Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
ANAND VENKATKRISHNAN / Elaine M. Fisher, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India | 000 |
E. SUNDARI JOHANSEN HURWITT / Kristin Hanssen, Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living with Bengali Bauls | 000 |
RICHARD BARZ / John Stratton Hawley, Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century | 000 |
JUSTIN W. HENRY / Frank J. Korom and Leah K. Lowthorp, eds., South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons | 000 |
JARED WESLEY OPOIEN / Narender Kumar, ed., Politics and Religion in India | 000 |
NATHAN MCGOVERN / Mark McClish, The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India | 000 |
MICHAEL BALTUTIS / Nathan McGovern, The Snake and the Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion | 000 |
PATRICIA SAUTHOFF / Nina Mirnig, Liberating the Liberated: Early Śaiva Tantric Death Rites | 000 |
R. JEREMY SAUL / Deonnie Moodie, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata | 000 |
LEAH ELIZABETH COMEAU / Vijaya Nagarajan, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India—An Exploration of the Kōlam | 000 |
MICHAEL BALTUTIS / Hillary P. Rodrigues, Hinduism: Understanding Our Religious World | 000 |
YANG QU / Dawn F. Rooney, ed., The Thiri Rama: Finding Ramayana in Myanmar | 000 |
ADITYA N. BHATTACHARJEE / Jennifer B. Saunders, Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and Their Narrative Performances | 000 |
JULI L. GITTINGER / Banu Subramanian, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism | 000 |
FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, SJ / Kenneth R. Valpey, Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics | 000 |
ANDREA WOLLEIN / Christof Zotter, Asketen auf Zeit: Das brahmanische Initiationsritual der Bāhun und Chetrī im Kathmandu-Tal | 000 |
Elaine M. Fisher, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 298 pages. The problem of Hindu unity, whether constituted by its diversity, predicated on exclusion, or based in hierarchical inclusivism, has occupied both those interested in promoting that unity and those trying to understand its formation. Whether their intention is to elide difference or to highlight it, accounts of Hinduism tend to understand “sectarian” traditions—by and large a calque for Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism—as deviations from, or subsets within, a normative umbrella religion. Elaine M. Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism flips the script and locates in the formation of “sectarian” communities in early modern South India the very earliest expressions of Hinduism as a unified religion. That is, it is in the very modes of being, and being in public, engendered by the Smārta Śaiva community of the Tamil South, that we find forms of Hindu pluralism that persist into the present. In Fisher’s inimitable terms: “One could not be a Hindu in late-medieval or early modern India without first and foremost being something else” (5). Fisher’s book tells the story of this community and the formation of multiple religious publics, primarily through the writings of its major intellectuals, “who sought both to cultivate common bonds of devotion and to foster shared modes of public engagement that visibly demarcated the boundaries between distinct sectarian communities” (6). The first chapter sets the scene for the emergence of the community in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South India, the second describes an “unprecedented socioreligious network” of public intellectuals and monastic lineages, the third examines polemical pamphlets that evince a “heightened philological sensitivity” shot through with religious concerns, and the fourth explores the enduring popularity of the “Sacred Games of Śiva” due in many ways to the efforts of Smārta Śaiva theologians (28–30).
Fisher’s concept of a “religious public” engages critically with mainstream European theories of a public sphere antithetical to religion, in which citizens are purportedly “unmarked,” as opposed to the patently “marked” nature of citizens in South Asian society (135). Sectarian intellectuals like Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita employed what Fisher calls “public theology,” extracting theology from “the confines of the monastery or temple complex to cultivate the public ethos of a particular sectarian community” (22). Through their writings, Fisher argues, they sought to constitute a community of marked individuals, drawing a distinction between public and private modes of religiosity, a key feature of Hindu religious identity. Social life in South India was, and is, made up of multiple religious publics, which “make room for difference not by erasing religion in the public sphere but by publicizing it…to facilitate the coexistence of diverse realities” (136). Fisher’s public refers not only to the educated elite, but also to the domain of popular culture. In this, Fisher shares an interest with Christian Lee Novetzke, who has recently argued for a quotidian public sphere in medieval Maharashtra. Through her account of the “Sacred Games of Śiva” cycle of tales, Fisher demonstrates that “these two publics were by no means the disparate phenomena one might imagine” (24).
The multiple material, nonliterary sites in which the “Sacred Games” narrative was available to people from a wide range of backgrounds prompt Fisher to explore how space itself becomes “entextualized with the emergent public canon” (176). Sacred space is public space, a “site for the reproduction of public religious culture, available for response, reenactment, and contestation” (176). While sensitive to the limits of caste in speaking of the public in premodern India (and Fisher is careful to stress that there is no singular noun in the modern sense, only multiple overlapping publics), Fisher argues that the “Sacred Games of Śiva” managed to “transcend the boundaries of south India’s multiple public spheres, differentiated along lines of caste, language, and religion” (141). Fisher’s insights in this regard come from her study of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita’s Śivalīlārṇava, a Sanskrit version of the “Sacred Games” that layers the values of transregional Śaiva Smārtism atop an otherwise regionally and culturally specific Tamil text. Despite being a staunch advocate of Sanskrit and its intellectual culture, “his conservatism in language choice does not equate with a conservatism in caste consciousness,” given his explicit endorsement of a Śaiva initiation rite that elevates the practitioner above caste distinctions (174). Given the ongoing caste practices of Smārta Śaivas, however, one wonders if it is not precisely those traditions which explicitly disclaim their attachment to caste that end up reinscribing it with greatest vigor.
Hindu Pluralism presents both a sophisticated intervention in major debates within religious studies and political theory and an excellent granular study of diverse textual genres in a polyglot literary culture. It promises to be a mainstay in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in the field of South Asian Religions.
Anand Venkatkrishnan
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Kristin Hanssen, Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living with Bengali Bauls. New York: Routledge, 2018. 228 pages.
Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia is a highly engaging ethnographic study that investigates gender and the use of the body in Vaiṣṇava Bāul culture. Bāul is a highly fluid term that loosely categorizes a diverse religious community of generally low caste individuals whose practices are frequently Vaiṣṇava in focus (their Muslim counterparts are known as Fakīrs). These practices include song composition and performance, devotional ritual, meditation, renunciation, and antinomian practices such as ritual sex and the consumption and physical application of various bodily fluids. The book’s narrative centers around a renunciant householder named Tara, along with her husband Karun and her parents Muni Baba and Sunita. Kristin Hanssen records and analyzes several of their core practices, which include food practices, physical practices (sādhana) including music and ritual performance, and death and burial rites. Additional themes include community, sexuality, caste, and economics.
The Introduction and first chapter provide a brief context for the study and introduce the reader to the family at its center. The Bāul approach to sannyās, or renunciation, in which practitioners remain fully engaged in their communities, is explored in the second chapter. The third chapter engages esoteric ritual practices including the consumption of menses and what she calls yogic sex, both of which Hanssen argues are ritual ideals and not commonly practiced. An important element in this chapter and throughout the book is women’s roles as subjects in sexual and other bodily practices, including fluid flow and retention. Although Hanssen does not discuss parallels with Tantric practice, these insights from a living oral tradition may be useful in informing approaches to studying representations of women in Kaula Tantras, which seem to form part of the ritual and philosophical substratum of Bāul traditions.
The fourth chapter explores initiation rites and begging practices, deeply engaging the Bāul concept of renunciation. In another parallel with Tantric communities in this region, senior initiates undergo a symbolic death with ritual funerary rites and can no longer fully participate in certain rites of passage such as weddings and funerals, but remain otherwise fully engaged with their communities. As Hanssen argues, “although a central feature of the Baul path is detachment, this is understood to be a means of dealing with and acting in the world, rather than a means of retreating from it” (15; emphasis in the original). Self-restraint is thus the primary mark of renunciation. Chapter 5 follows with a discussion and comparison of begging practices, stage performances, and rural celebrations. Chapter 6 continues exploration of contrasting traditions with thick descriptions of two funeral rites—the first for a renunciant Bāul, the second for a layperson.
Hanssen argues in Chapter 7 that men and women take up this path not only to nurture their musical abilities, but to establish new identities as Vaiṣṇavas. Although they are distinct from Brāhmaṇs, this new identity places them in parallel with Brāhmaṇs, allowing them to distance themselves from their low caste status. The struggle of living as both a householder and renunciant is reflected in conflicts between a sense of elevated spiritual identity and dissatisfaction with their social status, lack of recognition, and poverty in their daily lives.
Even though it is strong in ethnographic detail, there are some frustrating omissions. The study lacks a strong contextualization in and comparative analysis of the larger history and practice of popular and esoteric religious traditions in the region. Although the relationship between Bāuls and Tantrism has been discussed by Edward C. Dimock, Jeanne Openshaw, Hugh Urban, and others, meaningful discussion of the relationship between Bāul practices and Bengali Tantrism is curiously absent given the striking similarities shared between the philosophy and antinomian practices of Hanssen’s research participants and those described in several early modern Tantric texts of the Kaula revival that have remained popular in Bengal and the Northeast. Additionally, many of the beliefs and practices Hanssen identifies as emphatically Vaiṣṇava have strong similarities to those found in Bengali Śāktism and exploration of their historical relationship in the region would provide relevant context for some of the modern tensions Hanssen describes between Vaiṣṇava and Śākta Bāuls. Finally, very few songs are included in this ethnography of a musical community. In several places where a song’s philosophical content is discussed, the reader is left to guess at its actual lyrics and no reason is given for its omission. Given the importance of music as text in oral traditions, the inclusion of these songs along with commentary from Hanssen and her research participants would have been a helpful and important addition.
Despite these shortcomings, this is an excellent contribution with relevance to a variety of fields including anthropology, ethnomusicology, South Asian and Bengal studies, and religious studies. Thoroughly engaging, rich in ethnographic detail, and written in an accessible style, it is highly suitable for the university classroom. Specialists in several fields may also find it fertile ground for developing further studies.
