The Resources of History: Tradition, Narration and Nation in South Asia.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

Edited by JACKIE ASSAYAG. Etudes thematiques, vol. 8. Paris and Pondicherry: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY, 1999. Pp. xvii + 374.

This volume presents the proceedings of the social sciences half of an international symposium on Indology and on the social sciences held in Pondicherry in January 1997. Most of the twenty-two contributors are anthropologists, as is the editor. The theme originally proposed to the participants in the symposium was "The Resources of History; Traditions: Transmission or Invention?," a reexamination of the theory set forth in the influential volume edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, and visited on India by Nicholas Dirks and others. The fact that many contributions spontaneously addressed issues of temporality, past, present, and future, according to the three concepts of tradition, narration, and nation led to a change in the subtitle of the proceedings. The papers are arranged in three roughly equal sections: "Sacred Texts and Regionalism or Nationalism," "Construction of Regional Traditions," and "Imagined Narratives of Regionalism or Nationalism."

The editor observes that "the textual approach predominates in this volume," a circumstance that "the anthropologist will regret" (p. 25). By this is meant that unwritten practices have been neglected, not that the authors' methodology is what a philologist would recognize as textual criticism. The only contribution that fits squarely in this latter mode is that of Alf Hiltebeitel on the Alha Hindi folk epic in the Sanskrit Bhavisyapurana. Yet other papers, particularly in the first section of the volume, command the interest of humanists as well. They inelude those by Gerard Colas on the reworking of "Vedic" paradigms in medieval Vaikhanasa liturgies, and of L. S. Vishwanath on the successive recourse to texts, Shastric and Puranic, and to empiricist knowledge by the British to suppress female infanticide in Northern India. Chris Fuller's paper on the teaching of the Agamic tradition to temple priests in contemporary Tamilnadu is particularly noteworthy in that it points to a tension--which, one might add, manifests itself most strongly in the Indian diaspora--between the traditional pedagogical mode of memorization and a modernist emphasis on understanding the sacred...