Divining an author: The idea of authorship in an Indian religious tradition

History of Religions

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 213-242

  Novetzke, Christian Lee ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43449133532     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/375037     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 1:163
2. The relevant portion of Bentham's last will and testament reads, "My body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in a manner hereinafter mentioned, and I direct... he will take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame in the manner expressed in the paper annexed to this my will and at the top of which I have written Auto Icon. The skeleton he will cause to be put together in such a manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing. I direct that the body thus prepared shall be transferred to my executor. He will cause the skeleton to be clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me. The body so clothed, together with the chair and the staff in my later years bourne by me, he will take charge of and for containing the whole apparatus he will cause to be prepared an appropriate box or case and will cause to be engraved in conspicuous characters on a plate to be affixed thereon and also on the labels on the glass cases in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained. . . . Queens Square Place, Westminster, Wednesday 30th May, 1 832" (Charles F. A. Marmoy, "The 'Auto-Icon' of Jeremy Bentham at University College, London," Medical History 2, no. 2 [April 1958]: 81)
3. For two snapshots of this theoretical moment, see Thomas Docherty, On Modern Authority: The Theory and Condition of Writing, 1500 to the Present Day (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987)
4. and Maurice Biriotti and Nicola Miller, eds., What Is an Author? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
5. S. Babar et al., eds., Śri Nāmdev Gāthā (Bombay: Maharashtra State Government Printing Press, 1970), song number 1232, p. 511. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted
6. See G. A. Deleury, The Cult of Vithoba (Pune: Deccan College, 1960)
7. Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weaver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993)
8. and S. Kulkarni, "Sant Nāmdevgāthyātīl Cār Nāmdev," Yugavani (July-August 1992): 6-10
9. I prefer the term ideograph to either "signature" or "autograph" for reasons that will fit with the arguments that I make below. Essentially, I follow J. S. Hawley's idea that the signature of a famous singer within a song is not indicative of authorship in the sense of ownership, copyright, or sole original composer. Instead, the name of the famous singer implies a genealogy or a tradition, and in that sense it functions as an ideograph, as a symbol that represents the idea of authorship within a particular tradition. See J. S. Hawley, "Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India," Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (May 1988): 269-90
10. A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scholar Press, 1984), pp. 11-12
11. See Bernadette Masters, "The Distribution, Destruction and Dislocation of Authority in Medieval Literature and Its Modern Derivatives," Romantic Review 82, no. 3 (May 1991): 270-85
12. See James Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1996)
13. Gerard Colas, "The Criticism and Transmission of Texts in Classical India," Diogenes 47, no. 2 (1998): 30-44
14. Sheldon Pollock, "New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India," Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 1 (2001): 7
15. S. M. Katre, Introduction to Indian Textual Criticism (Poona: Deccan College, 1954), p. 30
16. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977 [1968]), p. 143
17. See Peter L. Shillingsburg, "Editions Half Perceived, Half Created," Studies in the Literary Imagination 29, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 75-88
18. Shillingsburg also discusses alternatives to the dominance of authorial intention in the editing of texts. See also Judith L. Fisher, "Scholarly Editing, Textual Criticism, and Aesthetic Value: The Garland Thackeray Edition Project, a Case Study," Studies in the Novel 24, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 309-21. Fisher portrays the development of the scholarly editing profession as well
19. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 76
20. It is also interesting to note that for Bourdieu the artistic field and the religious field are intimately linked. See Bourdieu in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 86
21. Paul Auster, New York Trilogy (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994)
22. Brian Trainor, The Origin and End of Modernity: Reflections on the Meaning of Postmodernism (Quebec: World Heritage, 1998)
23. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Simon & Schuster, 1993)
24. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984 [l969]), p. 118
25. S. G. Tulpule and Anne Feldhaus, A Dictionary of Old Marathi (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1999), p. 160. Tulpule and Feldhaus list four inscriptions dated 1146, 1164, 1248, and 1289 as evidence. Of the four inscriptions - located in Bhandak, Savargav, Manur, and Rohilagadh, respectively - the one closest to Pandharpur is found in Savargav (Savargao), and the reference is to an Amba Devi temple, not to the Vitthal temple in Pandharpur. No inscriptions have been found in Pandharpur that use the word kīrtan
26. See G. N. Koparkar Pāyīk Nāradāmce (1997), p. 21, app. 4
27. It is interesting to note that Mahipati calls Namdev an incarnation of both Prahlad and Uddhav. See J. Abbott and N. Godbole, trans., Stories of Indian Saints [Bhaktavijaya] (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996 [1931]), p. 70, chap. 4, verse 172
28. See D. B. Mokashi, Palkhi: An Indian Pilgrimage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987)
29. See C. Vaudeville, Myths, Saints, and Legends in Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)
30. A. Ranade, On Music and Musicians of Hindoostan (New Delhi: Promilla Press, 1984), p. 122
31. See Anna Schultz, "Rashtriya Kirtankars of Maharashtra: Musical Fragments of Nationalist Politics" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, forthcoming)
32. See William Crooke, The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Printing, 1896)
33. V. D. Divekar, "Rashtreeya Kirtankars in Maharashtra: Their Role in the Indian National Movement," in Regional Roots of Indian Nationalism: Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, ed. Markand Mehta (New Delhi: Criterion Publications, 1990), pp. 214-32, 224
34. and Y. R. Date and C. G. Karve, eds., Maharashtra Shabdakosh, vol. 5, Pa-bha, 2243-2244 (Pune: Varada, 1995 [1936])
35. See Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
36. For more on the connection between patronage and written historical narratives, see D. E. Brown, Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), pp. 323, 325
37. S. G. Tulpule, Classical Marathi Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979), p. 353
38. However, in the oldest version of this text, from Dhule, the grantha is attributed to Jnandev, who indeed is associated with physical books or scriptures. The ideograph seems to have been changed later. As I argue elsewhere, the biographical Tīrthāvalī seems to be a compilation of songs by various sants, perhaps organized by Namdev (or a Namdev), and other songs attributed to Namdev or Jnandev. In any case, the Vārkarī tradition remembers Namdev as the author of the biographical Tīrthāvalī, as well as the autobiographical one. See Christian Lee Novetzke in Alternative Krishnas, ed. Guy Beck (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003)
39. According to Molesworth, this verb means, "to write; to draw, delineate, or trace" (p. 720, col. 2). In modern spoken Marathi, the word means both to physically write something and to trace something, but it also indicates the act of composing literature. Thus, one often hears in Marathi that Namdev "wrote" songs, though the meaning is not literally that he physically wrote down his songs (see J. Molesworth, Marathi-English Dictionary (1831; 4th reprint, Pune: Shubhada-Saraswat Prakashan, 1991)
40. J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
41. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: New American Library of Canada, 1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: New American Library, 1964)
42. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982)
43. J. Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 3 (April 1963): 310, 345. Goody and Watt have proposed a fascinating, yet problematic, paradigm of scholarship wherein the sociologist should study literate, developed societies, which are those that have history; whereas the job of the anthropologist should be to study oral, illiterate, and underdeveloped societies that have no sense of history but merely of present culture (p. 343)
44. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (n. 22 above), p. 76
45. See also Bourdieu, "Sociology as Socioanalysis," in Bourdieu and Wacquant, pp. 62-74
46. Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen, The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1988)
47. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980 [1878]), 2:140
49. Christian Lee Novetzke. 2008. Bhakti and Its Public. International Journal of Hindu Studies 11:3, 255-272. [CrossRef]