E. Sundari Johansen Hurwitt
California Institute of Integral Studies
San Francisco, California, USA
John Stratton Hawley, Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020. 382 pages.
For Hindus, Vrindavan (Vṛndāvan) in Mathura District, Uttar Pradesh, is the earthly equivalent of the mythical place where Kṛṣṇa inspired men and women to forget their limited lives to take part in his play—his līlā—of boundless love. Ever since the sixteenth century when Vaiṣṇava sectarian leaders from the Gauḍīya Sampradāy and the Puṣṭimārg established Vrindavan and its Braj region as the preeminent holy land for devotees of Kṛṣṇa, the town has been a magnet for large numbers of Hindu pilgrims each year. As John Stratton Hawley puts it, “Vrindavan is celebrated as the place where Krishna spent his childhood, and Krishna is celebrated as the divine force that calls us human beings away from our deadly self-involvements—away from the world’s entanglements—to the persons we really are. Vrindavan projects a timeless youth, a paradise where we all should be living some essential part of our lives” (3). The intertwining of mundane involvement in the pursuit of wealth and prestige with Kṛṣṇa’s call to eschew such entanglements as it is played out in contemporary Vrindavan is the theme of Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century.
The first chapter of Hawley’s book, “Paradise—Lost?,” begins with a paean to the old, traditional Vrindavan that he first saw in 1974. Then it was a “gentle, reflective, off the beaten track” pilgrimage town “that served as a theater for every aspect of Krishna’s playfulness” (3). Later in the book, he writes that at the time of this first visit Vrindavan was “a paradise of efficiency and cleanliness” (219). In this last point, as elsewhere in his book, Hawley is a bit too idealistic. I agree with him that at the beginning of the last quarter of the twentieth century Vrindavan was a picturesque little town on the Yamunā River with many fine old temples and fascinating festivals. On the other hand, when I first visited the town at about the same time as Hawley it lacked any effective public sanitation or sewerage system and had no more cleanliness or efficiency than any other place of its size in its region. Though Hawley’s memories of erstwhile Vrindavan may be nostalgic, his view of Vrindavan in the present is starkly realistic. For instance, he says that, because of severe pollution, “Almost nobody bathes in [the Yamunā] these days, and fewer still dare to drink its water” (19).
In his second chapter, “The Battle of Keshi Ghat,” Hawley introduces the two groups that are the main protagonists of his book. One is the Futurists, who include members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, Hare Krishnas). They want to retain the religious appeal of old Vrindavan while constructing next to it a modern Vrindavan of magnificent temples, lavish resorts, and up-market apartment complexes. The other group is the Protectors, among whom is Shrivatsa Goswami, a hereditary leader of the Gauḍīya Sampradāy, Vrindavan’s senior Vaiṣṇava Bhakti tradition. The Protectors, Hawley says, are not against development as long as it is carefully regulated and is not allowed to smother the religious spirit and charm of old Vrindavan.
In the third chapter, “Mall of Vrindavan,” Hawley gives the reader a guided tour of the new temples and related buildings that have sprung up on the outskirts of old Vrindavan. As he moves along Chatikara Road, he points out, among others, the gigantic Mā Vaiṣṇo Devī temple, the white marble Prem Mandir with its soaring spire floodlit in different colors at night and ISKCON’s Krishna Balaram temple erected in 1975 and the precursor of the temples of the new section of Vrindavan. As Hawley observes, “The new Vrindavan could not have developed in the way it has without the particular vision of globalization that the Hare Krishna movement has fostered” (93).
Chapter 4 deals with the “Skyscraper Temple,” the 210-meter tall Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir (VCM) under construction as “a project of the Hare Krishna movement—specifically, ISKCON’s prosperous Bangalore temple” (119). In 2017 a plan was launched for, quoting a VCM official, “a new phase of marketing” by “bestowing a second name on the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir—‘the Vrindavan Heritage Tower’ ” (128). The hope was that this new title “will deflect attention from the fact that it is actually a temple being built here” and more successfully reap donations from Indians residents outside of India who “are apt to react sourly to the idea of building a new temple” (128). Hawley’s response is that, “Perhaps the concept of lila is generous enough to encompass it all—a playful sense of bemusement about the workings of reality….But when it comes to heritage and leisure and the way they ought to be connected, I find myself really getting stuck. Heritage is being Disneyfied at the VCM, there’s no question about that” (174).
In Chapter 5, “A Different Refuge for Women,” Hawley addresses the problem of widows whose families have shunted them off to Vrindavan institutions to live out their lives in abject poverty. Although a few of these institutions are corrupt, he focuses on two that are benign: Mohinī Giri’s Mā Dhām (186–95) and Sādhvī Ṛtambharā’s Vātsalya Grām (195–205). Following a survey of the life of Shrivatsa Goswami in Chapter 6, “Being Shrivatsa,” Hawley sums up the message of the book in his final chapter, “The Sign of Our Times”: there must be a rejuvenation of Vrindavan that retains its ancient ambiance and buildings while accommodating the realities of twenty-first century Hinduism.
John Stratton Hawley is a distinguished authority on Hindu devotional religion and literature, but in Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century he wears his scholarship lightly. Every page of his book bears witness to his passion for Vrindavan and Kṛṣṇa bhakti. Perhaps his views are a bit too rosy in places, but his sincerity cannot be denied. Anyone interested in the evolution of modern Hinduism will find this volume to be as enjoyable as it is informative.
Richard Barz
Australian National University
Canberra, A.C.T., Australia
Frank J. Korom and Leah K. Lowthorp, eds., South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons. New York: Routledge, 2019. 196 pages.
This collection of essays, previously published in 2017 as a special issue in South Asian History and Culture 8.4, offers a fresh contribution to folklore studies in South Asia, made especially rich by the varied methodological approaches of its contributions, which include textual as well as archival and ethnographic data. The papers comprising Part One of the book (“Historicizing Folklore”) emphasize the dynamic relationship between received literary and oral traditions, reminding us of the longstanding practice of elite oral literacy in South Asia and of the precarious and etic imposition of the dichotomous “classical versus folk” literary taxonomy. Adheesh Sathaye (“The Scribal Life of Folktales in Medieval India”), for instance, analyzes textual variations across manuscripts of the Vetāla-pañcaviṃśati (“The Twenty-Five Tales of the Animated Corpse”), characterizing scribal communities as “folk groups,” or communities of readers and copyists with “the power to define who they really were, beyond the pregiven labels of caste, occupation, language, or religion” (31). Leela Prasad (“Nameless in History”) analyzes a fascinating and sadly unfinished poem written in 1884 in Madras by an accomplished poet, translator, and lawyer, P. V. Ramaswami Raju (1852–1897). The first installment of Ramaswami Raju’s Srīmat Rājāṅgala Mahodyānam is a 1500-verse Sanskrit-language Purāṇic-style narration of the peopling of the land of England, accompanied by the author’s own English translation. The poem depicts the success of the European colonial project as essentially accidental—a fluke event in the longue durée of history—by having the English descended from a disgraced gandharva harpist who was ejected from heaven by Indra; “puncturing the claim of the superiority of English civilization,” Raju’s poem renders the British empire the “result of a cosmic error” (55).
Contributors to Part Two (“Materializing Folklore”) work to account for continuity and change of folk traditions from traditional to modern contexts. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger (“Standing in Cement”) explores the unique and ambivalent relationship that the people of central Chhattisgarh have to Rāvaṇ, the demon-king antagonist of the Rāmāyaṇa. Rāvaṇ is in this region memorialized by way of large cement statues, with residents explaining their sympathetic view of the classic villain in various ways: some Gonds viewing him as their ancestor, some refusing to immolate his likeness during the annual Daśherā ritual, and some Brāhmaṇs revering him as a learned academic and pious devotee of Śiva. Kirin Narayan and Kenneth M. George (“Tools and World-making in the Worship of Vishwakarma”) explore the significance of Viśvakarmā’s “tools” as they configure in Hindu temple iconography; in Vedic, Purāṇic, and oral mythology; and in various present-day political discourses (from labor rights and development initiatives to Hindu nationalist discourse). Exploring innovative strategies for navigating the complexities of reproducing sacred spaces in foreign environments abroad, Puja Sahney (“Pavitra Hindu Homes”) outlines methods of preserving pavitratā, “sacredness,” in the domestic shrines of Hindu immigrants to the United States. Ülo Valk (“Shrines, Stones, and Memories”) collates competing oral accounts of the origins of the Kāmākhyā temple at Silghat, Assam, querying the presupposition that written (in this case, inscriptional) sources stand as more authoritative than do oral histories from the point of view of devotees to the goddess.
Part Three (“Politicizing Folklore”) addresses a range of issues including the perdurance and contestation of colonial narratives projected onto South Asian subjects, the vicissitudes of achieving recognition for “intangible cultural heritage,” and the integration of audio-visual technology into the performance of one of the oldest continuously practiced religious rituals in the world (an elaborate sacrificial ceremony based on the Ṛg and Sāma Vedas). Shakthi Nataraj (“Criminal ‘Folk’ and ‘Legal’ Lore”) uncovers discourses of normative domesticity, hereditary criminality, and deviant sexuality in nineteenth century British legal and ethnographic literature, exploring their reproduction in the “emplotment” of present-day accounts of abductions and forced castration by hijrā and aravāṉis. Leah K. Lowthorp (“Folklore, Politics, and the State”) follows the process of the canonization of kūṭiyāṭṭam, Keralan dance-drama, as a UNESCO-certified form of cultural heritage. Finnian M. M. Gerety (“The Amplified Sacrifice”) tracks the transformation of the Nambūdiri Brāhmaṇ Vedic yāgaṃ—a twelve-day atirātra sacrifice to Agni in central Kerala—from its film documentation by Robert Gardner and Fritz Staal in 1975 to its performance as a largescale public spectacle in 2011. The yāgaṃ—traditionally a cloistered and private ritual to which only Brāhmaṇ men were allowed access—has over the past four decades been “amplified,” both literally and metaphorically, to become a celebrated and visible dimension of Keralan Hindu culture, retaining a compartmentalized ritual space designed to ensure the purity of performance enclosure while allowing for maximal viewability and audibility by a diverse audience (with respect to caste and religion).
