Customer Reviews

Fruitful Journeys : The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims

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A caveat before buying, Fruitful Journeys is not intended to be a light Sunday read. Grozdin is an excellent anthropologist who, via participant observation, had produced one of the best anthropological ethnographies of modern pilgrimage available in the world today. Even if one is not interested in anthropology, the detail in which she describes the symbols, layers and rites of Hinduism at the village level is worth the price of the book. Despite this intricacy however, I contend that Fruitful Journeys remains highly accessible. Grozdin is not "one of the good ole boys", nor is her prose precocious or dense. Don't be scared off by the scholarly nature of this work.

This is a tough read. It is written in dense anthropological style, heavy with symbolism and steeped in nearly unintelligible post-modernism. The author writes like a "good-ole boy", though a woman. The good thing about the book is there are lots of Hindu, Rajasthani and Sanskrit tales and songs translated into English, and they seem to be true to the original meanings of Indian society. This is a good read, if you can ignore that it sounds like a man wrote it at the begining of the twentieth century.