review of pastoral deities in western india

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Pastoral deities in western India. By Günther-Dietz

Sontheimer translated by Anne Feldhaus. pp. xviii, 278, 16pl., 3 maps. New York and Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1989. £34.00.

I. M. P. Raeside

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland / Volume 1 / Issue 03 / November 1991, pp 418 -

419DOI: 10.1017/S1356186300001371, Published online: 24 September 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1356186300001371

How to cite this article:I. M. P. Raeside (1991). Review of Günther-Dietz Sontheimer, and Anne Feldhaus 'Pastoraldeities in western India' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 1, pp418-419 doi:10.1017/S1356186300001371

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4 i Reviews of Books

commissioned a copy of the Basava purana. As the century progressed Brahmin scholars too began

to take an interest, and indeed published some of the forgotten Vlras'aiva works; in consequence the

genre (and the subject) began to attract a wider audience. The Basava purana was retold in Tamil and

Kannada; there was even a Sanskrit translation. Nevertheless, Palkuriki Somanatha's text (without

proper commentaries and no reliable printed editions) remained problematic.

The present work is the first English translation of the Basava purana. Narayana Rao and his

assistant Gene H. Roghair have followed the text edited by Nidadavolu Venkata Rao since it is the

best available . In addition they also consult Brown's MS. no. 970, as well as Prabhakara Sastri

(1926) and Tam may ya (1966), whenever there appeared to be problems with Venkata Rao's edition

(p. 29). For various reasons theirs was not an easy task. Though a written text, the Basava purana

follows closely the oral style of composition; it was meant to be performed rather than read.

Stylistically it is almost undistinguishable from oral texts (with repetitions and fillers where

appropriate). The syntax is difficult and often obscure and the best the translator can at times do is

to interpret. Narayana Rao and Roghair have solved such problems with credit and where no

interpretation was possible left the passage untranslated but indicated this in their notes. The

translation itself (which took over ten years and much labour to complete) reads extremely well,

preserving, to a remarkable degree, the vitality, texture and flavour of the Telugu original. This is

an important introduction to one of the most radical religious groups of southern India, full of

information apt to challenge the conventional view of Hinduism.

ALBERTINE GAUR

PASTORAL DEITIES IN WESTERN IN DIA . By GUN THER-DIETZ SONTHEIMER, translated by ANNE FELDHAUS.

pp . xviii, 278, 16 pi., 3 maps. New York and Oxfo rd, O xford University Press, 1989. £34.00.

Professor Sontheimer's Biroba Mhaskobd und Khandoba: Ursprung Ceschichte und Umwelt von

Pastoralen Cottheiten in Maharastra was first published in 1976. It was founded upon immensely

thorough fieldwork that was carried out between 1967 and 1972 amo ngst the Dhangar community

of South Maharashtra with whom Sontheimer had established a close and friendly relationship. Up

to now the mass of detail in this book was only available to those of us whose German is weak in

the English summary of the appendix, and we owe Anne Feldhaus a considerable debt for having

translated the whole thing into English.

This study of the popular gods of Maharashtra and of their bewildering interconnections, their

consorts and their subsets, is build around a core of oral texts that Sontheimer recorded from the

mouths of nomadic shepherds - the Dhangars - supplemented by puranic tales and by some of the

still relevant stories that occur in the old district gazetteers. As he says in his preface, there is a danger

that with the increasingly normative Sanskritisation of popular beliefs and with the settlement of

these nomadic castes in agricultural comm unities, scholars w ill lose awareness of the texts'

presuppositions and hence of their full meaning . Thus in many ways this book is an exercise in

rescue archaeology.

