Unfortunately your question is far too common among Western philosophers of the last 25 years. There are no apologists for polytheism in Eastern religions as there is no polytheism in Hinduism or Buddhism. It is Westerners who have not studied Eastern philosophies that have this distorted view of the East. Eastern religions are either nihilistic, monistic, or monotheistic. There is no polytheism.

There are different monotheistic systems within Hinduism, but each one of these sects follow their view of God as being God; the other 'gods' they dismiss as out of hand just as a Westerner would dismiss their concept. Within the monotheistic camps the two predominant ones are the ones that see Shiva (Shavites) as the Supreme Godhead and the ones that see Vishnu (Vashnavites) as the Supreme Godhead. Shavites dismiss Vishnu as either being a manifestation of Shiva or just dismiss him, the same way a fundamentalist Christian would dismiss him. And the Vashnavites are vice-versa.

Monists assert that everything is One, and not in a pantheistic way, that the different names of God are due to different viewpoints of different people, that all the different names of God are just manifestations of the One. So Shiva, Vishnu, the Christian God, are all the same God viewed through different colored lenses.

The 'gods' of Hinduism are the Sanskrit devas. gods is a very loose translation of devas; a more exact translation is 'shining ones'. The gods are actually offices, like governor, for different aspects of the current cycle. A individual soul in a human body that aspires to be a god for a cycle can do certain karmic actions to gain the karma to become a god in a new cycle. At the end of that new cycle, however, when the karma is exhausted, the soul that became that god must come back to the earth and once more enter into the system for accumulating new karma.

Suggested reading: The Spiritual Heritage of India by Swami Prabhavananda. It is a clear summary and introduction for Westerners For a comparison of the different monistic Eastern systems, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy by David Loy.