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Hinduism: A Religion to Live By
This now-classic book provides a description and interpretation of Hinduism, focusing particularly on the religious psychology and behavior of Hindus. Rejecting familiar assumptions about early Hinduism, Chaudhuri provides illuminating insights into its formative influences and examines temple
and image worship as well as the three major cults of Siva, Krishna, and the Mother Goddess.
and image worship as well as the three major cults of Siva, Krishna, and the Mother Goddess.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
31 books83 followersNirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চন্দ্র চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) was a Bengali−English writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters. In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE). His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.
In 1951 he published his most famous book, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a penetrating and challenging analysis of Indian history, culture and British rule. The controversial dedication to the memory of the British Empire caused a furore at the time but the book is now considered a classic work of Indian literature. He was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for The Continent of Circe (1965), was made CBE in 1992 and received the Hon.D.Litt from the University of Oxford; the University of Viswa Bharati also awarded him Deshikottama, its highest honorary degree.
A passionate admirer of western culture, he first visited England in 1955, a visit which inspired his book Passage to England. He decided to make his home in Oxford in 1970 when he was over seventy. He was a familiar and arresting sight out and about in Oxford, a diminutive figure, always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, although he wore Indian attire at home. He wrote his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse only a year before his death at the age of nearly 102.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 17, 2012
No one seems able to explain Hinduism to me. It is not a religion like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.
Although the author's views on Hinduism might be classed as controversial, this is the only book that has explained this religion to me in a way that I can begin to understand.
Although I read the book, I must confess that I am still quite mystified about this fascinating religion.
Although the author's views on Hinduism might be classed as controversial, this is the only book that has explained this religion to me in a way that I can begin to understand.
Although I read the book, I must confess that I am still quite mystified about this fascinating religion.
March 9, 2018
Nobody has been as much a bette noire to the 'bhodrolok' bengali as much as Nirad Babu has been . Never the one to mince words , his powers of observation and his incisive comments would put even those of the most acerbic wit running for cover . Indeed as he has demonstrated amply in his biography , "Thy Hand , Great Anarch" ( sequel to "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian" ) , that perhaps no one can be as reliable as him in describing his ancestral people with as much acuteness and precision that he is able to . Indeed it was his impatience with the many hypocrisies of the Bengali people , hypocrisies that have merely changed form , that rendered him so unpalatable to the Bengali intelligentsia. This was a man who dedicated an entire chapter in his autobiography to Rabindranath Tagore lamenting that the world will never understand his genius and when it does , it will only misunderstand him ( a fact that sadly has come true ) and yet dismissed the poet Najrul Islam as an upstart. This was a man who was a secretary to that legendary revolutionary Sarat Bose and regarded him as perhaps the only man in Bengal ( save perhaps his younger brother , the more famous Subhas ) as a man of unimpeachable integrity and yet never balked from saying that the British Rule was the best thing that has happened to India in spite of its so many failures . In Nirad Babu all these many contradictions sat comfortably in a united whole never once causing any consternation . He was ruthless and unsympathetic in his observation . This was a man to whom England became all the ideals it professed and which he internalised in spite of the Empire never practicing it in reality . This was his Mecca where he finally moved and lived the rest of his life , a thorough English gentleman who was also every inch a Bengali . It is perhaps an ode to the many contradictions that found unity in him that he would name his book ' Hinduism- A Faith to Live By ' in spite of having very few if at all any kind words to say about the faith he was born into . And yet there are those echoes that one can hear , that almost feral admiration of the Hindu genius which was at odds with his English ( and therefore Christian ) values.
Thus we read those self-evidently spurious claims ; claims that shock and sometimes amuse even an amateur reader of history such as where he claims the Bhagvat Gita was derived from Christian contact simply because it was unique or where he babbles the mumbo-jumbo that the wisdom of the Upanishads was due to the neurological phenomenon in the primitive man's brain as he was just learning the faculty of language in the background of his proto-religious animistic life .
