and Gehlawat demonstrate how and why Hindi film is far from obvious or transparent and requires diligent, rigorous academic attention, specifically transitioning into and through the twenty-first century with the unrelenting manifestations of cosmopolitanism and globalization and their ramifications for the form, content, and future of Hindi cinema. ERIN O’DONNELL East Stroudsburg University—Pennsylvania eodonnell@esu.edu Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World. By ROBERT DESJARLAIS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xii, 295 pp. ISBN: 9780226355733 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). doi:10.1017/S002191181800284X Robert Desjarlais’ s Subject to Death is a deeply haunting and evocative book about the mourning rituals within Hyolmo society in Nepal. The text uncovers a collective process of witnessing and responding to death that answers a set of questions posed in its penultimate chapter. Why do Hyolmo rites invoke so many varied images of the deceased, only to dissolve them in subsequent ritual moments? Why do the rituals proceed from tangibility and graphicness to abstraction, anonymity, and emptiness? And how do these rituals transform or assuage the grief of those who mourn? By placing these framing questions at the end rather than the beginning of the book, Desjarlais asks the reader to proceed through the text in a state of relative unknowing that is overwhelmed by the rich complexity of sensory details, characters, and narrative frag- ments of loss. The effect is one in which the reader experiences death as a rich source of unknowing or overwhelming dissolution, as well as a creative exercise in remaking and transforming that enables a kind of “remembering to forget” (p. 222). On the one hand, the rites seem directed at the living, who are given an object lesson in the deep Buddhist truths of impermanence, emptiness, and no-self, as well as the distant possibil- ity of transcending an endless cycle of rebirths that all sentient beings are subject to until enlightenment. On the other hand, the rites are a guide for the deceased, who are given instructions to depart as well as assistance in gaining a good rebirth through the merit generated by their relatives. Further, the rites imply a ritual play or mastery over the uncontrollable trauma of death that suddenly and inexplicably disrupts the predictable and mundane flow of life. Rituals of mourning offer a “template of grieving” (p. 221) that allows relatives to move from the sharp, raw pain of early grief to more manageable and subtle forms of sorrow that reestablish a more predictable flow of time through ritual repetition and a periodic structure of linked rites. The reader learns how Hyolmo mourn- ing rituals digest and manage the pain of death while fashioning new images and effigies of the deceased that move away from discrete tangible life towards more abstract notions of impermanence and emptiness. Desjarlais describes the rites of mourning using the Greek term poesis to indicate the humble process of transformation that tries to influence the broader laws of karma that will determine the fate and rebirth of the deceased consciousness. While this term is evocative, the use of Western theorists—Freud, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze and Guttari, and Blanchot––seems out of place at times and not as cohesive as the tentative Book Reviews—South Asia 221 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002191181800284X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 3.239.6.172, on 04 May 2021 at 14:58:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at