Kali's Child - Overview

Overview

The book was developed from Kripal's Ph.D. dissertation on Ramakrishna at the University of Chicago, advised by Wendy Doniger. According to Kripal, he adopted a Freudian approach to uncover the connections between tantric and psychoanalytic hermeneutical traditions. In the preface, Kripal writes that he was fascinated and interested in the relation between "human sexuality and mystical experience". He also mentions that Kali's Child was influenced by Wendy Doniger whose, "voluminous work, both in its rhetoric style and its erotic content provided me with a scholarly context, a genre if you will, in which I could write and defend my own ideas."

The primary thesis of Kali's Child is that a Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were generated by the lingering results of childhood traumas, and sublimated homoerotic and pedophiliac passions; and that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic." Kripal has argued that the same view was expressed 12 years earlier by Malcolm McLean, in his English translation of the Kathamrita. In his preface, Kripal also mentions that he did not set out looking for a "homoerotic saint" but that as his research proceeded, he became increasingly aware of the "role of homosexuality" in the saint's life and teachings, especially as that became evident in the "secret sayings".

Kripal examines a series of remarks made by Ramakrishna to some of his intimate disciples regarding his mystical experiences and visions which, following Ramakrishna, he calls "secret talks" (guhya katha). These "secret talks" are taken as evidence of Ramakrishna's unresolved homosexual desires, misogynistic attitudes, and general obsession with the erotic. Kripal argues that Ramakrishna's attitudes and orientations were well known to some of his contemporaries (though not to Ramakrishna himself) and were hidden and suppressed, initially by his own disciples and later by members of the Ramakrishna Order. He argues a systematic whitewashing of details and a general cover-up carried out by the biographers and translators of Ramakrishna.