ask; not what interpretation one gives to some action or the
other. The answer I give should be capable of being tested in the Indian culture. Then, I
will have begun producing an objective theory.
3. Would my answers be meaningful to the audience? If they are not, my answers will not
be understood by some audience, but that would not render my answer either false or
subjective. In other words, even though to test the truth of a theory one has to understand
the meaning of that theory, it does not mean that the truth of the theory *is* its
meaningfulness to the audience. They are different.
4. To understand the above point better, consider your question: If no one had read these
columns, would there have been any production of knowledge? You should actually
reverse the question to get the import of your own worry: Would what I write become
false, assuming that it is not now, if no one had read these columns? Is what I write
non-knowledge just because some audience does not read what I write? If you say yes,
then you would be denying historical facts: the misunderstood genius, who was ahead of
his/her time.
5. In other words, I do agree with you that meaningful knowledge is actually created
when the reader (consumer) engages with the content/book/article that the author wrote
(produced). But this does not tell us anything about the truth or falsity of the content:
after all, false theories *are meaningful* too (otherwise, we would say it is nonsense
and not false).
6. None of this means that experience has to be put into neat boxes as you put it. Nor
does it imply that I am not comfortable with multiple meanings of the Puja of Ganesha. I

am. You are. All Indians are. So, what does this about our culture? This is my question.
As I warned you in the beginning, this is all a bit philosophical. I hope I have not given
you a headache!

1. You start your post thus: I think it is very sad that Balu thinks that to compare a Siva
Linga to a penis is to trivialize the Linga. May I comfort you? You can compare
anything with any other thing: I do not object at all. Consequently, you need not feel sad.
Such comparisons do not trivialize, and that is not what I am saying. I say that if someone
comes and tells me that I am *not* doing puja to the Shiva Linga but worshipping the
penis instead, then he/she is trivializing and denying my experience. I am sure you will
agree that these are entirely two different things.
2. You go on: That means for all his fancy throwing around of names of various schools
of philosophy both eastern and western, and myths and metaphors, (he really twists
himself into some pretzel positions with his words!) he basically trivializes his own
penis. Frankly, this is puzzling. I do not know what names of which schools I have
thrown around, or even what myths and metaphors I have spoken of (are you sure we are
talking about the same piece of writing? By the way, what is a pretzel position? I am
unfamiliar with this turn of phrase). Am I trivializing my penis? I do not know, even
though you seem to! I am very honestly interested why you say this: perhaps, you would
care to explain this in your subsequent post?
3. You say that you have read Kripals two books carefully. You did well; I wish you had
shown me and others the same courtesy as well. You attribute things to us without caring
to find out whether any of us here do indeed say those things. Like for example, when
you say, actually Kripal is being more respectful of Hinduism than you type of men are
when you get all upset about the possibility that sexuality might be considered sacred. I
do not know which one of us has said it. Whether sexuality is scared or not is not even
the point of discussion. Where did you read this? Better put, why do you read this into the
discussion?
4. You suggest too that mystical experience in ALL religious traditions involves sexual
imagery and that we belong to that group of very hung up MEN who cannot stomach
their own sexuality, their own bodies, not to mention the bodies of women they both love
and hate simultaneously, so they have to censor those ecstatic experiences that involve a
complete UNITY of body, mind and spirit. Even though these sentences invite it, I will
not become polemical. But I do want to invite you to consider inverting the first sentencefragment thus: sexual experience in ALL religious traditions involve mystical imagery.
Why would you prefer your formulation to this inversion? (This is just an experiment, not
an expression of my alleged position.) Perhaps, you would then care to reconsider your
sweeping categorization.
5. You end your post, Rati Gupta, with this advice which I shall cherish: And you, dear
Balu, for all your long and complicated journey in life, have not put together one simple

fact: That Creation is sacred and creation comes into being from the union of male and
female energies on all levels. I suggest you read up on tantra, your own cultural heritage,
before you start throwing stones. I will follow your suggestion, but I beg to differ on one
score though: I am not throwing stones either at the sinner or while living in a glass
house. I merely seek knowledge.

Wonderful! You have come very close to the heart of the real problem, as far as I am
concerned. Therefore, do you mind if I reformulate in my own words what I take the
issues to be? Of course, that might lead me to say things you do not mean, or do not want
to say. Should that happen, please let me know, will you?
1. To begin with, there is the feeling that scientific explanations, with their emphasis on
rationality and objectivity, are reductive in nature. Wherein lies the *root* of this feeling?
Let us say that some physical theory describes the motion of a snow flake gently floating
down to earth or a rose petal lazily spinning in the air. Or that some branch of human
genetics computes the probability of a particular human child being born with absolutely
dark eyes or ones that are brilliantly blue. Is either of these two explanations reductive in
nature? Not quite: their mathematical calculations tell us very little about the laziness of
the petal or about the brilliance of blue eyes, it is true, but it is not their job to do so. If
you want to relish descriptions of an autumn evening or a spring morning, you do not
open Feynmans Lectures on Physics, do you? You go elsewhere. In other words, the
theories in the natural sciences are not reductive in the sense that they do not reduce the
*beauty* of a particular sunset to the motion of earth around the Sun even if they explain
sunrise and sunset.
2. The current crop of the so-called social sciences does precisely the above. While
ostensibly about human beings, their psychologies, their societies and their cultures, the
tales they tell shine forth in the splendour of a monochromatic dullness. (Most of us know
something or the other about explanations from these so-called social sciences, so I will
not try to give examples.) Why? Here is the first possible reason: they have to give
reductive explanations because they are scientific and objective. Without reducing
human beings into objects, one cannot do science and the existing social sciences merely
follow the scientific method. This reason does two things simultaneously: (a) it
explains the fate that has befallen the social sciences and humanities; (b) it *justifies*
the poverty of these theories by blaming it on the nature of human beings and the nature
of science. We have silly sociological theories and stupid psychological ones, because it
is in the nature of human beings to defy being objectified; science cannot work any other
way. As I say, this is but one way of looking at the so-called social sciences today.
Needless to say, this is *the* dominant mode as well.
3. There is also another way, my way, of looking at the issue. *This is how western
culture has been studying human beings, their societies, and their cultures all this while.*
There is nothing remotely scientific about either this venture or its results. The
justification they provide (see 2b above) is an expression of an empty pretentiousness:
because we have not been able to study human societies and cultures differently, the

intellectuals from the western culture pontificate, no one else can. The limits of our
culture are also the epistemological limits of human beings. Surely, they say, if *we*
have not succeeded, that is because no one can! Why do I say that this is the way of the
western culture? What has this culture to do with the monochromatic formalism I spoke
of earlier?
4. When Christianity met (or meets) other religions (especially the heathen religions
like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and so on), there is only *one way* it
can describe them: these religions do not worship God but the Devil. We are the
heathens and the pagans, and the differences (subtle or gross), if any, between these
religions are at best those that exist within the heathen religions. Of course, there are
rays of light to be found in the heathen religions too: but that is accounted for by the
fact that these religions are the corruptions and degenerations of the primal religion that
God (of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) gave to Man. (The same story is told by Judaism and
Islam as well, but I will not talk about either of them now.) Over the last two thousand
years, Christianity has worked out immensely sophisticated notions of Man, society, and
so on. These notions have become a part of our daily language-use: whether you speak
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or whichever other European language. That is
not all.
5. These Christian ideas about Man and his psychology, society and culture, have become
the *presuppositions* for what we call social sciences and the humanities today. (In
my book, I describe this process which I call the secularization of Christianity in detail.)
They are so deep and so pervasive within the western culture that they sit *limits* to the
western imagination itself: it is not simply possible for this culture even to *imagine* that
other ways of thinking and going-about the world are possible. The so-called social
sciences today, endlessly embroider this theology: all peoples and cultures (except
themselves) are heathens. If this is all they tell, it is, one must admit, pretty boring.
Indeed so: everyone and everything (excepting the western culture) are the same, and the
most interesting things are to be found in the western culture. Whether you speak of
politics (from dictatorships to democracy), knowledge (science), settling human
disputes (Law), welfare of people (from slavery to capitalism), or whatever takes
your fancy, it transpires that the western culture has them all. What they do not have at
the moment, they say, is what they have *lost* (i.e. had them once). All other cultures
end up becoming pale or erring variants of the western culture, in exactly the same way
our religions are pale and erring variants of Christianity.
6. Of course, it does not stop there. Why has the western culture *reduced* the other
cultures to a pale and erring variant of itself? That is because, *it is so*: it is
*epistemologically impossible* that human cultures are different in any way *other* than
how the western culture has described them! It calls this *reduction* science:
objective, value free, and what not. Philosophers and social scientists endlessly assure
us that it cannot be any other way. Beloo, this is not science but bad, baaaaad Christian
theology. It has become secularised, become established in the universities with
professorial chairs, grants, and doctorates and what-have-you, but it remains as dully
monochromatic as its religious original: Who is Ganesha? The minion of the Devil. Who

is Saraswathi? The minion of the Devil. Who is Krishna? The minion of the Devil. Who
is Sharada? The minion of the Devil. What do we do? We worship idols, whether made of
stone or clay. We are mentally deficient: that is the reason why we worship cycles, cars,
the pen (Aayudhapuja), the cow and the crow, the naked fakir and the stone penis. Not
only are the Indians guilty as charged: *all* heathen cultures are that as well. The
Egyptians, the Mayans, the Africans, the Thais, the Japanese The list extends to all
cultures and all peoples who are not Jewish and Muslim. (These two are deficient in
their worship; they might be heretics but not heathens.) If this is the litany, you can have
only one reaction: Ho Hum! (A huge Yawn!)
7. The varieties and differences in human cultures get reduced to the same: they are all
versions of worshipping the Devil. The so-called social sciences are on this track. This is
not a simple expression of racism, western superiority or Orientalism (even if they are all
that). Rather, it has to do with what western culture is, what its social sciences are, and
what the relation is between these two and the religion that Christianity is.
8. In other words, this is how I explain the reduction that the co-called social sciences
indulge in: the reduction occurs not because they are objective and scientific
explanations, but because they are secularized theological claims. Until recently, I was in
the strict minority of one in the republic of learning but I do not believe that you need to
win two-thirds of the vote to decide about the truth or falsity of scientific theories. So I
soldier on, certain that I have good arguments and an exciting research programme;
where possible, I try to show that my story is more interesting than any other that exists
in the market-place. In the long run, I know that this story will win out; until such stage,
there are the words: Karmanyeevadhikaaraste, Maa Phaleshu Kadaachana.
9. From all of these, it follows that I am not trying to compare our culture with the
western one any more than I want to compare, say, Hinduism with Christianity. But
what I do want to do is to understand both: our culture and the western one, our traditions
and the western Christianity. It is not enough, if it is a true understanding that I merely
*think* I am right. You and the others must not only understand what I say, but you must
also be sure that it is not merely my personal prejudices that get bundled together as an
explanation. In other words, you should be able to test my theory in any number of
ways: from checking it against your own experiences to drawing conclusions from my
arguments that I am not even aware. That, Beloo, is what knowledge and objectivity all
about: am I ranting and raving, or am I saying something worth thinking about and
exploring further?
10. As an unrepentant heathen, I do not believe in the truth claims of Christianity that it is
the true religion. As a member of the Indian culture, I do believe that alternative (more
realistic, more factual and more productive) heuristics exist in our culture that will help
human cultures to understand each other. As an intellectual, I believe that developing
them is my priority. As a scientist, I believe that if what I say is knowledge, it will also be
like what scientific knowledge is: tentative, hypothetical, and testable (in a broad sense).
And, finally, as a human being, I do not believe that knowledge reduces the complexity of
the world but teaches us instead to truly appreciate how marvellous we and our worlds,

both natural and cultural, really are.

