The Gods of India

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But then you have these sentences a few lines later: "Shiva and Ganga met as two excesses. Shiva allowed the celestial river to break over his head before touching the earth, which otherwise could not have survived the impact. And in ever bathing the motionless Shiva's head, ever flowing in streams down his face, Ganga stopped the scorching god from withering up the whole world." Here, in an explanatory gloss that's typical of Calasso, we get a mixture of something that sounds like hip European anthropological theory ("two excesses") with what might be a traditional Indian understanding of Ganga's love for Shiva. Then again, it might be a whole lot of Calasso—or a bit of all the above. Rather than risk the smoothness of his narrative voice, Calasso avoids writing anything as pedestrian as "according to medieval Indian commentators." Elsewhere, too, Calasso plays with themes that clearly fascinate him—the role of sacrifice, the passage from the vague, shapeless gods of the Vedas toward well-defined personages like Vishnu and Kali—in language that moves from the vocabulary of ethnology into a poetic voice that blurs the line between Calasso and classical India.

Bringing the literary and philosophical treasures of the old civilizations of Asia into the West is a great endeavor that someday will be seen as part of a two-way Renaissance that's been going on since the heyday of Indomania. At its best, the effort proceeds with a paradoxical combination of boldness and humility. It's thrilling that Calasso, in company with so many other Western writers old and new, feels moved enough by the Indian tradition to join it to his own intellectual landscape; and his portrayal of Indian mythology lacks nothing in color, complexity, and fascination. But in blurring the line between what is his own, what belongs to Western scholarship, and what comes from the texts themselves, he rubs out the difficulties and pitfalls of the process of cross-cultural interpretation. What he gains in vividness and flow he loses in necessary humility before the task—and before one of the oldest and richest traditions on the planet.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print