26. introduction
teed that it would instantly come to the attention of Hindus living in countries all
over the world. Yet although its reach is global, sulekha.com especially engages a
North American readership, and the issue raised by Shrinivas Tilak has newly crys-
tallized in that part of the world. Have foreigners distorted the meaning of Hin-
duism? What about Hindu scholars who work with foreigners and have been
trained in non-Hindu institutions—a group Rajiv Malhotra of the Infinity Founda-
tion has called “sepoys,” “neocolonizers,” and “honorary whites”?^17 Should either
set of scholars be allowed to continue? What can Hindus do to reverse the tide?
It doesn’t take much to see that this set of questions is a direct challenge to the
validity of some essays that appear in this volume, since their authors have been crit-
icized as being “foreigners” or “sepoys.” But the book’s final essay views this land-
scape in a very different way. Written collaboratively by Kala Acharya, Laurie L.
Patton, and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, this essay focuses on a process of “inter-
logues,” as its title says—the constructive engagement of people who are and are
not Hindu as they attempt to understand what Hinduism is and has been. These
three writers pick up on Shrinivas Tilak’s suggestion that this subject calls for what
Mahatma Gandhi called satyagraha—an open-ended struggle to grasp the truth—
but they argue that satyagrahaleads in a direction quite a different from what Shrini-
vas Tilak envisages. Satyagraha soon reveals that the categories “Hindu” and “non-
Hindu” are far from being the binary, opposite entities Tilak seems to believe them
to be.
Acharya, Patton, and Ram-Prasad go on to explore the many ways that processes
of mutual engagement play themselves out in today’s religiously plural world, and
they are not afraid to face the real challenges that such pluralism poses. In doing so,
they look back toward some of Hinduism’s most ancient texts and find there not
monoliths or models of internal consistency, but a style of thinking that values the
ability to understand and speak from more than one perspective on any given issue.
Here Hinduism emerges as something intrinsically complex and dialogical—inter-
logical—so it makes sense that the authors themselves emerge from very different
locations: a Hindu living in India (Acharya), a Hindu born in India but living in the
diaspora (Ram-Prasad), and a non-Hindu whose life and thought have been deeply
affected by what Hinduism has to teach (Patton).
We offer this volume to readers in just that spirit. You come from everywhere,
and we have no way of knowing where you are going. We hope that as you think
about the life of Hinduism, the essays assembled here will serve as guideposts along
the way—even if they sometimes seem to point in wildly different directions.