Contrary to the claims of Clinton Seely on the jacket cover of this volume, it will not “wake up” practitioners of what is “conventionally and comfortably called comparative literature” to the “existence of literature written in the Sanskrit language.” Comparatists are actually well informed and have engaged in such comparative work for many years. This volume, in fact, achieves something more significant for the discipline of comparative literature. There has been some concern among Western comparatists that the field is moribund. This volume shows that there is important work being done not necessarily across cultures but within cultures. The author examines selected modern readings of Sanskrit canonical texts to show the complex relationship of modern Indian intellectuals to the Sanskrit texts as well as the political stakes involved in their turn to them for inspiration.
Chapter 1 examines Rabindranath Tagore's reading of the Sakuntala and its valorization of freedom as a postcolonial critique avant la lettre. The author juxtaposes Tagore's reading to that of Hazariprasad Dvivedi, focusing on the play's depiction of asceticism. However, this chapter deals less with the analysis of Tagore and Dvivedi and more with the author's nuanced reading of the Sakuntala and attempt to discuss it in terms relevant to recent literary theory. Kalidasa's vision of nature is then seen as gendered, heterosexed, and marked by the hyperculture of an ascetic will to power and an economy of compensation. The author's reading of Kalidasa is more satisfying than her reliance on a procrustian bed of little explored theoretical concepts—also seen in the chapter's conclusion that examines Tagore's essay on the Meghaduta as a poem dealing with modernity as a state of exile and homelessness.
Chapter 2 returns to Dvivedi, along with other authors such as Srikant Verma and Mohan Rakesh, and examines their self-conscious quest to understand their relationship to Kalidasa and, by extension, to the Sanskrit tradition. The author asks what Kalidasa can mean for modern Hindi writers. In the case of Rakesh, his interest in Sanskrit texts is seen as intimately connected to a quest for modernity defined here in sociological rather than literary terms, as a quest for the contemporary, the local and the immediate. Such a definition is the only statement of what the author means by modernity in an entire book devoted to the topic. As in Chapter1, Chapter 2 concludes with the Meghaduta, in this instance, an insightful analysis of Verma's 1956 rewriting entitled The Cloud Astray.
Chapter 3 examines Gandhi's reading of the Bhagavad Gita as a text of ahimsa. The author claims that Gandhi's interpretation of the text differed from that of his contemporaries but leaves unspecified what these counter readings might be. Here too, the argument might benefit from more contextualization beyond the allusion to interpretations by two (albeit significant) Westerners such as Humboldt and Hegel. Gandhi's reading of the Gita allows the author to posit two possible forms of reading—that of the history reader's approach and that of the activist. The author aligns herself with the history reader and by extension with most poststructuralist and postcolonial readings. Gandhi is presented as an activist reader. The author's interpretation of Gandhi's reading is subtle and persuasive, showing a firm grasp of the relevant scholarship. But here too, the argument might have benefited from contextualizing Gandhi's interpretive strategies within the tradition of 19th- and 20th- century Hindu reformers who also developed innovative hermeneutical approaches to reading (Dayananda and Ambedkar come to mind).
Chapter 4 deals with Dharamvir Bharati, a poet of the New Poetry Movement and his evocation of the Mahabharata in his 1953 play The Blind Age. After summarizing the play, the author sees its major theme to be that of disillusionment. Here too, the analysis stops short of explaining how this theme pervades all modern Hindi drama. Chapter 5 returns to Dvivedi and introduces other readers such as Buddhadeva Bose, Ramchandra Shukla and Jaisankar Prasad. These individuals were all primarily academics. The author examines how they all read a representative text and frame or redefine the tension it poses between poetry and art. Whereas Dvivedi sought the historical connection between poetry and art, Bose sought the disjunction between the received image of Sanskrit poetry and his actual experience of it. Prasad and Shukla sought to reclaim Sanskrit texts to provide a new conceptual basis for modern Hindi poetry. The author sees in their “remembering” the Sanskrit tradition a quest to cure the trauma of alienation and deracinaton effected by colonialism.These critics are also seen to evince an anxiety regarding the role of alamkāra (ornamentation) and this premise leads the author to conclude the chapter with a discussion of Anandavardhana's Dhvanyaloka, although a connection with the authors in question in tenuous at best. The epilogue to the book presents a discussion of karunā, drawing on the scholarship of Charlotte Vaudeville, here erroneously identified as a male named Charles (Ch.). This gaffe brings to light a more significant editorial concern. An error in identifying a major Indological scholar leads me to question who might have vetted this project—Indian Studies scholars or postcolonial critics? I fear the latter is the case, especially since Indology is a particularly dogmatic and closed discipline and does not welcome comparative readings. Such comparative work, as found in this volume, is valid and important. Its publication and editing should, therefore, not be left in the hands of English Department theorists who unquestioningly accept theoretical jargon (exile, mapping of gender, heterosexual economy, economy of romance, hyperculture, etc.) and let slide the foreign language material. With the exception of Tagore and Gandhi, general readers will be unfamiliar with the authors under investigation or how significant or representative Dvivedi, Bose, Shukla and Prasad are of important trends in literary scholarship, if indeed they are. What I found most valuable in this volume was the author's command of the Sanskrit texts under investigation. She brings genuine insight to her readings of Kalidasa, the Gita, and the Mahabharata. She opens up innovative ways of reading Anandavardhana and Asvaghosa in light of modern literary theory. That she opens up this range of comparison to a varied assortment of Hindi-language authors is the volume's primary contribution.
