Why is Hinduism portrayed so negatively in the media and academia?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Often when anything from our heritage is brought in, often the Hindu scholars who oppose it, there is a reason for that. And I was at a interfaith conference in Washington DC last year and we were talking about how different religions have their footprints in the world.
So now if you consider the religion that is the smallest and has the biggest footprint in the world, that is Judaism. Very small religion, but Jews are hugely influential. In contrast with that, if we consider Hinduism, it is a significantly large religion, but in terms of social influence, it is very less.
So why is that? One of the main reasons is that Hindus, for whatever reason, choose careers that lead them to become individual achievers. But they don’t choose careers that lead to them becoming opinion leaders of society. So if you consider the study of Hinduism, one of my friends, he joined the staff of Journal of Hindu Studies.
And the studies of Hinduism, but there are around 50 scholars in that and he is just one among three scholars. So it’s Hindu studies, but only three Hindus are scholars in it. All the others are non-Hindus.
Mostly western people. Now why is that? It is not that western people have just monopolized that scholarship. It is that Indians don’t want to study that.
They say, no, I want my son to become an engineer. I want my son to become a doctor. I want my daughter to become a doctor.
And religious studies. What is there in that? So if you see, Islam, although it comes under a lot of flak because of its association with terrorism, there is a large number of Islamic scholars who very assertively defend Islam. And that’s why whenever any terrorist attack comes, if Islam is blamed, immediately the media comes up and says Islamophobia.
So it is not just that the media is perversely tilted towards Hinduism or perversely tilted towards Islam or anything like that. It is just that who are the opinion leaders of the media. So Islam has done a lot of work in that area where they have contributed energy, resources and people to try to change people’s perception about their religion.
The religion which has done this the best is Buddhism. Buddhism is advanced in the very otherworldly religion. But it is the only religion that is considered to be cool.
You can be Buddhist and you can be totally considered cool. That’s just a matter of public marketing. So if you see the media, the scholarship, these are areas and other areas where social opinions are shaped.
Hindus are not so much in those fields. So we can see that it’s very easy to blame the big bad world or it’s very easy to have a victim mentality. Oh this is portrayed badly, the world is like that.
Ultimately change happens when you begin to take responsibility. So it’s largely because we have not taken the responsibility to present our tradition properly. So we have not worked to shape people’s opinion of the tradition.
That’s why others have got a particular opinion of the tradition and nobody is challenging it. So again my point comes back that most mainstream scholarship on Hinduism is done by leftist scholars. And these left oriented scholars, we don’t want a right wing extremism but there is left wing extremism also.
So they consider basically Hinduism as a source of the caste system, as a source of sati, as a source of all kinds of social evils. And there is so much good, every religion has some evils associated which get accreted to it. But there is a lot of good.
But that they don’t talk about it at all. I think that point about taking responsibility…