Book Reviews : KUNAL CHAKRABARTI. Religious Process: The Purānas and the Making of a Regional Tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 368

Abstract

Professor Chakrabarti’s thesis is that in the early medieval period, brahmans in Bengal engaged in a creative process of ’negotiation of meanings’ between the ’great’, pan-Indian traditions of ’brahmanism’ and ’little’, local Bengali traditions (p. 317). A body of Sanskrit texts, the ’Bengal PurGl)as’, most of them composed in Bengal between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries, record results of these negotiations, at least from the perspectives of their brahman authors. The latter selectively legitimated some features of local beliefs and religious practices, especially those having to do with the worship of local goddesses, even though these same beliefs and practices sometimes contradicted the Vedas. Of course brahman authors of the Bengal Purdnas also upheld the core principles of ’brahmanism’: the formal authority of the vedas, the authority of brahmans as knowers of the Vedas, the legitimacy of varndsrama-dharma (modified to take into account special features of Bengali society), and an implacable opposition to Buddhism (p. 25). Their purpose was to secure hegemony for brahmans in authorising rituals, and a wide range of attendant political and social privileges. But their efforts also had