Why don’t Hindus eat beef? Why do Hindu women wear a dot on their forehead? Who is the Monkey God? Who’s that God with the elephant head? Children can ask the weirdest of questions and sometimes it’s difficult to tell them the answers to these questions. The reality is that even the adults don’t know the answers to many of these questions. The fact is, Hinduism is a complex religion eve…
Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction , Kim Knott offers a succinct and authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious tex…