And yet he shows that perhaps no one can equal him in his powers of observation and inference when it came to Hinduism as practised in his day and age . He belonged to that generation that grew up in the aura of British benevolence as it was thought by the Indian and most importantly Bengali intellectuals , the British betrayal of that faith and the rise of the demand of Purna Swaraj and then the final fall of the Empire in the final blood bath of the partition . In this entire process he saw the faith from which the culture and society of this country stems as it was before and after British impact after all those miserable years of Mughal rule . Indeed he takes great pains to mention that he is concerned with Hinduism as it was before the Western impact .
And in doing so he so brilliantly exposes the many lies which the Hindus have told themselves repeatedly in their attempt at defending their faith without never having the intellectual capacity for understanding it . Indeed that capacity in the common Hindu had long been decimated by the destructive impact of Islam and those who would protect it , those Brahmins and godmen had fallen to charlatanry and those who retained any integrity had withdrawn to the fortresses of mysticism . The character of this great faith had been moth-eaten by the centuries of ravages and the failure of its followers to defend it . It was this hollowed edifice that manifested itself to him , it was this decadence that he had to describe. Indeed it is often that he seems to conflate the two phases all the while reiterating that Hinduism had changed. But Hinduism as confronts us today as a living faith is but the product of this decadence and the western impact , its long forgotten glory is only for those select few who wish to seek it and understand it as dispassionately as a zoologist would a long lost creature capable of its own language and civilisation .
And he does this with such characteristic brilliance . He exposes the sugar coating that was placed on the sexual aspect of the Krishna cult to make it more palatable to the western audience in a bid to gain acceptance from them : a sexuality that the followers of the cult themselves were never ashamed of for Hinduism has celebrated the sexual union , its pleasure being a metaphor for the union with God . He quotes from the original poems of Kalidasa , of the Rupa Goswami's treatises and amply demonstrates the fake puritanism that Hindus resorted to as if being ashamed of the very thing they were defending , when neither was called for ( stopping just short of accusing a very famous historian of Indian philosophy of outright dishonesty). He demonstrates with that impeccable logic that the North-South distinction in the nature of Hinduism is but a product of Muslim rule as it was that cataclysm that decimated the faith in North India putting to rest all contemporary and future attempts to drive a wedge through the nation in the name of Aryan-Dravidian divide . Thus doing so he ends up inadvertently at one place the essential cultural unity of India though that was hardly his intention .
To say any more would be to ruin the book . But for anyone who wishes to understand as the british found it and as was practised by the Indians at that time , then one has to look no further that this work . Its authenticity is unparalleled. But the uninitiated would do well than not to judge this great banyan tree of acceptance ( his metaphor not mine ) from only its age of decadence . While that is an indispensable necessity to understand the Indian people as we are now especially those glaring follies that cause the most educated of us to feel nothing but shame , it would be a disservice to the history of Hinduism if its age of brilliance was ignored altogether.
Thus we read those self-evidently spurious claims ; claims that shock and sometimes amuse even an amateur reader of history such as where he claims the Bhagvat Gita was derived from Christian contact simply because it was unique or where he babbles the mumbo-jumbo that the wisdom of the Upanishads was due to the neurological phenomenon in the primitive man's brain as he was just learning the faculty of language in the background of his proto-religious animistic life .
And yet he shows that perhaps no one can equal him in his powers of observation and inference when it came to Hinduism as practised in his day and age . He belonged to that generation that grew up in the aura of British benevolence as it was thought by the Indian and most importantly Bengali intellectuals , the British betrayal of that faith and the rise of the demand of Purna Swaraj and then the final fall of the Empire in the final blood bath of the partition . In this entire process he saw the faith from which the culture and society of this country stems as it was before and after British impact after all those miserable years of Mughal rule . Indeed he takes great pains to mention that he is concerned with Hinduism as it was before the Western impact .
