ABSTRACT
Hagiography can be defi ned as ‘a branch of biography with the task of narrating the lives of the saints’ (Rühle 1958: 26). As such, and in its property as a narrative genre, it borders on other genres such as biography, mythological accounts and historiography. Scholarly perception of hagiography has often focused on the blend of ‘solid historical description’ and ‘phantasy-born legend’ (ibid.), and efforts have been made to defi ne criteria for the isolation of historically valid information from ‘literary topoi’ (Paul 1990: 20). A high degree of stylisation and stereotyped characterisation has no doubt developed in various hagiographical traditions of different religions, and the problem of historical validity is a serious one indeed. However, it is not the only one, and hagiography can be investigated without problematising the factuality of its narrations; William Smith (2000), for example, takes a different approach and studies patterns and motifs of Indian hagiography instead of sifting facts from fables. Rupert Snell remarks that the focus in Indian studies used to be on primary texts, and hagiographies, if taken into account at all, were treated as a kind of commentary:
Such ‘biographies’ typically contain elements of the fantastic such as miracles and a variety of chronological implausibilities offensive to the historical basis of objective research principles; such ostensibly ’biographical’ writing has often, in consequence, been dismissed out of hand as a tedious impediment to verifi able historiography. More recent research on this literature, however, sees it as addressing and revealing facets of belief and attitude which, though at some remove from historical actuality, lie at the very heart of the traditions that they represent; and indeed this literature allows us to understand more fully not only the nature of the traditions being studied but also the mechanics whereby they propagate themselves.
