Fatalism in Ancient India.

AuthorROCHER, LUDO
PositionReview

Fatalism in Ancient India. By SUKUMARI BHATTACHARJI. Calcutta: BAULMON PRAKASHAN, 1995. Pp. xxvii + 356. Rs 250.

Sukumari Bhattacharji, known for her Indian Theogony (Cambridge U.P., 1970; corrected Indian ed., Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978; U.S. ed., Anima, 1988), has become a prolific writer after retirement: Literature in the Vedic Age, 2 vols. (Calcutta: K.P Bagchi, 1984, 1986; rev. JAOS 110 [1990]: 174-75); Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Literature (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1992); History of Classical Sanskrit Literature (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993); etc. These survey volumes were primarily the outcome of her many years of teaching at Jadavpur University.

Fatalism in Ancient India is different. This is a book with a message, inspired by the reaction to a statement Bhattacharji made at a conference on religion in Winnipeg (1981) to the effect that "the theories of Karman and rebirth were two of the most vicious ever invented by man". ... "I was attacked vehemently by all and sundry; I realized that fatalism with which these theories were intrinsically linked was a vested interest, or, the apathy and passivity it provoked were" (preface). The volume is not restricted to the study of karma, rebirth, transmigration, and fatalism in the Indian context. It expands into civilizations in other parts of the world as well, perhaps too ambitious a project for one scholar not sufficiently familiar with the primary sources. Sanskrit adrsta is not "a cognate of the name of the Greek goddess Adrasteia" (p. 1), whose name, rather, is related to a-didrdskein "not run away." Plato did not write "in the first century B.C." and he is not the author of a work called "Mano" (p. 19 , for Menon?). Empedocles "(582-507)" is antedated by nearly one century. Heracleides of Pontus is not called "Pontiens" (p. 20), but "Ponticus." Among the several encyclopedias (with misprints in quotations from languages other than English), I miss Mircea Eliade's The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), which includes articles on...

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