Kali's Child

Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna

Author	Jeffrey J. Kripal
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Hindu studies
Publisher	University of Chicago Press
Publication date	1995
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)

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.

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."