The contributions to this volume remain India-centric, with the editors themselves recognizing that, while new initiatives for folklore studies are underway in Pakistan, “nothing similar seems to be happening in the other countries of South Asia, which suggests a further need to explore the folk worlds of Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, where mostly collection of folklore for nationalistic purposes has sufficed up until the present” (7n19). The need for greater geographical amplitude in South Asian folklore studies is coextensive with a need for more systematic treatment of Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and adivāsi oral traditions as well. In sum, however, this collection of essays represents the first substantive survey of the state-of-the-field since Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan’s seminal Another Harmony (University of California Press, 1986), containing a fascinating cross section of theoretically and thematically current contributions.
Justin W. Henry
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, Georgia, USA
Narender Kumar, ed., Politics and Religion in India. New York: Routledge, 2020. 244 pages.
Narender Kumar’s Politics and Religion in India is an edited volume of case studies that investigates “important phases of passive and active interaction of religion and politics” in India (3). Based on Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby’s notion that “all religious mobilizations are inevitably political” from their 1991 work Fundamentalism Observed (6), Kumar’s Politics and Religion focuses on politics and religion from a variety of geographical areas in India.
In addition to its historical elements, Politics operates on the argument that since the early 1900s under British rule, various religious groups in India pushed for religion-specific representational rights. Colonialist influence reinforced these movements, which came to be blended with liberal governmental tenets (3–5). This blending is presented as unique to India, as opposed to western democratic nations that have favored a hard, secularized separation of “church and state,” one of the consequences of which is the emergence of the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party).
The text begins with an overview of colonialism in India by Himanshu Roy. Roy discusses the colonial and postcolonial implications of majority-minority struggles in India and even includes a section devoted to the “Muslim question” (that is, what Roy explains as India’s attempts to incorporate minority Muslim concerns) (21). While the aims of Roy’s inclusion of Islam are admirable, the situated politics of Muslims in India becomes lost among Hindu-majority problematics. By the end of this chapter, it is unclear what exactly addressing the “Muslim question” has accomplished for Roy’s position apart from adding surface historical complication.
To complicate the matters raised in Roy’s piece, Mujibur Rehman, Ashutosh Kumar and Hardeep Kaur, and Dhruba Pratim Sharma, Tarun Gogoi, and Vikas Tripathi show how the governments of various states across India have utilized religious polarization as an effective political tool for maintaining control while India faces increasing external pressure to become part of a global capitalist world. Rehman’s piece highlights such moments, as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Odisha have all pushed religious polarization that has undermined the secular polity in their respective states (40). Kumar and Kaur maintain much of the same tone as Rehman and Roy, describing recent efforts by the BJP whose campaign promises of a party for all Punjabis often go unfulfilled (58–59). Sharma, Gogoi, and Tripathi argue that elections won by the AIUDF (All India United Democratic Front) and the BJP point to a polarization of votes along ethnic-religious lines (78). The tactics of this successful BJP movement have mirrored governmental political consolidation efforts in other areas of the globe, most notably by “illegal migrant” rhetoric amidst strong notions of nationalism (81).
The essays by V. Bijukumar, Abdul Matin, and Malini Bhattacharjee consider religious institutional mobilization. Bijukumar raises concerns of religious watchdogs by focusing on the attempts by the Ecclesial Authority Christian Church in Mizoram to “cleanse electoral politics in the state,” which “has serious repercussions not only for democracy but also peace and stability” (93). Harkening back to the tone of Roy’s piece, Matin describes how Muslims have found themselves in yet another challenging dynamic of the communal-secular binary concerning the emergent Hindutva nationalist movement in West Bengal (103–4). Bhattacharjee shifts to Karnataka and argues that the “meteoric rise” of the BJP there cannot be divorced from the discourse of Hindutva and that the Sangh Parivar (that is, organized Hindu nationalist movements) has demonstrated a failed proposition of secularization in India (118–19).
Next, Josukutty C.A., Parimal Maya Sudhakar, and Muhammad Tajuddin demonstrate the divisiveness of nationalistic, religion-oriented politics. Josukutty C.A. argues that the BJP’s political peacekeeping efforts in Kerala are strategic political moves. Sudhakar adds an additional layer of the BJP’s strategy to the mix by showing how the BJP was successful in “painting all non-Hindutvavadee parties as pseudo-secular or appeasers of religious minorities” (154). In a milieu of outwardly prosecular attitudes, this pseudosecular accusation is the equivalent of an electoral death-sentence for any opposing political group. Analyzing Jammu & Kashmir, Tajuddin shows that under the auspices of Hindu nationalism, political leadership in Jammu & Kashmir resembles authoritarianism. Political leaders in this region have enjoyed the control of “both executive and legislative powers” in times of leadership transition, in which the shuffle of Hindutva politics and conflict with Pakistan have enabled this political dynamic to continue (169).
Finally, Umakant, Dhananjay Rai, and Y. S. Alone address regional facets of communal polarization. Umakant focuses on religious violence and mobilization in Bihar in which the BJP has allied with some groups involved in this political mobilization (184). Rai writes on Gujarat and argues that there is a “need to delineate the difference between Hindutva and the Hindu Political” in which the Hindu Political is linked with state power, whereas Hindutva remains a cultural category (200). Last, Alone offers another dimension in which public and political perceptions are taken into account as discourse phenomena, which are present in the “invisible doctrine” of “vote hamara Raj hamara” (“our votes, our rule”) (214).
This edited volume provides a necessary blend of religion and politics situated within India’s very complex colonial history. Having said this, it is apparent that this volume has a particular view of what constitutes “politics.” As a result, it falls short in other core categories of the studies of religion and politics such as: embodied ritual use, geopolitics, gender, sexuality, etc. While these issues are occasionally mentioned, their treatment is brief, and they do not receive adequate critical attention within the context of politics and religion in India.
Though this particular view of politics often suggests optimism regarding the separation of state power from its underlying cultural categories (see Rai’s chapter on Gujarat for an in-depth example), the ability of neither the Hindu Political nor of Hindutva to meaningfully incorporate these cultural categories into their broader respective visions enables the BJP’s nationalism by way of a logical paradox. The consideration of such cultural categories would not only provide additional depth to the volume, but would also call out this paradox as one component of nationalism itself.
Jared Wesley Opoien
University of North Texas
Denton, Texas, USA
Mark McClish, The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 294 pages.
Given the difficulties in dating the texts that form the key evidence for the study of ancient India and thus for the protohistory of Hinduism, the field of South Asian Studies is in desperate need of a definitive scholarly work on each of these major texts that sets it in a plausible historical context. This book is that work for the Arthaśāstra, a text of unique importance for the study of ancient South Asia that has too often been misunderstood and misused as a source of data for the Mauryan period. Mark McClish argues that the Arthaśāstra as it comes down to us is the result of a major redaction by Kauṭilya in about the third century CE of an earlier text, which McClish calls the Daṇḍanīti, written in the first century BCE or CE. He argues further that one of the major effects of Kauṭilya’s redaction was to impose a more orthodox conception of varṇadharma on a text whose politics was originally concerned primarily with the utilitarian exercise of power. Thus, he resolves the long-noticed inconsistency of the received text on whether the king’s power enjoys a Machiavellian freedom or must submit to a higher dharma.
Although it is not explicitly structured in such a way, the book is effectively divided into two parts. After the Introduction in Chapter 1, Chapters 2–5, which constitute over half of the book, are devoted to a detailed philological study of the Arthaśāstra. McClish begins in Chapter 2 by reviewing and refuting both the traditional account of the Arthaśāstra’s composition (that Kauṭilya was Candragupta Maurya’s purohita Cāṇakya) and other theories of the text’s unitary authorship. In Chapter 3, he shows that the redactor redundantly and clumsily resegmented the text, which was originally divided into topics, into chapters. Then, in Chapter 4, he shows that citations of previous scholars in the text are a tell-tale feature of the redaction. Finally, in Chapter 5, he demonstrates that the original text had a structure, partially obscured by the redaction, in which the first half discussed domestic affairs and the second half foreign affairs.
The second half of the book, Chapters 6–9, is a bit shorter and gives a commentary on the implications of McClish’s philological conclusions. Chapter 6 summarizes the history of the text as uncovered by McClish. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss the politics of the Daṇḍanīti (the original text) and the Arthaśāstra in turn. Finally, in Chapter 9, McClish discusses the broader implications of his findings. He argues that the Daṇḍanīti of which the Arthaśāstra is a redaction represents an independent tradition of statecraft in ancient India that was coopted by orthodox Brāhmaṇism, first through its incorporation into the Mānava Dharmaśāstra and then through Kauṭilya’s redaction.
It is difficult to overstate how exciting of a contribution this book makes to the study of ancient India. In particular, by demonstrating that the original text on which the Arthaśāstra was based represented an independent statecraft tradition that had to be “corrected” by Kauṭilya, it contributes to our growing awareness of the limits of ancient Brāhmaṇical hegemony. Scholars who are mostly interested in the book’s implications for the study of religion may feel frustrated by the philological detail and may (as McClish himself admits) want to skip to Chapter 6 after reading the Introduction. Nevertheless, I applaud McClish for making unabashed use of higher criticism to stratify the text. Higher criticism has come into some disrepute lately for real and perceived excesses, in favor of safer and at times undervalued synchronic study. Especially in the field of ancient South Asian history, however, which is chronologically data-poor, there is a desperate need to grapple with the history of texts that, yes, did indeed change over time.
