Abstract
The second chapter on the syncretistic tradition of Satyanrya~ and Satyap>r is an interesting discussion of a cult that flourished around the fifteenth and sixteenth century, which manifests a union of Islam, Buddhist, Hindu and animist beliefs, whereas the third chapter discusses the redefining of Rdh, consort of K~a, that rid her of her erotic attributes and turned her into a romantic and adventurous heroine, a transformation that begins with the Bengali holy man Caitanya and his follower Rpa Gosvm>, who changes her into a symbol of servility. The volume under review, the product of a three-year long SOAS research project entitled Epic Constructions: Gender, Myth and Society in the Mahbhrata, bases its research on the reconstituted text of the Critical Edition with its author not initially interested in how the reconstituted and retrojected Poona text anciently came to be (8). 244 / International Journal of Hindu Studies 15, 2 (2011) Though the author approaches the history of the text relatively unproblematically, he handles the books main subject, the epics focus on a single though oft-contested lineage (vama), by employing several speculative and unusual interpretive methods, including: reading adjacent stories as versions of one statement, describing the symmetrical structures of and framing relationships among multiple passages, and understanding oblique identities between various types of character (1011). According to Ratnak:rti, an inherent weakness in the Nyya theory is their view that a finite, unspecified number of empirical observations and nonobservations can establish the absence of a reason property in all dissimilar cases (C2.3) (149).