Review

Review of Imaging Hinduism: A Postcolonial perspective. By Sharada Sugirtharajah. Routledge, 2003. 164 pages This book is the first of its kind to bring post-colonial perspectivesinto a study of Hinduism. Consequently, there are no conventionalreference points for the author to use to build her narrative. She has to figure out how to use the conceptual apparatus ofthe one to study the other. In …

Introduction During the last decade or so, a new restlessness has begun to disturb the calm facade of the social scientific academia. As yet, it has no name. Better said, it has many names: from ‘reflexive’ to the ‘post-modern’. The ferment is not widespread, but the voices of discontent are coherent and articulate. The critical voices indicate the many kinds of dissatisfaction they have with the …

FRITS STAAL. Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Toronto Studies in Religion, Vol. 4. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1989 xxii+490. In order to set the tone of this review article, let me begin straightway with a confession: I have been a closet admirer of Frits Staal ever since I discovered his writings in 1987. The reasons that undergird my attitude are several: …

Today, there are multiple images of India current in the West. There is the mystic India, an image that the German Romantics created and the ‘flower children’ of the sixties made popular. There is the third world India with enormous poverty and suffering, which the developmental workers have projected. There is also the India, the centre of IT outsourcing, which the developments in the last decade …