And in doing so he so brilliantly exposes the many lies which the Hindus have told themselves repeatedly in their attempt at defending their faith without never having the intellectual capacity for understanding it . Indeed that capacity in the common Hindu had long been decimated by the destructive impact of Islam and those who would protect it , those Brahmins and godmen had fallen to charlatanry and those who retained any integrity had withdrawn to the fortresses of mysticism . The character of this great faith had been moth-eaten by the centuries of ravages and the failure of its followers to defend it . It was this hollowed edifice that manifested itself to him , it was this decadence that he had to describe. Indeed it is often that he seems to conflate the two phases all the while reiterating that Hinduism had changed. But Hinduism as confronts us today as a living faith is but the product of this decadence and the western impact , its long forgotten glory is only for those select few who wish to seek it and understand it as dispassionately as a zoologist would a long lost creature capable of its own language and civilisation .
And he does this with such characteristic brilliance . He exposes the sugar coating that was placed on the sexual aspect of the Krishna cult to make it more palatable to the western audience in a bid to gain acceptance from them : a sexuality that the followers of the cult themselves were never ashamed of for Hinduism has celebrated the sexual union , its pleasure being a metaphor for the union with God . He quotes from the original poems of Kalidasa , of the Rupa Goswami's treatises and amply demonstrates the fake puritanism that Hindus resorted to as if being ashamed of the very thing they were defending , when neither was called for ( stopping just short of accusing a very famous historian of Indian philosophy of outright dishonesty). He demonstrates with that impeccable logic that the North-South distinction in the nature of Hinduism is but a product of Muslim rule as it was that cataclysm that decimated the faith in North India putting to rest all contemporary and future attempts to drive a wedge through the nation in the name of Aryan-Dravidian divide . Thus doing so he ends up inadvertently at one place the essential cultural unity of India though that was hardly his intention .
To say any more would be to ruin the book . But for anyone who wishes to understand as the british found it and as was practised by the Indians at that time , then one has to look no further that this work . Its authenticity is unparalleled. But the uninitiated would do well than not to judge this great banyan tree of acceptance ( his metaphor not mine ) from only its age of decadence . While that is an indispensable necessity to understand the Indian people as we are now especially those glaring follies that cause the most educated of us to feel nothing but shame , it would be a disservice to the history of Hinduism if its age of brilliance was ignored altogether.
February 15, 2020
A good, albeit slightly dry, introduction to Hinduism. It's a great read for anyone who wants to understand the historical origins and development of Hinduism. It's also a good introduction to Hinduism from a Western lens.
January 18, 2022
This was useful to me as a complete ignoramus on Hinduism. That being said, it did leave me with a lot of unanswered questions, which I think is natural for a thought-provoking book and especially naturally for Hinduism. Particularly through this book I gained an appreciation for the mind-boggling diversity within Hinduism.
Chaudhuri is an endlessly witty and engaging writer. I came away with a couple of deliciously quotable citations.
With that being said, he engages in some strange, fallacious reasoning at various points throughout the book. Despite having excellent arguments regarding the speciousness of historical dating of religious texts (often construed to be far more "ancient" than they can actually be proven to be), he has rather flimsy arguments for other cultural phenomena, and at times his justifications are as bad as basically 'it just couldn't possibly be otherwise, I can't accept it'. This argumentation is just incredibly weak and disappointing coming from a neutral, secular standpoint, as it is coming from a religious one.
Most useful were his personal observations on customs he had observed as an Indian, as a resident of Bengal.
Chaudhuri is an endlessly witty and engaging writer. I came away with a couple of deliciously quotable citations.
With that being said, he engages in some strange, fallacious reasoning at various points throughout the book. Despite having excellent arguments regarding the speciousness of historical dating of religious texts (often construed to be far more "ancient" than they can actually be proven to be), he has rather flimsy arguments for other cultural phenomena, and at times his justifications are as bad as basically 'it just couldn't possibly be otherwise, I can't accept it'. This argumentation is just incredibly weak and disappointing coming from a neutral, secular standpoint, as it is coming from a religious one.
Most useful were his personal observations on customs he had observed as an Indian, as a resident of Bengal.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews