Sanskrit Criticism by V. K. ChariReview by: Robert E. GoodwinJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 111, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1991), pp. 593-596Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604284 .

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Reviews of Books 593

gourmandizing that pictures it as any kind of model, save a negative one. The word-picture of the Caube is often that of a paunchy self-indulgent being, an object of ridicule or disgust. For examples of such rejection see the sources cited in A. W. Entwistle's Braj, Center of Krishna Pilgrimage (Groningen, 1987), 6f. Mast, the term universally used to identify this epicurian ideal, is an Urdu word of Persian origin. Use of it suggests that its users see the mast activities as having little rootage in the Hindu past. For a central Hindu position on the appetites, typical even though it is brahmanical, I am compelled to recommend a source that is literary: Bhagavad- gTtd 2:55-72, 12:13-19, and 16:10-16. The small acceptance of the Caubes' lusty response to food and drink does not dimin- ish, however, the importance of this data for Lynch's thesis. The persistence of the mastT ideal in its own circle shows that differing conditionings of emotion can be observed within the internal circles of major cultures as well as between cultures.

Frederique Marglin's paper on the cosmology of the dance of the devaddsis of the Temple of Jagannath at Puri takes us into deep and foreign waters indeed. Dedicated to the temple by her parents, the devaddsT since youth has had the deity alone as her husband, and her highly erotic midday dance enacts the conjugal intercourse of the fructifying powers of the universe. Drops of the feminine fluid of that intercourse are believed to fall downward into the dust of the dancing- floor. At the conclusion of the performance, devotees roll in that dust and eat remnants of food-offerings over which pinches of the dust have been strewn. Immense indeed are the obstacles to unclouded understanding of this dance-outra- geous to Western theological minds, ridiculous to secular minds. Some "sympathetic" Western observers think they find parallels, in grossly motivated areas of their own experience. Here, if not before, readers will agree with Professor Lynch that unassisted empathy will fail when real cultural differences are involved. I add, however, that intercultural sophistication will also fail-has often failed in the case of learned Orien- talists-without the will to place one's self in the position of another. An educated empathy is the desideratum.

NORVIN HEIN

YALE UNIVERSITY

Sanskrit Criticism. By V. K. CHARI. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, 1990. Pp. xii + 302. $35.

V. K. Chari has written a consummately intelligent and learned book on Sanskrit poetics that genuinely crosses over into the modern debate on aesthetics and literary interpreta- tion, or at least to the Anglo-American corner of it. His solid

knowledge of the details of the current and the traditional Indian debate has enabled him to dispense with jargon, and talk, precisely and pointedly, about essential ideas. Nor is he hampered by any kind of defensiveness about the Indian material or the need to hallow it. As a university professor of English, Chari has been forced to be much more practical about Sanskrit poetics than the typical Indologist. Here is a good example of how comparative study may lead to a sharp- ened understanding of the issues involved in an Indological discipline and bring them out of the cultural museum. But Chari's ambitions are higher yet. He is convinced that rasa poetics, properly understood, provides the basis for a general theory of poetics that will hold up against any argument. Whether he succeeds in convincing the reader of this will depend on one's understanding of literature's essential func- tion: is it purely aesthetic or is it also engaged in shaping ideas and values? Chari generally takes the former view, but not without a certain waffling. But more on this below.

"Properly understood," in this case, means an interpreta- tion of rasa according to Mimamsaka semantic and herme- neutic principles. For Chari this indicates a hardheaded, objectivist approach to poetic emotion that steers its way between the subjectivisms of the intentionalist (or expressive) and affective "fallacies," the former grounding meaning in authorial intention, the latter in reader (hearer, spectator) response. Though allowed as an intimate personal response to poetic stimuli (its subjective aspect), rasa is primarily a precise "emotive meaning" semantically lodged in careful descriptions of concrete emotional situations (the vibhdvddi). On the other hand, Chari distinguishes his objectivism from that of certain modern theorists who bracket emotional response, if indeed they do not altogether deny its existence. How, he asks, can there be an aesthetics without aesthetic pleasure? Chari fol- lows Abhinavagupta et al. in assuming that aesthetic pleasure is not a formalist delight in structural symmetry or the like but a detached impersonal savoring of specific emotions presented by the text and felt by the reader in sympathetic vibration (hrdayasamvdda) with them. Nevertheless, he says, criticism cannot be based on the presence or absence of this response or on its degree of intensity.

