268 Reviews of Books

he not infrequently suggests that they have done so deliberately. Thus the statements of others are
"clearly slanted" (p. 13), or "favor performers who know the least about the classical epics" (p.
16); one scholar's account "makes the term bhuta fit his theory" (p. 24.), while another's is
dismissed as a "strained insistence" on a set of facts that Hiltebeitel finds inconvenient (p. 86); and
so on.
Sometimes Hiltebeitel appeals to research of his own in order to counter the observations of earlier
researchers. Thus in arguing against Blackburn's explanation of the relationship between ritual and
narrative in the Tamil bow song tradition, he refers (p. 32) to a single interview which he carried out
at the Melakujam festival - neglecting to mention that Blackburn's own work is based on "eighteen
months of field research in Tamil Nadu" devoted to collecting "information about bow singers,
songs, festivals, and manuscripts" as well as "175 hours of bow songs on cassette tape. The total
number of stories in the collection is sixty-one" (Stuart H. Blackburn, Singing of birth and death,
Philadelphia, 1988, p. xxii).
More often, though, the attempt to discredit prior research is made by misrepresenting what is said
by the researcher. My own work on Pabuji seems to me to come in for this treatment particularly
often, perhaps because it is a northern tradition in a language to which Hiltebeitel does not have
direct access. Hiltebeitel repeatedly manipulates my statements to suit his own purposes.
Thus on pp. 13-14 he takes me to task for examining the evidence for the historicity of the events
of the story, when it is "virtually certain" that the source for even the earliest version of it is "epical";
the casual reader would not guess that 1 make much the same point myself, but that it is argued rather
than simply asserted. On p. 39 my remark that goddesses "are relatively unimportant in the
Mahabharata and Ramayana" is interpreted as showing that I underestimate the role of "goddesses and
heroines" (my emphasis), and then extended further still: apparently I "treat these texts as if they
originally did without females of any kind". On p. 93 a phrase of mine ("Sindh or Kutch") which, in
its context, quite clearly refers to a difference of opinion among informants is taken as indicating
"vagueness" on the part of one informant whose version of events Hiltebeitel wishes to dispute. On
PP- 93 ~4 m y factual reports of disagreements between informants about some aspects of an
incarnation system are twisted to yield results different from mine, and these are then used to show
that I distort my own evidence (what Ian Fleming would have called the Big Lie): I "peripheralize"
this, "marginalize" that, and "downgrade" the other, all as part of a "strategy" to treat doubtful
incarnations as "formulaic (read: nonliteral, exaggerated, metaphoric, mere and simple) and
interpolated" - seven words, not one of which I use in the discussion in question. And so on; and
so on.
This is why I shall not finish reading Rethinking India's oral and classical epics: I cannot see any point
in doing so. When - as a result of reading or writing a book - I know something about a topic, I can
see that Hiltebeitel's treatment of it is invalidated by his wilful misrepresentation of both fact and
opinion. There seems little to be gained in reading what he has to say on topics where I do not have
the benefit of prior knowledge.
JOHN D. SMITH

INDIAN SEMANTIC ANALYSIS: THIS "NIRVACANA" TRADITION. By EIVIND KAHRS. pp. xv, 294.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

This elegant book is a meticulous examination of the nirukti or nirvacanasastra, a tradition of linguistic
analysis parallel to, but not as widely known as, the grammatical uyakarana. The tendency among

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 Reviews of Books 269

Indologists has been to interpret a nirvacana as a device for etymological analysis. Kahrs's intention is
to offer a new interpretation - that a nirvacana is rather a method for extracting semantic content.
The book, whose scope is therefore narrower than its main title might suggest, begins with a brief
discussion of methodology (Chapter 1). There then follows a review of the extent nirvacanasastra
literature (Chapter 2), a corpus comprising only Yaska's Nirukta along with its three commentaries
(Durga's fyvartha, Skandasvamin and Mahesvara's Niruktabhasyafika, and the varttikakara), and
Nilakanfha's Niruktaslokavarttika. Chapter 3 is a study of the application of nirvacana analyses in the
tenth to thirteenth century AD. Kashmiri exegesis of Saiva scriptures on ritual, centred on a searching
case-study into the nirvacana analysis of the name of the Tantric deity Bhairava. The nirvacanas in
Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka are examplary (TA I. 96; cf. Kahrs, pp. 72—74): "[He is called 'Bhairava'
for the following reasons: because] he carries (bibharti) the universe, according to [his] nourishing [it]
and supporting [it]; also [because] he is carried (bhriyate) by it. Moreover, because his form is rava, the
roar, by fact of his being endowed with self-cognition. [He is] also [called Bhairava because] he
favours those terrified (bh'tru) by sarnsara".
This is followed by a chapter evaluating in considerable depth the patterns of nirvacana analysis to
be found in Yaska's Nirukta. The pattern exemplified by N 9.26 "apalj apnoteh" is by far the most
frequent. It is here that Kahrs presents a major argument for his reinterpretation - that in the
explanatory component of a typical nirvacana analysis ending in -tel) or -eli, it is possible to construe
the ending as a genitive as well as an ablative. On the basis of his evaluation of the patterns found in
the Nirukta and its commentaries, Kahrs proposes a substitutional model for nirvacana analyses: X
[stands in the place] ofY, in preference to the etymological: X [is derived] from Y.
The fifth chapter, which accounts for a third of the book's length, does not continue with the
nirvacana literature, but presents instead a lucid study of substitution in two other regions of Sanskrit
literature, Paninian grammar and the ritual Sutras. Panini's rule A 1.1.49 sasthi sthaneyoga defines the
substitutional genitive (sthanasas(ht), and Kahrs finds commentarial evidence to support the inter-
pretation of sthana "place" as artha "meaning", in addition to its usual interpretation prasariga, which
Kahrs translates as "possible appearance". Reading this interpretation with the substitutional model of
nirvacana analysis leads to: X in the meaning of Y, and so finally to the view (Chapter 6) of nirvacana
substitutes as "placeholders in semantic space" (270; cf. pp. 73-4).
A difficulty with the book is that this notion of a "placeholder in semantic space" is never made
sufficiently precise. The function of a nirvacana analysis, we are told, is one of extracting a definite
description from a name, a description which establishes a relation to a verbal root: "[I]t is the very
power of nirvacana analysis to give for any term a unique description of its referent through the term
itself, thus forcing the term to reveal its semantic content. This is fundamental to the way in which a
nirvacana works" (p. 48). According to the substitutional model, the name "stands in the place of" a
description, but in just what sense is it a substitute? What is the semantic work of the substituted
description? Kahrs tells us that "the most fundamental aspect of nirvacana analysis [is]: why is
something called what it is called?" (p. 131). This suggests that the definite description is implicated in
a "causal explanation of why a word is the right word for something" (p. 172). The explanatory
scheme is reminiscent of Quine's example "Giorgione was so called because of his size" (Quine 1969:
139; cf. Kahrs, p. 180), and it seems that the function of the explanation is to cite the reason or
reasons on the basis of which name was initially given. Kahrs appears tempted by this thought, as
when he speaks of the "causal explanation revealing the action or event which caused the initial
baptising . . ." (p. 99).
There are, however, a number of difficulties with this idea. The first is that there is no evident
reason why the description implicated in the causal explanation of something's receiving a name

