Les sources et le temps: Sources and Time.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book Review

Les sources et le temps: Sources and Time. Edited by FRANCOIS GRIMAL. Publications du Departement d'Indologie, vol. 91. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'INDOLOGIE--ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2001. Pp. v + 412.

The volume under review contains the proceedings of a colloquium held at Pondicherry on 11-13 January, 1997. A review cannot do justice to every detail in the 412 large and tightly printed pages of this volume; I can only briefly indicate what readers may look for in a volume published under the intriguing title Les sources et la temps/Sources and Time. According to the editor's preface, the participants in the colloquium were asked "to display and to examine the manner in which texts stand the test of time, how they survive, are preserved and transmitted, and how philologists struggle to restore the best possible version, going on to show how, and with which of the available tools such as commentaries, ancient and modern, oral and written, indigenous and otherwise, that version is better understood and, ultimately, to how it is translated bearing in mind that the epoch and metalanguage of the translators is but the latest damaging aspect of time erosion, of course never to be final" (p. i). As one might expect, some contributions are nearer to answering these questions than others.

I wish to stress above all that this is not your ordinary report on a colloquium, in which the papers presented at the conference are often printed without or with only slight revisions. Several contributions to this volume are polished articles, some of them qualifying as full-fledged monographs: Alexis Sanderson's "History through Textual Criticism in the Study of Saivism, the Pancaratra and the Buddhist Yoginitantras" covers 48 pages, Muzaffar Alam's and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's "A Place in the Sun: Travels with Faizi in the Deccan, 1591-1593" 43 pages, and Subrahmanyam's own "A Palette of Histories: Texts and Meta-texts about Raja Desingu" 49 pages. Several articles include extensive footnotes, for instance, Dominic Goodall's "Announcement of the Proposed Edition of the Earliest Commentary on the Raghuvamsa with Some Methodological Reflections on the Editing of Works of Kalidasa, and of Commentaries on Kavya," which reads like the introduction to his proposed edition (with Harunaga Isaacson; see also Isaacson's abstract: "Scribes, Redactors, and Editors: On the Transmission of the Ur-Skandapurana") of Vallabhadeva's commentary Raghupancika, and...