It was thirty years ago, in 1995, that a then-unknown junior academic named Jeffrey Kripal published Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. The book took a new look at the stories written about the revered 19th-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, from the then-current Freudian lens: it explored passages that it described as homoerotic, and argued that there was a connection between the homoeroticism and the mysticism. Kripal, who was raised Catholic and once attempted to enter the priesthood, always saw an erotic dimension in mysticism, and found that goddess traditions like Ramakrishna’s felt a more natural fit than Christianity with his own heterosexuality – so was surprised to find homoerotic elements in Ramakrishna, and realized that was something worth writing about.

Few, least of all Kripal, expected what happened next. Ramakrishna devotees in India found out about the book and became furious that anyone would dare treat Ramakrishna’s mysticism as having a sexual element. Hindu nationalists burned copies of the book, there were multiple attempts to ban it, and Kripal was no longer able to travel to India out of fear for his safety. It was the first in a series of attacks that Hindu nationalists came to make against Western scholars in the decades to come, outraged that scholars would point to aspects of their traditions that they didn’t like.

I had read a little about this story before I arrived at Harvard as a new PhD student in 2000. There were three scholars of South Asian religions – John Carman, Edwin Bryant, and especially Charles Hallisey – who I’d expected to study under when I got there… and all three of them had just left, for various reasons, without (yet) being replaced. So I felt a little adrift. But as I had a first walk through the hallway of a Harvard Divinity School building, there outside an open office door was the name plate of a visiting professor in South Asian religions whose name I did recognize: Jeffrey Kripal.

I peered inside the office door, and instead of the Indian man with the Punjabi name whom I expected to see, there sat a blonde, wholesome, cornfed-looking Midwesterner. He looked up at me, and I asked, “Are you Jeffrey kree-PAHL?” He said yes, not yet correcting me that it’s pronounced “CRY-pal”. (It turns out that his ancestry is Czech, not Indian – or rather not immediately Indian, since the name is of Romani origin and thus traces itself back to India in the long run. It still comes as a surprise to most people to meet the scholar of India with a typically Indian name and look at a white guy.)

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but I do fondly remember the two courses I took with him – and even more so, the many times during his year at Harvard that the two of us would meet over coffee or beer or a meal. I got very lucky, because up until that point Jeff – I never called him anything else from then on – had taught only undergraduates at a small provincial college. He was as interested in the intellectual stimulation provided by a precocious starting graduate student as I was in speaking regularly to a professor in my area. He became a mentor to me, both at the time when he helped me address my impostor syndrome – I had switched disciplines and felt self-conscious about my lack of area knowledge – and decades later as he talked me through the difficult process of publishing my first book. (Which will be out from Shambhala Publications next year – stay tuned!)

As for Kālī’s Child… You could say I tried Freud on for size in those days, but it wasn’t a good fit. I did try to explore what Freud had to offer, owing both to Jeff and to my first wife. The first paper I ever wrote on Śāntideva was for Jeff’s class – interpreting Śāntideva through Freud’s theory of masochism. But as I went on, Freud’s explanations stopped seeming to me like the most adequate explanation of humans’ pervasively irrational behaviours; I found more in Buddhist and cognitive psychology.

But where Kālī’s Child really did stick with me was in its portrayal of Ramakrishna himself – in ways I wasn’t comfortable revealing for many years afterward. I took “ramakrishna” as my handle on MetaFilter (hey fellow middle-aged people, do you remember MetaFilter?) – but staying anonymous, not admitting at the time that that was me, because I didn’t want to admit publicly what I said on the MetaFilter bio page, that I “I see a lot of myself in the conflicted Ramakrishna that [Kripal] describes.” At the time I wasn’t even ready to admit that to Jeff himself.

I’m not sure “homoerotic” was quite the right term to describe Ramakrishna’s psychology, because the Ramakrishna of Kālī’s Child didn’t just display same-sex attraction. He also dressed in women’s clothing, and described himself as having the essence of prakṛti – the feminine principle of nature in Sāṃkhya thought, contrasted with puruṣa, the passive masculine principle of spirit. He wasn’t just “effeminate”, he embraced his femininity. That all resonated with me in ways I didn’t yet understand. My first wife, who knew my ambiguous relationship to gender, asked me to give her a book that would let her a bit more into my intellectual world, “a book you’d like me to have”. Kālī’s Child was the book I gave her. It would be nearly two decades later before I started calling myself gender-fluid, and while I think it’s considerably oversimplifying to say I always was gender-fluid, there was still something already there that I was seeing in Ramakrishna and in myself.

All of this is yet another reason the racial binaries of the Social Justice movement have sat so poorly with me, even though I owe the movement for my gender expression. This white guy’s sympathetic but critical portrayal of a revered Indian figure resonated deeply with me and helped me figure myself out – while Indians were out there trying to shut him up. For defending Kripal in online spaces I got called a “sepoy in training” – by people who considered me Indian only by virtue of hearing my name, and I don’t believe that name tells you any more about me than Kripal’s name tells you about him.

Yet twenty years later, it was the left that somehow decided to adopt the Hindu nationalists’ view that white people shouldn’t be writing about India – that that writing constitutes “cultural appropriation” and that this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing. That I should somehow feel loyalty to this culture I didn’t grow up in rather than the one that made me who I am, because our ancestry should define us. Hindu nationalists were Trump before Trump was cool – and it turns out they were also cancel culture before cancel culture was cool, trying to silence the white guys for writing about Indians, just as the American left somehow decided it was a good idea to do. (I don’t generally have much that’s positive to say about the Hindu nationalists, but I will give them credit for being ahead of the curve.) I would much rather stand with the real Ramakrishna in his own gender ambiguity, and with the kind and clever professor who pointed that all out.