My only quibble with McClish’s conclusions is that he does not, to my mind, take the implications of his findings far enough. He continues to operate with a model of a more-or-less stable Brāhmaṇical “orthodoxy” of some antiquity that had a “renaissance” around the turn of the era, with the Daṇḍanīti representing a tradition that is independent thereof. I do not think McClish fully appreciates the degree to which this “renaissance” actually brought Brāhmaṇism into being. There are of course Vedic antecedents to the varṇadharma Kauṭilya introduced to the text, but we should not lose sight of the degree to which Kauṭilya, Manu, and other figures of the so-called renaissance were actually saying something new. We should, in other words, take the Daṇḍanīti seriously as representing the mainstream for its historical context, not merely an “alternative.” After all, if Kauṭilya so often wanted to say the opposite, then why did he choose to redact this text, rather than write his own?
Nathan McGovern
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Whitewater, Wisconsin, USA
Nathan McGovern, The Snake and the Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 329 pages.
This monograph reflects the cyclical scholarly interest in the overlapping chronological and sectarian boundaries of Indian Buddhism. Regarding its chronology, one need only recall the seemingly ever-changing dates of the birth and death of the historical Buddha, regularly altered by new and new readings of textual and archaeological finds. This book is more concerned with the historiographical treatments of the tradition’s sectarian bookends that are once again productively being troubled: with the origins of Indian Buddhism frequently framed as an offshoot, rejection, or reform of Hinduism, its conclusion is often causally connected with the spread of Islam across the subcontinent. Nathan McGovern addresses the former issue via through his examination of the compound term “Brāhmaṇa and Śramaṇa” (brāhmaṇa-śramaṇa) that, though first used by Patañjali in his mid-second century BCE Mahābhāṣya, is only likened to the oppositional compound “snake and mongoose” (ahi-nakula) in a much later (seventh century) Jain grammatical text, also commenting on, as is the Mahābhāṣya, Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī.
Questioning the extent to which this adversarial metaphor reflects the rhetorical origins of the religions now referred to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, this book focuses on textual “encounter dialogs” between Brāhmaṇs and Buddhists, within a relatively short historical frame. Establishing the horizon of Indian history with the reign of Aśoka in the third century BCE, the author downplays the explanatory value of these later categories, advocating a paradigm shift in the ways that we consider these developing sectarian identities. McGovern argues in his Introduction that, in considering the dialogic nature of these early texts, we eschew such “preexisting, metahistorical categories such as Brahmanical or non-Brahmanical,” since these early authors did not use these terms polemically to assert sectarian identity, as did later authors and much later scholars (23).
Throughout the six chapters of this book and treating ancient Indian discourse as “the raw material out of which such identities emerge” (23), McGovern details many of the strategies that these early authors deployed in different genre of text, as they jockeyed for position among wandering monks, donating householders, and powerful kings. Despite the use of the term “Brāhmaṇ” by individuals who would come to be identified as Jains and Buddhists, the polemics of these debates “proved so successful in arrogating the category Brahman” to the Neo-Brāhmaṇical movement that it has since become easy to lose sight of the near universality of this term in early Indian religion (27; emphasis in the original).
Chapters 2 and 3 build upon the argument clearly laid out in the Introduction. Chapter 2 details debates from the Pali Canon over the proper methods by which one acquires Brāhmaṇhood—a product of the acquisition of proper truth and dharma, rather than of simply one’s birth (56)—and Chapter 3 presents the two primary ways that the compound brāhmaṇa-śramaṇa is used in these early texts: negatively, when Buddhist “teachings on wrong views” construct an ideological other “against which the Buddha, as a literary character, seeks to define himself” (72), and positively, as other Suttas “refer to a class of persons who are worthy of honor, praise, and in particular gifts (dāna)” (77).
Chapters 4, 5, and 7 represent an extended argument on two of the primary, related, and most well-known points of contention between “Brāhmaṇas and Śramaṇas” upon which these polemics turn: the celibate wanderer (paribbājaka) versus the householder Brāhmaṇ (gahapati). (Chapter 6 offers close readings of Pali and Chinese commentaries to examine “the way in which later authors dealt with the problematic treatment of the word Brahman” [166; emphasis in the original].) The negotiation over the neutral and universal term “Brāhmaṇa”—a word and a religious office based, in early Buddhist and Jain texts especially, on the religious work of the brahmacārya (celibacy) that these muni perform—resulted in the construction of their interlocutor as a celibate renunciate equated with the jaṭila, vānaprastha, and śramaṇa, though one who was clearly connected to Neo-Brāhmaṇism via the performance of Vedic fire ritual. As the author does at a number of key moments throughout this book, he reminds his reader to not read back into these early texts any expectation that these authors or the audience to whom they were writing should “appear to have respected the putative boundary between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical” (122). McGovern then devotes a significant amount of time to the social construct we might expect to read about here: the fourfold varṇa and āśrama systems that were used together as the Neo-Brāhmaṇical “ideological tool” that brought into high relief for all concerned groups the dichotomous pair of the renouncer and the householder, a “binary that conditioned the way in which competing claimants to Brahmanhood in ancient India understood their own identity and their relationship to other groups” (122, 110).
The final chapter, before a brief Conclusion, is entitled “Losing an Argument by Focusing on Being Right” and addresses the rhetorical question anticipated throughout the book of how Neo-Brāhmaṇs (that is, Hindus) successfully arrogated the term “Brāhmaṇ” to themselves and how Buddhists and Jains abrogated that same term to them. McGovern argues that this rhetorical shift, which became a significant marker of all of the religious identities concerned, occurred in a twofold manner: first, it was a result of the context of the Buddhist and Jain encounter dialogs that repeatedly “replicated and amplified the very ideas it was arguing against”; and, second, in terms of their content, of the compound brāhmaṇa-śramaṇa, and of the respective opposition of householder and renouncer, “there was little room for [Buddhist] opponents to force them into another category; they literally had nothing else to call them” (211–12).
The Snake and the Mongoose is a difficult, detailed, and excellent study that not only expands upon a previous generation of scholarship (for example, Olivelle’s voluminous work on the āśrama system and the dharmasūtras) but also opens up new methodological vistas as we challenge essential categories in the study of religion (Hinduism and Buddhism), troubling such fundamental issues in the field of South Asian religions as the origins, boundaries, and identities of the metahistorical categories that we thought we knew so well.
Michael Baltutis
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA
Nina Mirnig, Liberating the Liberated: Early Śaiva Tantric Death Rites. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2018. 381 pages.
Initiation (dīkṣā) into the Śaiva Tantric fold bestows ultimate liberation (mokṣa) by uniting the soul of the newly initiated with Śiva. This undisputed idea appears throughout the Śaiva Tantric canon. Why then do early Śaiva texts provide postmortem death rites that mirror those of initiation to liberate initiates?
Nina Mirnig approaches this conundrum early on in her monograph Liberating the Liberated: Early Śaiva Tantric Death Rites. Though her examination of works from the fifth to twelfth centuries, Mirnig determines that, “no sound doctrinal position was fully developed for death rites, reflecting their problematic status within the Śaiva tantric ritual world” (24–25). Instead, these rites develop out of Brāhmaṇical funerary and postmortem rituals, replacing ancestor worship (śrāddha) with the integration with and postmortem offerings to increasingly powerful manifestations of Śiva.
The five chapters and two appendices of Liberating the Liberated naturally split the monograph into three parts, though these are not indicated within the text itself.
The first, Chapters 1–3, are of greatest use to the philologist. These chapters examine the doctrinal issues with postmortem liberation (Chapter 1), analyze the development of Śaiva funeral rites (antyeṣṭi) in seven texts dating from the fifth to ninth centuries (Chapter 2), and explores how those rites developed further in five texts from the tenth to twelfth centuries (Chapter 3). These chapters introduce each text, including dating information where possible, and detail both funerary rites and later interpretations by commentators. Here Mirnig also offers comparisons of the texts to demonstrate parallel passages and the development of cremation rites.
Though incredibly informative and important, any attempt to create a mental image of rites as actually performed is impossible from these philologically focused chapters. Fortunately, the text’s second section offers a narrative account of cremation rituals in Chapter 4, built upon all the texts mentioned in the previous section. Here, Mirnig clearly lays out the rites, from preparation of the corpse, funeral procession, and building of the cremation site to the funerary initiation, lighting of the funeral pyre, departure and purificatory rites to the gathering and disposal of the remaining bones. This chapter builds upon the questions raised in the preceding chapters, but is not so dependent upon those questions that it cannot be read on its own. For those with an interest in Tantric rites, this chapter systematically lays out the procedures for the cremation and postmortem liberation of the dead. Here we learn the role of the Tantric guru within the rites as well as catch glimpses of those involved in the practical tasks of cremation. Key to this chapter is the mirroring or inversion of ritual gestures. For example, the sacred thread is placed on the right shoulder rather than the left, circumambulation occurs in the reverse direction, and purification occurs beginning with the purest rather than most impure level of the cosmic order (132).
Chapter 5 begins with a description of the Brāhmaṇical ancestor worship and quickly moves into Śaiva innovations. Much of this chapter demonstrates the strong paradigm on which Śaiva practitioners overlaid their own Tantric worldview. Many of the rites described adhere to the Brāhmaṇical worship, though adjustments are made to include Śaiva conceptions of the cosmos as well as differences in worship depending on the initiatory level of the deceased.
Finally, two appendices present critical editing of key sections of the text utilized in the study (Appendix A) and translation of those sections (Appendix B). These sections offer a deeper look into the rites, and Appendix B is of great value to those interested in details of the rites not mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5.
