Hindu Temple

The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meanings and Forms by George Michell, 184 pages

For millennia, Hindus have constructed temples to their gods, some of which rival the great cathedrals of Europe in both grandeur and intricacy.  This book by George Michell serves as a brief introduction to the various expressions of the fundamentally conservative form of the temple-mountain, not only on the Subcontinent, but also in Cambodia, Java, and Bali.

As is inevitable in such a short book attempting to cover such a vast topic, The Hindu Temple is both dense and dry.  The text is only slightly marred by the dual reductionism so characteristic of postmodern Westerners writing about traditional non-Western religions, attempting to elicit the sympathy of readers by awkwardly aligning the religion with their presumed values even while deconstructing the religion with an anthropological approach.

Survey of Hinduism

A Survey of Hinduism: Third Edition by Klaus K Klostermaier, 507 pages

As a religion practiced by hundreds of millions of people and the oldest of the great world religions, with roots in a time before human memory, Hinduism is unsurprisingly mind-bogglingly diverse - indeed, there are even those who claim that the very idea of a singular "Hinduism" is a colonialist imposition of Western categories on Asian reality.  Certainly, Hinduism is inseparable from Indian life and culture, and it is this aspect of the religion as a living experience that Klostermaier attempts to present.  To this end, he thankfully consciously rejects dissection and over-analysis, thus making it possible to "not only learn about Hinduism but also learn from Hinduism."  Unfortunately, this also results in his giving perhaps too much credence to the Hindu pseudo-science equivalents of creationism and the "Bible code".

A Survey of Hinduism is designed as a course textbook, and as such it is not ideal for solitary reading - much would benefit from expansion and elucidation.  Although there are many black and white photos and illustrations, these are pedestrian in the textbook tradition.  Klostermaier slips somewhat when referencing Western religion - there, he participates in the same kind of dead academicism he wisely avoids when the subject is Hinduism, a problem compounded by his evident animus towards Christianity - but this does not affect the bulk of the book.

From the Ruins of Empire

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra, 310 pages

In From the Ruins of Empire Pankaj Mishra examines the careers of three prominent Asian intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, all of whom struggled with the cultural, economic, and military dominance of the West - not only as such power was deliberately, oftentimes violently, exercised, but also as the uncritical embrace of the mechanistic, utilitarian Western worldview by modernizing elites in their homelands.  Each of the three represents a third of non-Russian Asia - itinerant journalist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani for the Islamosphere, scholar and activist Liang Qichao for the Sinosphere, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore for the Subcontinent.  Each sought freedom for his people, but also a form of modernity that preserved the values of his own culture.

It is possible to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in this book, problems that are only somewhat excused on the grounds that the perspective is that of the subjects.  Understandably, in writing about anti-colonialists Mishra concentrates on the negative impact of colonialism on Asian nations and cultures, but at times he oversimplifies to the point that he falsifies - even a casual reading of Finkel's Osman's Dream (which Mishra cites in his bibliography) demonstrates that the problems of the Ottoman Empire were not only - or even primarily - the result of Western imperialism.  That the reality was somewhat more complicated than Mishra's default narrative of Asians fighting for liberty from Western injustice is implied in the fact that both al-Afghani and Liang were persecuted by their native governments, and both took refuge in the oppressive, racist West - the only one of the three who was consistently safe in his homeland was Tagore, who lived under British rule (and was celebrated in the West, lecturing to packed halls and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913).

It is possible, again, to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in From the Ruins of Empire, but to do so would obscure the very real value of the book.  Beginning in the eighteenth century, the great civilizations of Asia were confronted with the reality that they were not, after all, the center of the world or of history.  How they adapted not only helps explain the world of today, it also has lessons to teach the West as it begins to discover the same truth.

Was Hinduism Invented?

Was Hinduism Invented?  Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion by Brian K Pennington, 189 pages

There have been extensive debates amongst scholars as to whether the religion known as "Hinduism" exists in continuity with precolonial Indian religion or whether it is an ahistorical construct built by imperialist action and colonial reaction.  According to the latter account, British governors, ethnographers, and missionaries opposed an ideal philosophical, spiritual, "pure" Hinduism to an existent superstitious, worldly, "corrupt" complex of indigenous sects and beliefs.  This concept was seized upon and internalized by Indian modernizers and nationalists.  Pennington rejects this narrative out of hand, noting that it does not do justice to the sincere beliefs of Hindus past and present who maintain that their beliefs and practices are continuous with the precolonial era, and fails to appreciate the extent of discontinuity and development present in every religious tradition.

The bulk of the book is taken up by a discussion of three journalistic sources.  The first is a British missionary publication and the second a British scientific journal, both concentrating on the subcontinent.  Pennington attempts to use these to show how British perceptions of Hinduism were shaped by domestic attitudes, particularly concerning class and Catholicism, and how the encounter with Hinduism affected those attitudes in turn.  The third source is a traditionalist Hindu newspaper from 19th century Calcutta, which he uses to demonstrate how Indians reacted to British criticism of their religion, particularly in the strong assertion of Hindu identity.  He also attempts to use these discussions to contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the nature of the relationship between scholarship, the religions it studies, and the practitioners of those faiths.

Pennington's own preconceptions sometimes creep in at the sides, as when he declares that Willliam Wilberforce could not have genuinely cared about the British lower classes because his politics were insufficiently progressive.  At times it appears that traditionalist and modernist might be better descriptors than the progressive and conservative labels he uses, which have political meanings that do not necessarily overlap with their theological meanings, creating confusion he is obviously aware of but seems unable to escape.  Then there is the epilogue, when in a desperate bid for moral equivalency he conjoins the murder of a missionary by Hindu nationalists to the publication of an insensitive anti-Hindu tract by the Southern Baptists, an offense compounded rather than excused by his immediate denial of any such equivalence.  Still, all in all, the worst thing about the book is its length, far too short for an adequate treatment of such a fascinating subject.