Tiruvannamalai: Un lieu saint Śivaïte du Sud de l'Inde, vol. 3: Rites et fêtes by FrançoiseL'Hernault; Marie-Louise Reiniche; Richard DavisJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 124, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2004), pp. 382-383Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132245 .

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382 Journal of the American Oriental Society 124.2 (2004)

documents translated by T. Burrow (A Translation of the Kharosthi Documents from Chinese Turkestan [London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1940]), and the seventh and eighth centuries in Khotan. After all, Niya was less than one hundred miles from Khotan, and the Kharosthi documents frequently mention ref- ugees from Khotan.

What next? All readers of this catalogue will join me, I am sure, in urging Prof. Skjaerv0 to tackle for his next project the Khotanese documents held in Paris.

VALERIE HANSEN

YALE UNIVERSITY

Tiruvannamalai: Un lieu saint sivai'te du Sud de l'Inde, vol. 3: Rites et fites. By FRAN OISE L'HER- NAULT and MARIE-LOUISE REINICHE, with Supplement: Le Pararthanityaptijavidhi: Regle pour le culte quotidien dans un temple, by HELhNE BRUNNER. Paris: ECOLE FRAN;AISE D'EXTREME- ORIENT, 1999. Pp. 342, illus., maps.

With this volume, scholars at the Ecole franqaise d'Extreme-Orient in Pondicherry have brought to completion an immense collective project, pursued over almost twenty years and filling six published volumes, to study in full depth a single South Indian religious site and its community. The location chosen, Tiruvannamalai, in North Arcot district, Tamilnad, is the site of an ancient Saiva temple, the Arunacalesvara temple, with a large corpus of inscriptions dating back to the early Cola period. The town remains a lively place of pilgrimage in contemporary Tamilnad. The project has previously exam- ined Tiruvannamalai in terms of its epigraphy (vols. 1.1 and 1.2), its archeology (vol. 2), the religious sociology and history of the temple (vol. 4), and the town's demographics and economics (vol. 5).

This volume completes the broad study by providing a full account of daily temple worship, festi- vals, and the ritual calendar consisting of numerous annual observances. In addition to the full and de- tailed description of temple rituals, the volume is enhanced by 124 striking photographs taken primarily by the two authors, numerous line drawings and plans, and appendices of Tamil texts relevant to the history of Tiruvannamalai rituals translated by Paul Albert. Finally, the volume includes as a lengthy supplement a translation of the Pardrthanityapiijavidhi, a Sanskrit ritual text often ascribed (incor- rectly) to the twelfth-century Saiva Siddhanta master Aghorativa, here translated by a modern master of Saiva Siddhanta studies, H6lne Brunner.

This volume enters a crowded field. Numerous are the travelers, anthropologists, and historians of Hinduism who have offered descriptions of the ritual activities of the great temples of southern India. The spectacular and very public annual festivals put on by the temples have especially attracted atten- tion. One thinks, for instance, of several important studies (by Dennis Hudson, Carol Breckenridge, Chris Fuller, and William Harmon, among others) of the Minakshi temple in Madurai and its ritual, or of Paul Younger's work on Cidambaram. However, for descriptive detail and comprehensiveness, the presentation here by L'Hernault and Reineche is unsurpassed.

The authors organize and present their extensive materials carefully. They begin with certain myths that have long been associated with the site, notably the identification of the Tiruvannamalai mountain with Siva's manifestation as the limitless column of fire known as Lifigodbhava. Such mythical asso- ciations, they observe, are not determinative, but one finds that they are laced in various ways into the ritual program. The authors go on to outline the ritual calendar. The ongoing ritual observances of Tiruvannamalai are organized around cycles of time, starting with the cyclic recurrence of day and night, the week, the lunar month, the year, and on to still larger units of time. Starting with a descrip- tion of the daily ritual observances of the temple, the authors then provide an account of the principal festival of Tiruvannamalai, conjoined with the Karttika mahadipa, the celebration of Siva's manifes- tation as Lifigodbhava. This is certainly one of the most thorough descriptive accounts of a temple mahotsava yet published, and will be valuable for all students of South Indian Hinduism. The ritual calendar of the temple provides for special occasions throughout the year. The authors document the

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Reviews of Books 383

complete schedule of these other festivals and observances, rather than just the most spectacular one, as many have done.

L'Hernault and Reiniche recognize a tension in the Tiruvannamalai series. This volume, focused on rituals and festivals, presents the religious practices in a clear, organized, "structuralist" fashion, which might suggest an idealized fixity, an "atemporal harmony" in the temple's scheme of myth and ritual. This could be at odds with the historical and sociological approaches of the other volumes, which reveal more clearly the complex, changing, and contested qualities of Tiruvannamalai's traditions. The authors suggest that we think of the ensemble of temple ritual as a work of art, admittedly one of enormous complexity. It is a privileged moment that allows outsiders insight into the religion of another. Of course, for the many ritual practitioners and participants who sustain this year-round work of perfor- mance art, the stakes are much higher.

In the introduction to her supplementary translation, Hdlne Brunner recounts the efforts she and others have made to locate the authoritative textual sources for daily worship in temples such as Tiru- vannamalai. As she notes, paddhati works, much more than the principal Saiva Agamas, have provided practical guidance for generations of temple priests in southern India. However, the Somalambhu- paddhati of the eleventh century, which Brunner has translated and annotated in four hefty volumes, and Aghorasiva's Kriyakramadyotika of the twelfth, best known of all paddhatis in South India, devote themselves to "private" worship (a~tmrrthapijad) rather than "public" or temple worship (parartha- pifja). This fact led Brunner to turn to other texts explicitly concerned with pardrthapi~ij, and especially to one attributed to Aghoraiiva, the Pararthanityapiajividhi. The translation she provides here is not a complete one, for she abbreviates the text whenever the public ritual parallels that of private worship, already available in the Somalambhupaddhati.

To Brunner, however, this text proved to be disappointing in two respects. First, it was not possible to match the injunctions of this allegedly twelfth-century text with ethnographic descriptions of con- temporary ritual practice. (It would have been truly remarkable if one could.) Brunner therefore makes no claim about the text's practical application. Second, the work is evidently not one by Aghoraiiva. The frequent use of Vedic mantras in preference to Saiva mantras is one clear indication of later com- position. The translator's disappointment aside, her translation of the Pararthanityapjijavidhi is a valu- able addition to the literature on South Indian ritual and temple practice.

Just as this volume was being completed, bringing the two-decade project on Tiruvannamalai to a close, Franqoise l'Hernault died. Reiniche speaks of l'Hernault as the cheville-ouvriere (lynch-pin) of the entire project. This outstanding volume, along with the others in this impressive series, serves as a worthy memorial for l'Hernault's indefatigable work in the study of South Indian iconography, arche- ology, and religious history over a period of more than thirty years.

RICHARD DAVIS

BARD COLLEGE

Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940. By JEFFREY COX. Stan- ford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. ix + 357. $55.

The study of Christian missionary activity in British India has been transformed in recent years, as researchers increasingly challenge and revise the established dominant narratives about the beneficial work of white male missionaries. Social historians recently have focused on the convoluted relation- ships and interactions of missionaries, the imperial government, and Indians before and after 1857. His- torians of gender have also begun to trace the central role of female missionaries and the opportunities provided to them by their work in India. However, there have been few attempts to place these emerging studies coherently into a larger picture, especially for northwest India. The book under re- view incorporates recent research in order to examine the complexity of missionary activity. In this book, Jeffrey Cox has concentrated on northwest India, mainly the Punjab region and Delhi, where

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