Anne Feldhaus with Ramdas Aktar and Rajaram Zagade, eds. and trans., Say to the Sun, "Don't Rise," and to the Moon, "Don't Set": Two Oral Narratives from the Countryside of Maharashtra Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii + 613 pages. 3 maps, list of maps, preface, abbreviations, bibliographical references, index. Hardcover, $99.00; ebook, $114.99. ISBN-13: 978-0199357642 (hardcover). In this volume of Oxford University Press' South Asia Research series, Anne Feldhaus, Ramdas Aktar, and

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... jaram Zagade offer well introduced, clearly contextualized, and highly readable translations of two Marathi oral narrative performances recorded decades ago under the direction of the late Günther Sontheimer. In 2006, these scholars had published in Marathi a larger selection of texts from the Sontheimer collection, and from that material they present in English those items entitled "The Story of Birobā" and "The Story of Dhuḷobā," what Feldhaus describes as that volume's "two longest, richest texts" (xi). Those performances about regional deities fill approximately seven and a half hours and twelve and a half hours of tape, respectively, and they are presented, with some excision of formulaic repetition, over roughly 170 and 280 pages. While they acknowledge the inherent impossibility to capture completely the liveliness of performance from audiotape and to present it fully on the page, this team has crafted approachable English renderings which present well both the underlying narratives and their performative richness. The volume then very much lives up to the phrase which has been borrowed for its title, "Say to the Sun, 'Don't Rise,' and to the Moon, 'Don't Set,'" a plea for extending the night, the very time appropriate for such performances. In addition to being of interest to scholars of Hinduism, this work will also be of interest to all who study oral traditions and grapple with how to present them. The text has three parts. Its first part includes five chapters that introduce, contextualize, and provide initial lines of analysis for the two transcribed performances which respectively constitute the second and third parts of the book. While the last three of the introductory chapters are slightly more analytic in nature, the introduction does not attempt to analyze the material exhaustively. Instead it strikes a good balance between giving enough information to effectively orient readers to the texts and not so much as to overwhelm them, and in it Feldhaus (58) informs us that she has begun another book "to draw out and make explicit all the vast store of information about traditional rural life that these ovīs hold." "Ovīs and Dhangars," the first chapter, provides a strong foundation for approaching the performance texts. Building upon the preface, which very touchingly discusses Sontheimer and his work, this chapter thoroughly describes the work of recording, transcribing, editing, and translating the performances. It also very clearly introduces the Dhangar community and their social position; the historical moment of the recordings, the early-1970s; and the characteristics of the Ovī genre. This chapter also concretely introduces each of the performances, provides brief summaries, and places them, albeit with thoughtful reservations, within the study both of South Asian oral