Ganesapurana, part II: Kridakhanda--Translation, Notes and Index.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

Ganesapurana, part II: Kridakhanda--Translation, Notes and Index. By GREG BAILEY. Purana Research Publications Series, vol. 4, part II. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2008. Pp. xvi + 693.

More than a decade ago I reviewed Greg Bailey's Ganesapurana, part I: Upasanakhanda (IIJ 40 [1997]: 381-87). It was a big and complex book, comprising, besides fifteen pages of prefatory matter, 167 pages of an introduction titled "Towards a Description of the Puranic Genre," 202 pages of translation. 209 pages of notes to the text and the translation, and 59 pages of appendices. Bailey accounted for the extensive introduction and notes in the foreword: "Despite the translation of the U(pasana)kh(anda) forming the centre-piece of the present work, I intend the volume as a whole to be a theoretical work on the Puranic genre. As such the translation provides the raw material for the analyses undertaken in the Introduction and the Notes" (p. xiii). He even more ambitiously claimed that the conclusions advanced in the introduction and notes were "meant to be binding for the Puranas as a whole and should have both a descriptive function in respect to the extant Puranas as well as predictive capacity regarding the form and contents of any putative future Purana" (p. xii). Until having read more closely the Kridakhanda, he abstained from writing on the time and place of composition of the Ganesapurana, especially since "I intend to reconstruct the socio-economic (and political) background out of which this Purana might have been produced" (pp. xii-xiii).

The new volume again comprises an introduction (pp. 1-85), the translation (pp. 87-412), notes to the text and the translation (pp. 413-626), appendices (pp. 627-63), and an index (pp. 665-93). The introduction bears the title "Towards an historical and literary contextualising of the Ganesapurana" It is a model of textual and literary analysis. In this review I can touch on only a few of the many questions Bailey raises and on only some of his arguments. The two parts of the Ganesapurana are complementary, but different: whereas the Upasanakhanda "focuss[es] on how a person becomes [Ganesa's] devotee and the subsequent worship that requires." the Kridakhanda (also called Uttarakhanda) "offers us a comprehensive set of narratives dealing with the god's adventures in the world and how he cheats certain classes of people, saves others, reveals himself to yet a third category and provokes a fourth" (p. 3).

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