This book is the closest to a modern, critical, interdisciplinary answer to the oft-asked question "What is Hinduism?" The author does not claim to answer this question which he does not think can be answered unequivocally. Yet in this terse, succinct presentation something close to such answer has been attempted. The author analyzes both Hindu thought and Hindu behaviour as he approaches Hinduism both textually and contextually, as an indologist and a cultural anthropologist. He presents the average rural and urban Hindu views of the tradition rather than that of an intellectual or sacerdotal elite, and he introduces work-a-day people’s way of acting as Hindus rather than the rituals or the meditations of highly tutored specialists, of the woman and the man in the field or in the office rather than of the purohita or shastri in the Vishvanath or Meenakshi temples. Bharati also clarifies a number of confusions which have become part of modernized Hindus’ notions about ritual, caste, ‘superstition’ and other themes which the Hindu Renaissance of the last ten decades has generated. In order to illuminate the links between popular and learned Hinduism which includes a powerful esoteric segment, the author explains the perennially mystifying problem of bhakti vs. jnana, pivotally exemplified by Adisamkaracarya to whose order the author also belongs. When the late Pt. Nehru insisted that India’s was a composite rather than a Hindu culture, he put his finger on an important fact: that one cannot sensible and sensitively talk about Hindu action without heeding the interface between Hinduism and Islam which has indeed become part of modern Hinduism, as it is indeed for South Asian Islam.
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