India's Agony over Religion.

• Author: Brockington, John

The five crises that Larson signals at the start - with the Sikhs in the Punjab, in Jammu and Kashmir, between Hindus and Muslims over the Shah Bano case, the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, and the Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhumi issue - and that he returns to in his penultimate chapter are indeed major crises. Equally, as he argues strongly, they are only intelligible through knowledge of the background to India's cultural and religious diversity.

Larson warns in his preface that this book "is primarily designed for the non-specialist or general reader, but it is not by any means designed to be easy or elementary." This overall aim has certainly influenced the way that the book is organized from the opening with a "first-person" piece on "Beating the Retreat" as part of the Republic Day celebrations to the tendency to use repetition as a didactic device. In particular, Larson provides an overview of Indian history, together with his own terminology for the periods - or better aspects - of that cultural history: Indus Valley, Indo-Brahmanical, Indo-Sramanical, Indic, Indo-Islamic and Indo-Anglian. He makes the major but not novel point that these continue to exist concurrently, as each new feature is added to the complex. This overview is necessarily condensed and would hardly be intelligible to a non-specialist, even one making the effort implied in Larson's warning (while for the informed reader, it is longer than needed).

Regrettably, the drive for conciseness has led at times to distortion of the material. For example, Yajurveda does not mean "Instruction Veda" (p. 59), to say that "Krsna . . . fights on the side of the victorious Pandus" (p. 76) misrepresents a key feature of the Mahabharata (and is avoidable by a phrase like "sides with"), and "from Brahma down to a blade of grass" is a commonplace rather than limited to the Samkhyakarika (as implied on p. 86). Similarly, it is oversimplifying just to contrast sahajdhari and kesadhari Sikhs, equating the latter...