Essays on Vaisnavism in Bengal.

• Author: SALOMON, CAROL
• Position: Review

Essays on Vaisnavism in Bengal. By RAHUL PETER DAS. Calcutta: FIRMA KLM PRIVATE LIMITED, 1997. Pp. Rs 220.

Of the four essays collected in this slim volume, the first two-- "Of Worlds and Times" and "The Origins of Caitanya's Vaisnavism in Bengali: Some Enigmas"--are English versions of lectures originally written in German. The remaining essays--"Recent works on Bengali Vaisnavism" and "On Nirmal'narayan Gupta's Study of The Kar'ca of Gobinda Karmakar"--are English translations of book reviews previously published in German in Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, the first in 1993 but updated somewhat for this version, the second in 1987.

"Of Worlds and Times" concerns notions of time and space in Bengali (particularly Gauriya) Vaisnavism.(1) Gauriya Vaisnavas view Krsna's lila as going on eternally in heavenly Vrndavan, where it has no beginning and no end and where its events do not occur in any fixed order. Das finds the closest parallels to this notion of time in the Vedas. He cites scholars who hold that mythic events in Vedic texts, in particular the Rg Vedic story of Indra's freeing of the waters, are constantly repeated and observes that one use of the Vedic injunctive is to indicate such extemporal events. He concludes his discussion of time by noting that Visnu took over many of Indra's characteristics, seeming to imply that the Vaisnava view of sacred time may have developed out of the Vedic one. This argument is far-fetched; sacred time is by definition "indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable."(2) Since Das does not find any other commonality between the concept of time in the Vedic myth and in Gauriya Vaisnavism, there is no reason to posit any link between them, or even to view them as parallel notions.

Das goes on briefly to explain the Gauriya Vaisnava notion of space, pointing out that (p. 12) "there is in Vrndavan not only the visible Vrndavan but also a Vrndavan invisible to most that actually belongs to another dimension." A visit to earthly Vrndavan, Das notes, helps the devotee to perceive the transcendent realm. He then argues a point which is so obvious that it does not warrant lengthy discussion--that the primary meaning of tirtha is a (p. 17) "'point/place of crossing over' (in this case to something otherworldly)." The essay ends with a discussion of concepts of space and time in science and science fiction.

Much of what is said in the first few pages of "The Origins of Caitanya's Vaisnavism" repeats material from the first essay. In this second essay Das reiterates a...