Realizing that he faces a dilemma-requiring aesthetic re- sponse generically yet denying it a role in critical judgment- Chari attempts to resolve it early in the book by appeal to the Mlmamsaka principle of bhdvand:

It is to be assumed ... that the work will induce in the sympathetic reader a delectable experience. But this experience can only come through the meanings of the poem, only when the reader recognizes the described situation as carrying an evocative force. "Evocation," or bhdvand, as Bhattandyaka conceived it, is a special potency assumed by the verbal presentation itself, and

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594 Journal of the American Oriental Society 111.3 (1991)

as Abhinavagupta explains, it should be understood in the sense of "bringing about the perception" [ABh 6: pratyayagocaratdpddanam] of rasa or, to put it differ- ently, making the rasa available to perception. It is in this sense that the rasas are said to be evoked by the poem. The poem may, then, be deemed to have dis- charged its function once it has delivered its meanings, whether it actually arouses the corresponding emotions in the mind of the reader or not. Such is also the Mlmamsaka view of the prompting (bhdvand) effected by the Veda. (p. 46)

BhAdvand in the Mmarmsaka context has to be understood with reference to the related concepts tdtparya (purpose of utterance) and Akdnksa (the sense of expectation left by a statement that causes one to seek its contextual purpose). For the Mmarmsakas all Vedic statements are implicitly injunc- tive, whatever their literal sentence meaning, which is usually formulated in the declarative mood. That is, they have no discrete meaning apart from their purpose of enjoining sacri- ficial ritual or dharma (cf. the principle of arthavdda explained by Chari, pp. 178-79), but whether or not anyone actually obeys their injunctions is immaterial. What this seems to amount to in the case of rasa is the assumption of a normative response to aesthetic stimuli that includes the idea of personal feeling while avoiding its psychologistic idiosyncracies. Poetic literature is emotive discourse for the sake of contemplative delectation, rather than persuasion and the like (cf. Jakobson's distinctions-not mentioned by Chari-between expressive, conative, and poetic functions). Its criticism, which Chari

grounds in the concept of rasaucitya, should be concerned

solely with the question of how well the literary work struc- tures its linguistic and situational details in order to evoke the

ideal or normative response (see chs. 3, 4, and 10). We may wonder, though, whether Chari's achievement-

the grounding of rasa in an objective semantics as "emotive

meaning"-is worth the price he has to pay for it. The mean-

ing of literary texts, according to him, is not only decidable in

principle, but univocal and precise, containing no overtones

which do not directly contribute to a clear rasa modality. For

Chari emotions are never ambivalent. Whatever mixing takes

place (e.g., love and rage in Othello) occurs according to sequential and other formulae that leave it clear what we are to feel as a dominant tone (see the various tables in ch. 4). He

also argues for the canonical nine principal modes, not admit-

ting hope or friendship, for instance, except as contributory states (the area of vyabhicdribhdvas is the only one where he

admits a certain openendedness in the traditional system). He

does not even bother to argue against psychoanalytic interpre- tation-he gives no indication that he is even aware of it-

though he does take on deconstruction, reception theory, and

a few other critical approaches that he rightly calls "anti- closural" (pp. 189ff.). Texts never leave us, therefore, with

disturbing questions either about their own meaning or the meaning of the situations they represent. Even figurative lan- guage (ch. 5) is only disguised literality: no haunting reso- nances that elude decoding. "A close examination of the issues in Hamlet criticism," Chari says in a characteristic statement on p. 192,

will reveal that there is a remarkable agreement on the essential nature of Hamlet as a drama of tragic grief. Critical quarrels over the play, where they are genuine quarrels, do not pertain to its essential features, but to peripheral issues.

