Content area
Full Text
ETHICAL LIFE IN SOUTH ASIA. Edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. viii, 290 pp. US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-253-22243-5.
The subject of this stimulating collection are actual practices and lived experiences through which people in South Asia are produced and produce themselves as ethical/moral agents. The pace is set by the notion of "ethical life," outlined in Anad Pandian and Daud Ali's introduction, that brings to the fore projects of self-crafting, the cultivation of embodied moral dispositions through which people engage with economies of "virtues" articulated across complex and overlapping "moral traditions." Bringing in conversation scholars from different disciplines, this volume underscores, on the one hand, relationships between projects of self-making and "particular forms of collective life," and on the other the specific historical contexts sustaining, or undermining, the discursive production of traditions of ethical engagement.
The collection opens with a section entitled "Traditions in Transmission." Here, Daud Ali's chapter focuses on subhasita, didactic verses circulating in elite, courtly circles from the Gupta period onwards. Emphasizing the acquisition and cultivation of caste/status-specific qualities or virtues, gunas, these texts underscore the embodied nature of ethics, whereby moral perfection simultaneously entails physical beauty and worldly success. The recitation of these verses in courtly circles constituted a moral public, an avant lettre public sphere of dialogue, confrontation and interaction. Mnemonic learning of ethical poems characterizes pre-colonial Tamil tinnai (verandah) schools analyzed by Bhavani Raman. The inculcation of ethical values associated to an agrarian economy takes place via the cultivation of mnemonic and sonic skills enabling the transformation and refinement...