India, July 12 -- I have heard uninformed foreigners - and some Indians - denigrate Hinduism for having lakhs of gods. These naysayers argue that Hinduism never had a unified core. No one god, no one religious text, no one supreme temple, no one pope and no one set of prescribed rituals make it just a collation of diversities that cannot qualify it to be a "coherent" religion in the way Abrahamic faiths are.

The high-priestess of American Indology, Wendy Doniger, actually asks superciliously, "Hinduism (dare I use the "H" word, and may I stop holding up my hands for mercy with quotation marks?), is, like the armadillo, part hedgehog, part tortoise." The academic ease with which Doniger conflates diversity with disparity is amusing. What ...