Dear Ramesh,
It is not possible for me now (either in this post or as a column) to do justice to the
questions your raise. That is primarily because a great deal of ground has to be cleared
before one can tackle issues of inter-cultural communication in a satisfactory manner.
However, I will try to approach the issue of denying our experience in a different
manner than what I have done hitherto. (I will presuppose that you have already read my
answer #126 to Beloo. I will build further upon that post.)
1. Let us begin with one of the minimal conditions for inter-cultural (verbal)
communication. And that is: people should be able to have conversations with each other.
It is legitimate to claim that one does not need to know what a conversation is in order
to have a conversation. Therefore, whatever else we may want to say, it would be very
difficult to maintain that there is no conversation in other cultures. Equally difficult
would it be to hold that some cultures are inferior to others regarding their practice of
conversational activity. In other words, our intuitions do not allow us to assert either a
factual or a normative claim, which would either deny the existence of conversation in
other cultures or suggest that members from some cultures are incompetent
conversationalists.
2. The western culture has produced several theories about and several theorists of
conversation. These theories are the results of research into the nature of conversation.
Such theories shed light on the nature and properties of conversation. Some of the famous
maxims of conversation are known (and practiced?) by many of us. Strange though this
suggestion might sound, we have learnt such maxims in the West *after* we left India. As
examples, consider the following two maxims: Be relevant (or be to the point) and Be
brief. [Some of us are probably under the impression that these maxims of
conversation are efficient or business-like and that they help us get on with our lives
better. I will come back to this point later.]
3. Whatever these theories do or do not, they should at least help us affirm the points
made in the first paragraph. In order to see *how* our theories of conversation help us
relate to them, let me introduce the following scenarios set in the Asian continent. (All of
them true, all narrated to me by the Europeans and a few any numbers of time. That is
why I have structured the scenarios the way I have.).
3.1. As a white man and foreigner, you are a teacher in an English class in China. All of a
sudden, one fine day, the Chinese director of the school drops in during the afternoon and
requests to speak to you. After nearly a quarter of an hour, during which time the director
has praised your work and qualities sky high, and just when you thought that he was
coming to the real point of his visit he politely takes leave. You know that what he said
was not what he came to say; nevertheless, you also realize that something has been
said. (This is the experience of an American, who suffered a nervous breakdown after

living for about two years in China under these conditions.)

3.2. As a white man and foreigner, you are travelling somewhere in Asia (say, Thailand).
Intending to take the public transport, you go to a bus stop and enquire a native passer-by
when the next bus is due. The native consults his wristwatch, assures you that you could
expect it any minute and moves along. An hour and a half later, while still waiting for the
same bus, you spy the same native returning from his errand. Furious, you collar him and
ask him the same question. Though a bit surprised at your rage, when the native gives the
same answer, you realize that you have been had: that guy had no more clue about the
bus timings than you had!
3.3. As a white man and foreigner, you are travelling on a train in India. Seated next to
you is a Brahmin, eager to strike up a conversation and impress you with his learning.
Your sensibility is shocked by the poverty in India, and by the existence of
'untouchability' in that culture. Outraged and incensed by the indifference that Indians
show to poverty and suffering around them, you quiz this Brahmin about why he is
unmoved. The Brahmin assures you with great solemnity that most of the 'beggars' you
have seen are really no beggars at all, but, to the contrary, rather wealthy. Many, in fact,
are wealthier than either of you. In support of this fact, the Brahmin tells you a tale (an
anecdote) about some beggars who turned about to be the greedy rich in disguise!
Regarding the lot of those beggars who are not cheaters, he merely shrugs his shoulders
and says that it is their karma. You are utterly shocked by both the flimsiness of his
'explanation' and by the total lack of humanity in that Brahmin. Both of you know that the
'anecdote' was a figment of his imagination.
Each of the three scenarios is a part of our folklore: almost each traveller and tourist who
has been to Asia will have some such tale to tell.
4. There will not be much of a controversy, if we identify all three as conversations. That
is to say, two or more people are involved; there was some kind of a question and answer,
some exchange of information in some context or the other. We do not suppose that one
needs to be knowledgeable about conversation theory in order to identify that a
conversation has taken place. And yet, were we to look at some of the existing theories
about what conversation is, we are led to some nontrivial and startling conclusions: *it
would appear either that there has been no conversation at all or that in each of them
some or other maxim has been violated.*
5. In and of itself, this piece of knowledge is not startling. But it does become so when
we take into account that these types of conversation are not exceptions but standards,
and that they all are examples from non-western cultures!
In the first case, for example, the Chinese director was neither brief nor relevant; in the
second, the native was violating the 'cooperation principle' and was lying; in the third the
same holds true as well.
6. Our theories of conversation, then, generate the conclusions that other cultures either

do not know how to have a conversation or that they always violate the norms of
conversation or, even more crudely put, most of the time only westerners are competent
conversationalists. This is a logical possibility, to be sure; but there is something utterly
implausible about such conclusions. Our conversational 'theories' generate such
conclusions because of some assumptions they make. Let me try and identify just three of
them.
7. *The first assumption*: Common to all (or nearly all) theories of conversation is the
assumption that conversational relations (like, say, that of 'relevance') hold between
beliefs. (I do not mean religious beliefs, but beliefs of any kind.) That is to say, the
semantic relations between propositions constitute the main area of inquiry. (Some
statement A is relevant to some statement B: therefore, relevance has to do with the
meaning of the statements A and B.)
*The second assumption*: Theories of conversation do not refer to the fact that it is
people who indulge in conversation; yet, one intuitively thinks that it is human beings
who indulge in conversations. These two ideas are not (necessarily) opposed to each
other. That is, the distance between the theories and our intuitions is bridged (often) by a
metaphysical assumption, which is highly culture specific: only human beings have
beliefs. Or, at least: human beings embody beliefs.
*The third assumption*: With respect to this property of embodying beliefs, there is a
third assumption about the nature of persons. This says that humans are equal with
respect to this property.
8. The first assumption allows you to 'discover' relations between beliefs; the second and
the third assumptions enable you to develop a general theory of what it is to have a
conversation. If this caricature is even approximately true, we can raise the question now:
*What if there exist cultures and societies, where none of the above assumptions are true?
* That is, what if there are cultures and societies, which do not make this kind of a
distinction between human beings and the rest of nature; to whom the 'observational'
term, viz., human beings turns out to be a very 'theoretical' term? Clearly, in such cases,
our theories of conversation break down. By the same token, they cease being universal
in the sense of being theories of *human* communication.
9. What I would like to propose is that this is indeed the case: *in each of the scenarios*
sketched above, what we see is the breakdown of our theories of conversation. In these
cultures, the kind of conversation held depends on exactly *who* the participants are; the
'relevant' answer to a question depends upon just *who* is asking the question and
*who* is doing the answering. What is a relevant answer to a question in one
conversation need not be a relevant answer to the same question in another conversation.
10. The above considerations are enough for me to raise two general points: one about us
and the other about inter-cultural communication. Let me begin with the first. Why do we
Indians, so proudly at times, accept ideas from conversation theories (even if we do not
know where they come from) with so little reflection? In fact, I have had people

preaching to me that we Indians are a garrulous lot and that we better learn from the
western culture the virtues of being relevant, brief and to the point. Why so little
understanding of the issues involved? Why the urge not to think our own experiences
through and look at our own inheritance and culture? I do not want to praise the Indian
culture as the best form of life; but I do want to say that it is our form of life and just as
valid as any other form of life. Let us learn all we want to and can from the West: I have
learnt a great deal already and continue to do so. But that is possible only if we do not
denigrate either of the two cultures. (This is a huge issue, and I hope to return to this
some day.) Personally, I am only glad that I have learnt to know them both so intimately.
11. If we continue along the lines of the thoughts sketched above, we see that the
theorists of inter-cultural communication have not even begun to suspect the kind of
problems involved in thinking about the theme. No wonder the problems of inter-cultural
communication, instead of going away, return with a vengeance. Because, as the earlier
points will have hinted at, the entire discussion is not about inter-cultural communication
at all but about *intra-cultural communication*. Better put, the whole issue is about the
monologue the western culture has within itself and other cultures have to merely play
their scripted role. *How should different cultures speak both to the West and to each
other within the framework of the western culture?* Obviously, this is not merely a
cultural, political or an economic question but one that arises within the theories of
conversation!
12. In other words, the denial of our experience takes place in more forms and fashions
than we understand. While we protest about it in one area, we acquiesce to it in another.
This is something we need to keep in mind. It has already become a long post, longer
than I intended, but such is the nature of the issues. Besides, what is wordiness between
Indians; there is no need to be either brief or to the point! Right?
Friendly greetings

Dear V C,
Three remarks.
1. The bit about rain dance occurs in my reply to Jeffrey Kripal. Your reformulation is
not the question I raise. My question was about the nature of stories, whether they should
be seen as explanations or not.
2. In #169 you ask the question: can a culture have a few superstitious practices (such as
engaging in rain dance) while being successful on the whole? Even though this is not
my question, I wonder what you mean by a superstitious practice. In a way, you answer
this question indirectly in #175, when you say the following and italicize it: I do think
that an atheist has done something remarkable/noteworthy/creditable in refusing to

believe in a myth/ simplification. Am I to assume that a superstitious practice is some

specific practice of the one who believes in some specific superstition?
3. If yes, I am a bit puzzled. Because I do not want to wander-off from the theme of the
discussion, I would like to ask you a question. Is your fascination of Skinners
behaviourism a personal one, or is it also a professional? Being more than reasonably
literate in the history and theories in psychology, I cannot but help being puzzled by the
ease with which you use intentional predicates. If it is a personal fascination, you need
answer none of the questions I raise. In that case, your posts become self-explanatory. If
it is also professional, that is, if you are an academic and/or teach and do research in
psychology, I would like an answer to my questions.

Dear VSM,
It is not my normal practice to enter into the kind of discussions your post invites. Yet I
do it, because of your explicit request. You say: All of you please bear with me and
simply state the flaws in my argumentation. I presume that yours is a genuine request
and hence my reply.
1. Here is how you begin your argument. From a purely human observational point of
view, I can clearly see that all of the above are saying the EXACT same thing and yet
CLAIMING that they are indeed different and hence better, and thus trivializing and
hence embarassing each others' personal experience and thus commiting the exact same
crime they have accused wendy and kripal etc of committing??? What is wrong with this
argument? Well, the following.
1.1. You say in the above quote that some people (among whom you mention me
explicitly) are saying the same thing and are yet claiming they are different. *Assume*
for a moment that this characterization is true. (That is, we assume for the sake of the
argument that this premise is true.) What follows from this premise? According to you the
following: and hence better, and thus trivializing and hence embarassing each others'
personal experience and thus commiting the exact same crime they have accused wendy
and kripal etc of committing. Logically, what you say do not *follow* at all. Even if I
say the same thing and claim I am saying something different, the fact that I say
something same and yet different do not make what I say better. (E.g. Assume you say
It rains in English, and I say Het regent in Dutch. Both of us are saying the same thing,
i.e. these two sentences mean the same. Yet we are saying something different: you speak
in English and I use a Dutch sentence. From this it does not *logically* follow that what I
say is better.) So, your statement hence better does not follow as a logical inference.
Thus trivializing. How does the Dutch sentence trivialize the English sentence? It does
not: they are merely two different ways of speaking two different natural languages. So,
this inference (thus trivializing) does not follow logically either. Hence embarrassing
each others personal experience does not logically follow either. (Another kind of
example: If I say I like the taste of coffee and you say you do not, this does not trivialize
or embarrass either us or our experiences.) And thus committing the exact same

