I descended to the field of classical indology from the lofty heights of western philosophy. As a graduate student I had spent four years studying two giants of European thought, Aristotle and Hegel, whose respectful student I still consider myself to be. But circumstances not defined by philosophy led me to the discovery of the world outside Europe. Indian philosophy was for me an obvious anchor as was the comparative study of religions. As my knowledge of Sanskrit increased and my understanding of the depth and beauty of Indian culture widened, I jumped on the opportunity offered to me to study the history of one of India’s most sacred places, Ayodhyā, which became the subject of my PhD research. I had landed on holy ground.
The studies presented here take their start from 1986, the year that my Ayodhyā book was published. Thirty-one articles are collected in the present volume; they span a period of thirty years, during which I worked mainly at the Institute of Indian Studies of the University of GroningeṇThey are the backbone of my research and naturally follow the intellectual development that informed my academic career.
The reader may notice a gradual shift away from theoretical, say philosophi cal subjects to a historical, cultural orientation in which two mainstreams come together, strands that I found entwined in the holy ground that was my first object of research: the Sanskrit textual tradition, including epigraphy, and the material culture as expressed in works of religious art and iconography. It was only while working on this volume that I gradually discovered that the history of holy places has been a leitmotiv throughout my scholarly endeavours. And this has been so because I have been and still am fascinated by the potential for understanding, if text and art are studied in close combination in the ac tual field where they meet: two types of sources that release their maximal informative power when they are bound to one and the same locality. After Ayodhyā my attention focused on the culture of Vidarbha, in particular during the two centuries of Vākāṭaka rule. My second monograph, The Vākāṭakas, which appeared in 1997, thus carried the subtitle: An essay in Hindu Iconology. Hegel’s place was taken by Panofsky.
Apart from this general intellectual direction, there have been two major chal lenges which, more than anything, have enriched my research and left their imprints on this volume. One is the Kevala–Narasiṁha Temple Inscription found on the Rāmagiri (Ramtek), the other the discovery of the ‘original’ Skandapurāṇa, found in ancient Nepalese manuscripts in the National Archives (Kathmandu).
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Our edition of the first, the KNT inscription, has gone through two subse quent revisions. The first edition (Bakker & Isaacson 1993) is given here as study No. 6, in which later revisions and conjectures are added to the apparatus and footnotes, including conjectures published here for the first time. The se cond revised edition is contained in Bakker 1997, and the third, partial edition (Bakker 2010c), is our study No. 17.1. The importance of this inscription for the history of the Gupta–Vākāṭaka age cannot easily be overrated. Evaluation of its content has informed studies Nos. 7, 14, 15, and 17.2–3 of this volume.
The second discovery has resulted in the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, of which so far five volumes have appeared (SP I, II A, II B, III, IV), and at which a varying team of scholars has been working since the 1990s of the last century. This work has prompted a series of articles by several authors with the common subtitle Studies in the Skandapurāṇa. Of these, three have been selected for the present volume, studies Nos. 10, 13, and 27. The SP project has also resulted in a third monograph, The World of the Skandapurāṇa (Bakker 2014).
In selecting these thirty-one studies out of a total of eighty-five articles I applied—in addition to considerations of quality—the general, though flexible rule not to include those articles that may be considered preparatory studies, that is studies whose final form has been integrated in a (later) monograph, edited volume, or introduction to our edition of the Skandapurāṇa. This en tails that some subjects that have occupied me a great deal may appear un derexposed in the present volume, such as, for instance, the critical edition of Sanskrit texts, 1 the history of Vārāṇasī, 2 or the archaeology of the Vākāṭaka sites, Ramtek and Mansar. 3 With one exception, No. 30 (Bakker & Bisschop 2016), I have selected articles that were written during my work at the Uni versity of Groningen, that is until 2013. Study No. 17 combines and integrates three articles that were published separately. 4 Two essays are published for the first time in the present volume: No. 16, an English translation of an ar ticle originally published in Italian (2010), and No. 31, my valedictory lecture (2013), which concludes this book. The articles selected for this volume are marked by an * in the reference list; the latter contains only works referred to in this volume and does not comprise a complete bibliography.
The critical reader may ask what aim is served by another edition of articles that have already been published. The question contains the answer. The present volume not only collects and reproduces articles that have been pub lished, but it edits them agaiṇI have taken the liberty of revising the original publications, in some cases rather thoroughly, and I have brought their contents in agreement with my other writings. In so doing I have tried, to the best of
1 See e.g. the Prolegomena to our Skandapurāṇa edition, Volume 1 (SP I).
2 See e.g. the Introduction of Skandapurāṇa Volume 2 (SP II A).
3 Dealt with in e.g. Bakker 1997; Bakker 2004d; Bakker 2008.
4 Bakker 2010c, 2012, 2013b.
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my ability, to put them in accordance with the latest insights. In brief, the aim has been to make my published work more consistent and up-to-date as far as possible. This does not imply that I have rewritten earlier work. My intention has been to strike a balance between leaving the original article intact wherever possible and reformulating and emending the existing publication when needed. When my views have changed in such a way that rewriting would affect the original too much, I have presented my changed position in footnotes.
The revision described above has a few important consequences. All arti cles have been typeset anew. Preliminary Abstracts, Acknowledgements, and Keywords have been left out. The separate bibliographies have been assembled in one list of references at the end of the book. The text of the studies has been newly divided according to headings and subheadings which appear in the Table of Contents. In order to serve the aim of welding a collection of studies into a real unity, I have added hundreds of cross-references. Illustrations have been inserted whenever I found them useful and the volume is concluded by an Index.
The book is divided into three parts: I Early Studies (1986–2000). II Stud ies in the Early History and Culture of North India. III Studies in Early Saivism. As most divisons, this arrangement is relatively arbitrary. It pre cludes a strict chronological order of the original publications and allows a thematic ordering only to some extent. This compromise between chronology and themes means to facilitate a ready access of the reader to the subject of his/her interest, whereas the sequence of studies opens the possibility to con tinue the development of a theme as it has evolved in my thinking. Where a thematic sequence was not possible it is hoped that cross-references may guide the reader further. Despite selection and revision, a certain amount of redundancy could not be avoided.
This volume has been composed as part of my work as curator at the British Museum (2014–2019) for the project: Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State (ERC Project no. 609823). I am grateful for all the help I have received from my colleagues in this project and the museum staff. Special thanks are due to Dr Michael Willis who as ‘Principal Investigator’ has initiated and guided this project. I am grateful to Dr Dory Heilijgers for proofreading and making the Index. I also thank Prof Harunaga Isaacson (Hamburg) and Prof Peter Bisschop (Leiden) for permitting the inclusion and reissue of articles that we wrote together (Nos. 6, 11, and 30).
Hans Bakker
British Museum, 1 May 2019