This collection of books is united by a search for the sacred (and sometimes the divine) in the increasingly secularized world that we inhabit—whether it is a translation of the well-known and well-loved Bhagavad Gita where Krishna appears on the fratricidal battlefield of Kurukshetra before Arjuna or it is Lata Mani’s critique of current patterns of consumption and distribution that are materialistic in the extreme. In between these two poles, we have explorations of sacred calendar art by Devdutt Pattanaik and a physical journey that turns spiritual as Dominique-Sila Khan travels through Kerala, as well as explorations of the infinite depths of the mighty Mahabharata by Pamela Lothspeich and Trisha Das. The books range from the thoroughly academic (Lothspeich) to the ultimately popular (Pattanaik) which is some indication of how universal the problem of the sacred and secular has become, how it permeates all levels of discourse and appears in all genres of writing, from travelogue (Khan) to fiction (Das).   Penguin has re-issued Juan Mascaro’s 1962 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a translation that floats upon a sea of a hundred translations into English alone, each one driven by the translator’s belief that there is place for one more telling of the Gita in the world. Mascaro’s translation is forty years old and has been a part of Penguin’s Classics series (while it was still edited by the formidable Betty Radice), and has carried the wisdom of the Gita far and wide. The translation is poetic and deeply felt, as Mascaro (like many indigenous theologians who translate the text), actually internalizes the message of the Gita and then re-presents it in the light of the literal and literary text at his disposal. Since Said’s seminal critique, Orientalism, the kind of work that Mascaro does with classical texts in Pali and Sanksrit has been rejected and sneered at for not being rigorous enough, for reflecting western ideas of what the east is rather than trying to see the east as it sees itself. I have always been surprised at how very lovely Mascaro’s ‘translations’ are and how wonderfully accessible they make the culturally and linguistically dense texts they carry into English, the Upanishads, for example. His Gita is no exception to the gentle grace that he brings to bear upon religious works from a culture so far from his own. For the casual reader, ...