Customer Reviews

Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and Practice

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This book is just what I hoped it would be.

I teach a course on world religions to ninth-graders at a Catholic prep school, and of the five religions covered in the course, Hinduism is the one I know the least about. I know the basics as found in a high school or college textbook, and I've read and taught the Bhagavad Gita, but when my students ask questions that go much beyond that--as they do with great frequency--I'm often at a loss. So I wanted to learn more.

In particular, I wanted to learn more about how contemporary Hindus actually practice Hinduism. For instance, although I can give the Hinduism 101 lecture on the four main castes, I didn't know how the caste system actually functions in contemporary India. Now I do; that's the subject of chapter 8. Similarly, my students are interested in religious holidays, especially if their neighbors are celebrating them, but the only holidays I knew much about were Divali and Holi. Chapter 4, about the ritual calendar, includes explanations of eighteen holidays in a paragraph to a page and a half each.

Other chapter topics include oral and written texts, devotionalism, ethics, Hindu thought, gurus and the groups they founded, changing views on gender, fundamentalism and secularism, environmental movements, and Hinduism outside India.

This book covers a lot of ground on Hinduism. But it does not make the right connections among the concepts. It provides an outside-in view, rather than an inside-out view. So a reader who is serious about learning Hinduism may perhaps get the breadth, but not the depth of Hinduism, through this book. The four purushardhas of life, for example, is the distilled essence of the wisdom of the Hindu sages. The sages distilled their understanding of human aspirations into the four broad categories called purushardhas. The deeper understanding of these words can only come from its relationship to the interaction between prakriti and purusha, from which the purushardha concept emerges. The book gives simple dictionary meanings of these words purushardha (as aim), kama (as desire), ardha (as wealth) and dharma (as morality). Making connections among the concepts is essential for the understanding of Hindu Philosophy. This is just one example. This is good book for getting a overview of Hindu terms, vocabulary and concepts, but not the intricate connections among the concepts.