Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia.

• Author: Sax, W.S.

We tend to think of Ramayana and Mahabharata as books, but this is an impoverished perspective. In their origins, during most of their histories and for the vast majority of the millions of people who have been acquainted with them, the great South Asian "epics" have been and still are bedtime stories, performative traditions, hegemonic discourses, oral narratives, and political models, but only sometimes (and comparatively recently), books. Installed in our office shelves, they look impressive; they are certainly weighty. But it is well to remember that Ramayana and Mahabharata are not bounded by leather covers, that they have been and still are more lively, less fixed, more changeable, and less predictable, than mere books.

Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger and Laurie J. Sears, has a great deal to teach us about the degree to which the Indian epics can or cannot be thought of as books, and especially about the various and complex relationships between written and performed versions of them. In their introduction, Sears and Flueckiger express an interest not only in the relation between performance and written texts, but also with the variability of indigenous definitions of text. They ask what it is that performers and audiences mean when they identify something as "Ramayana" or "Mahabharata." This is an interesting and potentially fruitful line of inquiry, but unfortunately it is not pursued very far, except in Sweeney's excellent first essay which begins by suggesting that "colonial print literacy created 'the epics' in Malay, and that, in so doing, it effectively guaranteed their demise." This essay, like much of the rest of the book, constitutes a clear warning to scholars engaged in cross-cultural research of the dangers of projecting their own categories onto their objects of study.

The main theme of the book is the three-cornered relationship among written texts, oral texts, and performance. The differences between oral and written texts can appear to be self-evident, and Boundaries of the Text performs the very useful task of making those differences seem less "obvious" than before. As Doniger notes in her summary of the important issues raised in the book, a distinction between "fluid" and "fixed" texts is perhaps more useful than the more common, but misleading distinction between oral and written texts. Most of the essays (especially Sears') problematize...