Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.
• Position: Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in Honor of Shaul Migron - Book review

Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India. Edited by DAVID SHULMAN and SHALVA WEIL. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. viii + 256.

Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in Honor of Shaul Migron. Edited by DAVID SHULMAN. Jerusalem: ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, 2010. Pp. x + 276.

The two volumes under review, both compilations of articles on a select set of topics, testify to the vibrant Indological scene in Israel and its lively engagement with Indological scholarship in Europe and the US. The two volumes share an editor, but are otherwise complementary in purpose and scope, though of roughly the same length and having the same number of contributors. The second by publication date (2010) serves as a Festschrift for the Israeli Vedicist and Indo-Europeanist Shaul Migron (who, unusually for a Festschrift, has an article in the volume), and represents the proceedings of a conference held in his honor in 2001: it clearly lingered for some years in conference-volume limbo, as is so often the case. Among its twelve contributors, nine list current affiliations outside of Israel (though several, such as Yigal Bronner and Tamar Reich, began their careers in Israel). Thus, a tribute to an Israeli scholar from an international collection of scholars.

The first volume (2008) was published to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel in 1992 and was by design limited to contributions from Israeli scholars. It, too, has twelve contributors, and only Bronner lists a (relatively recent) non-Israeli affiliation. Thus, a nation-internal showcasing of Israeli Indological scholarship. Also, given its origins as a celebration of the current ties between Israel and India, one of its three sections, consisting of three articles, a quarter of the total, is devoted to contemporary travels in India--e.g., a sociological investigation of "the Israeli backpacking experience in India," by Darya Maoz--a section that will not concern us further here.

Both volumes otherwise concern antiquity, but the larger topics treated overlap significantly only in one area, Classical Sanskrit poetry and poetics, the specialty of the editor of both volumes, David Shulman. The Migron volume is divided into four sections, "Studies in the Language of the Vedas" (four articles, including that of the honoree), "Ritual Reflections, Vedic and Epic" (two articles), "Ancient...