Kali's Child
Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna is a book on the Indian mystic Ramakrishna by Hindu studies scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal, published in 1995 by the University of Chicago press. It argues for a homoerotic strain in Ramakrishna's life, rituals, and teachings.
The book won the American Academy of Religion's History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995. It has been criticised by Ramakrishna's followers and several scholars, and became the object of an intense controversy among both Western and Indian audiences. Critics have argued that the book's conclusions were arrived at through mistranslation of Bengali, misunderstanding of tantra, and misuse of psychoanalysis. Two attempts have been made to have the book banned in India, in 1996 and 2001, but did not pass in the Parliament. Kripal published a second edition in 1998 and several essays and rebuttals, but as of 2004 the controversy still continued.
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“If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those particular relishes.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)