In her comprehensive study of early Śaiva funerary rites, Mirnig has examined a wide variety of sources in detail. Through translation and narrative, she offers a thorough look at these rites as they appear in texts. She ends her work by noting that this reconstruction is nowhere near complete and raises more questions than have been answered. This is due to the small number of texts that explore such rites, the encroachment of Tantric practice on deeply rooted, socioreligious ritual structures, and complex doctrinal issues that have not been fully resolved by Śaiva practitioners (215).
For those readers with a philological background, the first three chapters demonstrate a systematic and clear approach to texts that I hope will be utilized by future scholars. The chapters are well-organized and present philological analytic work in an unintimidating fashion, though will still likely appeal more to graduate students and scholars than undergraduate students. However, Chapters 4 and 5 and Appendix B are accessible enough for those new to Tantric or ritual studies that the work is sure to be useful to a wide range of academics.
Patricia Sauthoff
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Deonnie Moodie, The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 234 pages.
In this study of Kālīghāṭ, the most important temple of the goddess Kālī in Kolkata, Deonnie Moodie argues that it is has long been at the center of public contestations over how to represent the city’s cultural identity and modernity. In considering the evolving relationship between the city and the temple, Moodie has particularly highlighted the pivotal role of Kolkata’s “middle class,” which from colonial days onwards has spearheaded the drive to reconfigure Kālīghāṭ to match the respectability that this sector of the population has also sought for itself. Each chapter of this book thus presents a historical snapshot of middle-class schemes of improvement, and the resistance it has often engendered, starting with Kolkata’s rise as a colonial capital in the early nineteenth century, through twentieth-century legal debates over the temple’s public image, to recent neoliberal ambitions to remake Kolkata as a world city.
Inasmuch as the outsized influence of the middle class is the foundation of this narrative, the author defines what it means to belong to this social class in each era. For instance, in British times, the Bengali middle class, known as the bhadralok, comprised natives who had received Western-style education and had abilities in English and could therefore serve in the colonial administration (23). There was nonetheless a protonationalist impulse among bhadralok historians; at least some regarded the purportedly ancient Kālīghāṭ as evidence of the city’s precolonial roots, thereby challenging the British rhetoric that Kolkata owed its origin to colonial economic initiative. And yet, at the same time the middle class often looked with discomfort at the temple’s supposedly backwards social and material condition, which was not consistent with the prosperous future to which the middle class aspired. This fundamental polar tension set the stage for ongoing attempts by would-be do-gooders to improve Kālīghāṭ in line with a middle-class zeitgeist of rationality, orderliness, cleanliness, and of course modernity.
The ensuing chapters advance this theme of middle-class intervention, often carried out through civic organizations and state offices as instruments of the public, in the late colonial and postindependence years. The author gives particular attention to a number of court cases initiated from public objections to the allegedly coercive practices of certain classes of people pursuing a livelihood from visitors at the temple—Brāhmaṇ ritualists, hawkers, and beggars. As a result of a series of court rulings, the temple’s management was transferred from Brāhmaṇs acting in the name of the deity (who had been the nominal owner of the temple) into a public trusteeship. Moodie presents this transition of the temple into a legally public establishment as a highly significant historical development, since this effectively meant that the middle class, as representatives of the public, rather than the goddess herself, would henceforth claim the right to determine the temple’s development (91). Moreover, as the author observes, this court-ordered restructuring also imprinted a modernist (and indeed, middle class) vision that religion and economics should be distinct public domains, as opposed to the “corrupt” old Brāhmaṇ regime (71).
In the outcome of Kālīghāṭ’s designation as a public site, recent decades have witnessed various civic groups debating how to aesthetically enhance and even reconstruct Kālīghāṭ as a Kolkata “heritage site,” echoing the familiar problem of pride in the temple as a symbol of the city tempered with displeasure about its actual condition (100). This agenda has entailed lengthy lists of reforms, such as reducing the visibility of animal sacrifices, a holdout from the old days that clashes with modern-day Vaiṣṇava sensibilities (124, 150). Further, with India’s increasing integration in the globalized economy, and local awareness of the Indian diaspora’s higher standards of living, Kolkata’s middle-class public has pushed to upgrade the city’s image by way of “cleaning up” the temple, in other words keeping the many poor people in the vicinity out of view (103).
In covering earlier epochs this study is not surprisingly an archival endeavor, but in discussing recent years Moodie takes a more ethnographic turn, interacting with both interventionists and those at the temple who resist them. Most tellingly, the author observes that at least some visitors at the temple say that the raw “feeling” (bhāv) of devotion would be lost if the temple environment were to be overly cleansed and modernized (165). A certain amount of disorder is, after all, not inconsistent with the wild nature of the goddess herself. Perhaps, too, the author seems to suggest, the modern view that religion and economics belong in mutually exclusive domains needs to be reconsidered, since both are arguably integral to temple life. As a study of how such attitudes shift over time, this book is thus likely to be especially appreciated among those who reflect on the continuing centrality of religious sites within the dynamics of urban change.
R. Jeremy Saul
Mahidol University
Bangkok, Thailand
Vijaya Nagarajan, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India—An Exploration of the Kōlam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 330 pages.
This book is about the auspicious threshold design known as kōlam, its significance in Hindu culture and ecology, and the lives of the women who remember and elaborate on kōlam forms every day. The kōlam is drawn in rice flour before dawn. By midday, the ephemeral design has fed many passing insects and birds and been scuffed away by visitors’ feet. According to Vijaya Nagarajan, this book is also “a telling of women’s lives…women…who move in the worlds of orality, visuality, gestures, and ritual” (xix). The author’s approach to this important task is primarily rooted in her ethnographic research carried out in Tamil Nadu from 1984 to 2015. Nagarajan also incorporates experiences from her childhood and her bicultural identity as she and her research crisscross between India and the US. She takes great pleasure in her writing and ultimately succeeds in both capturing and transmitting the many values and textures of the kōlam.
Chapter 1 introduces the topic, the author’s kinfolk, and the multiple streams of knowledge from which she draws over the course of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the “People Who Taught Me” (25), tensions between “tradition” and “modernity,” the very Tamilness of the kōlam, and her personal and intellectual navigation of eight journeys to India. Chapter 3 emphasizes the kōlam’s invitation to and close relationship with Lakṣmī, the goddess of good fortune, and Bhūdevī, the goddess of earth. This chapter also explains an array of temple, holiday, and domestic rituals that create sacred space, as well as the ways in which kōlam-related knowledge is preserved and shared.
Chapter 4 connects the kōlam with the pottu (red forehead dot) through discussion and analysis of everyday women’s practices that mediate auspiciousness and ritual pollution in domestic spaces. Chapter 5 traces similarities between the kōlam and the story of the poet-saint Āṇṭāḷ through four parallel metaphors: sacred time, “waking up,” forgiveness, and generosity (113). The author also presents literary and historical references to the presence of the kōlam in Tamil women’s domestic routines from the ninth, twelfth, thirteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in this chapter.
Chapter 6 explains the foundations and guiding principles of kōlam design. At the end of this chapter, Nagarajan makes explicit the binding relationship between the kōlam, beauty, and ethics. This extended quote captures the thesis of the entire volume and provides context for the title of the book: “A beautiful kōlam is not just two-dimensional; it actually has an aura of beneficence and goodwill that emanates from it, like a three-dimensional visual prayer. This is why women often say that the ethical purpose behind this ritual art form is to ‘feed a thousand souls.’ It is as if beauty is linked with the generous attitude of wanting to feed and satisfy the hungry” (156).
Chapter 7 is a captivating study of mathematical concepts embedded in kōlam designs, especially fractals, patterns, symmetry, and picture language. At the end of Chapter 7, the author unites these mathematical concepts with choreography that expresses similar notions of winding lines and infinity through dance. Chapter 8 focuses on playful kōlam competitions that bring women together and out into the public sphere. The author compares three competitions, the roles and tastes of kōlam judges, and shifting cultural values expressed by the contest participants.
In Chapters 9, 10, and 11, the author develops three interrelated concepts for understanding the sacredness of the natural world: embedded ecologies, intermittent sacrality, and generosity. A central theoretical contribution that bridges religious, environmental, and art historical studies, Nagarajan defines embedded ecologies as “the concept that many of our ideas about the natural world are embedded and steeped in cultural, ritual, and artistic forms” (205). According to the author, intermittent sacrality refers “to the tendency to hold the earth as sacred during specific rituals, and then to drop that deferential attitude and practice in the midst of the practical demands of daily life” (216). Nagarajan explains further that while temples, mountains, and rivers are considered permanently sacred, other sites and substances host and then dehost the divine as guest (217). The ability to start and stop the force or substance of sacrality enables people to both participate in ritual hospitality and then go about common human routines. Thus, a building entrance or threshold can be ritually purified and made sacred with the application of the kōlam, and, at another time, the same earth can be walked over or strewn with debris. Chapter 11 is a concentrated study of generosity, in particular, of giving food in the first instance (meaning not in reciprocity). The kōlam, which is made of rice flour and feeds many small creatures, is shown to be “the epitome of ritual generosity” (252), as well as a practical way to get ritual debt relief for a female householder even before her morning bath (253). Although at the forefront of these chapters, the three concepts (embedded ecologies, intermittent sacrality, and generosity) are certainly developed throughout the book. Significantly, these terms provide scholars of South Asian religions with fresh insights and models for analyzing a wide variety of religious practices that rely on sacred geographies, ephemeral materials, and notions of bounded experiences.
At the conclusion of the book, Nagarajan shares her concerns and doubts about the use of kōlams in nonritual contexts, from public competitions in Chennai to academic workshops in the US. Through reflection and dialogue with her multigenerational interlocutors, the author concludes that the kōlam is strong enough and great enough to withstand secularization (262).
