Words of Destiny: Practicing Astrology in North India.

• Author: White, David Gordon

Words of Destiny: Practicing Astrology in North India. By CATERINA GUENZI. Albany, NY: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2021. Pp. 376. $95 (cloth); $33.95 (paper).

Dating back to the nineteenth-century studies of Jean-Baptiste Biot and Albrecht Weber, the scholarly literature on Indian astrology (jyotisa) has mainly focused on one of the field's three sub-disciplines--astronomy (siddhanta)--with special emphasis on its debt to foreign systems. Over the past few decades, another sort of astrological literature, written by both South Asian and Western authors, has flooded the popular market: "how-to" guides of uneven value. Works of this type have uncritically eulogized the indigenous sources of this "Vedic Science." What differentiates the present study from all that have preceded is that in addition to providing both a thoroughgoing text-based account of the history of Hindu astrology and a detailed guide to its scientific principles, it also offers an exhaustive overview of the contemporary practice of astrology or the "astral sciences" by its mainly brahmin specialists.

The author's English-language translation of her Le discours du destin: La pratique de I'astrologie a Benares (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2013), Caterina Guenzi's Words of Destiny has for its focus Benares (Varanasi), the holy city of the Hindus that is also home to a great research university (Benares Hindu University: BHU) and a seat of power for the Hindu nationalist party (Bharatiya Janata Party: BJP). The fruit of a series of field studies conducted together with her colleague Sunita Singh between 1995 and 2008, Guenzi's participatory ethnography showcases the practice of some fifty Benares jyotisls and their mainly middle- and upper-class clients, where in many cases they became "an integral part of their professional team. Along with the ritual specialists, the secretary, the tea boy, and all the staff that gravitate toward the astrologer, there were also the two ethnographers, one with a video camera, the other with a sound recorder and a notebook" (p. 18). Time and again, Guenzi brings her reader into the consulting rooms of the city's jyotisls, relaying the voices and faces of the astrologers and their clients themselves through a wealth of case studies and a rich gallery of photographs.

By virtue of its prestige as a holy city and intellectual capital, Benares has, since the sixteenth century (p. 53), been a hub of astrological practice serving local residents...