Customer Reviews

The Hindu Tradition: Readings in Oriental Thought

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Although this work first came out in 1972 (and still bears the unfortunate word "Oriental" in the subtitle, which is very misleading for a book about South Asia), it retains its relevance and usefulness, especially if you are seeking a book to accompany a course on ancient and medieval India. As a professor of South Asian history, I have used this work several times in the first half of a two-part survey of Indian history, and my students have found it comprehensible, readable, and very useful for writing papers. It contains well-selected excerpts from most of the major texts you are likely to discuss in a survey course: the Vedas, the Dharmashastras, the Arthashastra, Kama Sutra, Bhagavad Gita, and so forth - right through to the Mughal period. Unlike a lot of recently-published "document readers," it is not a compendium of obscure and unusable primary sources which were selected only because they were available without copyright restrictions! No, every page of this inexpensive little gem of a book is pedagogically useful, and students will find that Indian terms used in it are clearly and carefully defined. Praises given, there are a few drawbacks to this book, apart from the unfortunate title: it represents the elite Hindu tradition almost exclusively, and it fails to integrate in any clear fashion the Islamic tradition that played such a major role in shaping the "Hindu" tradition of South Asia after about 1100 CE. A new edition of this work, properly edited, would be a fantastic addition to the field of South Asian Studies and History, which currently suffers from a plethora of recently-published general histories, most of which are terribly dry, poorly-organized, badly-edited, hastily-knocked off volumes, some riddled with factual errors, that will have your students in a state of mutiny in no time. Embree and Bary are old masters of the field, and this particular book if one of their greatest achievements.