Overview
This book provides a description and interpretation of the religion of the Hindus, focusing on their religious psychology and behaviour. By rejecting familiar assumptions about early Hinduism, Nirad C. Chaudhuri makes a reassessment of its formative influences and examines temple and image worship in general, and the three major cults of Siva, Krishna and the Mother Goddess. This should be of interest to scholars and students of religion and philosophy and general readers.
Full Product Details
Author: Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Publisher: OUP India
Imprint: OUP India
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.386kg
ISBN: 9780195640137
ISBN 10: 0195640136
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 01 January 1997
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
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Reviews
An engaging, informative, occasionally enigmatic guide to the world's most complex major religion. Chaudhuri is an extraordinary character, an 81-year-old Bengali scholar, journalist, and radio man, with a matchless grasp of Indian culture and an easy familiarity with Western thought and literature. Who else could have elucidated a passage from Kalidasa's epic Kumana-Sambhava with a reference (in the original French) to Casanova?. Chaudhuri begins rather dryly with an erudite survey of the origins of Hinduism and the maddening problem of establishing a reliable chronology on the basis of all but undatable texts. He then gives a broad descriptive account of Hinduism, not in the corrupt (to Chaudhuri's mind) and weakened form practiced in today's increasingly secular Indian society, but in a composite classic form, pieced together from the author's own memories and the best accounts by 18th- and 19th-century observers, both Indian and European. Finally, he discusses some special features of Hinduism, which turn out to be mostly one feature, namely its intense eroticism. Chaudhuri accuses Hindu apologists of dodging or allegorizing this vivid celebration of sex (e.g., in the Krishna cult), and to set the record straight he cites numerous scenes from Hindu scriptures in striking detail (but in the most proper, unsmiling prose). He also attacks Hinduizing Occidentals for etherealizing a religion which is essentially concerned with the humble, earthy round of ordinary life. But if Hinduism is a religion (or family of religions) to live by, Chaudhuri keeps his rational distance from it, displaying neither missionary zeal nor personal enthusiasm. Nowadays, it seems, only the Indian masses can really live by Hinduism. A fascinating study. (Kirkus Reviews)