crime.. This conclusion does not *logically* follow either because the previous
conclusion was not a logical derivation. From this, it *logically* follows that your
reasoning is not *valid*. That is to say, your conclusions do not follow from the premise,
if one uses valid rules of inference.
1.2. Even if your argument is not logically valid, it could be *true*. That is to say, each of
the steps in your argument could be an empirical truth about the individuals. Well, you do
not know me; nor do you know anything about my motives. I can also say that they are
false. That means to say, the individual statements (thus trivailaizing, hence
embarrassing, etc.) you make are also *empirically false* in this case.
1.3. If your argument is neither logically valid nor empirically sound (i.e. true) then such
an argument is both invalid and false.
2. Here is what you say in the subsequent paragraph. Balu even went on to suggest that
he is trying to change the way people see things. This while he clearly states that he is
still trying to formulate a way of understanding his own people, and then the western
people, without knowing who his own people are. He has only so far, in all his writings,
without exception, said that the west is wrong and onto a conspiracy to prove us all to be
heathens, without once saying what he understood about his own people?If one wanted to
learn football would you actually learn football or learn how it is different from soccer?
I have not spoken (nor implied) about any kind of conspiracy by the West to prove us
as heathens. It is a matter of history, according to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic
religions, that the Indian traditions exemplify heathen practices. It is also a matter of their
theology. Both statements can be easily checked.
You seem to suggest some kind of a problem (an inconsistency?) between trying to
change the way people see things and understanding my own people. Let us leave aside
the question whether or not in all my writings (I presume you are talking about my posts
alone) I speak about my understanding of my own people. Hitherto, my focus has been to
invite people to reflect upon the possibility that the way they are taught to look at their
own experiences might well be different from what they experience. In order to make this
invitation sound plausible, I have provided some reasonable considerations. I am not
trying to change the way people see things: I invite them to say what they see
because I believe that some say things they do not see. I do not see why such a
cognitive attempt is either wrong or inconsistent or even why I need to understand my
own people in order to say what I do say.
3. Your subsequent paragraph about India uses the word trivialize in a different sense
than how I use it in my article. I am not talking about one group trying to make fun of
the other. Rather, I am talking about what happens to our experience when a theological
explanation (from the Islamic and Christian theologies) is used to re-describe our
experiences. Consequently, *if * you see your paragraph as a criticism of my claim, then
you are wrong, because your criticism rests upon another meaning of the word trivialize
than my usage. One could even say that it is irrelevant and hence wrong if seen as a

critique.
4. Because I do not get the import of the paragraph where you speak about your hurt and
Gandhi, there is pretty little I can say, except to remark that I do not see how it is a part of
any argument in the sense your previous paragraphs are. However, it is my impression
that you have some problems with stereotypes (as you understand them) and that it
upsets you.
5. Your penultimate paragraph asks us not to judge. It is not clear what the force of
judgement is to which you object. When I listen to someone (today) insisting that the
earth is flat or that the Sun revolves round the earth, I judge that this person (in all
probability) does not have much of an idea about the physical theories. Because I am not
sure, I try to find out what his arguments are. If they do not cognitively satisfy me, I
judge that he is wrong. I do not see what is wrong with this kind of judgement. Equally, I
do judge that Hitler is an immoral human being. I do not see what is wrong with this kind
of moral judgement either. You might want to say that one ought not to judge the worth
of a person. Frankly, I do not understand what such a sentiment wants to say. I cannot
judge whether the life of some X or Y is worth living, simply because I have no way of
judging it either way. Nor can I say anything about the worth of human existence. (From
which perspective? The cosmic perspective?) If some person were to ask me whether it
makes any difference to the Cosmos whether the human race exists or not, I would not
know how to go about answering this question. Consequently, any answer will do as far
as I am concerned.
6. It appears to me, VSM, that there is some kind of an insight you are struggling to
express. (Especially when you speak of Jesus, Gandhi and so on.) It *could* be the case
that you are saying something like the following: we should live the way we find it fit to
live and not spend time either criticizing others or reforming them. You find that this is
the *wrong way* (both cognitively and morally) to live. *If this is what you are saying*,
it is an important insight. However, its field of applicability lies elsewhere. Some day,
hopefully on this Sulekha board itself, I will take up this insight and show how important
it is, and what is important about it. However, if you are saying this (I do not know), then
my writings are *all the more important for you*: they try to explain why you have
difficulty in expressing this insight properly. The language and the theory we have
absorbed from the West *actively* prevent us from even formulating our cultural
insights.
7. Let me end this post by responding to Satyas remark in #208. In response to your post,
he says the following: Every one of us believes our own viewpoint to be the best one:
such is human nature. This is not quite how I would put it. Let me, therefore say what I
think with respect to this issue.
7.1. Whenever I formulate a theory, I believe that my description is true. If I thought
that it was false, I would not write what I write. This is a belief about the status of my
description and its relationship to the part of reality I describe. Let us call this the objectlevel belief.

7.2. Relative to this, I also have a meta-level belief about my own theories. Do I believe
that my theory is the truth? No, I do not. As a student of the history of the natural
sciences, I know that there has no single theory that can claim this status. A better theory
has come along and displaced the older theory. This has been the story of scientific
progress. I believe that I am doing science. Therefore, I believe that, one day, a *better
theory* will come and displace my own. According to the best criteria of rationality and
scientificity we have today, I do think that my theory is *better* than any others that exist
currently in the market place. That is why I defend my theory. It is also my *hope* that
another, better theory will come into being in the near future. If it does happen, I will
have succeeded in my aim: *because* of my theory, a better theory comes into being.
That means to say, my labour has been scientific in nature and has contributed to the
furthering of human knowledge. That is all what I want: to contribute to human
knowledge. However, one needs to remember that my theory can only be displaced by a
theory that is *better* than mine.
7.3. In other words, both the object-level belief about my theory (that my description is a
true description) and a meta-level belief about the same (that my description is
hypothetical and tentative) are present in me in so far as it is a scientific endeavour,
which is human. I want to believe I am both: scientific and human.

Dear Kannan,
Here I was wondering whether you had disappeared from the face of the world because
there was nary a sound from you. Nice to know you are alive and kicking! Welcome back
to the discussion! About your queries.
1. Am I making a distinction between western epistemology and some other
epistemology? If you mean epistemology in its philosophical sense, i.e., the enquiry
about the nature and limits of human knowledge, I do not quite think so. Perhaps, my
research would add and/or modify some of the widely held claims by a majority of
philosophers. Some questions might turn out to be unintelligible or wrongly posed, some
new issues might arise, but I do not see my results as an *alternate* epistemology that
would be different from every theory propounded in the course of the western intellectual
history.
2. It is true I emphasize that the majority of the social sciences take a particular
experience of the world for granted and assume as universally true the assumptions that
structure such an experience. Not only do I identify these premises as Christian
theological in nature, but also criticise them. Of course, I do not stop at just criticising
them but go further in an attempt to provide an *alternative* theory. What does this imply
with respect to the limitations of my own theory? The answer has to do with two things.
2.1. What exactly is the nature of my criticism? Firstly, I criticise these theories for not

being scientific. That in two senses: (a) I say they are secularised Christian theologies.
(b) And that they are not scientific because they are not cognizant of this. Secondly, now
comes the important question: *could they have been any different?* According to my
story, *they could not have been*. Since you are reading my book, I can put this answer
in another way: the western intellectuals were *constrained* by their culture (the nature
of religion and its relation to the western culture) to theorise how they did. In other
words, I do not call it *their failure*, even though it is a cognitive failure, when looked at
as an issue of producing knowledge (i.e. as an epistemological issue). If one were to pose
the issue abstractly, i.e. without taking the real and historical dynamics of producing
scientific knowledge, then exactly the same criticism (i.e. the constraints of the culture)
would have been applicable to whoever theorised first. If Indian culture had developed
the social sciences first, it would also have been hampered by its *cultural constraints*.
2.2. However, this cognitive failure of the western culture provides an extremely
important reference point (or provides one set of problems) thanks to which I can
*escape* the constraints of my culture and become subservient only to the dynamics of
producing scientific theories. That is to say, the development and replacement of my
theories will be subject to the dynamics that govern any scientific theory, and *only to
that*. Let me make this abstract answer concrete by taking two examples of my theory
production: one from the book you are reading and the other from my forthcoming book.
My theory of religion answers two questions *simultaneously*: what is the nature of
religion? Why did the western intellectuals see religion in every culture? The answer to
one is also the answer to the other. No ad hoc assumptions intervene in the process of
answering the first question and deriving the answers to the second. In other words, the
*cognitive failure* of the western culture is a problem I have to solve and the solution to
this problem has to be derived (in some appropriate sense) from my theory about that
phenomenon which they failed to understand. (This must be done without adding ad hoc
assumptions.)
The western ethical traditions transform us either into immoral peoples or moral cretins.
To show that we are neither, I need to develop a theory of ethics that (a) shows that there
are ethical traditions in the Indian culture; (b) explains the western theories of ethics and
the corresponding perception. That is to say, my theory of ethics will *include* the
western theories as its limiting case. Under specific assumptions, I must show how you
can go from a theory of ethics I develop (which, I claim, is the Indian ethics) to the
western ethics. [To use a historical example: Einsteins theory enables one to derive the
Newtonian theory as its limiting case and under specific assumptions. In my book on
ethics, I have done this. Currently, I am beginning on the final version of this book; so,
this is what *I think* I have been able to do. I will have to wait and see whether it lives
through the final version.]
3. In other words, my story (though drawn from my culture) *has* to account for sets of
theories that are constrained by the western culture. It is not simply a story about how we
experience the world. It not only does more; it is forced to do more if it aspires to be
scientific. Such a scientific story, then, can be developed by any one from any culture

(see my declaration at the beginning of the target article); if it is replaced, it will be

because the better theory will do the job better. In other words, my story will become
subordinated to the dynamics of scientific growth and progress of science. That is why, as
I see it, the Indian Renaissance (I am really charmed by *Satyas* characterization) is of
significance and importance not just to us but to the human community and human
knowledge.
Trusting I have answered your questions,
Friendly greetings

During the course of the discussion, the issue of "rain dancing" has featured regularly and
different points of view have been presented. No doubt, VCs position is the most
unambiguous. He considers it to be a "superstitious practice", the implication being that it
is irrational to believe that dancing *causes* the rain to fall (e.g. #187, #210). Others
such as *Satya* feel that there is something wrong with this "explanation" and try to find
alternatives. The dance invites the rain he says, or, he emphasises that the behaviour is
not based on "beliefs and worldviews", but on "their experience of Nature" (#203). I am
puzzled by what he means when he says that rain dancing is based on a cultures
experience of nature, but I believe that he is right when he says that it is not based on
some belief or worldview (see further). Yet others take up the suggestion and claim that
the dance is a "formalized, socialized and traditionalised expression" of "life as art"
(Vrikodara #211). Hermione hasnt decided which camp to choose yet and suggests doing
a test first: "Does it rain every time the Native Americans do a rain dance?" (#215)
(Assuming that such a test is worth performing.)
At first sight it seems that VC has the strongest case: no reasonable people on earth can
buy the story that dancing actually causes rain to fall. I am not willing to buy it. However,
it is a fact that in some cultures people *do* perform rain dances. However, to explain
the rain dance by attributing a causative story is to trivialize such an experience. To
quote Balu in his reply to Kripal: "you are transforming the members of that group into a
bunch of idiots". When this happens, people such as *Satya* or Vrikodara rightly feel a
sense of wrongness.
In an attempt to shed some light on this matter, I would like to refer to a debate between
the famous Dr. Livingstone and a Tswana Rain Doctor. The discussion, of course, is
about the rain dance:
"Medical Doctor [i.e. Livingstone]: So you really believe that you can command the
clouds? I think that can be done by God alone.
Rain Doctor: We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I
pray to him by means of these medicines, and, the rain coming, of course it is then mine.

Medical Doctor: I only think you are mistaken in saying that you have medicines which

can influence the rain at all.

