Books in Review

culture. What is remarkable about this vol Reading ume is the manner in which Indian Studies Lawrence A. Babb & Susan S. Wadley, ed s. specialists engage with the burgeoning Media and the Transformation of Religion i n scholarly field of cultural studies. In recent South Asia. U of Pennsylvania Ρ US$16.95 years cultural studies has been read as a field Saskia Kersenboom in which one brings a largely non linguistic Word, Sound, I m a ge : The Life of the Tamil T ex t. competence to readings of the popular. Berg US$19.95 When it comes to non western cultures this Reviewed by Vijay Mishra means that the cultural studies academic would be interested in such matters as the We continue to be fascinated by Western commodification of culture through video readings of India. Once the debates were cassettes, television, cinema and so on. Babb about versus Indophobia, t h en and Wadley's volume touches on something it became a question of colonial dispatches rather different. It examines the huge impact and what they said about British rule, and the media have had on religious matters in finally, after further refinements of histori India. In many ways the narrowing of the cal themes (Eric Stokes's work is exemplary field t o religion is both the book's strength here) the interest moved to questions of and its weakness, a strength because reli representation. Postcolonial theory has, in gion gives the book a unity often lacking in turn, brought to our readings of India other edited texts, a weakness because it alternative ways of exploring adversarial as unwittingly continues the orientalist tradi well as complicit moments in the creation tion of reading religion as the core of Indian of Empire. The books I have before me are culture. And this is a pity since the act of recent attempts to tell the story of India (or living in India is also a question of survival to speak about Indian encounters) that in a harsh land, and while Indians may be combine scholarship with a high level of more religiously inclined than other peo self consciousness about cultural sensibili ple, there are many other aspects of their ties and the position from which one speaks cultural existence that require attention. about the "other." I begin with the Babb and In spite of this qualification, the volume Wadley volume which is, I would want to has some fine essays on subjects such as suggest, a rather unusual collection of essays calendar art and "god posters," the use of on Indian cultural matters by a group of comics for national integration, the m echan specialists who on other occasions may well ical reproduction of religious music and have been seen as "Indologists." From what sermons, cinema, and television seri I can gather all the contributors to this vol als. A number of observations may be quickly ume can read at least one Indian language, summarized here. We are told by H. D aniel and many are established scholars of Indian Smith that god posters and calendar art

129 Canadian Literature 15/ 1 Summer ¡ Books in Review

have had an enormous impact on "patterns that may be made about this book. The first is of Hindu devotionalism" by bringing images that the book, written by specialists, requires of gods and goddesses into innumerable considerable effort on the part of someone homes. Stephen R. Inglis examines the interested in cross cultural studies: indeed career of one of the great masters of calendar a fair degree of familiarity with high Indian art, Kondiah Raju (1898 1976) and makes culture is the unstated prerequisite through some exciting theoretical interventions into out. The second is the absence of any real Benjamin's argument about the decline of critique of the current state of Indian cul the auratic status of the original in the age ture. To claim that the serialized Ramayana of mechanical reproduction. Th is essay is on television is another addition to the followed by two complementary essays by Ramayana tradition is one thing; to mar Frances W. Pritchett an d John S t r a t t o n ginalize the considerable unease of large Hawley on Anant Pai's Amar Chitra K a t h a , parts of the Indian population about the a series of very influential comics modelled politics and aesthetics of this serialization is on the American Classics Illustrated comics. quite another. On e gets the uneasy feeling In both these essays what emerges is the that somehow severe criticism and compar way in which Anant Pai's own commitment ative judgements are no longer fashionable. to Indian secularism skews some very com The Babb and Wadley volume deals pri plex ideological moments in the texts marily with North Indian material. Saskia themselves. Hawley's comparative readings Kersenboom's book is about South India, of the representation of key saints in the specifically Tamil India. She works from comics against the historical facts make this what one gathers is a Tamil mode of pro ideological selectiveness very clear. The age ducing knowledge/meaning. Here she has of mechanical reproduction has also affected in mind a way of reading the world as a audio recordings and this aspect is explored complex semiotic system made up of, as the in Regula Burchardt Qureshi's fascinating title of her book suggests, word, sound and essay on the Sufi inspired qawwali. The image. The reference to the title of one of genre is one of the most popular forms of Roland Barthes' best known books in the religious music in India and and English speaking world is obvious. one which has been exposed to the West in However, where Barthes' Image, Music, Text recent times through the extraordinary examined the three as relatively indepen singing of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. dent semiotic systems, Kersenboom speaks Scott Marcus examines the ways in which of the three as constituting, in South I n dian Hindu devotional music is being marketed culture, a specifically Tamilian way of con through cheap and readily available cassettes. structing meaning, or reading the world. In In the third section of the volume Steve other words, the Tamil language itself con Derne, Philip Lutgendorf and John T. Little structs meaning by constantly relating analyse the relationship between religion "word, sound and mimetic image." N ot and the visual media through cinema, tele surprisingly, in Tamil discourse is given vision and video cassettes. In all three stud priority over system. Modifying this argu ies the power of the visual in transforming ment a bit one could say that parole c o m e s canonical religious texts or in transmitting before langue, the surface structure before religious messages to a national and global the deep structure so that worlds are con audience is seen as one of the decisive ele structed through specific articulations (of ments in the way in which contemporary language and body) rather than through a Indian culture is represented. pre existent linguistic system. Recent work There are, however, two general criticisms in the field of meaning construction has

