478 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 3 (2013): 449–480

narrative with that of Amrita Pritam and Vash is under-developed. This

strand should have been strengthened to enable an effective reckoning
with the limitations of Subhashini’s story as ‘testimony’. For, in Pritam’s
novella Pinjar, we do get an imaginative representation of the different
stages through which a survivor of traumatic violence passes before
reconciliation might be possible.
Datta’s study does highlight the complicity of common people in
collective violence during what Paul Brass (2006) called episodes of
retributive genocide during the partition. Such holes in individual and
collective memory and ambiguous responses to traumatic events deserve
further investigation. Researchers like Datta may at times risk getting too
close to their subjects, and being trapped in the mirror-box of memory.
Rather than the model of the epistle, such materials call for a more
rigorous analytical engagement with the debris of the past, while avoiding
impressionistic sentences like ‘Avenge (sic) Remorse Forget Silence
Transcendence’ (p. 210). This might enable the secondary witness/historian
to resist a transferential relation to the subject, even while acknowledging
the inevitability of the double bind that may result.

REFERENCES

Brass, Paul R. 2006. Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern
India. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective.
Caruth, Cathy. 1999. ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton.’ In Trauma: Explorations
in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 128–50. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Hindu College TARUN K. SAINT

University of Delhi

Gananath Obeyesekere, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary

Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. xx + 622
pp. Plates, notes, glossary, index. $50 (hardback).
DOI: 10.1177/0069966713496353

Gananath Obeyesekere is unusual among contemporary anthropologists

in the way that he uses the comparative method, cutting through a host

Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on May 28, 2015
 Book Reviews / 479

of disciplines, such as, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, history,

literature, indology, philosophy, etc. In this work on the phenomenology
of visionary experience, he continues with themes that are present in
his earlier works such as Medusa’s Hair (1984), where he dwells on the
relationship between personal symbols and culture.
In a series of fascinating case studies that range from prophets such
as Gautama Buddha, medieval European mystics like Julian of Norwich
and Teresa of Avila, modern visionaries such as the poet William Blake,
theosophists like Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott and Damodar
Mavalankar to psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung, Obeyesekere sets
out to explore transformative, visionary experiences known as ‘the
dark night of the soul’ (p. 11) that challenge the certitude of knowledge
derived from Reason. Of course, critiques of the Enlightenment
valourisation of the cogito and of the reflexive self, the ‘I’, are already
minor traditions in South Asian anthropology. Scholars such as Ashish
Nandy and J.P.S. Uberoi have both contributed to the study of alternate
knowledge traditions using the case study method—the former through
his insightful psycho-biographies of Indian thinkers and latter through his
study of pre-Enlightenment knowledge traditions in Europe. But for this
book, however, a vantage point from which we may make sense of the
range of different kinds of visionary experiences is Weber’s correlation
between worldly disenchantment and the progressive development of
rationalism. For Obeyesekere, the domination of reason may itself be
accompanied by an enrichment of our private fantasy lives—a growth
of what he somewhat whimsically calls ‘inner worldly enchantment’ (p.
368)—modifying Weber’s famous phrase. The closure of our minds to
the validity of visionary knowledge that follows from the overwhelming
domination of reason and knowledge based on empirical experience
may however have led to new kinds of knowledge and disciplines that
gave them validity—one such being psychoanalysis with its interest in
dreams. In fact, a tentative hypothesis that Obeyesekere suggests is that
as these alternate modes of knowing and experiencing come under the
sway of Enlightenment reason, visions decrease giving way to dreams.
What is the kind of knowledge acquired through meditation—through the
emptying of the mind of discursive reason and of the active consciousness?
The term ‘It consciousness’ (p. 202) adapted from Nietzsche is used to
characterise the modes of knowledge that are part of the experience of
meditation—thoughts that come to the mind as they wish, divinely revealed

Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 3 (2013): 449–480

Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on May 28, 2015
480 / Contributions to Indian Sociology 47, 3 (2013): 449–480

or heard (shruti) rather than through the reflexive ‘I’. To what extent is it
possible to read experiences that range across such a vast expanse of time
and space? Obeyesekere presents his argument as an encounter between
psychoanalysis and anthropology, and explores the interface between
personal symbols and cultural symbols. In my view, we need a more
anthropological reading of psychoanalysis but that perhaps is beyond the
scope of the argument in this volume. Obeyesekere’s ability to enter into
the intellectual worlds of the visionaries that he writes about and to discuss
their ideas from their own perspectives is admirable as is the sensitivity
with which he weaves the autobiographical voice into the text describing
some of his own dream experiences, leaving us, the readers, to make of
them what we will.

REFERENCE

Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1984. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Reli-
gious Experience. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Department of Sociology ROMA CHATTERJI

University of Delhi

Downloaded from cis.sagepub.com at PURDUE UNIV LIBRARY TSS on May 28, 2015