Rain Doctor: Thats just the way people speak when they talk on a subject of which they
have no knowledge. When first we opened our eyes, we found our forefathers making
rain, and we follow in their footsteps. You, who send to Kuruman for corn, and irrigate
your garden, may do without rain, we cannot manage in that way". (Cited in J. & J.
Comaroff: *Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness
in South Africa*, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 210-211)
I would like to invite the reader to take these sentences at face value. It is clear that the
rain doctor *agrees* with Livingstone that he does not *command* the clouds. Only
when he performs the ritual and the rain comes only *then* does he consider the rain his.
In other words, the rain doctor does not claim a *causal relationship*. He only says that
he considers the rain his, when he has done the performance and if it then starts to rain.
But this is not how Dr. Livingstone understands the matter. The medical doctor insists
that there can be no medicines which can influence the rain to fall. That neither of the two
understand each other becomes clear when we look at the response of the rain doctor.
He gets irritated and refers to what his forefathers *did*. Livingstone is looking for an
answer to the question *how it is possible* that the dance cause rains to come and wants
an *explanation*. As far as the rain dancer is concerned, the discussion is not even about
creating water. Consequently, irrigation is *not an alternative* as far as he is concerned.
For him, the discussion is about continuing what has always been done in his culture.
Hence his claim "When first we opened our eyes, we found our forefathers making rain,
and we follow in their footsteps". In other words, it is about what his people *do*; for
Livingstone the discussion is about what the Tswana people *believe*.
It is here that Wittgensteins observations become relevant, indeed. He says: "The very
idea of wanting *to explain a practice* seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is *to
make them plausible to people who think as he does*. It is very remarkable that in the
final analysis all these practices are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity. But it
will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity." (From
"Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough").
I will not go into the issue of stupidity again, but I will focus on the other things instead.
As far as Wittgenstein is concerned, the problem - i.e. the distortion of other cultures - is
caused by a desire to *explain* a practice. Trying to explain a practice by referring to a
theory or belief, is the only way for *us* (the Westerners) to make the others
*plausible*, i.e. to make sense of them. In other words, for us Westerners, for some
actions to be coherent, a story, a belief, a theory, or worldview is needed which *lends*
coherence to the actions. That actions can derive their consistency from actions
themselves is an option which is clouded by the constraints of the Western culture.

The discussion about the rain dance is in danger of getting derailed and one might end
up missing the forest for the trees. This post is an attempt to link this issue with the
larger concerns of the target article and the discussions of the past few weeks.

1. The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children
(including Jeffrey Kripal the reply to whom is the target article) *systematically*
portray the Indian traditions in an unfavourable light, even when compared to how
religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in
several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are
true or false, whether they are irrational or rational, and so on. The discussion is not,
as Rajiv Malhotra pointed out some time ago (see Taporis post #267 for the links),
about the truth-claims of these religions and traditions but about their depictions.
2. Because this is a *systematic phenomenon*, the obvious question is about the
why. One of the possible explanations is that these portrayals are Orientalist,
racist and Eurocentric in nature. My point is that this explanation is not adequate
because it ends up transforming *all* writers, who provide such descriptions into
racist, Eurocentric, Orientalist as the case may be. These writers include not just
the western scholars but many, if not most, Indian ones as well.
3. I account for this state of affairs by suggesting that the modern social sciences are
secularised Christian theologies. One cannot draw on this fund of knowledge and
contribute further to it without, in some sense, becoming theologians as well. In
several posts, I have provided some considerations to make this extravagant claim
appear less counter-intuitive. Before my argument can become plausible, I need to
solve many cognitive problems; before it becomes worthy of further research along
the lines I suggest, some *alternative* conceptualisations have to be provided. In my
book on religion I believe to have done both.
4. In the target article, and in several of my replies, I go further along this line. If what
I claim is true, one has to show that the same holds good for Kripal as well. That is to
say, one has to show that he cannot possibly have produced knowledge about
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa or his mysticism. Again, one possible way of doing it is
to challenge the truth-claims of psychoanalysis. (That is, one can try to show why this
discipline is not a science.) But this would not be sufficient for my purposes. I need to
show that he *could not* have produced knowledge and that his stance prevents him
from even recognising this fact. I do this by showing that his object of study is *not*
the experience he claims he is studying: his explanations trivialise and distort the
Indian cultural experience, which is his object of study.
5. There is something more that requires doing. If social sciences cannot produce
knowledge, this must be true whether they study the western culture or non-western
cultures. I suggest that it is true by showing (or suggesting, if you find that I have not
shown it adequately in my post) that attempting to explain the origin of religion by
appealing to a set of *natural causes* distorts his object of study. As I put it, atheism
*is* a philosophical option, but if one embraces it to study the origin and nature of
religion, *one cannot do science*. To become a theist and study religion is to do
theology and not science. In other words, I point out that he faces a dilemma and that,
by virtue of this, he could not be contributing to human knowledge by doing what he
does.

6. Of course, this unsatisfactory state of affairs about the nature of social sciences has
not gone unnoticed in the western intellectual history. Even though, as far as I know,
no intellectual has argued (or seen) this case in its *generality*, many people have
responded to many aspects of this situation in many different ways over a period of
time. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, is one such. He was dissatisfied
with the nature of philosophical enquiries in the western culture and tried to arrive at
some understanding of the nature of philosophical problems and their purported
solutions. His writings are not systematic elaborations in the form of a theory; he
formulates some of his startling insights in at times condensed, at times cryptic
manner.
7. Sir James Frazer wrote a multi-volume work called The Golden Bough, an
anthropological compendium of stories-cum-explanations about certain kinds of
practices in cultures. Wittgenstein wrote down some of his remarks, which were
published (posthumously, if my memory serves me right) as Remarks on that book.
(I am not sure whether he read all the volumes, or read only the abridged edition of
Frazers book.) In any case, he does not find the Frazers explanations satisfactory
because they transform all non-western cultures into *idiotic* ones (my term, not
his). Amongst other things, he considers Frazers discussion of the rain dance in that
set of Remarks.
8. This is where Willems post #254 comes in. Wittgenstein notices that Frazer tries to
explain the practice of rain dancing by attributing some sets of *beliefs* to the
people whose practice it is. The attribution of such beliefs, says Wittgenstein,
explains human practices only by trivializing them (my words, not his). That is to
say, they explain the *practice* of rain dancing as an *expression* of some sets of
beliefs. He calls such an attempt a sickness (his favourite metaphor). He points out
too that this explanation is not satisfactory because it cannot *explain* why these
people perform the rain dance only during the rainy season. (Of course, one can give
any number of silly explanations, including the explanation that the performers are
conditioned to perform the rain dance during the rainy season. What Wittgenstein
was talking about was a non ad hoc explanation.)
9. Willem brings out another kind of objection, which is misunderstood by *Satya* in
his #272. Willem is not implying that irrigation is unknown to the native American
Indians in his analysis of the conversational fragment he cites. *He is saying just the
opposite*. He is saying something like the following: one could suggest that rain
dances are performed because the performers need rain water for their crops. (And, of
course, they believe that their jumping up and down in some manner will *cause* the
rains to come. This is what Frazers explanation amounted to.) So, if these people
are taught about irrigation, then they will become rational (or scientific as the
case may be) and get an insight into the superstitious nature of their practices.
Willem is drawing attention to the fact that *this argument is wrong*. The rain
doctor knows about irrigation and says that this has *nothing to do with* the rain
dance. In other words, one should not further explain the rain dance by speaking

about the need for rain water either.

10. The general point about the example of the rain dance is this then. Here too is a
practice *distorted* by the kind of explanation that is provided. It is important to
understand what is being said and what is not. Neither Wittgenstein nor Willem is
arguing that some practice in a culture is beyond criticism *just because* it is a
practice in that culture. (Yay Bee Dee #260 understands it this way.) They both are
saying something like this: make sure that your explanation of a practice does not
*distort* the practice; do not confuse a *distorted description* of a practice with its
explanation.
11. In other words, this rain dance example is a further illustration of the fact that
social sciences (in the case of Frazer, the discipline in question is anthropology) are
unable to provide knowledge. (This is an illustration, not a proof for the claim.)
They seem to think that a distorted description is an explanation and in the process
of providing such a description, they transform human practices into pieces of
stupidity. Again, this does not mean that there are no stupid practices in human
cultures. This is not the issue. The issue is: *is it plausible to accept that all the
practices of entire cultures are pieces of stupidity?* Wittgenstein did not think so: it
will never be plausible to say that mankind does *all that* out of sheer stupidity. I
agree with him.
Balu
Dear V C,
Frankly, I do not get you: either the points or the purpose of your posts. Your #274
has more the tone of a taunt than anything else: I ask a question to Tapori about his
perception of the discussion (because he had expressed some concerns about the
direction the discussion was taking), and you wonder whether *I might not have*
considered other possibilities because I do not like them! Clearly, I have stepped on
your toes somewhere along the way. If that is the case, may I ask your forgiveness?
Your recent post #280 is another case in point. Are you objecting to the universal
quantifier (all) when I formulate the issue? Or are you proposing some kind of a
functionalist explanation of cultural practices? [That is, do you want to say that the
cultural practices which survive do so because they fulfil some needs? Or that the
function of a cultural practice is to satisfy some need?] Or are you saying that cultural
practices have reasons for their existence? (In which case, I do not see the purpose of
the scare quotes around the word reason.) Perhaps, you simply want to say you
disagree with me? Or is it something else? I do not know.
If you are objecting to the universal quantifier in my formulation (#278) of the issue,
let me strengthen it: I do not believe that *any* cultural practice (i.e. a practice that
has survived and been transmitted through successive generations) should be

explained by attributing beliefs to its practitioners in such a way that the beliefs make
the practitioners come out stupid. Why do I say this? There are primarily two reasons:
our ignorance and the principle of charity. Let me explain.
(a) Our ignorance. We know very little about how cultures come into being, how they
reproduce themselves and how they disappear. Until such a stage, where we are able
to discuss each cultural practice (like rain dance, for example) individually, we should
avoid making a virtue of our ignorance. One could come up with any number of
explanations to day to explain a cultural practice like rain dance. Without exception,
they would *all* be ad hoc in nature and, as such, the opposite of what a scientific
explanation is. Therefore, my criticism of such explanations is to show their ad hoc
character and, where possible, identify what makes them ad hoc. The purpose? To
move forward in order to develop a science of cultures and cultural differences.
(b) The principle of charity. While both intelligence and stupidity are not exclusive
prerogatives of any one particular set of people belonging to any one culture,
explanations that attribute causal beliefs to the practitioners of, say, the rain dance do
make an entire culture appear stupid. How? Assume for a moment we attribute to the
people who perform the rain dance the following belief: they believe that their dance
causes the rains to come. Precisely because of our ignorance about the dynamics of
cultures, we are forced to make this attribution more general and say that *such is
their notion of causal forces* that they believe in the causal efficacy of their rain
dance. (We have no way, at the moment, to limit our attribution *only* to performing
the rain dance.) Then the question becomes: are they not aware of the operation of
causal forces? Do they not know that the boats are caused by their work on wood?
Are they not aware that rains come when they do not dance and, therefore, that there
are (at least) other causes? Do they have the concept of cause at all? So on and so
forth. Because the practice is transmitted over generations, and it is considered
important by that culture, we will be forced by the logic of our argument to extend the
same attribution to the *culture as a whole*. Consequently, the entire culture is made
to appear stupid. They may not have our (current) natural sciences, but my principle
of charity tells me not to *assume* their stupidity because of this. In other words, I
assume they are as reasonable as any other group of human beings. If it was as simple
as believing in the causal efficacy of their dance, surely, I believe, many intelligent
people in their culture would have questioned it, ridiculed it, and so on. My principle
of charity tells me that if it has survived, then that is not because they have no notion
of cause and causal forces. (Besides, I think such a group would not survive as a
group for any period of time.) This is the principle of charity: assume that the other
person (group, culture) is at least as reasonable as you (your group, your culture) and
try to understand them thus. Consequently, my objections rest on at least on these two
grounds.
(c) How defensible is this position? How scientific is this? This is a philosophical
assumption in whose favour I have some evidence. It is, however, important to note
that this assumption functions as a *heuristic* of research and *not* as a premise in
my arguments. Consequently, if my research forces me to say that some culture X or

Y is stupid, I would do so. But that result must be scientifically demonstrable.

