The book could have been a very good reference book had he not spoilt it from Section Two onwards ranting about BJP and Hindutva. Suddenly in his rant, Ram Mohan Roy was reduced to a few lines, compared to what is happening On Valentine's day. I thought his book could be useful for my daughter who was born in the UK has no connection with India. However, she was born into a Hindu family and could learn many things from the book. Now I feel that one look at the book will make it completely uninterested in what is in it.
I suggest Mr Tharoor write a proper book on evolving Hinduism. ( )

The book could have been a very good reference book had he not spoilt it from Section Two onwards ranting about BJP and Hindutva. Suddenly in his rant, Ram Mohan Roy was reduced to a few lines, compared to what is happening On Valentine's day. I thought his book could be useful for my daughter who was born in the UK has no connection with India. However, she was born into a Hindu family and could learn many things from the book. Now I feel that one look at the book will make it completely uninterested in what is in it.
I suggest Mr Tharoor write a proper book on evolving Hinduism. ( )

I received this book as part of LT Early reviewers giveaway. I have been a big fan of Mr Tharoor and have read most of his fiction and non-fiction works.

Religion is always a hard topic to write on. At the very minimum, it is a very polarizing one. Regardless of the track you take, you can never have all people agree on the thoughts and conclusions. It all comes down to what your personal beliefs are.

Mr Tharoor does attempt to explore how un-religion like this religion is. I agree with most of what's in the book and not necessarily with most others. But, as I said, when it comes to religion, it is a very personal preference. ( )

Goodness me, that was hard work. I'd only give this a look if you're already a Hindu or contemplating becoming one. The book would only be of serious interest had the author, a Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) in South India, been less subjective. The entire work is pervaded by a sense of partisan point-scoring against non-Hindus as well as against extremist co-religionists within India. The evidence in Hinduism’s favor is weak, too: despite a rich scholarly history and thousands of years’ worth of lived experience, Hinduism is mostly practiced in modern India itself. It has failed to win over adherents from other faiths, despite being a ‘henotheistic’ religion (one whose followers worship their [Hindu] god but do not deny the existence of other gods in other religions). Shashi Tharoor labors hard to make the case for Hinduism as a pragmatic choice of religion for the 21st century, failing primarily because of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Although he does rather belatedly answer the question of why Tharoor worships as a Hindu, he never satisfactorily deals with the reason why one should be a Hindu.
I was curious as to how the author would deal with some of the conditions experienced by Hindus in India. Descriptions of the religion’s tolerance are at odds with the constant – and often violently confrontational - agitation among Hindus and Muslims. While India’s chronic struggles with medieval living conditions, poverty, famine and natural disasters are all addressed by Tharoor, his positions aren’t supported by the principles of Hinduism or compelling evidence to the contrary. For example, how to reconcile one’s beliefs with the caste system? Is caste a barrier to leveraging tolerant Hinduism to improve the lot of hundreds of millions of low caste Hindus? Tharoor gives us the example of Basavanna (1131-1167 BCE), and his ‘staunch rejection of the caste system’. He also describes the dynamic of one ‘holy book’, the Bhagavad Gita, within the religion. It’s mostly a 20th century phenomenon, subverted for political use as the independence movement gained momentum and rival factions coalesced around their particular religion at Partition in 1947.
My enthusiasm waned somewhat with the argument made by Mr. Tharoor that the caste system is the fault of the British Imperial period in India. This astonishing claim follows hot on the heels of a paragraph dedicated to caste going back to the invasion of the subcontinent by the Aryans (c. 2000 BC). It’s a total whitewash – pardon the pun – by an author whose previous work is wholly dedicated to a takedown of the Raj.
There follows some agonizing mental gymnastics at once condemning the caste system and justifying its continued preponderance in 21st century India as something “comfortable with the affinities it implies”, that caste is “a form of community organization that has been in place forever, and [that] we are not about to jettison”. Further, astoundingly: “that doesn’t mean we will discriminate against people of other castes, or mistreat them: we are an educated people, and we know that’s wrong”. Justification of a class-based bias that predetermines one’s fate at birth is hardly a bedrock on which to build a just society and underpin one’s personal religious beliefs. This ideological race to the bottom is complete when Tharoor describes ‘Untouchability’ as practiced by Sikhs, Muslims and Christians in India, thus deflecting from the reality that caste is entrenched within Hinduism and within Indian society, and has been for millennia.
In such a crowded and menacing part of the globe, Hinduism has formed a resilient bulwark against the existential threat of other religions, especially Islam. Perhaps this was a place to build an argument in its favor. Instead, Tharoor describes the revenge killing of 2,800 innocent Sikhs in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, or the frenzied, BJP-inspired destruction of the 470-year old Babri Masjid Mosque in Ayodha, thus:
“The actions of both Hindu and Muslim terrorists are anti-national; both aim to divide the country along their religious identities, both hope to profit politically from such polarization”