This book is a weaving together of ethnography and experience, and the culmination of the author’s profound understanding of the kōlam’s interlocking roles as invitation, art, play, and prayer. It is a tremendous gift to the field and a pleasure to read. Nagarajan’s joining of the kōlam and the pottu, mathematics and dance, and ritual and ecology are each extremely sophisticated cross-disciplinary interventions that ought to be studied not only for the data assembled over decades of research, but also for the masterful clarity and sensitivity with which she describes this work. Boasting over one hundred images, the book must also be recommended as an essential visual resource for kōlam studies. In sum, Feeding a Thousand Souls is a peerless engagement with the intimacy, auspiciousness, and multiple homes of the kōlam.
Leah Elizabeth Comeau
University of the Sciences
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Hillary P. Rodrigues, Hinduism: Understanding Our Religious World. eBook. Robinest, 2020. 122 pages.
The year 2020 presented a number of difficulties for all of us, as the global COVID-19 pandemic upended our typical patterns of working, shopping, socializing, parenting, and everything else that involved human contact. For those of us used to teaching in the classroom on a college campus, our patterns and expectations were also altered, to say the least. Most of us needed to adjust our sources, lectures, and teaching styles as we taught from home, uploading audio-visual lectures and/or streaming lectures to one of the many available platforms, in an attempt to engage students in new ways that were sometimes successful. Though we won’t use all of the new forms of technology and new teaching strategies we adopted during the pandemic, we have all acquired some hints and tips that we and our institutions might take with us even after the pandemic subsides.
Though produced slightly before the pandemic, the book under review represents a teaching tool that not only would have been helpful then, but will also be helpful in a more standard classroom setting moving forward. Produced specifically as a digital source (eBook), Hillary P. Rodrigues’s Hinduism provides a concise and visually appealing introduction to Hinduism, ideal for an introductory course.
Its first section on History begins with the Indus Valley Civilization and ends with a number of short sections on modern India, including the British Colonial Period, Global Hinduism (for example, ISKCON), and Hinduism in Popular Culture (for example, Bollywood). Its second section on Beliefs includes larger sections on Hindu Texts, Deities, and Temples. Its third section on Structure outlines the Four Classes, Religious Specialists, and Gender and Sexuality. And its fourth and final section, Practice, details Yoga, Pūjā, and a number of Hindu festivals (for example, Holī).
Just eighty pages in length, the succinctness of the core of this text cannot be overstated. Each subsection named above is brief: the section on British Rule, Reform, and Independence is summarized in just one page, while more complex sections are somewhat longer, with each deity (for example, Śiva) or each text (for example, the Rāmāyaṇa) given its own single page. Nearly every page of the book also contains illustrations: photos of the Taj Mahal and Victoria Memorial detail Mughal architecture (12), the ten avatāra of Viṣṇu depict Hindu deities (41–43), the Bṛhadīśvara and Mīnākṣī temples illustrate northern- and southern-style Hindu temples (47–48), and Holī and the Kumbha Melā illustrate Hindu festivals (77–78). The text also contains useful maps of the Indus Valley (5), the Mughal Empire (11), and religious sites in India (18) and charts of Cosmic Time (24), the Four Classes and the Four Stages and Goals of Life (53–54), and the Hindu calendar (76).
A ten-page section containing a Quick Review and eighteen Vocabulary Audio Files (pushing a button, a reader hears a native speaker of Indian languages properly pronounce words like “Mahābhārata” and “Bhagavad Gītā”) makes this text even more accessible to introductory students in the physical or virtual classroom. The text concludes with a thirty-page Reader of selected texts culled from traditional ancient, medieval, and modern sources (for example, Ṛg Veda, Devī Māhātmya, and Gandhi’s autobiography), all of which had been referenced earlier in the text.
The concise nature of this book is also in part a product of its publication. As the opening notes state, “This eBook has adapted and modified the text used in a chapter of [Thomas A.] Robinson and [Hillary P.] Rodrigues, World Religions: a guide to the essentials, published by Baker Academic.” The content of that book has been apportioned out into a number of texts, equally accessible and equally inexpensive (each available for $8 on the Google Play digital app). The content of Hinduism is also contained nearly verbatim in Rodrigues’s Eastern Religions: Understanding Our Religious World, which also covers Buddhism and East Asian Religions (Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto), and Hinduism’s Reader is also contained in full in the larger Eastern Religions Reader.
The introductory notes state that Robinson and Rodrigues designed and developed this book while “team-teaching a world religions course numbering 500 students a year,” providing a key to the better uses to which it might be put. Not intended for a full-semester course on Hinduism or South Asian religions, this book provides an excellent, approachable, and financially prudent option for a larger World Religions course written by an engaged and respected scholar with a keen eye towards the needs of today’s students.
Michael Baltutis
University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA
Dawn F. Rooney, ed., The Thiri Rama: Finding Ramayana in Myanmar. New York: Routledge, 2017. 390 pages.
As one of the most profoundly influential literary texts in the world, the Rāmāyaṇa has been the subject of countless scholarly works. Yet, comparing its various recensions in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Hindi, studies on Rāmāyaṇa traditions in Southeast Asia have only gained momentum in recent decades, and the existing scholarship on the Myanmar Rāmāyaṇa is even more scant. As the latest addition to the corpus of research on the transmission and development of Rāmāyaṇa traditions in Southeast Asia, The Thiri Rama is especially helpful in understanding the history and cultural significance of the Rāmāyaṇa in Myanmar, and the necessity of the present publication is also evidenced by the short list of existing scholarship referenced at the end of the book.
Edited by art historian Dawn F. Rooney, this volume consists of a series of short introductory essays written by prominent Myanmar literary scholars, followed by a synopsis of the story and a prose translation of the Thiri Rama (“The Great Royal Drama of Rama,” or Rama Nan-dwin Pya Zat Taw Gyī). The first part of the book presents a brief but helpful account of the history and tradition of the Rāmāyaṇa in Myanmar, as various forms of narrative and dramatic performances, from the pre-Bagan times to the end of the twentieth century. These discussions touch upon a broad range of topics, including how different artistic depictions, such as stone and wooden carvings, frescoes, and bas-reliefs, helped scholars understand the early history of Rāmāyaṇa in Myanmar; the stage setting and presentation of Rāmāyaṇa as a royal court drama; and the early transmission of the Rāmāyaṇa in Myanmar and its relation to the Thai influence. Specifically useful are the original drawings by contributor U Aung Thwin that illustrate the costumes, masks, and dance postures used for its staged performance that began as early as the Konbaung period in the late eighteenth century.
The second part of the book includes a short synopsis of the story and a previously published translation of the Thiri Rama that is adapted and rendered in prose by the editor. Written in prose and poetry with instructions for music, the Thiri Rama is considered the most complete text written for dramatic performance of the Rāmāyaṇa in Myanmar, allegedly composed by Nemyo Nataka Kyaw Khaung in the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century. The original English translation of the Thiri Rama made by Tin Maung Kyi was first published in three volumes by the Universities Historical Research Centre in 2001–2002 in Yangon for stage performance, and it was initially coedited by two contributors of the present volume, U Thaw Kaung and U Aung Thwin, based on the palm-leaf and paper parabike manuscripts from the Mandalay University Library and the National Library.
The prose rendering is accompanied by over two hundred illustrations from plaques at the Maha Law-ka Marazein pagoda in northwest Myanmar. These sandstone plaques provide fascinating visual accounts of the text, but unfortunately, it is unclear as to how and why they were chosen and in what ways they were identified with certain figures or scenes in the narrative. Apart from the lack of discussion of these plaques in context, the present volume would also have benefitted from further notes on how the editor reworked the text into prose and how the original translation was made from old Myanmar; these notes would be important especially for readers who do not have access to either Tin Maung Kyi’s original English translation or the Myanmar edition made by U Thaw Kaung and U Aung Thwin.
Furthermore, I also wish the contributors had included further discussions on the literary, rather than merely the historical aspect of the Myanmar Rāmāyaṇa. In his introductory essay, for instance, U Thaw Kaung writes that the Rāmāyaṇa is beloved in Myanmar for its main theme of Good triumphing over Evil as well as its representation of filial piety (11). Yet, the text of Thiri Rama is embedded with complex and ethically challenging plots that go far beyond the simple dichotomy of good and evil. For example, the tragic ending of the narrative depicts Sītā (Thida) disappearing into the earth after being asked to repeat the fire ordeal when she returned from her exile commanded by Rāma; having heard this, the desolate Lakṣmaṇa (Lakkhana) then committed suicide by drowning in the river; and finally, Rāma, after losing both his wife and brother, decided to follow Lakṣmaṇa and drowned himself in the river. How did intellectuals and literary scholars in Myanmar make sense of such a tragic ending and what kind of moral instructions does the text seek to provide? It would have been helpful if the contributors had discussed how this text was received in Myanmar, and also compared Thiri Rama with other Myanmar versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, such as the Yama (Rama) Tha-gyin by U Aung Phyo, written in 1775, or the Yama (Rama) Vatthu to be from the seventeenth century.
Compared to other relatively well-researched recensions of the Rāmāyaṇa in Southeast Asia, such as the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa Kakavin, the dearth of existing scholarship on Myanmar Rāmāyaṇa traditions presents great possibility for future work, especially in comparative and transcultural frameworks. The Thiri Rama would serve as a useful introduction for anyone interested in Myanmar literature in general, and in particular in the Rāmāyaṇa. I hope that this publication sparks interests in studies of Southeast Asian literature among a broader audience.
Yang Qu
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Jennifer B. Saunders, Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and Their Narrative Performances. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 258 pages.