The early chapters set out the physical landscape and the personnel: the ecology of the Deccan and

its pastoralist groups; the distribution of pastoral and agricultural economies at the time of the

Satavahana and Calukya em pir es with special emphasis on the evidence from the cult centres of

Mhasvad and Kharsundl; the forest and pastoral peoples - Kolis, Ramoshis, Lingayats, Gosavis andnomadic Dhangars - and the gods and goddesses which bulk so large in their lives. There is

remarkably little published in English on most of these deities. Even Khandoba, one of the major

gods of Maharashtra and associated with the easily accessible pilgrim age centre of Jejuri, is known

mainly from the distinctly undevotional verse of the modern poet Arun Kolatkar. In Chapter 7

Sontheim er describes in some detail the social and religious life of the Dhangars, especially those who



Reviews of Books 419

live for half the year in the two camp-like villages that he calls VadT A and VadT B. Some of this

is already familiar from the author's own articles, but here he concentrates on the Dhangars' festivals

which are again illuminated by vivid twe ntieth-cen tury folk-tales including the fascinating personal

account by a devarsi one of those professional soothsayers who are regularly possessed by a god, of

how he was first taken ov er .

The last two chapters describe, inevitably somewhat speculatively, the rise of the three main deities

from aniconic lumps of stone worshipped by the nomadic herdsmen of the Deccan plateaux, to

becoming accepted by all the settled agriculturalists of the region and finally honoured by temples

often built by the great families who had risen from their ranks - Holkars and Sindes (Scindias) and

Gaekwads. Biroba-Bhairava, the hero god of the high pasture, Mhasoba-Mhaskoba the buffalo god,

Khandoba who defends the flocks and herds with his sword, all sprang from the yaksas of stone and

tree and river.

The book ends with an appendix which is the translation of The Story of SrTnatha Mhaskoba Deva

given as first published in 1889 and apparently one of those little temple pamphlets which are

constantly reprinted and only obtainable on site. Some excellent photographs are reproduced (much

more sharp and clear though in the German original) and there is a very full B ibliography and Index.

As one wou ld expect from Professor Sontheim er, the Bibliography is full of Ma rathi works , notably

those of R. C. Dhere - that indefatigable scholar who is unknown outside Maharashtra because he

has published next to nothing in English. As regards the original Marathi texts selected here - 70 in

all of varying lengths - one would have liked a little more information at times about their source,

but as Sontheimer says in his preface he has sought to preserve the anonymity of his informants. A

list of names and castes and addresses is attached to the original manuscript and is preserved no doubt

with the tapes somewhere in Heidelberg. On the evidence of the sample text published by

Sontheimer in his 1975 article: Ein e Tempellegende der Dhangars von Maharastra , the language

of his texts is more than a little opaqu e for those who are only used to standard literary Mara thi, and

in the very few places where one can check (as in note 70 on page 60) I think that I would have

translated differently. Indeed in the mass of material presented here it wo uld be strange if there were

not speculations that are perhaps too bold and interpretations that others might wish to challenge.

The fact remains that this is a rich pudding of a book with a plum on every page and the recording

of these artless and ephemeral tales is something for which future scholars will be enormously

grateful.

I. M. P. RAESIDE

INVITING DEA TH: HISTORICAL EXPERIMENTS ON SEPULCHRAL HI LL . By S. SETTAR. pp . xx x, 372, 49 pi.,

62 figs., 2 maps. Dh arw ad, Institute of Indian Art H istory, Karnatak Unive rsity, 1986. Rs 175.

PURSU ING DEAT H: PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE OF VOLUNTARY TERMINATION OF LIFE. By S. SETTAR.

pp . x xxi, 414, 112 figs. Dh arwa d, Institute of Indian A rt History, Karnatak Unive rsity, 1990. Rs 325.

R eligious su icide is, in the eyes of Jains, a wrong description of the practice of samadhi marana.

Suicide has connotations of passion raga) and violence himsa) alien to the Jain concept of ritual death

by fasting. The person who undertakes sallekhanS as it is commonly (though loosely) called, should

approach death calmly, neither fearing nor desiring it, free from emotions, properly prepared, when

infirmity or insurmountable calamity are bringing his natural life to its close.

These two substantial volumes complement each other. The first, Inviting Death traces the history

of ritual death from the epigraphic material at the great Jain pilgrimage centre of Sravana Belgola.

The second book, Pursuing Death is a detailed study of the philosophy and practice of ritual death,

derived primarily from the canonical texts in Prakrit and Sanskrit, illustrated extensively by

reference to medieval Kannada writers.

review of pastoral deities in western india

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