130 Canadian Literature ¡47 /Summer 199Í brought to our notice the importance of Kersenboom herself is an accomplished the body itself, and the extent to which any performer of the Bharata Natyam and is theory of textuality must engage with the therefore a participant precisely in the world as.other than just linguistic objects— "text" that is the object of her analysis. both at the level of the world itself and at Much of what she writes would be accept- the level of how worlds are constructed. able to a whole group of current writers on Where once there was the claim that worlds language and representation. The book come into being only through language (and perhaps makes too strong a case for Tamil this idea remains strong in the tradition from difference at the level of its own way of Saussure, through Lévi-Strauss to Lacan), defining language and in many places the now the claim is that worlds are con- theoretical underpinning is both needlessly structed through multiple modes of cogni- heavy and sometimes far too repetitive. But tion in which all five sense organs as well as in as far as it draws our attention to worlds all the motoric organs in the body (to use a and systems that require both intellectual Samkhyan system here) are important. and bodily investment, the book demon- Saskia Kersenboom's "proof" text is a short strates that to know something well, you do narrative that is the basis of a dance. In ex- have to live through that experience. amining the relationship between the text Kersenboom shows a rare Western under- and the dance as performed in the Bharata standing of both the Tamil language and Natyam style, Kersenboom becomes con- one of its finest cultural forms, the Bharata scious of the massive disjunction between a Natyam. Finally, she draws our attention to textual (that is a verbal) construction of the the unity of the dancer and the dance, an event through Western textual analysis and issue that still remains central to modernist the Tamil construction of the same event aesthetics generally. that treats it as a complete social experience Both books discussed here draw us once in which all the senses have participated. To again to what may be called readings of the be able to read this text as performed one "East" in the wake of Edward Said's influ- has not only to describe it (in which case ential . While debates will con- one also has to know the tradition of tem- tinue to rage about the polemical nature of ple dancers in the culture as well as the Said's work, it must be said that in drawing dance/dancer's own prior history) but to our attention to the link between power view the event in the context of its perfor- and knowledge, the text forced scholars to mance. As she claims earlier on "no philo- engage with archives with a certain respect logical, historical, religious, moral, for the cultures that produced that material. hermeneutic, psychological, functional, These books—and many more published structuralist, semiotic, receptionist, socio- recently—bear testimony to a new mode of logical or (neo)-Marxist analysis and inter- research and engagement with the "other." pretation can represent what that textual event is." With this in mind the book comes with an interactive CD in which five min- utes of the performance is included. In South India the researcher is often asked "enta prayogam?" or "what's the use?" The value or utility of Kersenboom's research, as she explains at some length, is that her book is not simply a treatment of the object in a dispassionate way.

131 Canadian Literature 1571 Summer 19