In this sensitive ethnography, Jennifer B. Saunders offers access to an interesting selection of a single family’s memories. With roots in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk neighborhood, where their patriarch once owned a printing press (45), the Gupta clan is spread across five continents (5). In addition to amassing new accents, passports, and other documents of citizenship, their extended family has adopted a range of professional identities as doctors, engineers, academics, and businesspeople. Prompted by their accounts of immigration and transnational globetrotting, Saunders analyzes Gupta family vignettes imbued with a deeply felt yearning to build bonds of affective cohesion between their globally dispersed community of kinfolk. Saunders interprets these personal narratives as religious ones with properties that are consonant with modern Hindu understandings of dharma (4, 10). Central and urgent for her are the religious practices of the Atlanta branch of the Gupta family, particularly their thirty-year-old tradition of organizing a Sundarkāṇḍ manḍalī (a collective recitation of the fifth book of Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas) in the basements of homes owned by member-families across the American metropolis.
To illustrate the capaciousness of transnational mobility afforded to the Guptas, the book begins by probing the life of twenty-year old Satya, a great-nephew of the Atlanta branch, who clears passport control procedures in the airports of three countries (USA, India, and Nigeria), all within five months of his birth (4–6). This anecdote sets the tone in Chapter 1 for Saunders to lay out heuristic frameworks for the reader to relate to the experiences faced by global families like the Guptas. This chapter discusses transnationalism, social imaginaries, and narrative performance, delineating semantic boundaries of the oft-conflated terms “transnational,” “diaspora,” and “global.” Saunders convincingly argues that the framework of transnationalism best elucidates the experience of modern families like the Guptas. She invokes the contributions of Arjun Appadurai, Nina Glick Schiller, and Thomas A. Tweed to provide context for theories of modern migration. Saunders explains how religiously infused narrative performance empowers transnational families with the creative tools to remain emotionally attached to relatives who live in distant countries (15–17). In Chapter 2, the author surveys some of the primary reasons that have spurred Indians to emigrate, particularly in the period after Indian independence (34). By doing so, she situates the relocation of individuals like Dr. Gupta, first among the Atlanta branch to depart Chandni Chowk, against the backdrop of larger historical factors affecting both Indian and American politics.
Underscoring the value of Indian-Hindu identities in their biographies, Chapters 3 and 4 examine Gupta family narratives themselves. Chapter 3 introduces readers to the migration narratives of Dr. Gupta and his wife, who recall memories of their initial years in the United States during the 1970s. Saunders supplies a transcription and commentary of this testimony, coupling diagnostic techniques from linguistic anthropology and modern comprehensions of dharma. In Chapter 4, Saunders turns to narratives of the Guptas raising their children in suburban Atlanta. As they reinvent themselves in these surroundings, the Guptas make efforts to remain connected to different relatives in India and teach their children about their religious and cultural heritage (7, 122).
Chapter 5 departs momentarily from the Gupta testimonies to explore the individuality of Atlanta’s Hindu community (and the sites where they worship) in comparison to counterparts in other American cities. Saunders attributes the distinguishing characteristics of Atlanta’s immigrant religious practices to the unique racial cleavages that dominate the South. The book’s final chapter, “Sundarkāṇḍ: Performing Community and Religion,” is especially pertinent for scholars of modern Hinduism. Synergizing rich inputs from Philip A. Lutgendorf’s research on the Rāmcaritmānas, the chapter explicates the ways in which the Gupta family network’s self-understanding is shaped in juxtaposition to the religious significance of this crucial episode from the Rāma narrative tradition qua its manifestation in Tulsīdās’s sixteenth-century Awadhi iteration (158, 182). It also contrasts the Atlanta Sundarkāṇḍ manḍalī’s activities with similar ones undertaken by Gupta elders in Delhi (173–75). In doing so, Saunders uncovers the multiple resonances of Hindu narrative performance across transnational upper caste, North Indian contexts. The concluding reflection in the book, aptly entitled “Toward a Transnational Hinduism,” addresses whether the prolific emigration of upwardly mobile Hindu-Indian communities produces a category that might be called a transnational Hinduism (183–89).
Imagining Religious Communities: Transnational Hindus and Their Narrative Performances chronicles the Gupta family’s eagerness to maintain a sense of transnational cohesion that is simultaneously real and imagined. Their efforts at doing so are tinged with anxiety as they grapple with a cluster of hegemonic processes such as globalization, modernity, and immigration. Accounts of families like theirs have been widely circulating during the 1990s and 2000s. From acclaimed films like the Namesake and Monsoon Wedding to the more recently produced Netflix comedy, Never Have I Ever, delve into the life worlds of transnational Hindus. Given the ubiquity of such stories in popular culture and scholastic discourse, readers may be tempted to question the relevance of this book’s subject matter to current conversations in the humanities, especially since much of the ethnographic data presented here was collected between the late 1990s and early 2000s. While Saunders’s intellectual questions may have indeed been influenced by the this dated milieu, readers will quickly grasp the exceptionality of her contribution. The Gupta testimonies have not been reduced to evidentiary data meant to support prevailing grand narratives on transnational Hinduism. Rather, Saunders dignifies the family’s narratives with earnestness, measuring them as subjects with value that is equal to extended theoretical deliberation on them.
A superlative example of Geertzian thick description, Saunders’s project represents a noteworthy shift in the paradigms used to interpret transnational religious communities. It is particularly recommended to those interested in the evolution of modern religion in both the USA and in India. As individuals like Satya Gupta, equally at ease living in Delhi as they are in Atlanta and Abuja, have become a norm at American universities, a book like this one can greatly benefit scholars from all fields who desire to better understand the formative experiences of students from international and immigrant backgrounds.
Aditya N. Bhattacharjee
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Banu Subramanian, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. 308 pages.
Banu Subramanian’s book is a weighty contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and Hindu nationalism. The intersectional analysis throughout the volume is one of the most important and noteworthy features of Subramanian’s scholarship as sex, gender, race, nationhood, caste, and colonialism are inextricably connected to religion, politics, science, and history. The author outlines the rich and somewhat dissonant complexities of India by highlighting tensions—and the simultaneity—between religion and science, ancient and modern, mythology and history. Subramanian’s volume illustrates how Hindu nationalist organizations in particular rely on ideas of “archaic modernity” in which technology and science are intricately connected to religious mythology. This bionationalism, she argues, relies on the narratives of Indian history and “allows us to understand how old, and often conservative, cultural categories of gender, caste, and sexuality are transformed anew in scientific modern discourse” (9).
It is worth saying something about the structure of the book: the author has managed an enormous amount of information, case studies, and critical scholarship, arranged in tidy, thematic groupings and subgroupings. The Introduction is a robust chapter in itself, laying out several themes and critical strategies employed throughout the book: bionationalism, Vedic sciences, Queer politics, environmentalism, feminism, postcolonialism, and language. These themes overlap, encounter, and alter each other in intersectional and interdisciplinary ways, intricately layered but always apparent and accessible for the reader.
Perhaps most ingeniously, the author experiments with speculative fiction—her own storytelling of the creation of the world, drawing heavily from Hindu mythology for inspiration. The result of these ecoparables, a few pages of myth nestled in between each scholarly chapter of the volume, reifies the epistemological importance of storytelling: how do we come to understand how we know what we think we know? Storytelling reveals how truths, histories, mythologies, and perspectives come together and negotiate spaces in our popular, political discourse.
Storytelling is in many ways the undergirding theme of the book. Mythological storytelling is woven through science and history—these arenas are not exempt from narrative craftsmanship nor from subjectivity. In particular, Subramanian argues that “narratives of Indian mythology mingle with the powers of scientific reason to imbue the fantasies of Indian mythology and storytelling with rational possibilities and an energetic Indian scientific prehistory” (6). Furthermore, Hindu nationalism is especially adept in its use of science and technologies to highlight the relevance (or authenticity) of Vedic scriptures and ancient histories.
Each chapter is a rigorous and well-organized examination of one of the thematic case studies and could be used as a case study in the classroom as a standalone piece and still engage a wide range of disciplinary topics. Chapter 1 begins with a revealing look at Modi’s “development nationalism” which emphasizes the narrative of India as technologically advanced even in its ancient era (as evidenced in the Epics and the Vedas) as well as its potential for growth in the modern era. These political strategies, as Subramanian demonstrates, also have roots in Orientalism, colonialism, and notions of masculinity. This interdisciplinary lens is applied to subsequent chapters as well. Chapter 2 looks at the colonial legacies around “natural” and “unnatural” sex, engaging Queer studies, Western influences, and eugenics. The third chapter examines the concept of nativism, with particular attention to how the Rāmāyaṇa is often viewed as a historical rather than mythological narrative (complete with environmental “scientific” evidence). The fourth chapter explicitly addresses narrative and its role in nation building. Here, we find a theme of global brotherhood, where Hinduism is both indigenous and transnational.
The intersectionality of Subramanian’s work and invocation of biological/scientific in relation to the nation culminates in Chapter five. This chapter investigates the role of motherhood in three simultaneous ways: socially, biologically, and nationally. Subramanian argues that population control and reproductive technologies are examples of biopolitics, and the role of the woman (and her womb) becomes politicized in a number of ways. The biopolitics of surrogacy is an especially fascinating discussion, pointing to a form of Hindu eugenics motivated to create superior children through more Āyurvedic methods and yogic practices. Thus “genetic engineering” is done through traditional or natural methods—suggesting that control of the female body through diet, education, and her overall attitude will produce superior Hindu babies.
Holy Science is a well written and detailed exploration into the biopolitical nature of nationalism—particularly the interlocution of science and mythology in service of the nation. We are shown the various ways (demonstrated through her case studies) this science/mythology dualism is entangled with discourses of caste, gender, postcolonialism, sexuality, history, politics, and human biology. Banu Subramanian’s volume is a sober observation about the power of narrative as creation, but also narrative as control. A thoughtful and original contribution to scholarship on Hindu nationalism, Holy Science is a rigorous and detailed analysis of biopolitics in India that is both provocative and delightful to read.
Juli L. Gittinger
Georgia College
Milledgeville, Georgia, USA
Kenneth R. Valpey, Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 300 pages.