Have I explained myself sufficiently V C? I do hope that the apology, together with
this explication, will make you desist from taking pot-shots just for the heck of it. Of
course, the previous sentence is written under the assumption that you are indeed
taking pot-shots. I might be wrong, but, forgive me, I cannot make sense of your
posts any other way.
Friendly greetings
Balu
I have partially answered your question in my post to V C (#281). What *Satya* provides
is also an ad hoc explanation of the rain dance. One might be more sympathetic to it; it
does not violate the principle of charity. But neither makes it any less ad hoc.
Let me answer your question by means of an illustration. Consider the following sentence
plucked from a larger paragraph: A NA sees him/herself as part of that delicate harmonic
balance. The kind of knowledge of cultures I seek, which is scientific, must be able to
answer at least some of the following questions: What kind of knowledge does this
culture have of Nature? In what way does this show Nature to be a delicate balance?
And harmonic in nature? How is this knowledge gained and transmitted? Is it different
from the theories in Natural sciences? If so, in what lies the difference? How can it be
tested? Is Nature a whole composed of parts? Why should there be a balance between
its parts? Or is it an aggregate of objects, events and processes? How can we decide one
way or another? And so on and so forth.
At the moment, no one is anywhere near to answering these kinds of questions with
respect to any culture. Many, in fact, deny that a science of cultures is possible at all;
most postulate some kind of a divide between the natural and social sciences.
I believe that there are many hindrances that require to be won in our quest for
knowledge of human beings and their cultures. One of the biggest, I have found, is the
current crop of social sciences. Amongst other things, they hinder the development of a
social science by encouraging ad hoc arguments. Not only are they full of them; they also
propagate the idea that being scientific is nothing other than having an opinion on some
matter and having some arguments in its favour. Actually, if you were to go and
maintain this attitude among the Natural Scientists, no one would take you seriously. Yet,
among us it has become the summum of rationality and scientificity.
I hope to have answered your question.
Friendly greetings

"neti, neti" works only with the greatest of intellects. We lesser mortals need an "it is
thus". Lovely. I wish the implied suggestion about my intellect was true. I mean, who
would not like to belong to the greatest of intellects? I certainly would, if only it was true!
There is a model, a it is thus. I have written a book on religion (and its relation to a
culture), whose hypothesis you can test the way you would test any similar hypothesis in
any of the natural sciences. It also explains some of the things I have spoken of, including
such things as the secularisation of Christian theology. I have almost finished working
on an it is thus about western ethics and Indian ethics; one of my friends is working on
half of an it is thus about the caste system, and so on. In another five years or so, many
of my doctoral students will have also published a few it is thus on a wide variety of
topics. Together, all these works lay the groundwork for going beyond neti, neti. (By the
way, you do know that it is a cognitive strategy that works for *anyone* desirous of
knowledge?)

Dear *Satya* and Vikram,

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! You guys have raised what is probably *the most*
important set of questions so far. (*Satya*, you write in #292 that you are a woman. My
apologies for addressing you as a he so far. By the way, at times - this is the second time
- you show an unbelievable capacity to jump steps and go to a problem that should not
be obvious!) I am not sure how to go about answering them and remain intelligible to a
non-academic audience at the same time. I am going to do my best; if I fail, please prod
me further: the cluster of questions is far, far too important to lose track of.
1. I am going to reformulate the questions but let me begin doing that by making the
problem is *even more complex* than it is now. Let us begin in a very intuitive way and
ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter cultural differences? In human
contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? *In inter-individual contacts*. That is,
we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with
*individual* human beings. You do not meet the western culture but individual
Americans, Germans, French, etc. Neither do these individuals meet the Indian culture:
they meet individual Indians (or, even better, a Madrasi Brahmin, a Gujerati Baniya even these are general categories but I use them just to get the point across.) And yet, we
appear to see cultural differences in these contacts. How to make sense of *this
experience*? Let us first see what is partially involved to truly appreciate the complexity
of our perception.
1.1. Each individual human being is a complex combination of at least four aspects.
There is his biological (or genetic) inheritance; there is his social inheritance (whether
he is from the Middle Ages or from a capitalist society); there is his psychological
makeup (let us say his personality); and there is his cultural upbringing (whether he is a

Madhva Brahmin or a Lingayat, say). When we meet individuals, in many different ways
we notice these *differences*: the biological, the psychological and, after some time
perhaps, the social and the cultural. Let us bracket the biological away so that the
situation becomes deliciously complex. Let us agree to use the following words (they
are just words for now) in order to go ahead and raise the problem. Let us call the social
aspects of a person the sociality of the person; the psychological aspects the
personality of the person; and the cultural aspects the culturality of the person. Thus
we meet individual human beings and see the differences between ourselves and the other
human beings. What kinds of differences do we see?
1.2. Let us say you come across someone like the following: a Belgian who is living in
America driving a Japanese Car. He is married to an African, loves Chinese music and is
crazy about Indian food. He prefers jeans, wears a tie, is a bit short-tempered and has a
terrific sense of humour. Each week he goes to the Unitarian Church, calls himself an
atheist and a behaviourist (sorry, VC!), and is a nuclear scientist. And so on and so forth.
Let us say, you are just his opposite in many things, and yet you become friends (so that
you get to know each other well). In other words, you notice many differences (more than
you can *say*) between yourself and this person.
1.3. From among all these differences, which express his sociality, which his culturality
and which his personality? And for what reasons are they that? Notice that you cannot
solve these questions by giving definitions of what culture etc. mean to you. Every one
of us has the same freedom to define the terms any which way we want and your
definition is my counter example. Nor can you undertake some kind of a statistical survey
to answer them because it is not evident what you are looking for. Does the above person
belong to one culture, many cultures, or to none? Are his personal traits personal,
social, cultural or biological? The answer that it is both nature and nurture is not
adequate in our case. We need to know what nature is and nurture has at least three
aspects in this case: his personality, his sociality and his culturality.
1.4. Put even more sharply, but in general terms: *what makes some difference, any
difference, into a cultural difference as against, say, social or psychological difference?*
(Somehow, in our contacts with individual human beings, we *must* have answered this
question, even if none of us know what that answer is. Otherwise, we could not see
cultural differences.) Normally, one would expect Anthropology to have answered this
question. But you are going to come out bitterly disappointed if you were to seek the
answer either in their ethnographic texts or in their theoretical treatises. They do not
even *ask* this question, let alone solve it. (Sorry Vrikodara, another neti, neti!) Their
ethnography presupposes cultural differences without saying what they are; their
theoretical tracts still have not progressed beyond disputes about definitions of culture
and silly theories about human culture.
1.5. My research project, which I call comparative science of cultures (actually it
sounds better in Dutch and German than it does in English) *begins* with this question:
what makes some difference, any difference, into a cultural difference? I discovered that
to answer this one has to develop a *theory* of cultural differences and my study of the

western culture and the Indian one (sliced along several different themes) begins the
process of developing precisely such a theory. The iti, iti answer (that I have now) can
be given in a single sentence, but one cannot understand it without understanding the
theory I am building. (Cultural difference is the *how* of using the mechanisms of
socialisation.)
2. What I have discovered during the last two decades is this then: to say what is cultural
experience requires taking recourse to a theory about cultural differences. That is to say,
it is one thing to experience cultural differences, but it is a task of an entirely different
magnitude to *say* what this experience consists of or what makes it cultural. I do not
know whether the sequence of events that I describe in my reply to Jeffrey Kripal (the
target article) struck you as odd or not: I say I am developing conceptual tools to access
my own experiences and interrogate them. That is, to *speak* of our experiences as
cultural experiences we need theories that enable us to make this distinction (between
cultural and non-cultural say) and explain cultural differences. Otherwise, we can just
keep talking any nonsense that comes to our head and insist that such an experience is
cultural. (Many, many discussions on this thread are ample illustrations of this tendency.
Every one is an expert on saying what a cultural practice is, why it is/could be a
superstitious practice and such like without even having the faintest idea of what is
being talked about!)
3. Consider Vikrams sensing of the problem: Whats more, the insider/outsider
dichotomy itself might be too simplistic. After all, to say, you've got it all wrong
implies that you do in fact theorize within a framework of presuppositions. But in the
case of multifarious India, is it even possible to extract abiding universals? One's
presuppositions might vary from region to region, from caste to caste. Right on!
What I am saying goes further than this: it varies from individual to individual and that is
true with respect to all cultures and not just the Indian one. The insider/outsider
distinction is *empty* when it comes to *saying* what cultural differences are: it is the
task for building a scientific theory about specific cultural differences, and to build such a
theory the passport of a person is strictly irrelevant. (See my declaration at the beginning
of the target article.) So, can we extract abiding universals? (Vikrams question: see the
citation above.) No, we cannot and that in two senses. (a) Any theory we build will be
hypothetical (the way scientific theories are), and not abiding in any sense of the word.
(Besides, cultures themselves are dynamic entities: they evolve and change, do they not?)
(b) We will not be extracting some universal facts that require accounting.
(Philosophically speaking, developing a scientific theory in our case is not the task of
inducing some general patterns from trillions and trillions of facts. It would be
impossible. I will simply state this baldly.)
4. If that is the case, how do we go about *identifying* the problems requiring solutions?
I have partially answered it in my reply to Kannan (post #247). Here, let me just add
another aspect: we must be truly thankful that Kripal and his forefathers exist! They give
us one objective aspect of the problem. Instead of talking about it in the abstract, let me
give an example. (Vrikodara, take heed! Here comes the cooked up example.)

4.1. We notice that, in the hands of Kripal, Ramakrishna Paramahamsas mysticism

becomes an expression of homo-eroticism. Most of us do get upset and express this as
well. One reaction: an *unscientific response* is to do what Rati Gupta, B S and Gaurang
Bhatt did. Convinced of their own intelligence and of our utter stupidity they come up
with some third-rate atheism as though they have re-discovered the wheel all on their
own. That is, they do not even sense the problem. Second response: not being geniuses
like them, you and I sense something has gone wrong somewhere. This is the first step.
What has gone wrong? We start reading around, say, the articles from Rajiv Malhotra
and Sankrant Sanu. What do we find out? This way of talking does not appear to be
confined to Kripal alone. Therefore, there is a reasonable suspicion that it might not
merely be an expression of an individual idiosyncrasy of Jeffrey Kripal. This is the
second step. Let us say, we assume that it is the syndrome of Wendys children. So, we
read a bit more, from different people, from different periods of time (say the travellers
reports about India). They say the same things, but use a different imagery and a different
jargon. This is the third step. We see that it is not *merely* a question of Kripals
idiosyncrasy or *merely* a question of Wendys child syndrome (even if they are both)
but that it encompasses peoples reports from the western culture as well. This is the
fourth step. May be, it has to do with the western culture. At this moment, we merely
have an intuitive idea of what western culture is. So, we read a bit more: say, what the
Islamic rulers and writers said about our traditions. We see that they said more or less the
same things. This is the fifth step. So, it could be all of the above and yet might have
something to do with what religion is. (After all, both Christianity and Islam are
religions.) Then, because we are Indians, we read and reflect about what we said about
Christianity and Islam. We do not appear to have said similar things at all. This is the
sixth step. Two possibilities open up: either our religions are special; or, they might not
be religions at all. Then you start reading about religion and thinking again This
process continues until you are able to formulate a tractable problem and come up with a
testable hypothesis.
4.2. We are not inducing anything by first collecting trillions upon trillions of facts. We
are doing research that is hypothesis driven, and which is being tested at every step. But
what was the starting point? The feeling that something is wrong (cognitively wrong,
that is) with Kripals description of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Of course, my
description above is cooked up in the sense that our research is never that simple or that
straightforwardly progressive and cumulative. There will be false starts, blind alleys,
inabilities to see the obvious at times, etc. But that is a process of all scientific enquiries.
4.3. To *discover* that stories like Kripal trivialize and distort our experience (however
simple that formulation might sound) required scientific research that has stretched for
nearly two decades now. This is not the beginning point, but one of the results of
research. (That is why I do not respond to posts like those of B S and others. They have
no clue what I am talking about, and they apparently do not want to stop and think why
someone is saying it, or what he could probably mean by that.) However, this is merely
autobiographical. Today, the *results* of my research can *become* the starting points

