Book Reviews : JESSE S. PALSETIA, The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in Bombay City, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 2001, pp. 368

Abstract

doctrine of conditioned origin, pratityasamutpada. Both are like a large circle spiralling inward in concentric patterns to a central point, where they implode. Within this system of self-destruction and apparently irreversible momentum, the heroine manages to extricate herself through the application of dream logic which functions as the mode of memory, the paradoxical absence that is presence and the presence that is absence. The book’s final section deals with the triple nexus of love, desire and longing for the other. The essay ’Bhavabhuti on Cruelty and Compassion’ studies this writer’s portrayal of the painful separation of Rama and Sita. The virtuous king Rama is tragically torn between the conflicting ideals of individual attachment and collective duty, the king’s dharma. Shulman details the interweaving of the modes of karuna (compassion) and daruna (harsh, terrible, cruel) in the experience of love. In ’The Fire and Flood: The Testing of Sita in Kampan’s Iramavataram’, Shulman contrasts the south Indian version of the epic with the north Indian version by Valmiki. In Kampan’s version, the couple, reunited after Sita’s ordeal by fire, ’direct allegations to one another with almost shocking, verbal abandon’. The poem hinges on a level of passion and conflict not normally associated with more normative cultural representations of the saintly couple. The last two essays are lyrical articulations of classical Telugu poetic visions, interrogating notions of human identity and psychic formation. The handful of printing errors in this compilation could have been avoided through more rigorous editing; fortunately, they did not detract from this reviewer’s experience of David Shulman’s outstanding scholarship.