[12] 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.

A number of his translations from the primary text-Ramakrishna Kathamrita-are wrong; his psychoanalytical proceedings with the text, without the verifications psychoanalysts derive from patients under the ’free-association method’, fills me with doubt, especially as regards his identifications of some Tantrik symbols."

"[28] In his 1997 review, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay of Goldsmiths, University of London begins by describing Kali's Child's as an "invigorating read" and an "iconoclastic thesis ... supported by solid textual scholarship".

Criticizing the "obvious glee in Kripal's tone which sometimes verges on flippancy", Mukhopadhyay continues, "Ramakrishna is a very serious matter and real theoretical sophistication is needed to deal with this enigmatic character.

"[29] In 1997, Gerald Larson of Indiana University wrote that Kripal's book lacked balance and proper contextualization, and considered that it fell into the trap of monocausal reductionism.

In his opinion, the book would have been much more balanced if Kripal had sought a review outside the context of his teachers and colleagues, including the Swamis of the Ramakrishna Mission (but not allow them to censor) and professionals within the psychoanalytic community.

[30] Larson attributed the problem of reductionism to the attitude pervading the American Academy of Religion on the relation between modern secular intellectuals and believing communities.

[31] William Radice wrote in early 1998 that "[Ramakrishna's] homosexual leanings and his horror of women as lovers should not be the issue: there was plenty of evidence before the exposure of the guhya katha ["secret talk"].

[3][32] Urban also criticized Kripal for what he saw as a "tendency toward sensationalism and at times an almost journalistic delight in playing on the "sexy," "seedy," "scandalous," and shocking nature of his material".

[34] According to Hugh Urban, Sil's Statesman review of Kali's Child presented Kripal as "a shoddy scholar with a perverse imagination who has thoughtlessly 'ransacked' another culture".

[37] In another 1997 article, Sil charged Kripal with "willful distortion and manipulation of sources", and with, while criticising Swami Nikhilananda's translation of the Kathamrita, having "committed similar crime[s] of omission and commission to suit his thesis.

"[44] In 2000, Swami Tyagananda, minister of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Society in Boston and a Hindu chaplain at both Harvard University and MIT,[45] produced a tract entitled “Kali's Child Revisited or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation,” which was distributed at the 2000 annual meeting of AAR[2][46] and later published in journal Evam.

Until such an opportunity arises, however, I can say that I am eager to resolve these issues in a friendly and open-hearted spirit that can be as faithful as possible both to academic standards of free inquiry and intellectual honesty and to the felt needs of significant segments of the Hindu community, whose religious sensibilities I am all too painfully aware I have offended.

He denied that any of those errors had been intentional, and argued that all of them could be easily corrected without altering the substance or conclusions of the book, as they amounted to a very small part of the material he had used to demonstrate his thesis.

Additionally, Kripal argued (following modern literary theory) that all interpretations, his own included, are products of the interaction of the reader's horizon of understanding with that of the author's.

[7]: 28–29 In 2001, Huston Smith wrote in a letter to the editor of the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin that, "I doubt that any other book—not even those of early, polemical, poorly informed, and bigoted missionaries — has offended Hindu sensibilities so grossly.

[51] In 2004, John Hawley revised his initial positive evaluation of Kali's Child,[25] and wrote in his study The Damage of Separation[47] that neither the gopis’ torment nor Ramakrishna's must be allowed to devolve to a bodily level.

Sen writes that arguments made by Kripal that some of Ramakrishna's mystic visions are but subconscious revelations of his actual Tantric experiences with Bhairavi are chronologically not possible.

For instance Ramakrishna's vision describing a probing human tongue exploring—what Kripal translates as—"vagina shaped lotuses" as alleged sexual encounter with Bahiravi.

[27] Larson wrote that "Even Freud, with all of his reductionist tendencies, would have been highly suspicious and critical" about Mahendranath Gupta's so-called "secret" material, if for no other reasons than the temporal distance between his notes and the publication of the Kathamrita.

[1]: p.4 However, Tyagananda wrote that portions from Gupta's diaries (which are in the possession of his descendants) were published in various Bengali journals long before they appeared in book form as the Kathamrita.

[37] Furthermore, Tyagananda wrote that Ramakrishna Mission had published a two-volume edition of the Kathamrita rearranged in chronological order, after the copyright which rested with Gupta's descendants expired.

[37] Disputing the idea that Mahendranath Gupta ran out of material, Amiya Prosad Sen writes that the fifth volume (published posthumously) had "no note of finality" and ended "abruptly".

[63] In his book, Kripal also wrote that Swami Nikhilananda's The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,[64] which purports to be "a literal translation" of the Kathamrita, contains in fact substantial alterations from Gupta's text.

Besides combining the five parallel narratives into a single volume (which is often sold as a two-volume set), Nikhilananda would also have deleted some passages ("only a few pages"[65]) which supposedly were "of no particular interest to English-speaking readers".

[1]: p.329–336 Examples of missing passages quoted by Kripal include a declaration of Ramakrishna to a disciple: "In that state [during a Tantric ritual with a female guru] I couldn't help but worship the little penises [dhan] of boys with flowers and sandal-paste".

[37] Somnath Bhattacharya wrote that anybody with knowledge of Bengali could check that an overwhelming majority of the passages marked guhya-katha had been translated by Nikhilananda faithfully to the letter as well as to the spirit of the original.

[16][31] In 1998 Kripal wrote that he had "overplayed the degree" of his alleged suppression, noting that "to my wonder (and embarrassment), the Ramakrishna Order reprinted Datta's text the very same summer Kali's Child appeared, rendering my original claims of a conscious concealment untenable.

"[39] Kripal also wrote a long response[6] to Rajiv Malhotra's essay RISA LILA—I:Wendy's Child Syndrome which argued that the Freudian psychoanalytical approach had been discredited even among Western psychologists.

[2][46] Kripal lamented the "angry tone and ad hominem nature" of the text, and charged Rajiv of spreading "a number of falsehoods" over the internet that involved his person and reputation, and of having got "just about everything wrong" about his ideas and translations, claiming that his criticisms were merely a repeat of Tyagananda's.