Theories of the Gift in South Asia; Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on Dana.

• Position: Book review

Theories of the Gift in South Asia; Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on Dana. By MARIA HEIM. New York: ROUTLEDGE, 2004. Pp. 21 + 194.

This is the ninth volume in the series "Religion in History, Society, and Culture," the "Routledge first book series," edited by Frank Reynolds and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and the first volume in the series devoted to an exclusively South Asian subject.

In between the introduction and the conclusion, the book is divided into five sections: Sources, The Donor, The Recipient, The Ritual, and The Gift. The sources used in the volume comprehend a vast range of Hindu, Jaina, and Buddhist texts.

Heim argues that "South Asian theories of dana offer a sharp contrast" (p. 34) to Seneca's (De beneficiis) and Marcel Mauss's (The Gift) theories of reciprocity and social solidarity, and that "[t]he South Asian dana ... is in fact unilateral and unreciprocated" (p. xx). To be sure, she quotes Thomas Trautmann (Dravidian Kinship, 1981, 279-82) to the effect that, in India, some gifts are made because they yield religious merit and reward in the afterlife. Yet, she suggests that "viewing the gift only in reference to its soteriological purposes is to deflect the significance of the normative social etiquette that the texts take such care to articulate" (p. 35). It is, however, not necessary to invoke gifts made for soteriological purposes as exceptions that confirm the rule. The author quotes Richard Gombrich (Precept and Practice, 1971, 288), who rightly states that in a karmic worldview "prudence and true morality must necessarily coincide" (p. 40). I would dare to add that, in certain gifts, the boundary between the giver's soteriological purposes and the receiver's worldly gains is hard to trace. I am thinking of a theory that is present in all treatises on the Hindu law of inheritance, but most rigorously applied in texts from Bengal; the intertwining of the right/duty to inherit and the duty/right to perform the sraddha ritual for the deceased. In the Dayabhaga, the most influential text on inheritance in Bengal, Jimutavahana--wrongly, I agree--derives the term daya from the verbal root da 'give' (instead of from do, dyati 'to cut, divide'): he who is "given" the inheritance must perform the sraddha, and he alone who performs the sraddha "receives" the inheritance. In addition, if there are several survivors who might quality to perform the sraddha, the assets--and, not to forget...