As an undergraduate at Bard College, it was encountering The Alchemical Body, and with it, the realization that there was space within the life of the mind where a scholar could spend a whole lifetime dwelling in possibility and making real discoveries that made me decide to pursue this as my vocation. It has been a great privilege to be David Gordon White’s student. It is his compassion and his insight that made completing the present work possible during often trying times. It was David who redirected my focus, encouraging me to hone my sociological imagination and center the transactional realities of everyday religious life in a manner that has transformed my scholarship. No one else in the Western academy would have not merely endured but copiously commented upon this much academic prose, sometimes sending it back to the kitchen when it failed to live up to his exacting standards. I am forever grateful. Thanks to Barbara Holdrege for her kindness and superb sense of structure and for making me master and distill her gargantuan reading list (over a hundred books, some of them a dozen volumes), particularly in regard to the Vaiṣṇava discourses on bhakti rasa, and to Vesna Wallace, above and beyond her erudition, for a being a marvelous human being who provided constant support.
I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the variety of guilds—for, what are academic organizations but the sort of samūhas we will encounter throughout this thesis operating without strong sovereignty—within which my own professional identity has been articulated and where, by osmosis and example, I have acquired my craft. Thanks are due to the AOS (American Oriental Society), especially the South Asia division, which I have been attending since 2007, where time and again I saw modelled a type of careful close reading married to rigorous historical thinking that I have [[Pv]] aspired to emulate throughout the present work. I have been a (small) part of the American Academy of Religion for even longer, since I was a junior in college, and to my great benefit, among many other virtues, it has granted me a master class in the art of effective and entertaining communication across scholarly disciplines.
Inspired by my enthusiasm, Jeffrey Lidke invited me in my junior year as an undergraduate to Flagstaff, AZ, to sit in on the conference of the Society for Tantric Studies. There, I was essentially adopted by this kind, brilliant, and wildly innovative community. So many of the ways I think about religion that are reflected in the pages below are the product of decades of learning from and eventually dialoguing with this extraordinary thought collective. My thanks to Loriliai Biernacki, Marcy Braverman, Gudrun Bühnemann, Helen Crovetto, Paul Donnelly, Gavin Flood, David Gray, Paul Hackett, István Keul, David Peter Lawrence, Jeff Lidke, John Nemec, Charles Orzech, Richard Payne, Jeff Ruff, Jim Sanford, Fred Smith, Sthaneshwar Timalsina, Aaron Ullrey, and Hugh Urban. A special thanks to Glen Hayes, for being my advocate from the very beginning. The other great thought collective that has fundamentally shaped my identity as a scholar is the American tradition of the academic study of Dharmaśāstra. My profound thanks to Patrick Olivelle, Don Davis, Tim Lubin, Mark McClish, and David Brick for including me in their approach to close reading, historical thinking, and fine-grained intertextual analysis; you have helped to shape someone who was a mere interloper into a dialogical partner. Thanks in particular to Don Davis for many years of support.
The time I spent in Pondicherry at the École française d’Extrême-Orient under the support of an AIIS research grant was one of the most intellectually fruitful and happiest times of my adult life. It was a privilege and a pleasure to study under Dominic Goodall, an incredibly [[Pvi]] gracious host, whose guidance profoundly improved my understanding of how to work with difficult and highly corrupt Aiśa texts, especially the Śivadharmavivaraṇa and Piṅgalāmata. Hugo David provided a master class in microtextual approaches to śāstra informed by the best of the European academy and Indian pandit traditions, greatly enriching my reading of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Muktāphala/Kaivalyadīpikā. It was equally inspiring to be a part of the “big table” at Pondicherry, participating to the best of my abilities in scholastic deliberation on matters of interpretation and emendation alongside such great minds as Anjaneya Sharma, S. A. S. Sharma, Csaba Desző, Suganya Anandakichenin, Charles Lee, Jason Birch, Jim Mallinson, and Akane Saito. Thanks to the Haṭha Yoga Project for including me in their workshop at the end of my tenure at Pondicherry, as well as to Viswanatha Gupta for manuscript work and transcription. Profound thanks to Shaman Hatley for his kindness over the years and for sharing manuscript material for the study of the Piṅgalāmata. As always, thanks to Prerana Patel for making the EFEO what it is and doing everything in her power to enable us to navigate the uncharted and frequently mercurial waters of Indian bureaucracy. Many thanks to Elise Auerbach of the AIIS for her patient support and advocacy, especially when the VISA granting offices and banking facilities were being difficult and to Purnima Mehta, Philip Lutgendorf, and the staff at AIIS in Delhi for facilitating logistics and hosting us fellows.
A major objective of my time in India was to work through key parts of the archive that are foundational to chapter 4 of the present study under a traditional scholar of old Kannada. Finding one who had the time and inclination, and was capable of this task, even after a search across multiple universities, proved an impossible endeavor. My salvation came in the form of the extraordinary and unduly underappreciated Tim Lorndale, with his unique facility in both philology and pedagogy, who was willing to puzzle through the sort of non- [[Pvii]] standard discourse to which pandits are often averse. Ironically, I came to India and ended up staying up at odd hours of the night to read with a videśī teacher in Pennsylvania. Together we puzzled through these two extraordinarily difficult texts, and whatever literary quality and precision have emerged are mostly due to his contributions.
