[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.)”
Narayana Rao took up the distinction between the recorded text and the received text again in an essay on Purāna that was published in The Hindu World. Narayana Rao begins his discussion by referring readers to his review of Lutgendorf, but it should be noted that in this second discussion, the category ‘received text’ now appears in the singular:
Elsewhere I draw a distinction between the recorded text and the received text in India (Narayana Rao, 1995). What is recorded on palm leaf, and later on paper, is not the entire text, it is only a part of it. It acquires its fullness in performance, at which time it is appropriately recreated by the paurānika, who is trained in reading the Purānās and interpreting them. His knowledge, which was not written down, would be crucial in determining the received text. The recorded Purāna text tells only part of the story. When the paurānikas who knew the received text disappeared, scholars were left with only the recorded text, which has become our sole text. Simply reading the recorded text in a linear order, without the training in performing it, scholars found a number of irresolvable contradictions and discontinuities, not to mention a plethora of scribal errors. But if the early scholars had actually studied the Purāna in performance and learned how the trained performer constructed and presented a Purāna in each performance, we would have an entirely different kind of Purāna scholarship today. Instead of suspecting the panditas, the agents of transmission of this tradition from generation to generation, if the early scholars had striven to understand the nature of this text culture, a whole different way of asking questions would have emerged.
The paurānikās who knew this text culture had been initially marginalized and eventually disappeared from the scholarly scene. So much so that the entire scholarship of the Purānās has been conducted viewing these texts as artifacts with little direct interaction with the users of these texts and their textual practices. The textual activities of this culture—production, transmission, performance, and reproduction, performance, and reproduction, which includes the training of the paurānikās, the principles and methods of text creation they employed, and the rules governing such activities—need to be properly understood. In the absence of such an understanding, texts collected from their original locations and stacked in the air-conditioned rooms of libraries and studied in isolation could only give a distorted picture. The Purāna culture where hundreds and even thousands of paurānikās served as silent authors without claiming individual recognition—all speaking in the voice of the revered Vyāsa over such a long period of time in the history of India awaits to be properly understood (114-115.)
The emphasis on the paurānikās here, and to the training and culture of paurānikās, is certainly reminiscent of the discussion of the karanams in Textures of Time, that Narayana Rao wrote with David Shulman and Sanjay Subramanyam [New York: Other Press, (2003).] This emphasis on training and education, as well as performance, moves the idea of ‘received text’ away from that of a notion of text creation that include an openness to chance in performance towards one that emphasizes the determined nature of text creation in addition to the multiplicity of received texts. With this emphasis, Narayana Rao moves the idea of the ‘received text’ away from issues of performance towards culture and as a result another understanding of the ‘received text’ emerges, that of the culturally-authorized recreations and re-interpretations of a particular text.
This is a different and perhaps a more complex conception of the ‘received text.’ It displays how Narayana Rao’s notion of this phenomenon involves a deep interplay between closing off possible interpretation (something which may not exist at all for the recorded text) and the ways that a text can still leave many doors open. It also points to a question of what this interplay between closures and doors that remain open demands of our reading practices. In intriguing ways, this more complex understanding of the notion of a received text overlaps with questions raised by attention to the phenomenon of intertextuality, which also involves both closing off and opening up the meanings of a text. By turning to the education and culture of panditas, Narayana Rao helps us to see that the received text becomes a determinable and proximate possibility (potential proxima) that cannot be discerned completely in isolation from the recorded text itself. All this reminds us just how important the rich imagination of context is for reading a text in a way that allows one to maintain an openness to its many-layered history and significance.
It seems clear that when we learn from Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text and employ it to interpret other kinds of texts in South Asia besides the Puranas or Tulsidas (I have found this notion of the received text useful for interpreting a wide range of South Asian literature, ranging from secular poetry like the genre of messenger poetry (dutakavya) to Buddhist sutras) we best employ it when we keep both sides of Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text in play. That is, when we use the idea of the received text to interpret South Asian texts, we want to attend to how a text actually becomes ‘many texts’ in the world through various kinds of practices of performance and reception, even though these ‘many texts’ are all called by the name of a single ‘recorded text.’ When we use the idea of the received text, we also want to attend to how other practices both guide and constrain the production of textual meaning, especially those practices associated with the training of performers and skilled readers.
What is particularly subtle about Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text is the way it draws our attention to a complex interplay between closures of meaning and doors that remain open to new meanings. As we become more capable of tracing the workings of this complex interplay, we will develop our own kinds of reading practices, as students of South Asian texts, that are capable of engaging it more adequately than we currently are. And in this, we see that one of Narayana Rao’s greatest gifts to us is the way that again and again he turns our faces towards better futures of scholarly understanding and literary appreciation.