for a new, the younger generation of intellectuals. This is what scientific research enables.
On this, I pin my hopes.
5. Let me quote *Satya*s questions in entirety: So shouldn't social science (in this
instance, a science of culture) seek to explain what we observe or perceive of different
societies (in this instance cultures)?
The question, when it comes to culture, is whose perception and how do we define that
perception? What we observe of the physical world is pretty much the same irrespective
of our own culture, but when we make observations about societies (and cultures), what
we observe, how we perceive seems to differ from observer to observer, and more widely
between outsiders and insiders. So whose observations are the social scientists supposed
to explain? And how do they define what that perception is? Do they have to take the
perceiver's word for it? Or better put, don't they have to take the perceiver's word for it?
Let me now see which questions I have answered, and which I have not.
5.1. The first question. Yes, the science of culture should indeed *explain* what we
perceive. We also seem to *perceive* cultural differences even where we cannot (without
such a science) *say* what we perceive.
5.2. The other sets of questions she raises have been partially reformulated and partially
answered. Let me, nevertheless, state one general point. Even though the natural world is
invariant, the *way* we experience this world is, somehow and to some extent,
dependent upon the theories we use to *say* what we experience. (There is a huge debate
about this issue, and it is not yet settled one way or another. We do not, as yet, even have
a decent theory of perception. Research, for example, in Computer Vision is trying to
simulate some aspects of perception of objects and motion etc). This is true for our
cultural world too: we can say what we *see* depending upon what theories we bring to
bear on what we see and say. Dependent to what extent? This is not a philosophical
question, but one for scientific research. The theories about cultural differences have the
*onus* of answering this question partially as well.
This has become a very, very long post. My apologies. But the questions are so important
that I could do nothing else.

Dear Arun,
As long the thought about our possible idiocy occurs in one's downer moments, it is
healthy: it makes one all the more sceptical and critical of one's own theories. But that is
no reason to feel dragged down *by this thought*: if we are able to take the first steps,
even if hesitant and tentative, that is a good thing. The first steps, however unstable and
tottering, remember, are a *preliminary* to walking, running and later sprinting. So, our
first steps should not be used to *criticise* our desire to walk or even of our abilities to
do so. On the contrary. It shows that we *are* going to walk. So, from whence the feeling
low or of feeling down?

Recollect that there is also an excellent astrologer amidst us: remember *Satya* heralding
that the Indian Renaissance has begun? She is right; she was not predicting the future but
characterising the *present*.
As far as the Chinese are concerned. No, their travellers did not say what the Christians
and the Muslims said about us. Besides, how could there have been a Sanskrit *cultural*
empire for nearly a thousand years, stretching all the way to the borders of China, without
wars, conquest, conversions, church, or whatever else the West required to build a Latin
and Christian Empire?
Besides, remember another thing too, something which I wrote of. We are *also*, (in
some senses) the descendents of Vishvaamitra. If he could create the three worlds, surely,
creating a couple of theories cannot be beyond our means, after all!
So, cheer up, ol' chap! we are a long way away from becoming senile or idiots!

Dear Kannan,
You ask two sets of questions: one about a possible inconsistency (and you also show me
how to avoid it) and the second, which is more clarificatory in nature. Let me begin with
the second first.
1. You are fairly accurate in representing the gist of my argument. But I am not sure why
you use the notion of historical accident as an escape hatch. The situation is really very
simple. I am merely describing one of the ways in which scientific theories grow. Let me
use an example. (I am using it because it is such a lovely example, and is attributed to one
of the greatest geniuses Mankind has ever produced. Nothing more is implied.)
It appears that Sir Isaac Newton was frequently complimented for being the greatest
genius the world had ever known. One of his replies is alleged to have been the
following: Even a pygmy sees further than the giants if he stands upon their shoulders.
And I, Sir, stand upon the shoulders of giants. The extraordinary humility apart, there is
something very important to what Newton is saying: his theory would not have been
there, if the theories of Copernicus and Galileo were not there before him. It is, of course,
a historical accident that certain people preceded Newton. This allowed Newton,
however, to write his Principia.
In a way, this is all I am saying. Thanks to the writings that exist today, I can build my
theory. The errors and mistakes (or however one characterises them) provide me with the
problem-situation. Why certain errors are systematically committed? This is one
question. The second question is with respect to the nature of the phenomenon they
studied where these errors exist. All I am doing is developing a hypothesis that links these
two together: for instance, I say, it is in the nature of religion (this is one aspect) that it

makes those who have it want to see religion in all cultures (this is the second aspect).
Taken together, the hypothesis not only tells us what religion is, but also explains the
errors of the previous generations.
Perhaps, another example would explain why there is nothing extraordinary to what I am
doing. If there is a systematic error committed by people in identifying a certain colour
under artificial light, your hypothesis will explain both why people commit the error and,
at the same time, why some colour appears differently under artificial light.
Of course, in my case, cultures and their descriptions are involved and not colour
perception in natural and artificial light. But that has to do with the nature of the domain
that is being investigated. For the rest, they are symmetric as far as their cognitive
structure is concerned.
In other words, I am saying that my Indianness is no barrier to building a theory about
cultural differences because I have the work of previous generations to lean on. Without
them, I could not have done what I have done so far. I can only be grateful to them for
this.
2. In a way, I have almost answered your inconsistency. Even here, a certain
reformulation is needed. You see, I do not think that there is anything called a scientific
methodology that one can follow in order to produce scientific theories. (In fact, no
historian or philosopher of repute has spoken in such terms for more than 100 years.
Many scientists may still do so; certainly most social scientists do so. But this is an old
idea from the 19th century, which has been rightly discarded today.) Therefore, I do not
claim that any one who follows the scientific methodology will improve upon my results.
This is not so important to your argument either. So, if we remove this unnecessary
sentence fragment from your question, this is how it looks like:
I think you are vulnerable to much criticism on this front because your simultaneous
claims that (a) Western anthropologists could only have got it wrong, and (b) that
anybody, (even a Western anthropologist or social scientist), can get it right and improve
upon your theories appear to be contradictory.
How can (a) and (b) apply simultaneously unless you are the very first investigator in
the history of social sciences who has got it right? You are entirely entitled to claim
this and defend this position but you will obviously be challenged.
You will see straight away that, when the unnecessary sentence-fragment disappears, the
contradiction is not that strong: (a) Western anthropologists could only have got it wrong;
(b) anybody, (even a Western anthropologist or social scientist), can get it right. These
sentences say that they got it wrong so far (and it could not be any other way) and they
can get it right from now on. All that is required is that between then and now a more
correct theory has entered the picture. I claim that it has: my theory is able to do more
(much more) than any other theory in the market place. And that, to develop and build
upon this theory further, one does not have to be an Indian or anything else.

My individual person enters into the picture only if someone wants to know why Balu
wrote The Heathen and other books (which he, hopefully, will write!). Then Balus
Indianness might become important. It is like asking the question why did some
particular scientist, and not another, discovered some proof or the other. Then, the
individual biography might become important.
Will my theory be challenged? I hope so. Otherwise, there is no hope of scientific
progress. Where would science be, if there was no criticism and disputation? But the
thing to note is this: my theory can be challenged, improved, rejected, modified, etc.
the*same way* you do any or all of these things in the natural sciences. The same,
however, cannot at all be said of the competitor theories, whether of a Wendy, of a
Kripal, of a John Hicks, or of a Ninian Smart. There is no way you can empirically test
any of their theories.
Once this is understood, what does it matter who is first or the last? What matters is the
growth of human knowledge and the growth in understanding that ensues.
Friendly greetings

Not quite. Culture is a notion that belongs to a general theory of culture. (Among other
things, it will have to talk about human culture, proto-culture and such like.) I am not
building a general theory of culture, whether human or animal.
Because I am talking about empirical cultures (notice the plural), my fundamental term is
the compound word cultural difference. I characterise this as a difference in
configurations of learning. Therefore, a culture (notice the singular) is a configuration
of learning.

Dear Tapori,
Your questions are not clear enough to me to answer them. So, this post is to clarify your
questions. You seem to ask whether the evolution of games could be used as a model to
study the way societies (or rules in society) evolve. Assume we could. Why would we
want to do this? It appears to make the task doable. We can then study the history of the
last 100 years or so of these societies, instead of studying their histories of the last 1000
years or more. Is this the worry? I do not see why I have to study the history of the last

4000 years to understand modern India. To the extent past becomes relevant (my research
into some particular question will tell me whether the past is relevant, if so which part of
the past is relevant, and how far I need to go in understanding the issue I want to
understand), only to that extent do I need to study the past. The general statement we are
what we are because of the past is true. But this is also a general statement. How far into
my past do you need to go in order to understand my present? That depends on which
part of the present you want to understand and what this understanding means in the
context of your research. The same applies to a study of cultures and societies.
Is the model of games useful in understanding evolution of some aspect of society? If you
use games in a very, very general sense (viz. there are players, strategies, end-results,
and such like), then it might. There is a flourishing branch of mathematics called Game
theory that has been used to study many things in nature and society: from the evolution
of rules and norms to seeing evolution itself in Game-theoretic terms. I need to warn you
that its notion of games is a technical one and involves two or more players, who follow
certain strategies for winning to which a certain pay-off is coupled. While it has
uncovered certain interesting dilemmas in societies, I do not find it as fruitful as its
practitioners claim. (But I suspect this is not what you have in mind.)
I am not sure whether this is what your questions are about. Could you please clarify
further?

Dear Tapori,
What are you trying to do? Make me feel silly for writing long posts or for writing in an
academic style?! You do not have to apologise for your lack of eloquence: we are
having a conversation, which means we need to understand each other, and this is not a
contest for judging literary styles and capacities!
Dear *Satya*,
You raise far too many issues; some can be answered here, some have been dealt with
elsewhere, some can only be dealt with later At the risk of sounding vain (a mere
assurance about the absence of vanity is all I can give), I do think that you should read at
least two things I have written: the immature version of my project and The
Heathen The one I can send you through e-mail (thanks to Arun Gupta) but I need an
e-mail address to which I can send it. The other, you can get it through the inter-library
loan system. I will only pick up the issues I can address myself to here, and leave the rest
for the time being. First some general points though.
1. I do not want to indulge in a discussion about Behavioural Psychology either on this
forum or on any other forum. It is to waste of time I do not have. Let me very briefly state

