India, A Modern History, Percival Spear 1972 (ISBN 0-472-07140-8), p40.

"[Hinduism] is not a church in any Western sense.  It has no organization,
no dogma or accepted creeds, no councils to define the truths or archbishops
to guide the faithful.  All these things can be found within Hinduism but
you can be a good Hindu without any of them.  Next, it cannot be called
a religion.  Hinduism contains religion, in fact it contains many
religions some of which are quite contradictory.  A Hindu may have any
religious belief or none; he may be an athiest or agnostic and still be
accepted as Hindu .. But in fact there is no one duty binding on all
or any one ritual.  A man could neglect any one of the prescribed duties
of his group and still be regarded as a good Hindu. ... Though tradition
plays an important role in Hindu life, you can be a Hindu while disregarding
most of it."

Nirad Chaudhuri asserts that although there is a bewildering diversity of
beliefs and practices and obvious inconsistencies, Hinduism is one whole.
He dismisses the early western opinions (which can be traced to Greeks) 
about Hindu wisdom and their esoteric knowledge with this (Page 5): "The fact 
is that the more rational a set of men are, the more ready they are to succumb
to an assertive irrationality."   He calls scholars who take these legends
seriously as naive and gullible.  He asserts that realistic accounts of Hindu 
religion and philosophy were given only by the Christian missionaries. (p 3)
He quotes Monier-Williams' description of Hinduism which he believes is 
correct.  (Hinduism, Pages 145-146). 

  "It is all tolerant, all compliant, all comprehensive, all-absorbing.
   It has its spiritual and material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric,
   its subjective and objective, its rational and irrational, its pure and
   impure.  It may be compared to a huge polygon, or irregular multilateral
   figure.  It has one side for the practical, another for severly moral,
   another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and
   sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative.  Those who
   rest in ceremonial observances find it all sufficient; those who deny
   the efficacy of works, and make faith the one requisite, need not wander
   from its pale; those who are addicted to sensual objects may have their
   tastes gratified; those who delight in meditating on the nature of God
   and Man, the relation of matter and spirit, the mystery of separate 
   existence, and the origin of evil, may dere indulge their love of
   speculation.  And this capacity for almost endless expansion causes 
   almost endless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any
   particular doctrine."

He also says that to every definition of Hinduism, one is compelled to
say that it does not apply.  Most descriptions of Hinduism tend to emphasize
a part at the expense of the whole.  He believes that it is impossible to
avoid this kind of misrepresentation in a short book on Hinduism.

He also notes the current trend of emphasizing those feature which offend
certain modern sensibilities.

He says Hindu spirituality (as it is understood in Christian context) is a
myth and relegates discussion on this to epilogue.  He says that Hinduism is
a highly evolved form of animism where there is no distinction between
material and spiritual.