IMAGINING HINDUISM: A Postcolonial Perspective

Imagining Hinduism introduction a new and significant way of looking at western construction of Hinduism, Employing current postcolonial categories, Sharada Sugirtharajah examines how Hinduism has been defined, interpreted and manufactured through Western categorization, from the foreign interventions of the eighteenth-and nineteeth-century orientalists and missionaries to the present day. Her contention is thet ever since early orientalists'discovered' the ancient Sanskrit texts and the Hindu

golden Age, the West has nurtuned a comples and ambivalent fascination with Hinduism responding to it in ways ranging from romantic admiration to ridicule. At the same time she focuses attention on how Hindu Discourse has drown upon orintalist represenation in order to redefinr Hindu identify and construct a monolithic Hinduism, both in the indian and diasporic contexts.