Hopkins, Steven P.

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 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Religion Faculty Works   11-1-2000  Review Of "Devotional Poetics And The Indian Sublime" By V. Mishra  Steven P. Hopkins Swarthmore College, shopkins1@swarthmore.edu   Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion   Part of the Religion Commons   Recommended Citation Steven P. Hopkins. (2000). "Review Of "Devotional Poetics And The Indian Sublime" By V. Mishra". Journal Of Asian Studies. Volume 59, Issue 4. 1076-1077. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion/14  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religion Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime by Vijay Mishra; Rob WilsonReview by: Steven P. HopkinsThe Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Nov., 2000), pp. 1076-1077Published by: Association for Asian Studies .Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2659280Accessed: 03/03/2014 13:01 .Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Association for Asian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Asian Studies.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.58.64.71 on Mon, 3 Mar 2014 13:01:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsThis content downloaded from 130.58.64.71 on Mon, 3 Mar 2014 13:01:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions1076 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES still remains to be reconceptualized within Indian feminism, like the role of pleasure in sexuality, the place of lesbianism in the politics of engagements, and animal symbolism in the cultural imaginary that is an inevitable part of all radical enterprise. By bringing together only a few of the thoughtful, provocative, and erudite essays produced by an entire generation of Indian feminists, this volume does very good service to the Indian women's movements as well as to scholarship on modern South Asia. Its best achievement is that it sacrifices neither philosophical rigor nor passionate advocacy around issues that affect women in different ways. The only note of caution I would sound would be regarding the typos in various places. However, I would also remind the reader that, as with the Indian women's movements, there is much to be learnt from the honest mistakes of every endeavor. INDRANI CHATTERJEE Brown University Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. By VIJAY MISHRA. SUNY Series on the Sublime. Edited by Rob Wilson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xiii, 268 pp. $65.50 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). This is an ambitious, thoughtful, intellectually omnivorous book. Vijay Mishra's study argues for the presence of the "aesthetic order" of the "sublime"-as defined by Kant, and extended by He gel-in a myriad of Indian (mostly Hindu) devotional texts from various historical periods, languages, and regional traditions. Mishra reads through a mind-numbing cross-cultural collection of philosophers, literary critics, and poets, east and west, to argue the "sublime" in India, from the Bhagavad GTta and GTtagovinda, to Dr. Johnson, Stanley Fish, and Kabir. He might have done better to limit the scope of the book, for themes multiply and sometimes crowd each other out: there is rasa theory; reader-response; Schopenhauer and Islamic mathnavT; Orientalism, Sarpkhya, and G. N. Devy's postcolonial critiques of Indian literature. It would be impossible in the short span of this review to treat all the issues and side issues dealt with in this study, so I will concentrate on only a few. The central thesis of the book-that devotional literatures in India, whether Hindu or Muslim, have something to contribute to western philosophical and literary theories ofthe sublime-is compelling and important. In western theory the sublime operates by way of negation, transcending the aesthetics of the "beautiful," and is, in Mishra's phrase, "an outrage to the imagination" (p. 200). Mishra wants to show, on the contrary, "complex ways in which the Indian devotional texts [ ... J reflect the larger problematic of self and God within an aesthetics of the sublime" (p. 41, italics mine). And indeed, he does succeed, for the most part, in doing just this, though along the way I take issue with various claims he makes about the essential attributes of the "Indian sublime." First, Mishra has a tendency throughout to totalize, not only Indian tradition (as he freely admits, he does "collapse Indian thought with Hinduism," p. ix), but the sublime object of devotion itself as "Brahman"-the neuter, transcendental ground of being-a term preserved in the U panihads and in northern nirguYfa bhakti traditions. "The sublime," Mishra argues, "finds its highest form in the concept of Brahman" (p. 14), which he views as undergirding all Indian "devotional poetics" (cf. also 17, 3 7). This hardly does justice to the many unstable vocabularies of "sublime otherness" (p. 197) which Mishra himself reads so perceptively. It is particularly This content downloaded from 130.58.64.71 on Mon, 3 Mar 2014 13:01:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBOOK REVIEWS-SOUTH ASIA 1077 Business, Race, and Politics in British India, c. 1850-1960. By MARIA MISRA. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. xiv, 250 pp. $72.00 (cloth). This valuable, well-researched, and well-argued study of the managing agency houses of Calcutta over more than a century of their existence has been given a broader title than seems justifiable. However, the clear focus on these British-run managing agency firms brings large dividends that an even wider focus on the entire spectrum of business activity might have lost. This is certainly the best study of which I am aware of these business houses from their rise to their demise a few decades after Indian independence. Maria Misra has searched for their records and patiently explained what can be learned from them as well as what cannot be gleaned from them. She has presented what she has learned about their business practices, crucial decisions which frequently harmed them, recruitment procedures, relationships to government as well as to Indian business firms, and placed all of these activities in the context of the Raj. She writes clearly and whatever animus she has to their racism is muted in this dispassionate and convincing account. The author concentrates on the sixty or so managing agency houses, mostly based in Calcutta with home quarters in London, which dominated the Indian industrial and commercial economy of India from the later nineteenth century to the interwar period. These included, for example, Jardine Skinner; Andrew Yule and Co.; Mackinnon, Mackenzie and Co.; Bird and Co.; Shaw Wallace and Co.; and Burn and Co. As she notes, "By 1880 these firms had secured control over a wide range of financial and commercial interests and were also industrial pioneers .... [l}n 1915 jarring when Mishra identifies "Brahman" as the (unspoken?) object of desire in a Kablr poem where "god" is described in a nuanced vocabulary of intimacy quite foreign to "Brahman": Hari ("lord"), balama, and kaminz-highly charged words meaning "beloved" (p. 192). Ultimately, Mishra reads "sublime devotion" through the lenses of Satikara Vedanta and a specific strand of Hindu nirgutJa bhakti (devotion to a god "without attributes"). In this he closely follows his Kablr editors, Parasnath Tiwari, S. Shukla, and R. Chaturvedi, though he notes their bias (pp. 141-42; 227). Yet, for an author who argues so persuasively for "hybridity" and against "hegemonic discourse," such a normative account strikes one as odd indeed. The final two chapters (4 and 5) argue the sublime through a detailed, insightful reading of north Indian Sufism, the Nath Yogis, tantric Siddhas, and nirgutJi" sants like Namdev and Kablr, pages which repay close reading, and come closest to the fiery borders of the sublime. The final chapter on Kabir is the best in the book, and could have easily formed the core of Mishra's study. There Mishra argues for the Indian sublime in the experience of viraha-painful "love-in-separation"-most powerfully embodied in the figure of Kabir's "burning bride," the virahitJi" as sat/, the bride who burns (literally) for love of her absent husband. For Mishra, this "form of the negative sublime as divine pleasure implies the sacrifice of the self in a paradoxical death-in-life" (p. 197). Far from the cosmic confidence of unity with Brahman, here lies the true figure of the Indian devotional sublime. STEVEN P. HOPKINS Swarthmore College 

Review Of  Devotional Poetics And The Indian Sublime  By V. Mishra

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Review Of Devotional Poetics And The Indian Sublime By V. Mishra

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