where I stand with respect to that discipline. In its early days, it was useful in providing
some insights into animal behaviour. I share the dominant consensus regarding its status
today: it is obsolete. It does not quite have the status of phlogiston theory but it is pretty
close to the latter. I have suffered through many writings of Skinner and his disciples, but
I have neither the time nor the interest to discuss their theories now. This means, I am
going to skip over issues involving shaping, conditioning and such like.
2. There will be other issues I cannot discuss in any detail: the nature of scientific and ad
hoc explanations and such themes from the philosophy of science. At best, I could make
some bald claims and leave them there.
3. Even with respect to your question (c), I need to skip certain things (for instance,
explaining why the question is posed wrongly). You will need to bear with all these
limitations.
Having got some of the preliminaries out of the way let me turn to your post.
Here is your first concern: Someone, lets say her name is Wendy, comes along and
sniggers when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus. Youidentify Wendys
statement as an ad hoc explanation. You counter: No, I do puja (very loosely translates
to worship) a lingam and lingam has many different meanings. Couldnt Wendy argue
that your explanation is ad hoc too?
Two reformulations. (1) I do not identify Wendys statement as an ad hoc explanation. I
say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do.
(2) Here is what I say: I am doing Puja to Shiva. No discussion about Lingam or its
many meanings. This is a *wrong* way of conducting a discussion. She cannot,
therefore, argue that I am giving an ad hoc explanation because I am not giving an
explanation of what I am doing but merely describing it.
Let us sketch some scenarios in order to see what conversational moves are there in such
a discussion. (1) She sees me doing something and asks me what I am doing. (2) I say I
am doing Puja to Shiva. From here on, two possible threads of discussion open up. The
first thread goes like this. (3) Either she asks why I do it: I say, it is our tradition, or that
I am a Bhakta of Shiva, or because my mother said I should, or whatever else happens to
be the case. Or she asks me why Shiva has the form he has: either I tell her the story from
the Puranas, or provide her a sthala purana (i.e. a story about that particular temple) or I
say, this is how we do it. (4) Let us say, she pursues the story from the Puranas and asks
me So, you are worshipping the Lingam of Shiva. I say, yes, indeed, this *is* Shiva
Lingam. (5) Being persistent, she goes further: do you know what Lingam means?
and I reply well, yes, I do know some of its meanings as we use it in our language. (6)
Suppose she isolates one meaning, say, phallus and asks me: So, you say you are
worshipping Shivas Lingam. I reply, unperturbed, yes, but I said so already: this is
Shivas Lingam. That is why we call it Shivalingam and not, say, KuberaLingam. In this
thread, where I am using Indian words, she cannot even come close to saying what she

wants to.
Suppose at step three, we switch to speaking in English. (3) She asks what puja is and
what lingam means. Here is what I would say *today*: Puja is best understood as a
ritual; as far as Lingam is concerned, I suggest you see it as the form in which this
ritual is performed to Shiva. Again here, two possible threads open up: the first where
she contests my translation and the other where she accepts it. Let us pursue the second
thread to begin with. (4) Why has Shiva taken this form? Because I am not trying to be
polemical, I tell her our stories from the Puranas and say it is one of the stories from our
tradition. And I add, to perform puja to Shiva *means* to perform the ritual to this
form. Because my description has the form of a definition (Shiva puja=ritual to this
form) no sensible discussion about it is possible. (5) She can come up with *another*
definition, but then, I say yes, but that is not my definition and the discussion is over.
On this thread, where we are discussing in English, she cannot say what she wants to
either.
Let us now suppose she contests my translation given in step (3). How is she going to do
it? (4) But you are wrong. Puja is worship and lingam means penis. Therefore,
you are worshipping a penis when you say that you are doing puja to the Shiva
Lingam. Here is what I would say *today*: You see, the English word worship
comes basically from Christian theology where one worships either the God or the Devil
and nothing else. Under no interpretation of such a theology could one consider Shiva as
God, leaving us with only one possibility that Shiva is either the Devil or his minion. Is
this what you want say: that we are worshipping Devil or his minions? In that case,
Wendy, we are not discussing a translation issue but a Christian theological one. Again,
two threads open up: either she denies it or asks for further explication. Let us take up her
denial first. (5) No, that is not what worship means. It means reverence. I am not a
Christian, I was born a Jew; I know nothing of Christian theology even though I was
married to one for some time. I would say the following today: Wendy, I would be
willing to accept your definition of worship. But if I do so, I must do violence to other
people and cultures: the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim. From your definition, it
would follow that they are not worshipping God at all! And further, they cannot. In all
these cultures, one can show reverence to the elderly, the king, knowledge, the
powerful, etc. To say that they show reverence to God in the same way is to transform
all of them into idolaters, which, according to their theologies, is the greatest sin! I am
sorry, but your translation of puja is not a mere linguistic issue. Again, the discussion
shifts to another level. She cannot pursue this line of enquiry either.
Let us say she asks for explication, the other thread in step (4). How can the discussion
proceed? (5) Here let me bend the stick in favour of Wendy. But every Sanskrit-English
dictionary, and every Indian teacher in Sanskrit who knows English, translates puja as
worship. Are you saying their knowledge of either languages is deficient and *you are
the only one* who knows how to translate Puja correctly? Being a reasonable person, I
would not get offended by her rhetorical attempts to make me appear ridiculous. I would
say the following: You see, Wendy, we all learnt English through Indian languages and
were taught that Puja means worship. We give the meaning of Puja to the English

word worship. The first generations of translators decided to translate puja as

worship because they were convinced that we are idolaters and worshipped the Devil
and his minions. So, you see, we have to discuss the historical issues involving
colonialism and what it means to a culture like ours in order to satisfactorily resolve the
issues of translation. That is all I am saying. Shall we do so? Have your read The
Heathen?
Thus I can go on sketching several other scenarios of the possible conversational moves
open to Wendy in conducting such a conversation. In none of them can she induce the
*cognitive wrongness* that was induced in me when I was a boy of 14. She simply does
not have the cognitive ability to come up with an explanation that can trivialize my
experience *any more*. Let me just pen a few reflections about this state of affairs,
because it is very important to realise what has happened *consistently* throughout these
conversations.
(A) The first thing to notice is that, in all these scenarios, I am *defining* the terms of the
debate. She is unable to do this with respect to what *I am doing*.
(B) I am able to do it *because* I am knowledgeable about the western culture. That is, I
am not ignorant of the western culture the way I was when I was 14 or 24. Therefore, I
am able to *tell* her that she does not understand her *own* culture as well as I
understand hers.
(C) My principle of charity forbids me from transforming any culture, whether hers or
mine, into a *bunch of idiots*. My conversational move in (5) makes me *defend* the
Jewish, Islamic, and Christian cultures because of this principle. Of course, the same
principle makes me defend Indian traditions as reasonable ones too.
(D) I am not making use of any fancy defensive explanation - some or another kind of
symbolic explanation - (or even any explanation) that many Indians come up with to
defend their own traditions. Such explanations arise out of ignorance: both of their own
traditions and, above all, of the western culture. They have very little *understanding* of
the subjects they talk about, but the conviction they know what is there to know is
matched by none. (Some of the discussions on Sulekha have made this very obvious.)
Most English-speaking Indian intellectuals are a pompous and empty lot: they talk and
argue for the sake of doing so, and believe that knowledge is a matter of providing
citations and references to books. (I will be writing the article I promised you, as an
answer to your question, where I will take up this issue in some detail.) But they have no
depth of understanding regarding either their own traditions or those of the West. They
are like the JNU intellectuals: empty, sanctimonious, convinced of their own
intelligence, but full of hot air.
(E) To understand my mother, I wrote in the target article, I needed to understand my
mother-in-law. What you see in my imaginary conversation with Wendy is an
exemplification of this realisation. There will be no Indian Renaissance without breeding
a *new* set of intellectuals. The current lot is not even worth the paper on which they

write and produce so much nonsense. This might sound a harsh judgement. Undoubtedly,
there are some fine individuals among them; I know a few of them personally myself. But
this is how I look at the issue.
I wanted to say more. But that can wait. What I want from you is to reflect upon your
question, which I have cited at the beginning of this article, in the light of what I have
written in this post. I would like to hear of those reflections before I proceed further to
tackle some of the other questions.
Friendly greetings
Balu

Your question: Is it desirable to have a model that can simulate social and cultural
changes? I cannot see what good reason there is not to find it desirable. It would be
eminently desirable. It will take some time though before we get there, but we will surely
get there. Thanks to computers, we have a possibility of talking realistically about
simulation. However, we have to still go a very long way before we are able to do so. We
need to build some theories about social and cultural change and evolution; we need to
develop suitable algorithms for simulating these changes; we need to develop more and
different kinds of logics (non-monotonic ones) than exist today; we need to simulate
some relevant aspects of human reasoning process It is only now that we are
*beginning* to simulate the evolutionary process and have developed some kinds of
algorithms to do so. We need to overlay this with developments (hardly understood
today) about social dynamics and cultural dynamics. And then study what could happen.
So, it is definitely going to take some time. In all probability, we will first start simulating
some fragments of social or cultural reality first (after all, this is what modelling means).
(a) It has always been my dream (and some kind of vague conviction that it can be done)
to simulate the growth of the Indian caste system: I think a fundamental aspect of the
caste structure is recursive in nature. The only thing (!) one has to do is to isolate the
principles (probably they will be four or five at the most) and use something like the
genetic algorithm to simulate its growth, disintegration and recombination. (This is
probably the *only* way to check the truth of any theory about the nature of the caste
system.)
(b) I think some aspects of the western culture are susceptible to a simulation as well. I
think that the dynamics of its norms and this cultures basic strategies of social cooperation can be simulated. The empirical history would be the check for the accuracy of
such a simulation.
(c) If both (a) and (b) can be done, then we can simulate an aspect of colonialism as an
interaction between (a) and (b). Again, we have the colonial history functioning as a
check about what is simulated.

So, if this is your question, this is where I stand with respect to simulation. In all
probability, simulation is *how* we can test the truth of theories about the social and
cultural world. That we have not been able to do this so far has more to do with the state
of our knowledge than with the nature of cultural and social realities.
Friendly greetings
Balu

Dear Tset,
There is something very funny about us Indians. Intelligent people prefer to call
themselves village idiots, whereas the real idiots go around calling others stupid! (Just
to help you place me, I call the second group stupid! Go figure, as the Americans say.)
In a way I have taken up this issue in my reply to Tapori and Vrikodara in #328. The only
thing I want to add here is about the Chinese. There is another way to look at the feeling
we have with respect to the (mainland) Chinese. What if it has nothing to do with age of
the culture but with a fundamental *structural similarity* within the Asian culture? What
if there is something called the Asian culture the way one can speak of the Western
culture? Prima facie, there is some evidence (of sorts) that makes this appellation
plausible. How could traditions that we call Hinduism and Buddhism so easily
*migrate* across the whole of Asia? Remember this happened without any kind of
centralised authority (military, political, economic or religious) enforcing it on the entire
continent. The travelling mendicants, so many thousands years ago for heavens sake,
carried these traditions outwards. A plausible hypothesis would be: there must be
something fundamentally similar (structurally similar?) between the different Asian
cultures that makes them into the Asian culture. How about this: the strategy of social
interaction is the same within the Asian culture? That is, one could speak in terms of the
western way of going-about (i.e. strategies of social interaction that characterises the
western culture) and the Asian way of doing so. If only one could isolate these strategies
of social interaction today, we have the necessary formal tools (at this moment) to start
simulating them tomorrow!
Friendly greetings

Dear Vrikodara,
Your question: In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other
than Shiva, in particular "phallus"? A Wendy says "Yes", a Balu says "No". For some
person, not on this board, there is not a dialog; it is a reading of Wendy, a reading of Balu

- how to decide between the two answers, which one represents the truth about Hindus?
Depending on the patience of the visitor, a number of answers are possible including an
identification of the nature of the dispute.
1. In the context of the Catholic mass, do the bread and the wine mean or refer to
anything other than the flesh and blood of Christ? The Catholics say yes (this is their
doctrine of transubstantiation), the Protestant says no. How to decide between the two
answers and which one represents the truth about the Catholics? Or does one want to say,
which one represents the truth about Christianity? Or does one want to say, which one
represents the truth about the world? Notice that, in each case, the dispute is *not* about
the meaning (connotation) or the reference (denotation) of the word bread and wine: it
is a theological dispute that *appears* to be about the meaning and reference of words.
So, how to decide between the answer in this case? Depends on your theology.
2. In the context of Christian worship, does the word The Bible connote or denote
anything other than the word of God, in particular a book? One says yes, the believer
says no. Is this about the meaning or reference of the word The Bible? In *English*,
the word The Bible does not mean a book. It is a *name*. What does it name? A book.
Any book? No. All books? No. Only books? No, because it could be a *scroll* too. So,
some books, some scrolls and even some recitations could all be called The Bible. Let
us go further. Could one use the word The Bible to name any of the above in different
languages? Well, yes. So, what does the word The Bible name? Something that is the
same irrespective of the language, or the form this something assumes. The Bible
names this. So, what is the dispute about? The one who says that The Bible denotes or
connotes a book is *fixated* on the physical shape of some book he saw somewhere
and somewhen without even thinking his own claim through. So, one does not even have
to refer to what the believers believe in order to show this. How to decide between the
answers in this case? Depends on your understanding of what language is with respect to
its use sociologically.
3. In the context of physics, does the word mass denote or connote an invariant or a
variable? A Newtonian says an invariant; an Einsteinian says a variable. For some one
who does not know Physics, there is no dialogue. A reading of a Newton and a reading of
Einstein. How to decide between the two readings, which one represents the truth about
the physicists? I am sure we can elaborate on these ourselves. What is the dispute about?
The truth of the reading has to do *not* with the community of physicists, *not* what
any group says at any given moment of time, *but with* what a scientific theory is and
how one chooses between competing theories.
These three examples are enough to illustrate the following: what *appears* as a dispute
about the meaning and reference of words can be about things that have absolutely
nothing to do with either the denotation or the connotation of the words. This is the first
thing one will have to tell someone who is not on the board. Having said this, we can now
focus on what the dispute is between a Wendy and a Balu.

