A History of India.

• Author: Gerow, Edwin
• Position: Review

A History of India. By BURTON STEIN. The Blackwell History of the World. Oxford: BLACKWELL PUBLISHERS, 1998. Pp. xvi + 432. $26.95 (paper).

Stein's last major work was, at the time of his death in 1996, "almost, but not quite, finished" (R. I. Moore, the series editor, p. xii). It shows, unfortunately, many signs of having been rushed to posthumous publication in ways that do not lend credit to the memory of this engaging, controversial, and, above all, careful historian. Doubtless, the sections dealing with medieval and modern India (about three-quarters of the whole)--Stein's areas of mastery--have suffered less from the well-meaning efforts of others. But the section on "Ancient India" (pp. 37-104) has all the hallmarks of a preliminary sketch done, perhaps, at the behest of a publisher interested in a "comprehensive" work. It cannot be recommended to the unwary. I refuse to believe, having known and admired Burt Stein since we were graduate students together, that he would have permitted its publication in so desultory a form. Let me give four examples, chosen seriatim from a single subsection, on "The Status of Women" (pp. 57-58). Here, fou r classical texts arc adduced in support of various theses advanced; each is seriously misconstrued or misapplied.

1) The first, presumably establishing that education was freely available to all in a pre-sexist golden age, is: "An unmarried young learned daughter should be married to a bridegroom who like her is learned" (p. 57). This is said to be a translation of Rgveda 3.55.16, but it is not, [1] and no similar injunction is found anywhere in that Veda. (The view adumbrated perhaps echoes Atharvaveda 11.7.l8ab, the celebrated, though considerably later, passage allowing a maiden to acquire a husband "brahmacaryena," 'through brahmacarya'--sometimes adduced [though not by Stein] in support of the view that women were not excluded from "education" in an earlier epoch. But even here, the term brahmacarya, though already associated with the first asrama, studenthood, has still its primary connotation of ascetic discipline. The passage is part of an encomium, stuti, of such ascesis, and goes on to recommend the practice, no doubt hyperbolically, to horses and oxen [18cd]--hardly candidates for Vedic study--and in the next verse, to gods.) The attempt to massage such decontextualized excerpts, even if they exist, into the view that "daughters and sons were given the education of the time" is surely...