© 1985 Peter Laurence
© 1985 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
The following article represents a new approach for the Journal, and grows out of an opportunity to expand our awareness of multi-cultural perspectives on The URANTIA Book. Probal Dasgupta is originally from Calcutta and has lived in the United States on two separate occasions. He has now returned to India and teaches linguistics at the Deccan College Post-graduate and Research Institute in Pune. Dr. Dasgupta was introduced to The URANTIA Book in the late 1970’s while attending New York University. He has read the book in its entirety and brings to it a scholarly and piercingly analytical point of view, as well as a perspective which is decidedly non-Western. The book review presented here is a prelude to a future article in which he promises to share with us his reactions to The URANTIA Book. The reasons for this anticipatory review are perhaps best expressed in an excerpt from his correspondence — “This offer of a book review is not a substitute for an article expressing my views about The URANTIA Book or my experience of reading it. But such an article, coming from someone like me, would have more meaning if the readers had access to a comprehensive and sophisticated statement of a coherent Hindu view of religious and secular matters… Now that the book is out, I can see one of the (previously intangible) factors that was preventing me from sitting down and writing for you: this factor was the feeling, ‘I cannot, in a short compass and with my fragmentary and immature grasp of Hindu theology and philosophy, say anything about The URANTIA Book from my standpoint without making very partial statements and then appealing to more comprehensive formulations for the all-important background; and, for the relevant readership, there simply are no truly appropriate formulations to refer to.’ Well, now there is such a book, and I can gradually start thinking about writing a book review, first, and then my own remarks, which can now afford to be secondary and partial, since they can refer to something by an obviously inspired and enlightened author.”
— Peter Laurence
Armonk, New York