Rather than confront this reality, we read about India’s current president, Narendra Modi, upon whose watch as Chief Minister of Gujarat 2,000 Muslims were massacred in 2002 in the name of Hindu nationalism. Politically-inspired Hindutva nationalism exacerbates Hindu social programs to the detriment of India’s significant religious minorities, including a potential re-writing of the Constitution to cement these discriminatory impulses into the very fabric of Indian society.
Eventually, the book addresses perhaps unintentionally, the wretched lot – past, present and future – of the 20% of Indians who are not Hindus. It’s not a flattering portrait. Writers like Tharoor accept as immutable facts the inequalities of Indian society and how they both originate in, and persist because of, the preeminent doctrine of Hinduism and Hindutva. How, then, to reconcile with Tharoor’s depiction of “the Hindu people surrounded by enemies” (all 20% of them), and the need to galvanize Hindus through polarization “that pits Hindus against all others”?
I learned much from this book, and I thought Tharoor’s opening was particularly strong and informative to the uninitiated. I saw ‘Why I am a Hindu’ as an opportunity lost, and that chance was to confront the realities faced by Hindus and Hinduism, addressing how they could be overcome by adhering to the faith. On multiple occasions within the text I thought I was reading a partisan manifesto, perhaps not surprisingly given Tharoor’s political leanings and the role he plays within shaping the future of the religion as well as of India itself. But that wasn’t what I was expecting, and it undermined what could have been a valuable book.
Disclaimer: I received an advance copy of Why I Am a Hindu’ in return for an impartial review. ( )

Why I am a Hindu by Shashi Tharoor is a readable and instructive introduction to the Hindu faith. For the reader who is relatively unfamiliar with Hinduism, the text offers a thoughtful and sympathetic discussion of the essentials of the tradition.

A central theme of Tharoor’s perspective is that Hinduism is “. . . the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion” (p. 252). While the assertion may be accurate, it some ways it reflects the very provincialism that he seeks to criticize in other traditions. Within all of the major religions there have been saints or sages who recognized the inadmissibility of the boundaries imposed by the guardians of their faith, and who sought to reach beyond those boundaries to recognize common ground with other traditions. We who identify with any religious tradition do well to celebrate, and emulate, adherence to a principle of tolerance and acceptance, a principle which has found adherents and proponents among the practitioners of every faith tradition, though they have often been ignored and sometimes been cast out or murdered for their position.

Nonetheless, Tharoor’s point about Hindu acceptance of all traditions captures an essential feature of the strand of Hinduism that he represents. He laments the contemporary nationalist stream of Indian Hinduism and politics and offers an account of the Hindu tradition that is a welcome alternative to widespread impressions of Hinduism as fundamentalist, xenophobic, and violent.

Tharoor acknowledges “the sins of the fathers” present in the history of Hinduism as in every major religious tradition and he observes that contemporary, xenophobic “. . . Hindutva reassertion draws from the same wellsprings as Islamist fanaticism and white-nationalist Christian fundamentalism.” (p. 259) One might add to that list the brand of Zionism that continues to systematically displace Palestinians from their homes. No tradition is free from a history, or contemporary manifestation, of the impulse to place others at a distance, to deny their shared humanity, and to seize the power and privilege that can emerge from such a stance.

But Tharoor maintains that a religion should be judged by the best in its history, not the worst, and that the best in Hinduism not only fosters a spirituality that is compassionate and life-affirming but that is also fundamentally accepting of others’ traditions.