In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Bha\gavata-Pura\n≥a combines its own version of Epic narrative with the aesthetic sensibility of poetry (ka\vya) and dance (nr≥tya). Its theology is thus imbued with an aesthetic as well as narrative “logic” that operates around the centrality of absence. In discussing “many ways of dying” and the pastiche-like nature of the Pura\n≥ic narrative, I have emphasized the complex of dying, the multifaceted imaginings around death as opposed to literal death. This, as mentioned, places one in the imaginative province of myth. There are, however, several specific modes of narrative in the Bha\gavata, strands of discourse appropriated from different traditions in a seemingly less than unified fashion. In this chapter, the principle strands of Veda (theological iconic), alamæka\ra (poetic), itiha\sa (Epic), bhakti (devotional), and dars;ana (philosophic), will be untangled to see how they influence the representation of death and loss in the Pura\n≥a. The centrality of loss also blends into a series of self-reflective issues around representation itself which underlie much of the Bha\gavata’s project. By focusing on the “semiotics” of the text, or “how it produces meaning,” one may see different ways in which the Bha\gavata grapples with a “tension between fusion and separation” which Sudhir Kakar claims continues to characterize much Hindu subjective experience.1 Perhaps as fundamental to the death-narrative as the various tales of the dying, is the semiotic issue of the basic incompleteness in linguistic representations of reality. This “incompleteness,” interestingly enough, is often equated with mortality, and with language as well, for they are both part of the dualistic world which normative Veda\ntic ideology relegates to the realm of illusion. One philosophical term often used to describe such dualism or “difference” is “bheda,” which is used in the Epic to mean “wound” (among many other things). This may 29 2 THE SEMIOTICS OF SEPARATION point to a connection between philosophical discourse and subjective experience, an anathema to traditions that maintain strong subjectobject distinctions, but quite accurate in regard to normative Indian thinking. For the “woundedness” which difference often implies (i.e., the woundedness in the sense of suffering from birth, disease, old age, and death, as well the “difference” implied in their phenomenologies of transition) all too often proceeds from the arrows of Ka\ma, the movement of desire personified.2 In Bha\gavata discourse, language and love intertwine, being bound up in the movement of desire, ever wanting but never arriving at finality. The problem, known in the post-structuralist world as that of the “floating signifier,” (the absence of any ultimate stability to the linguistic sign and hence to any narrative), haunts this work, much as the “problem of desire” does. Again and again one meets situations in which finalities collapse as the flimsy moorings of apparently stable situations are graphically and searchingly portrayed. In the case of this Pura\n≥a, however, there is the philosophical assertion of an a\s;raya, or “ultimate resting place.” Language and love do have an end. Thus, one may initially be tempted to label the Bha\gavata-Pura\n≥a as “logocentric” in the Jacques Derridean sense of its having an ultimate finality. Indeed the Bha\gavata states, “All these are parts and portions of the Supreme Being, but Kr≥s≥n≥a is the Supreme himself.”3 This “logos,” however, is quite an unusual one in terms of Western experience. “It” plays a flute and operates along with others, for example within the confines of a small cowherd village. The common and unfortunate interpretive reaction to this scenario is to reduce it to one’s own terms through one’s own language (i.e., “Kr≥s≥n≥a is God,”), although there is no one word in the Pura\n≥a that could actually translate as such). The actual epithet “Bhagava\n” (possessor of bhaga—prosperity, fame, glory) implies greatness and wealth, while the devotional mood, in which Bhagava\n is realized , already implies a community, a “holding company” if you will, in which numerous participants have shares (since bhakti has the meaning of a “portion” or “share”). In the Bha\gavata, moreover, the “problem” of the floating signifier can be likened to the problem of samæsa\ra itself. Language keeps revolving through endless association, while Absolute Beingness (like death and dying) challenges efforts of representation. Indian philosophical traditions, beginning with the Upanis≥ads, have often discussed the dilemma of repeated...

Share