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 270 Reviews of Books

should be part of the semantic content of that name. Even if one were to concede that names have
descriptive semantic content (a thesis to whose hotly contexted status in contemporary and classical
Indian theory Kahrs does not refer), it is a familiar point from the causal theory of names that the
description that "fixes the reference" of the name need not be identical with the one that "gives its
meaning" (cf. Kripke 1980, Evans 1985).
Another difficulty is that the suggestion is hard to square with a second fundamental aspect of
nirvacana analyses, that typically more than one analysis is given for each name - a feature particularly
well illustrated by Abhinavagupta's nirvacanas for "Bhairava." Kahrs explains the possibility by
appealing to the idea of there being "alternative placeholders in semantic space," a notion he seems
here to explain in terms of sameness of meaning. Alternative descriptions for which a name can be
substituted have the same meaning as one another, and each has the same meaning as the name itself
(pp. 269-70; cf. 158). The problem is that the alternative descriptions given in the analyses of
"Bhairava" are clearly not synonymous, nor can more than one be implicated in a causal explanation
of Bhairava's being so-called.
Kahrs refers more than once to Davidson's discussion of the inscrutability of reference (pp. 3, 97,
277), the thesis that the function assigning truth-values to every sentence in a language is invariant
under transformations of the references of each name in tandem with correlative transformations of
the extensions of each predicate. The relevance of this discussion to the method of nirvacana analysis is
not at all clear. Presumably his idea that there is a connection between alternative nirvacana analysis of
the same word and alternative but extensionally equivalent truth-theories for a given language; but
how can this be, when reference is preserved under alternative nirvacana analysis but not under
alternative truth-theories? Davidson's point is that fixing the truth-value of every sentence in a
language does not uniquely determine an assignment of referents to terms. The existence of
alternative nirvacana analysis, on the other hand, shows that fixing the reference of a term does not
uniquely determine an assignment of explanatory description.
Some of these difficulties are due to the rather undifferentiated notion of meaning to which Kahrs
appeals. We have seen that he does not distinguish between the reference-fixing and the meaning-
giving uses of definite descriptions; nor, more importantly, does he distinguish between semantic and
nonsemantic ways for a description to be associated with a name. Insufficient sensitivity to the
ambiguities within the notion of meaning to which he appeals leads to an attempt to understand the
description extracted from a name by a nirvacana analysis both as entering the semantic content of the
name and as being implicated in a causal explanation of something's being so-called. There is another
idea, only occasionally hinted at, but one which if it had been more fully developed would, I think,
have avoided these difficulties. That is the suggestion that the nirvacana device is a means for "semantic
creation" (p. 86). One might develop the idea by thinking of the function of a nirvacana as a technique
for myth-making, creating around a name a body of beliefs associated with the thing the name
denotes. Kahrs begins to develop this idea when he says in a rather Foucauldian vein that "it is
impossible to separate discourse from the notion of power, in particular the power to be semantically
creative" (p. 6), and just as importantly the social power to be able to enforce one's semantic
creations. Thus it was, Kahrs concludes, that the method of nirvacana analysis "became a powerful
tool in cultural discourse" (p. 277). Those who had authority over nirvacana analysis were in a social
position to constitute a cultural domain of "objects" and "meanings", in the sense that they defined
the conditions for a discourse and a body of knowledge. It ought to be clear, however, that the
notion of "meaning" appealed to here has little to do with the notion of semantic content; the failure
to make that distinction is the only failing in an otherwise splendid book.

The book is generally free from typographical errors; on p. 275, line 35 read sthanivadbhciva for
stanivadbhava.

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