ABSTRACT
In the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, our hero – the dashing and brilliant professor of archaeology Indiana Jones – responds to an academic colleague who proudly cites physicist Robert Oppenheimer’s famous comments upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, by explaining that the words are not in fact his but are from ‘the Hindu Bible’ (by which he means of course the Bhagavad Gita – verse 11.32). This cinematic moment captures the central problem of the representation of Hindu traditions in the modern world – namely the prevailing Christocentrism of contemporary discourses of religion. This is no more clear than in the debate about the category of ‘Hinduism’ itself.
