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Book Reviews : KATHLEEN TAYLOR, Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: 'An Indian Soul in a European Body', Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001, pp. 319
Gautam Chakravarty Indian Economic Social History Review 2003 40: 373 DOI: 10.1177/001946460304000307 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ier.sagepub.com/content/40/3/373.citation

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for pre-colonial and colonial polities. Hence, despite the work of Subrahmanyarr and others on pre-colonial portfolio capitalists, it is argued that it was only the Company state who merge[d] merchant and political power (p. 97). Moreover, it is proposed that coercion and disciplinary authority exercised by the Company were not seen as a legitimate use of powers of kingship in South India, and that there was no such tradition of state interference in or regulation of labour or the labour &dquo;market&dquo; (p. 121 and passim). These bold hypotheses are based on a few top-level statements of pre-colonial authorities (the Nawab of Arcot, Tipu Sultan, tracts on statecraft: pp. 126-29) while there is no attempt to reconstruct quotidian practices of subordinating labour under pre-colonial regimes-admittedly a difficult task that would require a thorough analysis of pre-colonial documents (Sumit Guhas essay on the Marathas penal regime hints at the possibilities: Past & Present 147, 1995). Parthasarathis tendency to imagine the state as a structure detached from society is reflected by the fact that the crucial local levels of political organisation have not caught his attention. Hence local power-holders like the nattar, on which Mizushima has focused his study, or the palaiyakkarar (poligars) are not considered as potential agencies of subordinating labour. With regard to the latter, even colonial sources indicate that they had some impact on the organisation of commercial manufacture in the period covered by the book. Textile artisans, especially those producing high-value fabrics, apparently settled often in palaiyams, that is, the fortified strongholds of palaiyakkarar. Elsewhere, we find that palaiyakkarar were also concerned with protecting property and were the agents of a regional penal regime. One would have to look closely at quotidian practices of domination not only of regional but also of local south Indian authorities in order to reconstruct ancien regime state attitudes towards labour. The results of such enquiries may well disappoint the seekers of pre-colonial innocence. The good news is, however, that there is much scope for further research on the transition to a colonial

economy.
Ravi Ahuja South Asia Institute

Heidelberg
KATHLEEN TAYLOR, Sir John

Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: An Indian Soul in a European Body, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001, pp. 319.

First, a little about the official career of the subject of this remarkable biography: John Woodroffe (1865-1936) was bom in Calcutta, son of a prominent Calcutta High Court barrister who later became Advocate General of the Bengal government. His mother, Florence Hume, came from an old Anglo-Indian family, and her father was the cousin of A.O. Hume, the general secretary of the Indian National Congress for its first 22 years and a prominent Theosophist. Johrr Woodroffe took the Bachelors Degree in Law from University College Oxford (1884-88), and in

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1890 joined his father at the Calcutta High Court. He was promoted to the Indian judiciary in 1904, knighted in 1915, and retired from the High Court in 1922 to return to University College, this time as Reader in Indian law. Woodroffe was a judge in Calcutta at a time when judges, police officers and informers were targets of extremist violence. The Indian press and Indian lawyers, however, found Woodroffe fair-minded in judging cases with a nationalist slant, though he lost favour briefly during the Midnapore Appeal Case of 1912. Woodroffe, along with the Tagores, E.B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy, formed the Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1907, the nucleus for what became the Bengal School of painting. The Society saw more merit in Indian designs and art forms than the Arts and Crafts folks allowed, and they defended these forms and designs against art historians and critics such as James Fergusson and George Birdwood who found Indian art inferior when judged by the norms of classical and neoclassical European painting, architecture and design. For the Society, the defence of those peculiarities of style that seemed an affront to Anglo-Latin taste rested on the view that these could not be appreciated without a philosophical anthropology of Hindu art. For Havell and Coomaraswamy, Hindu iconicity was not assessable through European criteria, nor was it autotelic; rather, it was the materialising of philosophical and psychological insights and of religious

experience.
Woodroffes second persona as sympathiser of Indian nationalism dovetailed with his championing of Swadeshi art, as evident in the three books he wrote under his own name: Bharata Shakti ( 1917), Is India Civilized ( 1918) and The Seeds of Race ( 1919). The second book was a refutation of India and the Future, an uncharitable view of India by the theatre critic William Archer, who roundly pronounced the land uncivilised after a six-w-ek tour. The first and the third books were theoretical elaborations of Woodroffes rejection of the Archer thesis, which did no more than recycle the common places of missionary and liberal-reformist prejudice. As Bharata Shakti, a collection of his public addresses and articles explained, India was an idea representing a particular Shakti. This theophanic Hindu imagining of the nation as mother goddess shared a good deal with the symbolic idiom of popular Swadeshi nationalism, as with versions of revolutionary terrorism. A class of Indians who were the products of British education policy had, however, set out to erase the idea in a bid to leap-frog into European modernity, and part of the pathology of this new India was the compulsion to disown and sneer at all things Indian. As The Seeds of Race explained, the idea was identical with race. But unlike the social evolutionism of the high imperial years where racial hierarchies placed Indians somewhere at the bottom of the pile, Woodroffe proposed the lasting and often simplistic opposition between a materialist West and a spiritual East, the staple of orientalist Indology and Hindu cultural nationalism. Instead of a facile imitative modernity, the rediscovery of this racial essence was the high road to national rejuvenation for Woodroffe, a goal that for the Society could be reached by the revival of indigenous art.

