Praises to a Formless God.

• Author: Callewaert, Winand M.
• Position: Review

By DAVID N. LORENZEN. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1996. Pp. xiii + 303. $16.95 (paper).

In this book Lorenzen again displays his remarkable quality of combining rigorous text-editing - a rare commodity in Indian studies these days - with a well-documented commentary. The first text edited and translated into English is the "Prahlad charitra" or "Deeds of Prahlad," by the Dadupanthi Jangopal (north India, early seventeenth century). Using twelve manuscripts (dated from 1636 A.D. onwards), the author calls his critical edition a "composite text that does not consistently correspond to any given manuscript" (p. 39). One can understand his misgivings about this approach, but that is one of the two obvious ways to "edit" a text of this kind. The other option is a "corrected version that depends primarily on one manuscript and only deviates from it when most other manuscripts depart from the readings given in it" (p. 39). This dilemma is due to the specific quality of bhakti texts. In most cases these texts were singers' repertoires, transmitted orally for several generations in linguistically different areas. Because of the interaction with audiences and the creativity of the singers themselves, the morphology of these texts is a complete chaos and it is impossible even to think of a stemmatic relation between the manuscripts. One may perhaps suggest that instead of creating yet another "repertoire," as happens in the two options discussed, an editor of such bhakti texts may opt for a third approach: reprint one manuscript and give indented the complete line as found in the other manuscripts. If the variants are only morphological, one could even print (indented) only the lines where important ideological or hagiographical variants occur.

The second important text edited and translated is "The Kabir-Raidas Debate," attributed to Sain. This text belongs to the genre of metaphysical debates the Indian tradition is famous for. Lorenzen rightly points out that "although this text asserts the superiority of Kabir's doctrines over those of Raidas, it does not seem to be a Kabirpanthi text" (p. 170). Most manuscripts of this text were located by Lorenzen in Rajasthani libraries, often associated with the Niranjani sect. The...