Thus it is, even with the deliberately ironic modernist litera- ture (Eliot, Beckett et al.) that Chari examines on pp. 71-74. Ironic ambiguities in fact resolve themselves into a configura- tion with clear emotive significance, namely pathos or tragedy (by which he presumably means karuna rasa), which consti- tutes the meaning of "The Wasteland" or "Endgame." Stevens' poetry of critical reflection becomes an exercise in "wonder" (adbhuta), since "there can be no poetry of thought as opposed to a poetry of feeling" (p. 40; cf. also p. 191: "There can be 'thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird,' but only one way of reading the poem of that title by Wallace Stevens."). We can see, I think, that we have a reduction here, by which anything problematic is defined almost on principle as a "peripheral issue."

Chari's version of literary criticism (defined on p. 231 as "explaining how the work achieves success as a presentation of an emotive situation") makes nothing of the cultural and historical differences that help us understand choice of theme and its treatment. Any Weltanschauung approach, Hegelian or simply literary-historical, any attempt to see in literature a rhetoric or codification of implied values, to see it as engaged in ideological concerns, as impassioned, didactic, subversive, propagandistic, or deluded-this is all ruled out at the start. Thus the obvious problem with Chari's critical theory is that it

borders on irrelevance. The only conceivable effect his argu- ments could have on those engaged in questions of literature's

moral and intellectual content is to get them to change the

name of their enterprise. Perhaps many would be willing to do

this, but would literary study gain anything by it? The modern experience with propaganda has made us very leery of emo- tional effects, including unexamined aesthetic pleasure. Per- haps the epistemological emphasis of recent critical trends has fostered a certain aesthetic insensitivity and even at times a sadistic pleasure in 'unmasking' noble or tender ideals and sentiments. Nevertheless, it seems an overreaction, and ulti-

mately a naivete, to advocate a return to the supposed sureties of universal emotional truths (ch. 9), insulated from the emo-

tive and ideological currents of history. One might say that Chari's essential problem lies in trying

to apply criticism that works with Sanskrit poetry to Greek

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Reviews of Books 595

and Shakespearean tragedy and the modern poetry of self- conscious irony, but I don't think that this is really it. I cannot see that even kdvya is free from emotional, moral, and ideo- logical problematics. Can the rasa-aesthetic itself tell us any- thing, for instance, about the prevalence of the erotic theme in kdvya, a feature that stands out sharply in any comparative- literature perspective? If we think that this is a non-issue, then why has the question of the moral status of erotic love domi- nated the discussion of the Sakuntald since Tagore first ad- dressed it in 1920? What about the representations of the heroic? Are we to say that the literature gives us no under- standing of the meaning of heroism in Indian court culture or that, if it does, this is a peripheral issue? Does not a work like the Mudrdrdksasa present us with an ambiguous and ambiva- lent discourse on power and authority? In ch. 4 Chari argues for a straightforward understanding of the rasa system, in which the reader's ideal emotional or normative response must be based on a sthdyibhdva described by the text. In drama this would mean that, e.g., grngdra rasa must arise out of the sthdyibhdva rati of one or more characters in the play. But if we look at the fourth act of ?akuntald we see that our sorrow for the heroine is based on something more than her feelings about leaving the paradise of girlhood. Our privileged knowledge of the curse makes us ironic spectators who feel differently than any of the characters in the play, a situation that inevitably opens the door to polysemy (the villain of Chari's ch. 8). Many critics, and not only Westerners, have found the typical Sanskrit hero childish, self-centered, and at times almost ridiculous. Is this purely adventitious? Does it not rather derive from ironies as semantically present in the text as Chari's objective rasas? It is impossible to put a limit on what constitutes "emotive meaning," saying in effect that anything beyond the identification of and normative response to rasa is beside the point.

But what even is rasa? There is a fundamental ambiguity in Chari's treatment of it that has nothing directly to do with the problem of subjective response. It has rather to do with his assumption that aesthetic savoring (rasand) and human inter- est perfectly coincide. Rasa for him is at once an objective "emotive meaning" whose sole purpose is delighted contem- plation and a vehicle of insight into the human heart, but he never explains the connection. At the beginning of his tenth and final chapter ("The Validity of Rasa as a Theoretical Concept"), though he has already in chs. 2 and 3 denied that literary works have any cognitive or informational value qua poetry, he nevertheless says that in focusing on the objective sense of rasa he has dealt with it as

the express meaning of the work or, more specifically, as emotive meaning or meaning that conveys informa- tion about people's emotions.... The inner life of the psyche-man's strivings and passions, his desires and states of sentience-is its special province. (pp. 227-28)

