[khan]

This same understanding of the Hindu male explains the furor in the Hindu right over scholarly publications that stress aspects of sexual desire in the tradition. One terrifying example is the recent attack on Paul Courtright’s scholarly book on Ganesha,19 the god with an elephant head whose birth is closely connected to the sexual desire of the gods.20 The attackers, mostly in online publications and public letters, show no sign of having studied the book but focus on its Freudian reading of the relationship between Shiva and Ganesha, and Courtright’s suggestion that thinking about the sexual conflicts in the human family will help us understand the Hindu gods. They particularly dislike the idea that Ganesha’s sexuality is depicted (quite faithfully to the tradition) as playful and childlike rather than as aggressive and dominating. For writing this book 20 years ago, Courtright has recently received death threats; even the public face of the opposition is extraordinarily threatening, including prominent claims in periodicals as respectable as India Abroad that Courtright’s academic freedom should be revoked and that his university (Emory) should not allow him to teach.21

Similarly, when the wonderful scholar Wendy Doniger, whose work strongly influenced Courtright, lectured in London recently on sexual motifs in the stories of the gods told in the classical epic Ramayana, an egg was thrown at her from the audience; and the same militant columnist in India Abroad attacks her right to teach the Hindu tradition.22 Most recently, the historian James Laine of Macalester College impugned the purity of a prominent woman of the past by mentioning in his biography of the 17th-century Hindu emperor Shivaji that, because Shivaji’s father traveled for most of his life, there were jokes that the son was the product of an adulterous liaison of his mother’s.23 Laine did not even credit the allegation; he merely reported it. Nonetheless, the mere mention of a slur against the reputation of Shivaji’s mother brought an attack on Laine’s Indian collaborator, who was physically assaulted and his face painted black. Part of the institute in Pune where Laine did his research was burned; the book was banned by the state government; and its Indian edition was promptly withdrawn by a timorous Oxford University Press. Laine has been charged with a crime against public order, and Prime Minister Vajpayee himself (now ex–prime minister), on campaign in Maharashtra, has suggested that Interpol ought to go to the United States to arrest Laine. The death threats against Laine are obsessed with female purity; repeatedly they assert that Indian women are pure until death, whereas women in England are filthy and dirty.24

These examples show an obsession with treating sexuality as something other, something foreign. Ramesh Rao, attacking Courtright, refers to the sexual aspect of Ganesha’s history (an extremely important part of the traditional mythological record) as “heathen.” One way of “othering” the sexual, which Rao and Laine’s attackers pursue, is to suggest that Western scholars are foisting onto Indians their own sexual obsessions. Where the scholar in question is indisputably Indian, other tactics are chosen: the distinguished historian Romila Thapar, who has insisted on presenting a balanced view of historical Hindu–Muslim relations in the medieval and early modern periods, has been attacked as a communist and an agent of Pakistan. Another revealing strategy of “othering” is that shown in the punishment meted out to Laine’s collaborator: through blackface, he is both publicly shamed in a traditional way and turned into someone who looks “other” from the dominant Hindu self-image.

We might say, then, that for whatever reason extremists of the Hindu right currently exhibit an unusual degree of disgust anxiety,25 as manifested in a fearful, even paranoid insistence on representing the Hindu male as pure and free from lust (while being, at the same time, successfully aggressive).26 Muslims, in contrast, are the hypersexual, the other, the “black”; and Muslim women, like Jewish women in the Nazi era, are doubly sexual, beings whose fertility and beauty both attracts and repels. (One repeated scare tactic of the Hindu right is to portray Muslims as both polygamous and hyperfertile, thus as having many times more children than Hindu families, although this suggestion is not supported by demographic evidence.)

When the man who wants to be pure becomes attracted to a disgusting subordinated being, as Tolstoy and Andrea Dworkin eloquently show, the result is likely to be violent. Although Dworkin represents this violence as a cultural universal, it seems likely that it varies greatly in keeping with cultural ideologies. Sexuality and its vulnerabilities are difficult enough for any human being to deal with at any time. All cultures probably contain seeds of violence in connection with sexuality. But a person who has been taught to have a big stake in being above the sexual domain, whose political ideology insists on purity, and whose experience of cultural anxiety connects impurity with humiliation, cannot bear to be dragged into that domain. And yet, of course, the very denial and repression of the sexual create a mounting tension within. Tolstoy’s diaries describe how the tension mounts inside him until he has to use his wife, and then he despises her, despises himself, and wants to use force against her to stop the cycle from continuing.

The hate literature circulated in Gujarat portrays Muslim women as hypersexual, enjoying the penises of many men. That is not unusual; Muslim women have often been portrayed in this denigrating way. But it also introduces a new element: the desire that is imputed to them to be penetrated by an uncircumcised penis. Thus the Hindu male creates a pornographic fantasy with himself as its specific subject. In one way, these images show anxiety about virility, assuaging it by imagining the successful conquest of Muslim women. But of course, like Tolstoy’s narrator’s fantasies, these fantasies are not exclusively about intercourse. The idea of this intercourse is inseparable from ideas of mutiliation and violence. ****ing a Muslim woman just means killing her. The fantasy image of the untying of the penises that were “tied until now” is very reminiscent of the explosion of violence in Tolstoy, only the logic has been carried one small step further: instead of murder necessitated by and following sex, the murder just is the sex. Women are killed by having large metal objects inserted into their vaginas. In this way, the image is constructed of a sexuality that is so effective, so closely allied with the desire for domination and purity, that its penis is a pure metal weapon, not a sticky thing of flesh and blood. The Hindu male does not even need to dirty his penis with the contaminating fluids of the Muslim woman. He can **** her with the clean non-porous metal weapon that kills her, while he himself remains pure. Sexuality itself carries out the project of annihilating the sexual. Nothing is left to inspire fear.

A useful comparison to this terrifying logic is the depiction of warlike masculinity in a 1922 novel of Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Battle as Inner Experience):

These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines . . . men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy.

As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will . . . supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world.

In this fascinating passage, Jünger combines images of machinery with images of animal life to express the thought that the new man must be in some sense both powerful beast and god, both predatory and invulnerable. The one thing he must never be is human. His masculinity is characterized not by need and receptivity, but by a “concentrated and determined release of energy.” He knows no fear, no sadness. Why must the new man have these properties? Because the world’s foundations have been ruined. Jünger suggests that the only choices for males living amid death and destruction are either to yield to an immense and ineluctable sadness or to throw off the humanity that inconveniently inflicts pain. Disgust for both Jews and women become for such men a way of asserting their own difference from mere mortal beings.