Wrath Over Poor Reporting

I normally cringe whenever I see an article on Hinduism in a mainstream paper partially because I'm not a particularly religious Hindu and you can never be sure that a mainstream publication will be able to place the item that caught it's interest into an appropriate context. I made an exception to read a front-page article in tomorrow's Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam called Wrath Over a Hindu God, assuming that a presumably (from the name) Indian reporter would be able to provide the appropriate context for a story. Clearly, I was mistaken:

Folklore has it that elephants never forget, and Paul Courtright has reason to believe it. A professor of religion at Emory University, he immersed himself in the story of Ganesha, the beloved Hindu god with the head of an elephant. Detecting provocative Oedipal overtones in Ganesha's story -- and phallic symbolism in his trunk -- he wrote a book setting out his theories in 1985.

Nineteen years later, thanks to an Internet campaign, the world has rediscovered Courtright's book. After a scathing posting on a popular Indian Web site, he has received threats from Hindu militants who want him dead.

"Gopal from Singapore said, 'The professor bastard should be hanged,' " said Courtright, incredulous. "A guy from Germany said, 'Wish this person was next to me, I would have shot him in the head.' A man called Karodkar said, 'Kill the bastard. Whoever wrote this should not be spared.' Someone wanted to throw me into the Indian Ocean."

...

The attacks against American scholars come as a powerful movement called Hindutva has gained political power in India, where most of the world's 828 million Hindus live. Its proponents assert that Hindus have long been denigrated and that Western authors are imposing a Eurocentric world view on a culture they do not understand.

I have a number of problems with this article. Vedantam paints Hindus with a broad brush to suggest that we are incapable of handling religious critique or interpretation that is challenging in nature. He doesn't make any attempt to quantify the Hindutva movement. Anyone who knows anything about India knows that it's a place full of contradictions. There is no such thing as a majority in India - there are pluralities but certainly it would be very difficult to suggest that all Hindus believe the same thing to the same degree.

Vendantam's stereotyping of Hindus is worse when it comes to talking about Hindus in North America:

That argument resonates among many of the roughly 1.4 million Hindus in North America as well.

In November, Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago professor of the history of religion who has written 20 books about India and Hinduism, had an egg flung at her by an angry Hindu when she was lecturing in London. It missed.

In January, a book about the Hindu king Shivaji by Macalester College religious studies professor James W. Laine provoked violent outbursts: One of Laine's collaborators in India was assaulted, and a mob destroyed rare manuscripts at an institute in India where Laine had done research. The Indian edition was recalled, and India's prime minister warned Laine not to "play with our national pride." Officials said they want to extradite the Minnesota author to stand trial for defamation, and the controversy has become a campaign issue in upcoming parliamentary elections.

This assertion is perhaps the worst in the article - Vendantam suggests without evidence that 1.4 million Hindus in N. America feel the same way. Then he uses two incidents that have nothing to do with North American Hindus - the last time I checked London was not a city on this side of the Atlantic. To be fair, much later he talks about criticism from North American Hindus, but again in very broad quantitative terms and nothing that would imply that all or even most Hindus feel this way. In fact, he only interviews one North American Hindu in the whole article! This is just plain sloppy or lazy journalism.

I resent it because it makes broad assertions about a group of people based on anecdotal evidence and broad assertions. Someone who reads the Washington Post who may not know much about Hindus might come away believing that Hindus have little tolerance for intellectual examination of their religion.

Which brings me to the point of the article - which is to say, what is the point? Religion is a deeply personal thing for most people. Take any religion - if someone who doesn't practice that faith were to say something about your god that was extremely sacriligious, wouldn't you be offended? Might you say something in anger or even act on it?

Martin Scorsesee's The Last Temptation of Christ created an enormous uproar over religious interpretation in film, since it depicted Jesus Christ as a person with human desires which many Christian audiences found offensive. They boycotted the film, pressured retail chains not to carry it on videotape. The movie was banned in several countries including South Africa and Israel (although the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban). Christians who felt offended boycotted, picketed, vandalized, and even attacked moviegoers in the U.S. and France. Do the people who engaged in such acts represent the whole or even most of Christianity?

Similar sentiments have been expressed by works that interpret Muslim and other religions - which goes back to the point of the Washington Post article - what is it? Why is it newsworthy that an academic's interpretation of religious icons has offended and angered the people who believe in that religion?