4. In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in
particular "phallus"? Does ShivaLinga mean phallus? No, of course not. (Linga might,
but not Shivalinga. But I will come to this.) Does the word mean the phallus of Shiva?
Yes it does. In what way, precisely? The only way of answering this question is to
circumscribe the reference first. Let us assume the existence of an entity named Shiva.
Let us assume too that he has a phallus. Then Shiva Linga names the phallus of Shiva.
However, if it refers to such a *unique* entity as the phallus of Shiva there can be only
one such. (Shiva does not have infinite number of phalluses; and Shiva is an entity
different from Durga, Ganesha and, say, a mortal called Balu.) So, do we do puja to this
*unique* entity? That cannot be the case: there are finitely many shiva lingas in India and
outside. So, what we do puja to is not a *unique* entity which is the phallus of Shiva
but a form (or representation) of this unique entity.
What kind of a form is this? It cannot connote or denote the material of which the
phallus is made of. Whatever be the material out of which the phallus of Shiva is
constructed, it cannot be simultaneously constructed out of stone, aluminium, marble and
so on. So, it will have to be the shape of the phallus of Shiva. Therefore, if something
is to be a Shiva linga at all, it *must* have a shape of the phallus of Shiva and that
shape must be invariant across Shiva lingas.
The very same devotees of Shiva, however, do puja to Jyothirlinga and Aatmalinga
too. They are Shiva Lingas as well. Either one denies, pace the above argument, that
these two are Shiva Lingas at all, or one has to say that these Lingas have the same
shape as the phallus of Shiva. Neither of these two possibilities is true. The first is
empirically false (both synchronically and diachronically); the second is to literally see
phallus where there is none, in light.
The only possible conclusion: Shivalinga cannot possibly refer to the shape of the
phallus of Shiva. It is a *form*, which has little to do with the shape of Shivas Penis.
(Of course, no one has seen the shape of that particular penis except S B!) Thus, for the
lack of an alternative (at this stage of the discussion), we have to settle for the following:
ShivaLingam is the form in which we do Puja to Shiva. Apparently, this mind-numbing
(linguistic and philosophical) tour merely tells us what our grandmothers told us in all
their simplicity: we do puja to Shiva in the form of Linga.
Of course, one can go further in such a discussion along any number of other lines. It is
not my intent and, I presume, neither yours to do so. Hopefully, this goes some way to
clarifying the question you raised. The issues and the disputes are not so arbitrary any
more than they are merely questions of alternate readings or etymological fights. Other
substantial issues are involved and it is not an undecidable!
Friendly greetings
Balu

A very quick reply. First, it is clear what you ask of me. Second, I do promise to return to
this theme in at least some detail in the near future. Third, I want to briefly tell you
something now. Seeking a solid ground is not searching for some kind of faith. You might
feel a bit disoriented, but back then when you were an atheist, you discarded it and
searched for something else not because you felt disoriented but because you found that
atheism was not enough. So, the first thing to notice in your search for a ground is that
such a search might have nothing to do with feeling disoriented but in thinking that you
are. You say you are seeking solid ground and, if I may continue using that metaphor, in
the process of finding it you have taken false starts, toured blind alleys, stumbled, fell and
even hurt yourself. If you have done all this to come to where you are now, Cynical, have
you realised that you could not have done any of these things *if you were not already
standing on solid ground?* In a way, this might be a good description of what my project
is about: to show you that you are on solid ground already and that you always were! All
I want and can do is to remove the blinkers and help you see that you are on solid ground
and that you have been on it all along. This is an assurance I want to give you before I try
to persuade of it in the near future.
I will give a short reply to the others soon.
Thank you for inviting me to stay awhile (#292). Not that I intend to leave so soon. After
all, the discussion is more than just enjoyable, it is instructive as well. Only I wasnt sure
how to respond to your queries and at what level. I felt that in your answer to my rain
dance comment you touched upon a very important issue (#272), but I was unhappy
with the form it took. In a follow-up teaser you express your concerns thus: could
distortions simply be the result of missing something they dont know? And what then are
the implications of such distortions to the well being of mankind? Might we (by
distorting) be blocking access to, and gradually destroying knowledge that has been
encoded into the social practices of other cultures? Finally, you address the same issue
again in your comment #325 and rephrase it in terms of cultural practices having
intended purposes. Again I am unhappy with the formulation of this question because it
occludes a very important, if not *the* most important issue of a comparative science of
cultures: Is it possible *to learn* from other cultures? If it is, what *can* we learn?
Do not expect me to answer these questions. They are not the kind of questions that can
be answered straight away; even if they could, the answers wouldnt make much sense
today. However, because your concern *is* very important, let me try to address it in a
general way.
You will remember that in an earlier comment I have spoken about Europes Oriental
Renaissance. Looking back at this period, one cannot but be impressed by the enormous
dynamism created and the amount of intellectual energy applied to the field of Oriental
studies. What fuelled the dream of the minds of many giants across Europe was the
expectation of learning from the East, and, by doing so, *transforming the culture of the
West!* Remember, their point of reference was the period in European history we now
call Renaissance. One aspect of this period was the rediscovery of the Classical texts.

But this discovery was linked with many other (r)evolutions in the culture of the West.
Just think of the domains of arts and literature, philosophy, science, etc.
Therefore, even though energy was applied to collecting *the texts* of the eastern
cultures, what made it all sensible was the expectation that they contained *insights and
knowledge* from which the West could *learn*. I am absolutely convinced that the
Europeans were correct when they thought that they could *learn* from other cultures.
This is also what we should bring into consideration when we turn to books such as
Schlegels *ber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder* (On the Language and Wisdom of
the Indians; first decade 19th century). The German Romantics just gave a favourable
expression to a sentiment that was deeply rooted in the culture of the West. Indians
possessed a *wisdom* the West didnt have, and was therefore worth exploring.
Perhaps, we should regret that they were seeking *wisdom* instead of *knowledge*. The
*wisdom* of the East turned out to be clouded in mysticism and hence only accessible if at all - to mystics themselves. Of course, one could claim that the mystical is very
important and that it was acknowledged by geniuses such as Einstein. (This is what
Sankrant Sanu did in one of his comments on his column (#69) in order to defend why it
is important to read the Upanishads.)
Being neither a mystic, nor a genius, what do I get? What is it that I could learn from the
East? When one turns to contemporary social sciences, the answer is obvious: *nothing*.
Surely, I didnt give up my Catholic faith with its beliefs in the Immaculate Conception
of Maria or Jesus Ascension to replace them by others such as the doctrine of
metempsychosis. No, I will not give up *Western* science (natural science, that is) and
accept the belief that rain is piss of the gods. And no, I do not believe that jumping up and
down causes the bladder of the Gods to leak.
For the same reason *Satya*, I am very unhappy with your attempt to make sense of the
practice of rain dancing. You claim that the Native Americans see the Universe as the
manifestation of an intricate natural harmony. I am willing to believe you, but what does
that mean? You say: *A NA sees him/herself as part of that delicate harmonic balance.
Native Americans do not see themselves as distinct from Nature. The elements act on
Man, and Man also acts on the elements. It isn't a struggle of who conquers whom.
Rather, both Man and every other element of the Natural World influence each other, and
every event that occurs, from the tiniest raindrop to the biggest tornado, is part of a
logical pattern emerging from the interplay of those influences. As Chief Seattle said of
Man and the Web of Nature. 'Whatever he does to the Web, he does to himself. You
expand on this theme by giving the example of building houses.
The point that I want to make is this: if the explanation is true, we *do not* need Native
American culture to know that. Our situation is this: as human beings, we think that
cultures are worth studying *because we have the feeling that we can learn from them*. I
am absolutely convinced that this feeling is correct. None of the social sciences address
this feeling. On the contrary, everything we get is a distorted description trivializing the
experience other cultures.

Thanks to Balus research project, we begin to see *why* the West couldnt possibly
have learned from other cultures. Its religion forced the western culture to see others as
its *inferior variants*. About this issue much has been said already. Here I will make one
thread explicit that is implicit in what I have said so far.
I emphasised that the Europeans searched for texts and expected to gain insight and
knowledge. But look at what happened. Holwell, for example, translated the *Shastas* to
prove the soundness of Indian thinking (in his *Interesting Historical Events, Relative to
the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan*, 1765). By doing so, he merely
proved that the Indian thinkers shared the European insights into the nature of God.
However, he was forced to describe contemporary India unfavourably. The texts which
contained these valuable insights were very old. Since then, corruption had played its
role. What kind of corruption? The rituals of the Indians and their stories. That is,
everything we associate with *Hinduism* - the religion of the Indians. So what did
Holwell learn that he didnt know before? Nothing! Christianity had already told him that
there was only one God who created earth. The missionaries who did not fail to describe
the Indians as *Devil worshippers* had already told him that the Indian culture was
corrupt.
Now let us return to Wittgensteins remark. He says that the very idea of wanting to
explain a practice seems wrong to me. What kind of explanation was he thinking of?
The one Frazer provided of course. What did Frazer provide? Stories, beliefs,
worldviews, etc. which were believed to *explain* the practice, that is, *cause* of these
practices, so to speak. What else did Wittgenstein say? All that Frazer does is to make the
practices plausible to people who think as he does. I invite you to consider the
possibility that Wittgenstein was not just thinking about other *individuals*. In fact,
research reveals that what Frazer did, was the dominant way of doing in *the West*. In
other words, one could paraphrase Wittgensteins remark thus: All that Frazer does is to
make practices plausible to *people in the West*. In other words, Wittgenstein is making
an observation about the culture of the West. What does his insight boil down to? That
people in the West search for *beliefs*, of which the practices are an expression, to make
sense of practices. Livingstone asked the rain doctor why he *believed* that dancing
caused rain.
The next step must be obvious. What if there are cultures where beliefs have nothing do
to with how people go about in the world (i.e., they are not *constitutive* of this going
about in the world)? If they do exist, it must be obvious that they must possess other
*kinds of knowledge*, i.e. kinds of knowledge that differ from what we are familiar with.
Does it make sense to think so? I believe it does. Balu has offered an intriguing and
convincing beginning in his book, where he explores and makes sense of this idea. The
gist of his arguments cannot be summarised within the confines of a comment.
Yes, other cultures do possess knowledge. And, yes, current social sciences do block
access to that knowledge. Do they also destroy it? I do not think so. What is needed,
however, is a theory explaining cultural differences. That this will come I am sure of. In

fact, as you yourself said, the Indian Renaissance has already begun.
Willem Derde