This is an important collection of essays on a significant but neglected theme in the religious history of South Asia. The mention of 'the Indian subcontinent' in the subtitle is a little misleading, for twenty out of twenty-three essays in the volume are concerned with some aspects of Hinduism. One can therefore safely assume that the book primarily addresses two features unique to Hinduism-the absence of a historical founder and a core corpus of scriptures considered equally sacred by all adherents of the religion. These two features, among others, have endowed Hinduism with qualities that are conducive to doctrinal innovation but not an unambiguous self-definition.Canon, however, is an unavoidable prerequisite of any institutional religion. Therefore, by an extended defmition of the term, the Hindu canon may be said to consist of two parts: the Shruti or literal revelation comprising the Vedas and their angas, and the Smriti or remembered revelation comprising the law books, the epics and the mythologies. Of the two, the former has unquestionably greater Brahmanical sanction. Thus all later texts, aspiring to achieve canonical status, must in some way connect with the Shruti, so that Brian Smith defined Hinduism as the religion of those who create, perpetuate and transform traditions with legitimizing reference to the authority of the Vedas. At the same time, in the post-Vedic period the subject matter of the Vedas became largely irrelevant and therefore unfamiliar to those who defined themselves in relation to it. In view of this paradox, the Smriti became the effective canon for the Hindus and it is as yet an unfinished corpus of texts. Thanks to endless reiteration in the epics and the Puranas, it is generally understood that the question of dharma (righteous conduct) is subject to limitations of space and time. Consequently, canonical texts have to be continuously composed or revised to suit the needs of specific spatial-temporal contexts and even those written in regional languages are considered an ever-growing extension of the Smriti. Thus, within Hinduism, the various religious communities, distinguished from each other by the worship of certain deities, and the performance of special rituals, also have scriptures of their own, which function as their canon.From the nineteenth century, Western scholars such as H.H. Wilson began to describe these religious communities as sects. In a pioneering but largely unnoticed
I . ,Religion is human and derived from human nature. It has never been satisfactorily explained in terms provided by religion, which are acceptable to all men. Certain naturalistic approaches have therefore advocated that one shouid look at man for an understanding of this human phenomenon. Love is one of the universal expressions of human behaviour which Lee Siegel explores in an attempt to relate the human and the divine, the ,religious and the secular. Siegel moves back and forth between the particular and the universal to make explicit what is implicit in the Gitagovinda, to discern the component of the sacred in an evidently profane description of human love. Emile Durkheim, who was one of the earliest spokesmen of the viewpoint that religion is a product and an expression of social life, observed .that all known religious beliefs present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, into two classes of* opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms-profane and sacred. Durkheim suggested a clear division of the world into two domains, she one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane. He however drew our attention to a very important aspect of the sacred: the circle of sacred objects cannot be determined once and for all; its extent varies infinitely. 2 Peter Berger further qualifies the nature of the sacred. He says that although the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a way in which other non-human phenomena do not. Thus, the sacred cosmos, an immensely powerful reality, both transcends and includes man. The profane is the antonym of the sacred. The routines 1
The article proceeds from the hypothesis that Bengal was peripheral to the main Brahmanical zone, and that many religious beliefs and ritualistic practices existed there, probably in much diversity, before Brahmanism established its dominance. Brahmanism absorbed, modified and unified the local cults. The article takes the cult of the Goddess Maṅgalacaṇḍī as an illustration of how it is specific to Bengal and drew on various local rituals and beliefs in goddesses locally prevalent previously, but now regionalised. The cult as it was being formed was also sought to be accommodated in the Punāṇic framework: thus Bengal was given its particular cults, while preserving its place in the Brahmanical world.
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