Narayana Rao took up the distinction between the recorded text and the received text again in an essay on Purāna that was published in The Hindu World. Narayana Rao begins his discussion by referring readers to his review of Lutgendorf, but it should be noted that in this second discussion, the category ‘received text’ now appears in the singular:

Elsewhere I draw a distinction between the recorded text and the received text in India (Narayana Rao, 1995). What is recorded on palm leaf, and later on paper, is not the entire text, it is only a part of it. It acquires its fullness in performance, at which time it is appropriately recreated by the paurānika, who is trained in reading the Purānās and interpreting them. His knowledge, which was not written down, would be crucial in determining the received text. The recorded Purāna text tells only part of the story. When the paurānikas who knew the received text disappeared, scholars were left with only the recorded text, which has become our sole text. Simply reading the recorded text in a linear order, without the training in performing it, scholars found a number of irresolvable contradictions and discontinuities, not to mention a plethora of scribal errors. But if the early scholars had actually studied the Purāna in performance and learned how the trained performer constructed and presented a Purāna in each performance, we would have an entirely different kind of Purāna scholarship today. Instead of suspecting the panditas, the agents of transmission of this tradition from generation to generation, if the early scholars had striven to understand the nature of this text culture, a whole different way of asking questions would have emerged.

The paurānikās who knew this text culture had been initially marginalized and eventually disappeared from the scholarly scene. So much so that the entire scholarship of the Purānās has been conducted viewing these texts as artifacts with little direct interaction with the users of these texts and their textual practices. The textual activities of this culture—production, transmission, performance, and reproduction, performance, and reproduction, which includes the training of the paurānikās, the principles and methods of text creation they employed, and the rules governing such activities—need to be properly understood. In the absence of such an understanding, texts collected from their original locations and stacked in the air-conditioned rooms of libraries and studied in isolation could only give a distorted picture. The Purāna culture where hundreds and even thousands of paurānikās served as silent authors without claiming individual recognition—all speaking in the voice of the revered Vyāsa over such a long period of time in the history of India awaits to be properly understood (114-115.)

The emphasis on the paurānikās here, and to the training and culture of paurānikās, is certainly reminiscent of the discussion of the karanams in Textures of Time, that Narayana Rao wrote with David Shulman and Sanjay Subramanyam [New York: Other Press, (2003).] This emphasis on training and education, as well as performance, moves the idea of ‘received text’ away from that of a notion of text creation that include an openness to chance in performance towards one that emphasizes the determined nature of text creation in addition to the multiplicity of received texts. With this emphasis, Narayana Rao moves the idea of the ‘received text’ away from issues of performance towards culture and as a result another understanding of the ‘received text’ emerges, that of the culturally-authorized recreations and re-interpretations of a particular text.

This is a different and perhaps a more complex conception of the ‘received text.’ It displays how Narayana Rao’s notion of this phenomenon involves a deep interplay between closing off possible interpretation (something which may not exist at all for the recorded text) and the ways that a text can still leave many doors open. It also points to a question of what this interplay between closures and doors that remain open demands of our reading practices. In intriguing ways, this more complex understanding of the notion of a received text overlaps with questions raised by attention to the phenomenon of intertextuality, which also involves both closing off and opening up the meanings of a text. By turning to the education and culture of panditas, Narayana Rao helps us to see that the received text becomes a determinable and proximate possibility (potential proxima) that cannot be discerned completely in isolation from the recorded text itself. All this reminds us just how important the rich imagination of context is for reading a text in a way that allows one to maintain an openness to its many-layered history and significance.

It seems clear that when we learn from Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text and employ it to interpret other kinds of texts in South Asia besides the Puranas or Tulsidas (I have found this notion of the received text useful for interpreting a wide range of South Asian literature, ranging from secular poetry like the genre of messenger poetry (dutakavya) to Buddhist sutras) we best employ it when we keep both sides of Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text in play. That is, when we use the idea of the received text to interpret South Asian texts, we want to attend to how a text actually becomes ‘many texts’ in the world through various kinds of practices of performance and reception, even though these ‘many texts’ are all called by the name of a single ‘recorded text.’ When we use the idea of the received text, we also want to attend to how other practices both guide and constrain the production of textual meaning, especially those practices associated with the training of performers and skilled readers.

What is particularly subtle about Narayana Rao’s idea of the received text is the way it draws our attention to a complex interplay between closures of meaning and doors that remain open to new meanings. As we become more capable of tracing the workings of this complex interplay, we will develop our own kinds of reading practices, as students of South Asian texts, that are capable of engaging it more adequately than we currently are. And in this, we see that one of Narayana Rao’s greatest gifts to us is the way that again and again he turns our faces towards better futures of scholarly understanding and literary appreciation.