Languages, Texts, and Society.

• Position: Ascetics and Brahmins: Studies in Ideologies and Institutions - Book review

Languages, Texts, and Society: Explorations in Ancient Indian Culture and Religion. By PATRICK OLIVELLE. Kykeion Studies and Texts, Scienze della Religioni, vol. 4 Florence: FIRENZE UNIVERSITY PRESS [MUNSHIRAM MANOHARLAL]. 2005. Pp. 419. [euro] 20.

Ascetics and Brahmins: Studies in Ideologies and Institutions. By PATRICK OLIVELLE. Kykeion Studies and Texts, Scienze della Religioni, vol. 6. Florence: FIRENZE UNIVERSITY PRESS [MUNSHIRAM MANOHARLAL], 2006. Pp. 328. [euro] 19.80.

When our non-philologically inclined colleagues ask us scornfully what modern-day philology can contribute to the larger and more searching questions that occupy their attention, Indologists have the good fortune to be able to point to Patrick Olivelle, a consummate philologist (and recent past president of the AOS), who is a dream example of how deep engagement with texts on all levels produces insights into the deeper content and larger context of those texts. The two volumes under review, containing collected papers and book chapters from over thirty years, are an excellent introduction to the magic that Olivelle can work on texts and to the breadth of his interests.

Each of these volumes contains seventeen papers, but the two volumes differ in focus. The later publication. Ascetics and Brahmins, has the narrower focus but longer chronology: it consists of articles and some book chapters, dating from 1975 through 2006, concerned with renunciation and asceticism in the Indian religious tradition, the subject of much of Olivelle's earlier work. The pieces are not arranged chronologically but by topic. The collection begins with more general treatments (e.g., the first, "Introduction to Renunciation in the Hindu Traditions," originally published as a chapter in Gavin Flood's Companion to Hinduism [date not given, but 2003]), and then moves to more specific topics, such as food (ch. 5: "From Feast to Fast: Food and the Indian Ascetic." 1991) and the body (ch. 7: "Deconstruction of the Body in Indian Asceticism," 1995). The original publication information, especially the date, is not always recoverable. As is inevitable when a scholar has been treating a particular topic for some decades, certain key themes, arguments, and passages recur in a number of the articles. Especially important is Olivelle's continual insistence that asceticism was a part of the whole Brahmanical system, not opposed to it not imported into it, and that it must be studied within the context of...