THE HINDUS Book Review

Guilt urged me to review The Hindus: An Alternative History. I've been reading it for months, absorbing the rich, comprehensive description of the world's oldest major religion. You can read my "official" reactions on BlogCritics; it's the first such composition in which I managed to avoid using "I, me or my." This post is a more personal view of the experience of reading Wendy Doniger's opus. Her work clears up my decades-long confusion about Hinduism as a religion--it's been like the blind fondling an elephant. Every time I approached it, I encountered a different set of stimuli. No wonder! Hinduism, I now understand, is a complex mix of influences, some antithetical, but as a whole, tolerant of it's various practices.

Another benefit of Doniger's book is a correlation of world events through time. I have a much better sense of where and when Christianity and Islam developed and how they influenced the Indian cultures. I'd read Bulfinch's MYTHOLOGY since childhood, but now I see how Greek and Roman thinking fits into a more comprehensive understanding of human history. It is as if I had a set of alphabet blocks scattered about my brain, and Doniger arranged them to spell something recognizable.

I've revealed here how much I squandered my opportunities for a classic education at Northwestern University in the 1960s. It's taken me until MY 60s to self-educate a grasp of world history, human development and religious philosophy. Reading The Hindus felt like dropping in the keystone to my wobbly arch of understanding. Thank you, Dr. Doniger, especially for your very approachable writing style that kept me chuckling as well as intellectually stimulated and, of course, challenged. My readers know I'm a great fan of references and back matter--yours is the best!

The Penguin Press was kind enough to send a copy of the book last spring at my request. I appreciate the gift.

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