A bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy.

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Book review

A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. By JS. CROUCH.Delhi; INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE ARTS,2002.Pp. 430.

Ananda Coomaraswamy died sixty years ago, in the summer of 1947. James Crouch's bibliography is likely to be the final and most comprehensive listing of his publications. Will it be used, and by whom? Indeed, what is Coomaraswamy's legacy today?

Before I turn briefly to these rather complex but important questions, here is the organization of the book. Coomaraswamy's publications are arranged into five sections. Section A contains Cooma-raswamy's own books, of which there are ninety-seven entries arranged chronologically. These entries contain a great deal of information, including such things as a physical description of the first edition, an account of the book's contents, annotations of the contents (often using Coomaraswamy's own words), and a listing of reviews (which can often run into a number of entries, his Elements of Buddhist Iconography, for example, published in 1935, has twenty reviews, many written by the major scholars of the day, from Paul Mus to Mircea Eliade to D. C. sirear).

In section B are listed Coomaraswamy's contributions to books, again arranged chronologically. There are ninety-six entries, including the two-volume collection of his selected papers, edited by Roger Lipsey and published in 1977 as part of the Bollingen Series (vol. 89) by Princeton University Press. This publication stimulated something of a renewed interest in and evaluation of Coomaraswamy's scholarship by another set of scholars, and produced some twenty-four reviews, including one by John Kenneth Galbraith in the New York Times, and one by Michael Meister in this journal (JAOS [1980]: 153-54). Section C contains Coomaraswamy's contributions to periodicals, both newspapers and journals, also arranged chronologically, 909 entries in all. Section D is a tiny miscellaneous section with three entries, and the final section E has a selection of 216 entries of material about Coomaraswamy written by other authors, the entries arranged alphabetically by the authors' names. Three is finally a fifty-seven-page index.

The total, then, for publications by Coomaraswamy in this bibliography is a mind-boggling 1,105 entries, including ninety-seven books. Crouch says in a brief "Introductory Note" that "The existence of every item ... has been verified by the compiler through personal inspection ..."Crouch did not compile his lists from...