[ఛాల్స్ హాలిసీ (Charles Hallisey) హార్వర్డ్ యూనివర్సిటీ, డివైనిటీ స్కూల్‌లో బౌద్ధిక సాహిత్యాల అధ్యాపకుడు. షికాగో యూనివర్సిటీ నుంచి పిహెచ్. డీ. పట్టా పొందిన హాలిసీ, విస్కాన్సిన్, లయోలా, హార్వర్డ్ యూనివర్సిటీలలో ఆచార్యుడిగా పనిచేశారు. శ్రీలంక, దక్షిణప్రాచ్య ఆసియాలలో తేరావాద బౌద్ధం, బౌద్ధ సాహిత్యం, నైతికత, పాలి భాష, సాహిత్యాలపై కృషి చేస్తున్నారు. ]

As important as the publications of Velcheru Narayana Rao are as scholarship about South Asia, they are not the only fruits of his originality as a scholar nor are they the only vehicles of his contributions to our collective understanding of South Asian cultural histories. Those of us who have seen Narayana Rao as a teacher in the classroom and, even more so, those of us who know him as the brilliant conversationalist that he is know very well that his publications, as rich and as varied as they are, contain only a portion of the original insights that he has about all manner of things in South Asian religions, literatures, cultures, and histories.

The ideas and insights that he shares orally are addressed, of course, to subjects that he is particularly well-known for as a scholar –literature and religion– but they also extend beyond them. In a real sense, then, Narayana Rao’s scholarly ideas and insights also come in an oral teaching that is passed on person to person. I know that I myself have passed on to others the thought-provoking comments he made in conversation after he had read John Strong’s translation of a Sanskrit Buddhist work, the Asokavadana. Narayana Rao’s comments were about how he felt that the Asokavadana exhibited characteristics that we generally associate with folklore. I have also learned from the many ideas Narayana Rao has about the reception of Buddhism in modern India, only some of which are included in his essay “Buddhism in Modern Andhra: Literary Representations from Telugu,” [Journal of Hindu Studies, 1 (2008), 93-119.] I have shared some of these orally-transmitted ideas with others too. I have also returned many times to his notion of ‘unwritten Hinduism’ as a useful angle of vision for looking at the religious life depicted in the background of Buddhist jātaka stories, and I know that I am not the only student of South Asia who has found this notion compelling for understanding religion in South Asia. See, for example, Wendy Doniger, “An Alternative Historiography for Hinduism,” [Journal of Hindu Studies, 2 (2009), 17-26.]

Narayana Rao’s oral teaching in seminar rooms, in dining rooms, and in so many other places enriches his published scholarship in a way that is perhaps analogous to what he has said about the difference between a recorded text and a received text and the manner in which the received text adds to the richness of the recorded text: “What is recorded… on paper is not the entire text, it is only a part of it. It acquires its fullness in performance.” [V. Narayana Rao, “Purāna,” in The Hindu World, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (New Routledge, 2004), 114.] Attending to the ‘received text’ of Narayana Rao’s scholarship will help us to take the measure better of the fullness of his contribution to scholarship about South Asia. Attending to the ‘received text’ of his scholarship also helps us to appreciate better that what he has given us in his scholarship is not only to be discerned in terms of the evidence that he has made available to us, and his interpretations and analysis of that evidence, but also in the profound ways that he has helped us to appreciate the importance of reflecting on what we emphasize in our scholarship.

Indeed, Narayana Rao has given us tools that actually encourage us, in the course of our using them, to become more self-conscious about what we emphasize in our interpretations and reconstructions of the religious, literary, and cultural history of South Asia. His idea of the difference between recorded text and received texts is one such tool and in the rest of this short essay, I would like to consider this distinction, both for its usefulness in how we read texts in our scholarly practices and how it encourages us to become more self-conscious about what we emphasize in the course of our interpretations.

Narayana Rao’s distinction between recorded text and received texts seems to have entered print in a review by him of Philip Lutgendorf’s “The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas in The Journal of Asian Studies: The distinction between the recorded text and the received texts,” (these are not Lutgendorfs terms) is important for the study of the mode of existence of texts in Indian culture. For instance, Lutgendorf rightly comments that Marshall McLuhan‘s ominous pronouncement about fifteenth-century Europe-that Gutenberg‘s typography filled the world and the human voice closed down-does not apply to India. The Mānas has been in print for more than a century, but oral traditions continue. One can easily see why. It is the recorded text that gets into print, not the received texts. In cultures where such a distinction does not exist, where the recorded text is the received text, print has nearly silenced the human voice. [Journal of Asian Studies, 54 (1995), 601-602.]

In the context of this review of Lutgendorf’s book, which itself gives emphasis to performance, it might seem that what is at issue here is how a text exists ‘beyond the written word,’ to adopt the title of William Graham’s book “Beyond the written word: Oral aspects of scripture in the history of religions” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.] Elsewhere in the review, however, Narayana Rao makes it clear that this is hardly the only issue at stake in the notion of a distinction between the recorded text and the received texts. Another issue sustains the use of the plural that appeared when the idea of ‘the received texts’ was first introduced in the quotation above:

“While Lutgendorf began with the modest aim of studying the Mānas in performance, using Bauman’s influential lead in performance studies, he has succeeded in showing that one text, innocently devotional and simple in appearance, actually functions in use as many texts” (601.) What we see here is that, in terms of a text’s “mode of existence in the world,” it is not only that it has many various interpretations, but that a text actually becomes “many texts.” Part of the way that this occurs is through the choices of omission and emphasize that a skilled performer brings to each performance of a text. Thus texts as they exist in the world are not “flat.” Instead they come with a quality that allows for “peaks and valleys” to be discerned, and these, in turn, open the text up in its many appearances in the world. This is in stark contrast to what a text is like “for one who reads in cold print [:] every line of the text has a uniformly equal valency” (602.) The results of this way of engaging the internal differences in the lines of a text are striking:

[A] text undergoes a number of reworkings in the process of its use. Lutgendorf himself does not use this terminology, but his description of the various performances indicates that the readers and listeners produce various new texts out of Tulsidas’s text. Thus the individual reciters who devotedly sing the text (pārāyana) for its religious effect make a mantra of the Mānas, effectively treating it as Veda (uttered for the efficacy of sound, not for meaning). For public recitation, the text is made into a chant, as can be seen from Lutgendorf’s description of the Gyān Vāpi performance, indicating its analogy with a sacrifice. The expounders (Vyās) of the text reproduce it as a Purāna which includes material from other religious texts and digressions into events of social and political life. A group which recites it converts it into a bhajan, and the Rāmlila performers make it the score of their play. Most interesting of all is the way in which the Mānas text and folk songs are interwoven in group performance by less educated singers who, Lutgendorf reports, cut across caste and occupational lines, thus converting the Mānas into a folk song.

Hindu tradition is known for its multiplicity of texts, as for its multiplicity of gods. The vast popularity of the Mānas, which is often compared to the Bible, has not replaced this multiplicity with a single text infused with adoration of the God. Instead, the Mānas has been rendered sufficiently open to serve all the different purposes its users want (601.)”