The Home of the Dancing Sivan: The Traditions of the Hindu Temple in Citamparam.

• Author: Orr, Leslie C.

We are very fortunate to have this study of one of the great Hindu temples of south India. The Chidambaram temple (I will employ Anglicized spellings rather than Younger's Tamilized ones) has long held a unique and important position in the history of religion in Tamilnadu, and to this day attracts both pilgrims and controversy. Professor Younger's study is of great value both in that it undertakes a detailed and long-range study of a particular religious center of historical and contemporary significance, and in the way that it marshals an array of different types of evidence - literary, epigraphical, art historical, and ethnographic. One hopes that this study will serve as a model for future scholarship since, as Younger himself says, "only when the history and sociology of a number of temples has been traced out with some care" will it be possible to take up the task of describing the whole range of ways in which the temple is central to Indian society and culture (pp. 4-5).

As this study demonstrates, however, such enterprises involve certain challenges. One of the great strengths of this book is at the same time a source of tension. When one employs a variety of sources, of different character, conflicts surface and choices must be made. Younger alludes to these potential difficulties at the outset, but minimizes the problem: "In the end, if one functions as both an anthropologist observing the present and a historian looking for evidence of the past, one starts to find that the evidence from one source usually reinforces that from the other" (p. 5). But is it truly possible to be both anthropologist and historian? Are the priests of Chidambaram correct in thinking that the inscriptions on the walls of the temple confirm their understanding of their temple's traditions? Younger thinks they are, but I have my doubts.

The title of the book and the way it is organized make clear where the author's sympathies lie and what his approach will be. This is a book about temple "traditions" and each of the six chapters is a "story." The first chapter is "Story 1: The Priests and the Daily Ritual," and is an account of one aspect of the living tradition of the Chidambaram temple. It begins with a description of the "heritage" of the priestly community, the Dikshitars, which summarizes Younger's historical arguments as these are presented in more detail later in the book. But the most important contributions of this chapter and the one that...