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The Hindus

An Alternative History
May 16, 2014
The odd thing about people claiming this book shows Hinduism "in a bad light" is that she sees herself as praising India's very long tradition of diversity and tolerance, as witnessed by its openness to different practices and interpretation within the one religion. Doniger is bound to offend people who've never seriously studied the history of religions. The recent, politically-inspired controversy in India's far right can be ignored here -- the book even opens with an earlier event when some fanatic threw an egg at her. And she's hardly the first scholar to be attack by ill-informed fundamentalists who have not even read what they attack: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Hinduism/2003/07/Scholars-Of-Hinduism-Under-Attack.aspx The real problem is, while Doniger is a colorful writer and can be at times quite witty, all the asides make for a very long book. Doniger really needed a better editor on this book. Some of her arguments are more rhetoric than logic (for example, by her own reasoning, it would be racist for historians a thousand years from now to theorize that Spaniards must have colonized Latin America at some point). Worth reading, but Doniger herself makes it clear this book is not to be read without already having read on the history of the evolution of Hinduism.