Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Balagangadhara’s response
to Jeffrey Kripal]
You describe your bewilderment when you were told that the ‘linga’
actually means penis. You also describe your discomfort with your
friends holding your hands once you had been exposed to public
displays of homosexual love in Amsterdam. A barrier was created
between you and your earlier experiences of reverence and friendship
by the insertion of this new ‘knowledge’. You find this ‘knowledge’
spurious because it distorts and denies your genuine experience. The
explanation came actively between your experiences and you and
prevented you from describing or reflecting on your own experiences.
I think, first of all, that it is not just the nature of explanation, which
prevented you from accessing these experiences. If someone tells you
anything, you don’t believe it or you do not necessarily take it
seriously. It is the authority of these explanations that trouble you and
others. The explanation is authoritative because it is western (or
American), scientific, rational, modern. If it were not authoritative it
would have no power to ‘transform’ your experiences. A person who
does not accept this authority would ignore these explanations or
respond by knocking off a few teeth of the one who suggests such
explanations. This also explains the transformation of your experience
of friendly handholding in public. There were no explanations provided
by anyone in this case. What you perceived in Amsterdam transformed
your experience. The new knowledge in this case was your own
perception, and your experience of another culture. The effect on you,
however, was completely opposite of what happened to those western
travelers’ experience of another culture who interpreted Indian
religious practices in the light of their own theological prejudices and
preoccupations. How a knowledge claim affects us depends on the
relationship that we have with that knowledge claim. I would argue
that the way we relate to a knowledge claim is shaped by the
normative structure or framework of knowledge in which the claim is
embedded and to which we may or may not give our assent.
What has been implicit in this argument is that the question of ‘denial’
of experience of the colonized is integrally linked to the question of
knowledge and its authority. It cannot be subsumed under the question
of cultural difference though that may be important in its own right.
We do not merely seek understanding and affirmation of our
experience (we seek that too), but want to secure the possibility of our
current and future knowledge and build a different relationship with
current and past knowledge traditions, our own and other’s.
Yours in dialogue,
Avinash Jha
CSDS Library, Delhi.
Email: kalisaroj@yahoo.com