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Taylor uses Woodroffes association with the defenders of Hindu art, and his lectures in Calcutta on the theme of Bharata Shakti to unveil his two remaining and shadowy personae as orientalist scholar and as Tantrik sadhaka. From around 1904, Woodroffe took to the study and practice of Sakta-Tantra, an inclination formalised after his meeting with the Sanskrit scholar and Tantrik guru, Sivacandra Vidyarnava; not coincidentally the man who shaped the iconology of Havell and Coomaraswamy. Woodroffes lifelong though private association with Sivacandra and with Atal Behari Ghosh-a disciple of the former-led to the making of the public image of the magisterial Sanskrit scholar Arthur Avalon, the pseudonym Woodroffe used for his orientalist persona.
Sanskrit and the but had generally overlooked the vast Tantra or Agama corpus, which stretched roughly from the Manjushri-mulakalpa of the first century AD to the Mahan irvanatan tra of the eighteenth century. The neglect on the part of Indologists was partly because Tantra was seen as a corruption of the Aryan-Vaidika-Brahmana canon, and partly because of the moral opprobrium that popular imagination attached to certain Tantrik doctrines and rituals. Woodroffe/Avalons work as the pioneering European scholar and editor of the Sakta-Tantra corpus appeared mainly between 1913-23. He was the general editor of the 21-volume Tantrik Texts series for which he wrote introductions and technical glossaries, besides translating and writing commentaries on the Mahanirvanatantra, Anandalahari, Sat-chakra-nirupana, and writing expository texts on Tantrashastra and Tantrarajatantra. Woodroffee/Avalon became famous with his first publications, with Indians marvelling at a British judge with a deep interest in Tantra, while among European orientalists he acquired fame as a hugely learned Sanskritist. Interestingly, his expository work on the Tantra corpus is soteriological, without either the academic distance of European orientalism or the then-trendy mix of occultism and Theosophy. Kathleen Taylors reconstruction of Woodroffes life and career makes an exemplary intellectual biography, braiding orientalist research with colonial history; Swadeshi art with nationalist cultural politics and government educational policy; and the Indological resurrection of Sakta-Tantra with comparative discussion of the doctrinal and devotional content of other Tantrik schools. Along the way, Taylor introduces several arresting sub-plots. While Bharata Shakti took issue with the deracin6 Indian, Woodroffe/Avalons expositions of Tantra texts were responses to the criticism of Bengal Tantra by the neo-Vedanta of the Ramakrishna movement, which invented a rational Hinduism cleansed of Tantrik accretions to make it acceptable to the western-educated Indian, and respectable before a western audience. Like the tenth-century Kashmir Shaiva philosopher Abinavagupta, Woodroffe/ Avalon defended Tantra by calling attention to its non-dualist core. Tantra iconography and rituals were ways toward a spiritual goal akin to that of Sankaras

European Indology had worked on the Vedic-classical Pali canons through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

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By declaring Tantra the Sadhana Shastra of Advaitavada, Woodroffe/ attempted an apologia for the antinomian aspects of Tantra, which hardened missionary prejudices against Hinduism, and embarrassed middle-class Bengali neo-Vedanta. By repositioning Tantra as part of the Hindu high tradition, or at least as a complex and philosophically coherent system, Woodroffe/Avalon attempts to resolve the historic quarrel between the non-dualism of Vedanta on the one hand and dualist philosophical schools and the practices of ritual worship
Vedanta.

Avalon

the other. The insistence on Shakti as the intermediate term between Brahmanthe transcendental apex of the Vedanta system-and the world of existence brings a new resonance to his earlier view of India as idea or Shakti, even as it provides the key to the symbolic grammar of Hindu iconography. There is one last mystery that Taylor unravels at the end of her riveting biography. Woodroffe/Avalons sudden appearance as an erudite Sanskritist impressed many and brought Tantra to the notice of Indologists. But as Taylors indefatigable investigation shows, Arthur Avalon was an artfully constructed device concealing the teamwork of Woodroffe and Atal Behari Ghose, with the latter providing translations of texts and philosohpical expositions of Tantra Shastra that Woodroffe/ Avalon used in his books. The plan was simple and effective: the scholarship of an obscure Bengali would count for little in restoring Tantra, but when combined with the formers status as a British judge in colonial India, their project was assured of success. More than an evocative way of calling attention to a European with orientalist interests, the subtitle of the biography hints at the fertile intellectual exchange between the two disciples of Sivacandra Vidyamava. It recalls the long and extensive tradition of collaboration between Indian pundits and munshis, and European orientalists from the early days of Fort William College. Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal is an admirable work that should interest historians of modem Bengal and Indian art, and should attract readers interested in the historical and soteriological aspects of Tantra. Moreover, Taylors wideranging research and scholarship hardly ever impedes her very readable narrative, something that would make the book accessible to the informed general reader.
on

Gautam

Chakravarty Department of English University of Delhi

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