Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
doi:10.1093/jhs/hit004
Advance Access Publication 19 March 2013
Patel and Leonard’s volume is marked by its art historical focus, with the ma-
jority of articles containing sustained studies of art and architectural history. This
provides a welcome balance to the poles of textual studies and ethnography
tending to dominate research on South Asian Islam. Yet this focus also highlights
the need for scholars working within diverse disciplines to collaborate in under-
standing a fuller context of their subjects. Further interdisciplinarity coupled with
the comparative study of South Asian traditions could yield rich insights. For
instance, through the themes foregrounded in Sunil Sharma’s discussion—female
ascetics in Mughal and Deccani paintings, the role of the jogi as an object of love in
pre-modern literature, and shahr@sh+b poetry—one sees an intertwining of mar-
riage and the beloved jogi akin to that in Mirabai’s corpus. Suddenly the common-
Claire Robison
University of California, Santa Barbara
Arvind Sharma is one of the most prolific scholars of Hinduism today, who in his
long career has published numerous books and articles. Among his wide range of
publications, this one is rare and unique. I would call it a religious autobiography
of a Hindu scholar. These are his personal reflections and experiences of being
Hindu as he encounters world religions. We receive vivid comparisons between
and within Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions. This is not
a work of systematic comparative theology or philosophy, but poignant moments
of comparative insight and honest deliberations from an Indian-born Hindu, in-
formed by a variety of traditions: Advaita-Ved@nta, British India, North American
culture, and the world’s religions he has studied and taught. This is a global con-
versation between a variety of religious traditions, rooted in Sharma’s Hindu ex-
perience but not dictated by it. This is definitively a cosmopolitan book in its most
rich and vibrant sense.
Part I retells Sharma’s discovery of fundamental Hindu beliefs, for example how
as a child he understood karma when his family found themselves frequently on
the precipice of death. Later, after having discovered Ved@nta (from a Frenchmen
in India!), Sharma’s discussion of death looms large, but is enriched by notions of
m@y@ and the guru-śis.ya relationship.
Part II examines specific nodes in Sharma’s adult life, bringing intra-Hindu and
inter-religious comparative issues to the fore. I focus on a particularly illuminating
discussion in a chapter entitled, ‘Religions of India and China: Caught in the
Middle’. Sharma notes that when Xuanzang returned to China in 645 CE after a
prolonged visit to India, he encouraged the emperor to translate Sanskrit texts
into Chinese, though Chinese texts were not translated into Sanskrit. Despite the