As much as Tim Lorndale transformed my understanding of the world of literary Kannada transmuted into the “vernacular,” my understanding of the literary and cultural landscape of the western Deccan has been utterly transformed by my friendship with two remarkable people, Saili Palande-Datar and Amol Bankar, both of whom I initially forged a connection with through the usually not so wonderful world of social media. Apart from many hours of conversation, Saili and I spent two magical weeks on the road, documenting at a grueling pace sites both familiar and obscure in search of recovering an early medieval Maharashtrian imaginary and its dialogical continuation with a myriad of undocumented early modern and contemporary “present moments.” Through Saili, I learned to see every site through almost completely new eyes, and was able to participate as a fly on the wall in the type of deep community engagement across the boundaries of caste and religion that she so effortlessly fosters in every space through which her dynamic presence passes. Thank you for helping me encounter so many extraordinary people whose company I otherwise would never have kept. Like Saili herself, the independent scholar, epigrapher, and numismatician Amol Bankar began as a disciple of one of the last great traditional scholars of old Marathi, Brahmanand Deshpande, continuing his legacy for careful philology in the vernacular. Dialoging with him, travelling together, and working through inscriptions as well as particularly tricky portions of the Vivekasindhu has been a joy and I have benefited immensely from his tutelage.
[[Pviii]] Thanks to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute for letting me browse their unpublished Dharmaśāstra to my heart’s content, and to Dr. Dash and his successors at the New Catalogus Catalogorum Project for providing me access to the raw data that went into the compilation of the catalogues, much of which has yet to be incorporated into the published editions. A sincere thanks to the staff and directors at the GOML in Chennai and the ORI in Mysore, at the ORI in Karyavattom, Kerala, especially P. L. Shaji for hospitality and for helping me to begin to master Malayalam paleography, particularly the unusual script in which the Śivadharmavivaraṇa was transmitted. Thanks to the scholars of Kannada literature and epigraphy at Karnatak University in Dharwar, especially Dr. J. M. Nagaiah, Dr. R. M. Shadakshariah, and Dr. S. V. Padigar, and Dr. Taranatha of Mysore; to the staff and the late director of the Bharata Itihasa Sanshodhak Mandal; to the Hatnur Temple Trust; and to the many employees of the Archaeology Survey of India in Mysore, especially the regional directors who fielded my calls asking for special permissions. A special thanks to Bhimashankar Deshpande for allowing me to access his private collection of rare publications and manuscripts that is the product of a lifetime of independent scholarship, and to Dattaprasad at the trust of the lineage of Dasopanth at Amba Jogai. Thanks to the staff of the British Library for allowing me to spend hours reading and photographing their basically undocumented Kannada and Marathi publications from the India Office collection. I owe an unpayable debt to the many hundreds of people throughout the Deccan who have guided me around their villages and hosted me in their homes. Thank you for the time and kindness you showed a stranger.
[[Pix]] Sthaneshwar Timalsina has been a mentor and friend since I was in college. He has inspired me with his vast erudition and depth of wisdom, which he wears so lightly, and his profound and hard-won personal integrity. Over the course of the composition of this work, he has provided me with a number of ingenious resolutions to difficult textual problems and cracked the code on obscure allusions. More fundamentally, it is through decades of dialogue and engagement with him that I have arrived at whatever understanding I possess of what it is like to live within an embodied Tantric imaginary and swim within the ocean of śāstra. I am profoundly in his debt, for he has removed obstacles large and small.
[[Px]] The very same algorithms that have been used to radicalize populations have pushed me deeper than I ever would have ventured into the online world celebrating heritage and epigraphy in South Asia. Where others have found conflict, I have found incredible fellowship, where people from all walks of life come together to collectively make sense of the material landscape, especially in the Heritage and Culture of India group, going strong at 50,000 members. Thanks in particular to Shankar Ajjampura, Thomas Alexander, the late John Anderson, Kathie Brobeck, Sachin Dixit, Pavan Maurya Chakravarti, K. P. Ravi Chandra, Uday Kumar, the late Prakash Manjrekar, Corinna Wessels-Mevissen, Parag Purandare, Amar Reddy, and many others. We have modeled how we can collectively learn together both inside and outside of the academy. Thanks to the great scholar artisan Puttuswamy Gudigar, a living link to śilpin traditions of the western Deccan, for sharing about his family traditions, including a longue durée association with Shirshangi Devi. A special thanks to the great Jan Brouwer for sharing his fabulous hospitality and sui generis erudition about the lived traditions of the artisans of the Deccan in the era before globalization began to flatten the world. His recollections about fieldwork at places like Shirshangi, much of which did not make it into his published writings, proved instrumental in my arriving at core connections between past and present. Thanks as well to Mohit Kaycee for discussing his amazing fieldwork among Dalit religious communities throughout the Deccan, especially the tradition of Mōnappa, and for granting me permission to make use of his photographs of the rituals performed by the puruvants of that community who are entangled with the artisan religious imaginary of Shirshangi.