Kenneth R. Valpey, holder of a DPhil from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford (where I was one of his doctoral supervisors), candidly positions himself in this thoughtful volume as a believer, scholar, and proponent of the protection of cows. He has been a member of ISKCON for some fifty years and dedicates Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics to his guru Svāmī Prabhupāda. The book is several things at once: a well-informed and gentle perusal of the long Indian relationship with the cow; an honest confrontation with cow maltreatment and slaughter that avoids heated language and neither idealizes the past nor demonizes those with different attitudes toward animals; a concrete perusal of contemporary experiments that show care for cows and for the humans around them; and a hopeful look to the future, a world that is better because it cares for cows. It is key to understanding this volume that it is not in a series dedicated to Indian history, or Indology, or Hindu studies, but in the Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. It is a work of ethics meant also for a wider audience.
Chapter 2, “The Release of Cosmic Cows,” surveys an array of Vedic, Upaniṣadic, epic and Purāṇic texts related to cows, with attention to the tensions between dharma and bhakti, and the literal and figurative expressiveness of language. Valpey does not pretend comprehensiveness, but is fair and intelligent in his selections. He chooses Vedic hymns and Upaniṣadic texts (for example, Chāndogya 4; Kaṭha 1) with care for what they tell us about positive treatment of cows, which he holds to be the typical if not exceptionless ancient Indian attitude. The Mahābhārata is introduced to show the esteem given to the gift of cows; the Bhāgavata Purāṇa testifies not only the expected trope of Kṛṣṇa, cowherds, and cows, but also to show how much Vaiṣṇava devotionalism is permeated with stories of cows, gifts of cows, idyllic pastures, etc.
It will seem odd that Valpey is largely silent on the slaughter of cows and eating of beef in the first chapters, but he does address some difficult facts about beef-eating in Chapter 3, “Cows in Contested Fields.” He begins with Svāmī Dayānanda’s Gokaruṇānidhi (1880) and notes Mohandas K. Gandhi’s idealization of the cow at the center of a renewed Hinduism. He attends as well to the relatively less known “Beef in Ancient India” by the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s Rajendra Lal Mitra. Mitra held that there is no credible way to deny the many references to beef eating in ancient India, and Valpey wants this view to be noted and taken seriously. The reader wishes for more attention then also to Dwijendra N. Jha’s Myth of the Holy Cow (2009) but nonetheless Valpey draws us into the kinds of problems raised in that book, without pandering either to naïve innocence about the past or a radical deconstruction of tradition.
Chapter 4, “Surveying the Cow Care Field,” and Chapter 5, “Cow Care and the Ethics of Care,” look closely at care for cows in modern India, as linked to recognized notions of religiously grounded ethics, respect for life, and dharmic understandings of community in India. This is where the book finds its voice most effectively. He is candid about the largescale killing of cows in India, and also about the horrific violence against those who eat beef or are accused of doing so; though clearly on the side of the cows, he has no sympathy for violence against those whose traditions allow them to kill cows or eat beef. Yet Valpey still envisions an India that can, at its best, model care for cows and for life more inclusively. In Chapter 5 in particular, Valpey generalizes his case for the ethics of cow care by reflecting on ethics as duty, right action, and the cultivation of virtue. He proposes a more thoughtful and constructive relationship between humans and cows, as living beings that are mutually dependent and that will flourish in a society that respects all life. Chapter 6, “These Cows Will Not Be Lost,” highlights two ISKCON endeavors for cow care: the Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir in West Bengal, and the New Vraja Dhama in Hungary. What is done on a small scale can, he argues, be a model for the much more challenging largescale efforts that will be required.
Drawing on the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Valpey concludes by highlighting six simple but effective commitments: the necessity of moving from harm to care, for both cows and those who work with them; a fairness to cows that does not neglect the rights of humans; a gradual reduction of meat-eating, rather than an immediate ban; the move from care for cows to a care for the entirety of the land and those who live on it; expertise in caring for cows that in the long run benefits also the larger community; a retrieval of the sanctity of cows that enhances the sanctity of all life.
Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics thinks within the Hindu tradition without positing an exotic, perfect India; it reads history with a sympathy that is real but critical; it is a constructive work of ethics that will interest the wide range of readers who care about the earth, its community of living beings, and a future in which no living being is left behind.
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Christof Zotter, Asketen auf Zeit: Das brahmanische Initiationsritual der Bāhun und Chetrī im Kathmandu-Tal. Heidelberg: CrossAsia-eBooks, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, 2018. 528 pages.
Asketen auf Zeit (“Temporary Ascetics”) sets out to bridge the gap between textual and ethnographic studies of Hindu life cycle rituals (saṃskāras). The monograph focuses on the Vedic school of the White Yajurveda in the context of Nepal. It is a case study that explores seven initiation rituals—especially the upanayana, also referred to as vratabandha—among the Bāhun (Brāhmaṇ) and Chetrī (Kṣatriya) in the Kathmandu Valley through a constructive comparison of ritual texts (written, but also oral) and ritual practices in situ. It particularly considers how ritual adaptions emerge from an interplay of ritual text and performance.
Christof Zotter’s bountiful textual archive consists of seventeen texts from multiple genre of ritual manual (paddhati, vidhi, prayoga, etc.) that have the Pāraskaragṛhyasūtra at their core. More than simply analyzing these most widely deployed manuals, he examines their textual precursors, addresses less popular manuals, and engages a host of related primary source literature. This combination of a diachronic and a synchronic perspective serves multiple purposes: it highlights the variance of the material, traces the historical development of the ritual, and situates the case study within a wider field of philological ritual studies.
The intersubjectivity of the vratabandha performance is discussed in section 2.1 “Akteure” (“Actors”), which introduces the network of individuals involved in the ritual. Zotter continuously infuses the monograph with careful attention to their different roles and activities, beginning with preparations taking place days or even weeks prior to the event. Copious notes offer access to these spheres located outside the purview of ritual manuals (not least since these are only meant for priests).
Chronicling the progression of the ritual, the twelve chapters of the monograph flow seamlessly into each other, highlighting the sequential interrelation of ritual aspects. Each chapter begins with a comparative analysis of the relevant ritual element in the manuals, followed by a thick description of the ritual sequence as practiced, and transitions into final theoretical considerations grounded in a comparison of intertextual insights and ethnographic observations. It is noteworthy that this framework for organizing the information is anchored in the format of the written source materials. Some of the most popular (printed) manuals visually segment ritual steps into paragraphs with individual titles—practical correspondences also exist—which is mirrored in the monograph’s chapter format. Rather than a mere replication of composition, this structural choice subtly speaks to the discourse of what constitutes a ritual element. This theoretical issue is dealt with in Chapter 4 “Bausteine des Rituals” (“Building Blocks of Rituals”).
Foregrounding how the various aspects of the ritual are coconstitutive, the monograph expands its scope beyond a focus that solely considers the core sequence of the saṃskāra in isolation. Zotter emphasizes interritual dependencies by drawing close attention to framings, which include pūjā and homa standards known from all over South Asia (see section 7.2 “Pūjā und homa als Rahmung,” “Pūjā and Homa as Framing”). His analysis leads to the important insight that the distribution of framings within a ritual is in fact a key to interpreting the meaning of ritual sequences (see xxxiii, 210–11, and 432).
Drawing on a wide variety of ritual and Indological theories (for example, those of Jan Gonda, Ronald L. Grimes, Don Handelman, Bruce Kapferer, Timothy Lubin, Axel Michaels, Patrick Olivelle, Michael Oppitz, and Michael Witzel), Zotter further argues that the vratabandha results in a sustained subjectification of the initiated boy during the ritual. Entering the initiation ritual in a passive role as object, the boy becomes a ritually acting subject who engages with the ritual and maintains this status henceforth. The underlying thesis is that the vratabandha enables the boy’s own ritual agency, whereby he turns into a ritual actor for the first time in his life. This view is contrasted with other renderings of saṃskāras, elaborately dealt with in sections 9.6 “Das upanayana als Übergang” (“Upanayana as Transition”) and 9.7 “Das upanayana als „Bildungsritual“ ” (“Upanayana as Educational Ritual”; the translation unfortunately loses the pun of the German word “Bildung,” which denotes both an educational and formative act).
Another theoretical emphasis of the monograph is to view the historical or circumstantial dynamics of rituals as markers of a flexible ritual culture. Viewing rituals “as creations authorized by a living tradition” (425; my translation), Zotter demonstrates how the relatively young ritual of vedārambha was incorporated, and also transformed, within the vratabandha. Significantly, the focus here is not on why, but on how Brāhmaṇs created a new ritual. For this, see sections 10.3 “Die Genese eines saṃskāra” (“Genesis of a Saṃskāra”) and 10.4 “Der vedārambha als Vedastudium” (“Vedārambha as Study of the Vedas”).
The monograph’s meticulous descriptive documentation and comprehensive integrity make it an important foundational work about the life cycle rituals of the Bāhun and Chetrī—whose rituals are not as well-known as, for instance, those of the Newārs in Nepal. Its conjoining of philology and fieldwork resonates with studies on initiation and childhood rituals among the Newārs that were conducted in parallel (Niels Gutschow and Axel Michaels’ 2008 Growing Up), and echoes what Michaels refers to as an ethno-Indological approach (for example, Axel Michaels’ 2016 Homo Ritualis). Asketen auf Zeit uses this compound methodology nested in a solid comparative frame, which prevents it from becoming normative in its theoretical assertions. It comes with selected ethnographic photo material, an appendix with a directory of relevant Rāmadatta manuscripts in the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP), an appendix with a mantra directory, a glossary, and bibliographies of primary and secondary literatures.
Andrea Wollein
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Baltutis, M. Book Reviews. Hindu Studies 26, 253–282 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-022-09320-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-022-09320-3