This bilingual (German-English) collection of papers in honour of Professor Heidrun Brückner's 65th birthday proves wonderfully rich, too much so to do justice to in a short review. Professor Brückner who occupies the Lehrstuhl für Indologie at the Universität Würzburg, and whose accomplishments are outlined in German at the beginning of the volume, has inspired and influenced a generation of bright scholars. This volume which is testimony to her skills as a mentor, contains fascinating excerpts of research on topics that are dear to her abiding research interests, to wit, Indian theatre and aesthetics, Kannada literature, and Tulu folk culture and religion (the quote in the title is from one of her translations from Tulu oral ballads).
The volume starts appropriately with an article by none else than the late celebrated Kannada author U. R. Ananthamurthy who reflects on multi-lingualism in India. He is particularly insightful is his personal statement that stresses the strong influence on his own literature of both the “frontyard” Sanskritic and cosmopolitan male culture of his parental house, and the “backyard” women's preserve of the “vernaculars” (which he prefers to term bhāṣās). Kannada literature is further represented by an article on the tenth century epic Pampa Bhārata, in particular the concept of laukika, that means more than just “secular” (by B. A. Viveka Rai).
The biggest group of articles in the volume deal with folklore, in particular that of the West Coast (snake motives in folklore by Balan Nambiar, possession trances by Elisabeth Schömbucher) Tulu folk epics (like Siri, well-represented by two articles, by Puline Löhlua and K. Chinnappa Gowda respectively), of the but ranging over the region of Maharashtra region (Anne Feldhaus on shepherds’ epics), a comparative study of ghosts between an early Theravāda and a thirteenth-century Latin text (by Sebastian Stinzing), and a North-Pakistan i variant of the tale of Odysseus and the Cyclops (a transcription and translation of the oral tale of Prince Bahrām and the giant, by Claus Peter Zoller). The folk religious element is represented in the article on the cross-dressing jogappas of Reṇukā– Elamma in North Karnataka (Sarah Merkle) and the Kumaon folk deity Goludev (by Aditya Malik).
Also well-represented is Indian theatre with articles ranging from the classical (Monika Zin's search for the origins of the jester, or vidūṣaka, in art, Albrecht Wezler's interpretations of early evidence of the Sanskrit term yavanikā, Heike Oberlin's report on the project on Bhāsa's plays in Kūṭiyāṭṭam), over seventeenth-century Nepal (Horst Brinkhaus’ comparison of two Sanskrit dramas by Malla kings), to contemporary Tamil Nadu (Muthukumaraswamy's description of Draupadi Kuravanchi Koothu), Karnataka (Katrin Binder's reflections on the sūtradhāra in modern Kannada drama), and Kerala (Bozena Sliwczynska's study of contemporary Kūṭiyāṭṭam actors).
Several articles are of a more narrow technical nature: a double entendre reading of one of Bhartṛhari's stanzas (by Harry Falk), reflections on the word meaning of yoga (by Adelheid Mette), Renate Söhnen-Thieme draws attention to some little-studied figures of speech, Ingo Strauch studies intertextuality of Dharma- and Artha-śāstras, in the best of the German Indological tradition. There are also a few reflections on the Indological discipline itself, such as on the basis of epistolatory evidence a study of Böhtlingk's accusation of Monier-Williams’ plagiarism of his Petersburg Sanskrit Dictionary (by Agnes Stache-Weiske), the friction between Roth and his student, the missionary-linguist Ernst Trumpp (by Gabrielle Zeller), and even a comparative overview of the genre of Indologische Festschriften itself (by Axel Michaels).
As with all volumes of this kind, one could critique the uneven quality of the papers. Though all are solidly grounded in careful scholarship, some seem to be written for a specialist audience only and could have benefitted from briefly situating in context before presenting the valuable, detailed research findings that are not always easy to follow for the non-specialist. Another typical complaint is the lack of coherence of the papers, which might have been improved by organising them thematically rather than alphabetically by author's last name. Granted though, some contributions defy easy classification, such as the one on oral transmission in Vedic schools (by Perathiba Mohanathas), a fascinating study of Nārada's role in the Mahābhārata (by Angelika Malinar), the post-Vedic role of Indra (by Anna Aurelia Esposito), the incorporation of the “Act of Truth” and formulae for protection in Buddhist texts (by Kathrin Holz), pilgrimage accounts in the late 18th century (by Indira Peterson), analysis of the characters of the aiyār, or magicians, in the earliest Hindi novel Candrakāntā (by Barbara Lotz), the study of Western followers of Yoga-vidyā (Catherina Kiehnle and Martin Pasemann), and reflections on bhakti and human rights (Martin Fuchs).
An unfortunate shortcoming of this otherwise carefully edited volume, is that the contributors’ affiliations are not provided. Still, there is a useful index. All in all, this volume presents an impressively broad-ranging, and at the same time in-depth feast, for the Indologist, a powerful call to read wider than his or her narrow research interests, and not least a reminder that it still pays off to master German to be able to read the fruits of German Indology.