[[Pxi]] I would be most remiss to fail to acknowledge the benefit I have received from decades’ worth of inspiring engagements with Mark Dyczkowski, both in writing and in person. Beyond answering several of my queries, without Mark and his team at Muktabodha’s arduous labor in the production of open-source e-texts, especially of unpublished works in manuscript, our understanding and access to key parts of interpretive contexts that the current work is founded upon would have been greatly impoverished. In particular, I would likely have never recognized the indispensability of what the Piṅgalāmata could contribute to reconstructing the lived religious realities of the Deccan.
My gratitude to the many people whose constructive feedback, encouragement, and insight, in or outside of conference settings, helped make this better, especially those brave souls who read chapters, or who contributed in dialogue to my understanding of specific archives, including Andrea Acri, Ramdas Atkar, Gil Ben-Herut, Daniela Bevilacqua, Shailen Bhandare, David Buchta, Brian Campbell, Indrani Chatterjee, Seema Chauhan, Whitney Cox, Richard Davis, Dušan Deák, Florinda De Simini, Philip Deslippe, the late Simon Digby, Anne Feldhaus, T. Ganesan, Anya Golovkova, Eric Gurevitch, Jack Hawley, Vidula Hemant, the late Alf Hiltebeitel, Sundari Johansen Hurwitt, Jamal Jones, Katherine Kasdorf, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Sachin Ketkar, Shraddha Kumbhojkar, Borayin Larios, Steven Lindquist, the late Gerald MacKenzie Castro, Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, Larry McCrea, Nathan McGovern, Sudipta Munshi, Vasudha Narayanan, John Nemec, Christian Novetzke, Leslie Orr, Arunachandra Pathak, William Pinch, Abdul Aziz Rajput, Srilata Raman, Ajay Rao, [[Pxii]] Anusha Rao, James Reich, Tamara Sears, Anna Seastrand, Shubha Shanthamurthy, Caleb Simmons, Caley Smith, Pushkar Sohoni, Davesh Soneji, Hamsa Stainton, Eric Steinschneider, Valerie Stoker, Péter-Dániel Szántó, Sarah Pierce Taylor, Somadeva Vasudeva, Steve Vose, Chris Wallis, and Ben Williams. Thanks to Jim Fitzgerald for sharing selections from his translation of the discussions of sāmānya dharma in the Mokṣadharma division of the Śāntiparvan. I am particularly grateful to Anand Venkatkrishnan for his enthusiastic and informed feedback on a variety of chapters.
Because probabilistic reality, the universe, or the goddess (take your pick) has a wicked sense of humor, the very first work of Indological scholarship that I encountered in my life of my own accord—my freshman year in high school—was contained within an anthology called The World’s Religions. The chapters on India, largely curated by Friedhelm Hardy, presented what I now know to be basically the standard emplotment of the history of Indian religions, with one glorious exception. Even at thirteen, it was self-evident that Alexis Sanderson’s “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions” was something radically different—infinitely more interesting and appealing—than everything else I was encountering in my school’s library. And so, I asked the librarian, “has Alexis Sanderson written anything else?” At that time, the answer seemed to be no. Thankfully for all of us who study India, that is no longer the case. Our all too brief meeting was one of the best moments of my life in the academy. It is self-evident that this work would be inconceivable without his scholarship and the tradition he has engendered. I hope he will find it of some use.
I began reading the Vratakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi a few days after my daughter Amelia took her first consecutive steps. She is ten now, and in the interim she has patiently and with usually impeccable temperament endured her parents dragging her all over the world and all the over the Deccan as well as the piling up of papers—draft after interminable draft—all over the house. Her younger sister Lillian, a COVID baby, missed out on the fun travel but not the Indologically induced clutter. Don’t worry love, Mommy is finally finished looking over Daddy’s dissertation. In this life, if we are lucky, we leave beyond two legacies: our art and our children. This thing that’s clogging up your hard drive is my art. Amelia and Lilian are my children. I have dedicated much of my life to ensuring that both of these two different sorts of priorities thrive and arrive at their full potential. Profound thanks to my parents, David and Stephanie Schwartz, and to my grandparents, for their patience and support. They helped shape me into the person I am today.
This thesis is dedicated to my partner, the mother of my children, and my friend: Elaine Marie Fisher. It began with our first conversation on the steps of 80 Claremont Avenue, you discussing Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, and I, Śākta Tantra. Who knew where that would take us and that it would last a lifetime. In terms of matters both big and small, Ending the Śaiva Age is better because Elaine Fisher listened, contested, encouraged, and objected while I brainstormed and rambled and then had the forbearance to read the damn thing over and over again. Particularly in the final stages, her meticulous attention to detail immeasurably improved upon many a translation and ferreted out scores of hidden typographical errors, especially stray akṣaras in the footnotes. When it comes to whatever remaining sins of commission or omission, whether intentional or nonintentional, I have committed in undertaking this effort, I ask the reader for their indulgence.