Jacob De Roover is spot on when he says, "Imagine you are born in the 1950s as a Hindu boy with intellectual

inclinations. As you grow up, your mother takes you to the temple and shows you how to do puja. .......In school, you are taught ab out the history of India. You learn that Hinduism grew out of the Brahmanism imp orted during the Aryan invasion.......Your teachers present this account as the truth, along with Newton s physics and Darwin s evolutionary theory. You feel bad ab out your backward religion and ashamed about the massive injustice of caste. ........ Yet you feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. You sense tha t it misrepresents you and your traditions it distorts your practices, your people , and your experience, but you don t know what to do about it." It is precisely what I went through as a Hindu boy born in the early 1950's. Stu dying in a school run by Catholic missionaries and using texts written by the Br itish which still taught us how to convert Pounds into guineas, shillings, pence and farthings and the horrors of the Black Hole of Calcutta, I was told by an A nglo-Indian teacher that "we civilised you people or you would still have been s winging from the trees," and I actually believed what he said! However, I could not reconcile this image of 'savages' with the rich mythology, culture, emphasis on dharma (righteousness) which I imbibed at home from my mother. My father, a busy scientist and an atheist to boot, barely interacted with me and died when I was barely into my teens. It was this dichotomy which made me embark on a voyage of discovery of my religi on and culture after an initial flirtation with atheism and communism, which aga in is typical of my generation. Jakob has started on the right note. Let's see where he takes us next. After reading the entire essay, I can see that Jakob De Roover has made an hones t attempt to understand why Hinduism is caricatured by the likes of Wendy Donige r and why many gullible, 'educated' Indians are ashamed of their heritage. I however tend to disagree with him when he attributes prudishness towards sex a mong Hindus to the Victorian era ("To anyone familiar with the harm caused by Ch ristian attitudes towards sex-as-sin, this would count as a reason to be proud o f Indian culture. Yet the grips of Victorian morality have made these Hindus ash amed of a beautiful dimension of their traditions.") He has probably not taken i nto consideration the fact that Hinduism was under siege wih the advent of Islam in 712 AD and that it had far more negative impact than Christianity as far as Hinduism is concerned. In fact, during the British era, Hindus rediscovered the glory of their heritage thanks to the work of enlightened westerners and social reformers like Dayananda Saraswati, Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda, to name just a few, the reformation and regeneration of Hinduism took place. I would like to also clarify that the Linga is not a phallus and there is no obs cenity or profanity associated with linga pooja. The actual meaning of linga in Sanskrit is symbol and the Shivalinga is a representation of Shiva, the Supreme Soul. Since the Almighty is both formless and capable of manifesting in all form s, Shiva was depicted in a form (ellipsoid) which is the most perfect of forms w hile retaining the quintessential formlessness of the Supreme Soul. Since an ell ipsoid cannot stand on its own, it is placed in a pedestal. Yoni, again, actuall y means the point of origin. Focusing on the sexual connotations of these symbol s instead of understanding the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts is the root cause of a lot of misconceptions regarding Hinduism. Anyone gets upset when their religion is misrepresented, caricatured and ridicul ed under the cloak of false scholarship. Hindu anger against Wendy Doniger is fu lly justified. @ Peter Veer - I agree that Christian missionaries too were responsible for prop agating a negative and distorted image of Hinduism. Raja Rammohun Roy was a prod uct of his times and he was more of a social reformer than a religious reformer even though his Brahmo Samaj was a religious reformation of sorts in the sense t

hat it sought a return to its vedic roots. However, my response basically is to De Roover's attempt at 'untangling the knot .' The Indian seculars are indulgent towards Christianity and Islam but extremel y harsh towards Hinduism. It is these double standards that irk me. For example, M.F.Husain had painted Hindu Goddesses in the nude but does not dare to create images related to his own religion. If he was sincere about artistic freedom, wh y take liberties with just Hinduism? Is it because Hindus are perceived as pusho vers who can be insulted with impunity? Otherwise, I am the harshest critic of my own religion, the lack of understandin g of their own religion of a majority of my co-religionists and the abhorrent pr actices that have crept in over the centuries that do not have the sanction of t he scriptures. Comment by D.L.NARAYAN VISAKHAPATNAM, INDIA