Seven Days of Nectar: Contemporary Oral Performance of the Bhagavatapurana.

• Author: Malinar, Angelika
• Position: Book review

Seven Days of Nectar: Contemporary Oral Performance of the Bhagavatapurana. By McCOMAS TAYLOR. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xvi + 288.

In recent times there has been a growing interest in Hindu religious performances and the performative traditions connected to authoritative texts in modern and contemporary contexts. In order to analyze the ways in which well-established performance traditions are continued and transformed, the historical dimension of text-performances provides an important context of study. In academic debates about the relationship between oral and written forms of the composition and transmission of texts in Indian intellectual history, mainly focusing on the Veda, Sanskrit epics, and Puranas, representations of textual performances in classical and early modern literature and arts have been dealt with occasionally. The spectrum of older performance traditions has increasingly become a topic of historical research (for instance the 2015 volume edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield, Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India). The relationship between written and oral forms of text reception and production is an important area of research. A considerable number of studies demonstrate that in much of Indian cultural and intellectual history the two forms of engagement in texts are interconnected, and this helps scholars to trace commonalities and differences between past and present textual performances. The study of performances in contemporary settings thus implies dealing with the features of the text and its transmission that shape its performance as well as with larger questions relating to Hindu religions in contemporary post-colonial, globalized contexts, in particular new media, transnational mobility, and political and economic appropriations of religion.

McComas Taylor attempts to address these topics in studying the so-called saptaha, a seven-day performance of the Bhagavatapurana (hereafter BhagP). The saptaha belongs to a well-known spectrum of performative traditions, but has only rarely been studied in detail. The author presents accounts of performances in the North Indian pilgrimage center Vrindavan, the village Naluna in Garhwal (Uttarakhand), and Australia's capital city Canberra. In presenting his findings, Taylor draws on what he calls the "metaphor of yajna" (p. 23), which provides not only the model for understanding the structure of the saptaha, but is also used for organizing the book's chapters. The elements of the saptaha treated by the author as well as the chapters of the book are presented by using Sanskrit terms from Vedic sacrifice: the account of the saptahas is called yajna, the sponsor yajamana, the exponent hotr, the text Veda, the verses mantra, the audience vis, the results phala. The metaphor of...