Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India.

• Author: Orr, Leslie C.
• Position: Book review

Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India. Edited by LAURIE L. PATTON. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. 256. $55 (cloth); $22.50 (paper) (pub. in 2005).

This book contains essays written by nine authors, one of whom, Laurie L. Patton, also serving as editor, provided an introduction and afterword. Not surprisingly, given the expertise and accomplishments of the contributors, the volume presents a uniformly high quality of scholarship, displaying skillful research and an admirable attention to the complexities and nuances of the topic it explores.

The approach of all of the contributors is textual and historical, with the exception of Ann Grodzins Gold, whose concluding chapter draws on her study of contemporary ritual expressions of Rajasthani village women. As stated in the introduction (p. 4), "individual texts in the Indian tradition act as very particularized mirrors of the roles and status of women in different periods of history. It is the purpose of this volume to honor the specificity of these texts and the specificity of women's attitudes toward them as producers and audience." While a detailed focus on particular texts is the point of departure for the inquiries of several of the contributors, this statement of purpose--and the division of the book into sections bearing the labels "Ancient," "Classical," and "Reform and Contemporary"--is somewhat misleading, given the fact that most of the authors mobilize textual resources from a wide range of genres and historical periods, and present rich intertextual or comparative analyses. Stephanie W. Jamison's chapter provides a fine illustration of this, as her examination of depictions in Kalidasa's plays of marriages "that seem to run directly counter to proper, dharmic marriage rites" leads her to a consideration of Vedic, Epic and Dharmasastra texts as a means to discover "reasons for and possible justifications of" these departures from the norm (p. 69).

The specificity of texts is indeed honored by the authors of this volume, but because of the scope of their investigations--and, in many cases, because of the antiquity of the texts being scrutinized--the specificities of context often remain obscure. For instance, Mary McGee demonstrates that the question of women's authority, and especially women's entitlement to perform Vedic sacrifices, has been debated throughout history, but seeks also to show how "the construal, articulation and outcome of that debate is contextually sensitive to the politics of the time"; her suggestion that Jaimini's argument for women's...