Hindu Inconoclasts.

Hindu Inconoclasts

Noel Salmond

Wilfrid Laurier University Press 

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5

0889204195 $44.95 1-519-884-0710 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Hindu Iconoclasts: Rammohun Roy, Dayananda Saravati, And Nineteenth-Century Polemics Against Idolatry by Noel Salmond (Assistant Professor of Humanities and Religion, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) is a serious, scholarly study that asks why would nineteenth-century Hindus, who come from an iconic religious tradition, give voice to the types of declarations and invectives one might more readily attribute to Hebrew prophets or Calvinists? Questioning the simplicity of the common assumption that nineteenth-century Hindu iconoclasm simply borrowed attitudes from Muslim and Protestant traditions, Hindu Iconoclasts delves deeper to explore the lives and words of such prominent figures of the era as Rammohun Roy and Dayananda Sarasvati, who sought to bring about reform by eliminating image worship. Hindu Iconoclasts stretches further beyond the initial scope of its premise, contemplating a link between religious image-rejection and the unification and modernization of society in a process Max Weber has termed "disenchantment of the world", in a seminal discourse highly recommended for religious history and studies shelves.