678 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES the land-man conditions and existing land distribution patterns of the area. Our justification is the usual one that there appears to be little likelihood of any large scale programme of redistribution of land in the near future" (p. 486). In the end, Ghate seems to justify the direct attacks on rural poverty programs not so much because he expects them to confer direct benefits on the rural poor but because such programs may somehow generate pressures from below for structural change (pre- sumably the poor will become increasingly frustrated about the gap between what is promised to them and what is delivered). F. TOMASSON JANNUZI University of Texas at Austin The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in the Northern Indian Tradition. By DANIEL GOLD. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. x, 256 pp. $29-95. Over the past two decades there has been a remarkable increase of Western schol- arship on devotional literature in modern Indian languages. The prolific Krishnaite poets of the Braj area have attracted the most attention, but important studies have also been made of individual saint-poets, such as Kabir. This literature pertains to two main types of devotional worship: sagun bhakti, the worship of immanent gods through divine images; and nirgun bhakti, the worship of the living guru as a man- ifestation of transcendent reality. Daniel Gold's book is a scholarly attempt to develop a general perspective on the latter type. He shows that the nirgun sants are not un- connected individuals but form a distinct spiritual tradition that combines various elements in the Indian religious landscape. His subject is the character of sants re- ligiosity rather than the quality of their poetry. The book is divided into three parts. The first presents sant tradition in the sociohistorical and religious contexts of North India. Gold relates the rise of lineages of holy men to the appearance of feudalism in "postclassical India," but his sketch is too rudimentary to be convincing. The religious background of sant tradition is given by contrasting the devotion focused on the Radhasoami sant with the worship given to Krishna in Nathdwara, a center of Vallabha's Pustimarg, and the worship given to Brahma in Pushkar. The second part compares two sants formative for the tradition, Namdev and Kabir, with twow»/s from the eighteenth century, Paltu Sahib and Charandas. Gold's description of the life and works of the latter two saints is very interesting and a valuable contribution to our knowledge. However, considering the fact that a major part of his book concerns the Radhasoami lineages, it is disappointing that Gold has little to say about Tulsi Sahib of Hathras, the putative guru of Soamiji. Even more important, it remains unclear why and how exactly Soamiji used the name of Radha, Krishna's divine lover, in his devotion to the Formless Lord. In fact, the major theme of the historical relationship between nirgun and sagun bhakti remains almost un- touched. The third part of the book discusses the roots of sant tradition in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sufism. Unfortunately this discussion is not based on historical ar- gument but on assumptions about what are the essential features in these religious traditions. Moreover many of these features, such as the idea that the discipline of conscious humility is much more dominant in Sufism than in Ndth piety or Vaish- navism, are not evident at all. The question of the boundaries between religions can