Earlier too, in contrasting the moralistic or pious reading of the Rdmdyana with a properly aesthetic one, he says (p. 32) that it can be read "for its poetic (human) interest." Aristotle could at least appeal to catharsis to explain the link between sympathetic involvement in a fictive situation and the aesthetic distance that makes it pleasant. But there is no tension-and- release factor in rasand, which, as an impersonal savoring of emotional effects evoked by carefully chosen stimuli, seems serenely and abstractly remote from "man's strivings and passions" ("states of sentience," on the other hand, are per- fectly in keeping with the rasa-aesthetic). Chari's use of hrdayasamvdda (which he often refers to as "sympathy") does not solve the problem, especially since its subjectivist over- tones force him to exclude it from consideration in criticism (see pp. 27, 202)-although he surreptitiously uses it in his graphic depiction of generalization at work in Othello on p. 199. How can hrdayasamvdda be the kind of sympathetic involvement Chari describes on p. 201 (identification with the predicaments of Hamlet and Othello) when one of Abhinava- gupta's prime examples of sympathetic vibration is the rather coldly aestheticized savoring of the deer's fear in ?akuntald 1?

On the other hand, if through hrdayasamvdda we are inti- mately involved, let us say, in King Duhsanta's desire for Sakuntala, then srngdra rasa is more than a contentually neutral vehicle of aesthetic emotion. The whole area of art as fantasy is opened up to criticism. We should not forget that Duhsanta and in fact the Sanskrit ndyaka in general is himself a rasika-sahrdaya who thematizes the values associated with Indian aesthetic culture. Chari himself recognizes the practical identity of poet, hero, and reader (an idea of Bhatta Tauta's) on pp. 26-27. Is it inconceivable, then, that a play like the Sakuntald can legitimately be seen as a mythicization of the rasika's hopes, desires, fears, moral limitations, etc.? Chari's dismissal of Barthes (p. 189) never touches on the latter's concept of mythic resonance. But here I am returning to my former point, that Chari's understanding of emotional mean- ing is too limited: it never gets beyond the literal.

There is much more that one could discuss and argue with in this very detailed and exacting book-for instance, the repeated claim (e.g., p. 117), meant to pull the rug out from under the theory of vastudhvani, that poetic charm is in fact rasa, when Chari has all along insisted that rasa occurs only in the 8 or 9 canonical modes. I have taken issue with what seem to me the paradoxes of a theory that tries to fix and objectify poetic meaning. But I must at the same time make it clear that this is a very formidable book. Perhaps its greatest impact on specialists in Sanskrit poetics will result from his critical dis- cussion of dhvani in chs. 5 and 6, which challenges received opinion (he rejects the argument that suggestion is a semantic function like abhidhd and laksand). He is the first, not only to bring the Mimamsaka perspective to bear on Sanskrit critical theory (the only innovation that he claims for himself), but to focus resolutely on the semantic-interpretive underpinnings of

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596 Journal of the American Oriental Society 111.3 (1991)

Indian poetics generally. Even if one does not agree with his conclusions (though I assume many will), one will profit from his considered, erudite argumentation. One will encounter here the usual citations from Abhinavagupta et al., but also a number of others that have escaped critical notice. And as I said at the outset, the comparative literary-critical perspective is completely salutary in setting a tone of candid intelligence that is not always prominent in the secondary literature on Sanskrit poetics. Chari will make all of us think about the issues we have perhaps taken for granted. This is an achieve- ment that transcends the question of the viability of his theo- retical argument.

ROBERT E. GOODWIN

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Histoires de poteaux: Variations veiiques autour de la Deesse

hindoue. By MADELEINE BIARDEAU. Publications de 1Ilcole

Franqaise d'Extreme-Orient, vol. 154. Paris: ECOLE FRAN-

IAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 1989. Pp. xii + 356 (including 10

figures and 30 maps) + 108 photographs.

