India: A Sacred Geography

Abstract

This book—really a hefty tome—has been well worth the long wait for its appearance. In many ways, Diana Eck has been working on it since the publication thirty years ago of her first book, Banaras, City of Light. It is a magnum opus of a scholar of South Asian religions who has spent her career working on the interrelated issues of pilgrimage, sacred space, embodiment, plurality, theistic Hinduism, and temple rituals. Eck investigates the pilgrim's India, a storied landscape filled with special places that bear the traces of gods and the footprints of saints. Reading her text, one is plunged deeply and widely via rich journeys into a world I like to refer to as the worshipful interaction with embodied forms of divinity—whether that be a form in a temple crafted by human hands or some natural feature of India's sacred geography. This book examines the particular notion that India has not been so much shaped by the concept of the modern nation-state as it has by an extensive and intricate interaction between mythology and geography. It is a highly informative and enjoyable read for students and scholars of the religious traditions of India, and is a treasure house for understanding Hindu embodiment.

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