Book Review

Methods/Theory

The "classical" and "medieval" texts of South Asia—Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain—seem somehow so authoritative, so carefully edited and translated to produce a "pure" text as close to the "original" as possible, purged of later interpolations. These texts, in hefty bound sets, have been presented as South Asia's contribution to the wisdom of the world. The texts have, as presented, been unsatisfactory to historians; they float in a timeless never-never land without context, history, politics, or power, thereby avoiding basic questions. Who wrote them: where, when, why? Who was the patron, and who was the audience? What were the reasons for their production? How do they differ in viewpoint from others of their type, and what do those changes suggest about changes in society? At best, these texts have been attributed to the genius of a single author or—lacking a plausible author—to the impetus of a larger concept such as "Hindu society" or "Aryan sensibility" or "medieval spirituality."	1
The issues surrounding the "timeless" presentation of South Asian "classical" or "medieval" texts are major. They have generally been presented as typical of a "medieval" mentality or spirituality that separates previous centuries from colonial and current ones. In this now-dominant formulation, all earlier centuries are rendered functionally "dead" and inconsequential. Only the colonial centuries matter for the present.	2
In the past fifteen years, several scholars began rethinking both uses of the texts and methods for analyzing them. Thomas R. Trautmann studied the eighteenth and nineteenth-century politics of the "discovery" of the texts by the British colonial government. Paula Richmond has called into question an "authoritative" text and shown that many different Ramayanas are valid and valued among different audiences. Cynthia Talbot examined South Indian inscriptions for patterns of power. Ronald Inden produced a broad-brush critique of standard Indian textual studies in Imagining India (2000).	. . .