Tales of Posts is an unexpected title for a book by a scholar who started her career with Theorie de la connaissance et

philosophic de la parole dans la brahmanisme classique (1964), a translation of the Brahmakdnda of the VdkyapadTya (1964), and a volume on La Philosophie de Mandana MiWra vue a

partir de la Brahmasiddhi (1969). Yet, those of us who have followed M.B.'s writings over the years have noticed a shift from classical philosophy of language toward Hindu mythol-

ogy, toward the epics and the puranas, and toward Hinduism,

"popular" Hinduism, as it is practiced today. Readers of

"L'Arbre gaml et le buffle sacrificial" (Purusartha 5 [1981]:215- 43, translated in Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s. 18

[1984]:1-23) and audiences of M.B.'s recent lectures were aware that Histoires de poteaux was coming.

This is a big and important book, but it is not an easy book.

Constantly, for over three hundred large and densely printed pages of text and footnotes, the reader is faced with so many extremely detailed descriptions of temples, images, rites, myths, texts, etc., that he or she has to make a constant effort not to lose sight of the forest for the trees: "Au premier abord un 6parpillement de faits ethnographiques mineurs, de detail, oii la contingence geographique, historique, linguistique, sem- ble regner" (p. 1). Yet, the author's main concern is to demon- strate that, however numerous the trees and however much these vary in time and in space, there is a forest nevertheless.

The book grew primarily out of a series of ethnographic field trips conducted over a period of some ten years (1974-

84), all over the Deccan (including Orissa) and the Tamil South. Visits were paid to eight localities in Orissa, sixteen in Andhra Pradesh, forty-nine in Tamilnadu and Pondicherry, seven in Karnataka, six in Maharashtra, and two in Rajas- than. Kerala was left out for practical reasons: it was not possible to enter the temples, and the brahman priests refused to provide information (p. 112 n. 1). Originally this research was undertaken-and the present book is a "sous-produit" of it-to learn more about the Goddess in South India, and with the sole purpose of examining the connections between the Goddess and the buffalo sacrifice. However, the gramadevatas of Andhra led the author to the discovery of Patu Raju. It is Potu Raju, "le petit frere des deesses de l'Andhra" (pp. 8-34), often small and hardly visible, who became the main character in the book, the main purpose of which is to give "une certaine profondeur historique a ce dieu sans memoire qu'est Potu Raju" (p. 81), and it is the various manifestations of Potu Raju (Potta Raja in Tamilnadu, Pot-raj in Maharashtra, etc.) that M.B. went to look for in other parts of India.

Soon three facts emerged. First, Potu Raju, the Telugu "popular" deity, is normally represented by a post. Second, the post has to be made of a specific kind of wood: gamf. Third, Potu Raju is an integral part of the buffalo sacrifice; in fact, Potu Raju means "le Roi-Buffle," even though no one in Andhra is willing to admit that he is identical with Mahisasura of Devfmdhdtmya fame. Either the connection between these three facts was purely accidental, or there had to be a "logical" link between them. Intuitively, rather than as a real working hypothesis-"la forte conviction que l'hindouisme dans sa totalit6 s'est structure a partir du sacrifice vedique" (p. 2)- M.B. recognized in Potu Raju a stylized form of the yupa, the

Vedic sacrificial post to which is tied the sacrificial animal. "Il

semble . . . bien y avoir dans le complexe rituel que presente le

culte de la gramadevata d'Andhra quelque chose qui rappelle le sacrifice animal du rituel vedique, et ce poteau qu'est Potu Raju y remplace a la fois le yupa et le feu a oblations" (p. 63).

Even though information on the buffalo sacrifices is often "riche et de bonne qualite" (p. 270, on the buffalo sacrifice at the temple of Mangalanayaki at Maduvettimangalam, South Arcot Dt.), all descriptions in the book had to be based on

oral transmission rather than on attending a real sacrifice. The

buffalo sacrifice was, indeed, officially forbidden in 1947. (It seems, though, that it is still going on in some locations; see p. 242, for the temple of Aiyirattamman at Gangaikondam, Tirunelveli Dt.) Yet, the numerous descriptions of sacrifices and festivals, most often day-by-day, will be a mine of infor- mation for historians of religion, anthropologists, and others. A general index, or, at least, page references in the lists of sites visited (pp. 351-56), would have been useful.

The success of M.B.'s argument rests on a number of hy- potheses which not everyone may be willing to accept. I

already alluded to her "forte conviction que l'hindouisme

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