Honestly, dharma can be a pretty dry subject sometimes, but it takes a scholar like Wendy Doniger to make it all sound interesting.The title aside, this is not a book about dharma, that set of ethical, ritualistic and moral rules that govern life, but more about how it has been treated in the real world against the other two branches of the Indian corpus, Artha and Kama. Artha and Kama are, respectively, money and politics and sex. These are all powerful motivators in human life, and Doniger demonstrates how the drives for money, sex and power undermine, avoid, contradict or just plain ignore ethics, ritual and morality.This result should hardly be surprising. Doniger has been known to be a somewhat iconoclastic scholar, and her thesis is a similarly a renegade one. The conventional wisdom says dharma, artha, and kama operate in balance and in harmony.The reality, however, is very different. Doniger gives an extensive, but not belaboring, scriptural analysis of the Arthasastra, the pioneering book about the practical realities of political governance, and the Kamasutra, the manual of eroticism and seduction, to show how dharma was borrowed and abused. To make her topic more relevant, she traces how dharma has been exploited by the subsequent invaders of India — the Moguls and the British — down to the present day with the present ruling party in India.This is one of the best introductions on the subject I have found. It is a good introduction to the general reader and at the same time will augment the knowledge of someone who thinks they know the subject.