| Introduction | 1 |
| A World Lit Only by Nanus?: A Colonized Imagination Confronts Its Past | 6 |
| A Crack in Our Historiography as Vast as an Ocean: The Forgotten Pluralism of the Early Medieval | 29 |
| Ending the Śaiva Age: A Chapter Itinerary | 54 |
| Some Necessary Aporia | 81 |
| On Archives, Evidence, Tactics, and Ethics | 86 |
| PART 1 | |
| 1 Defamiliarizing the Brāhmaṇical World | 129 |
| Undoing the Binary | 132 |
| The Past Is Not Precedent: “Secular” Snakes or “Secular” Mongooses? | 142 |
| Being Brāhmaṇas? Following the Rules or Adapting to Circumstances “Just as They Are”? | 160 |
| The World of Men and the Language of the Gods: Three Brāhmaṇical Reflections on Being in the World and Becoming Brāhmaṇa | 229 |
| 2 A Beginningless Transactionality: Recovering the Quotidian Institutional Realities of the Early Medieval | 307 |
| A Beginningless Transactionality | 307 |
| Quotidian Sanskrit in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis: Introducing the Secret of Life of Institutions | 321 |
| “I Cannot Bear to Live Without You, Nameless Lover”: Procedure and Poetry in Mass Circulation | 327 |
| Before the Law: Writing and Civil Society | 334 |
| 3 The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge | 347 |
| Captured in Stone: The Guru’s Command (Ājñā) | 347 |
| The Differential Establishment of the Dharmas: Legal Pluralism in the Śāstra | 357 |
| Tantric Compacts: Rethinking Samayācāra | 373 |
| Governing Metaphor? Or Just Plain Old Governing? | 387 |
| Situating Difference: The Differential Application of the Law and the Śivadharmavivaraṇa | 390 |
| 4 Living in the Śaiva Age: Three Embodied Encounters with Authority and Responsibility | 468 |
| Not by Birth, but by the Sword: A Śūdra Big Man Makes His Mark | 468 |
| From Nāyaka to Īśvara: Worship and Become the God, or What Does It Mean to Be a Hero? | 491 |
| Whatever He Says Becomes Mantra: The Kālamukhas and the Śākta Tantras | 496 |
| Śivadharma Trumps Rājadharma: The Cāḷukya Kings of Kalyana in Their Own Words | 547 |
| 5 A Substantive Intervention: Reading the Material Culture of the Western Deccan Across Region and Dynasty | 592 |
| Irreconcilable Images in Irresolvable Space: The Changing Cāḷukya Temple | 598 |
| Where Is Bhairava? Or, the Changing Place of Power in the Deccan | 610 |
| Mainstreaming the Terrifying Lord: From Court to Monastery and Back Again | 658 |
| 6 Art and Terror in the City of Śiva: Śākta Artisan Imaginaries and the Making of a Material World | 677 |
| A World Made Fit for Images | 677 |
| Unmaking the Makers: The Sublimation of the Kārukas as a Creative Force within Tantric Imaginaries | 702 |
| The Artisan as a Social Agent | 750 |
| And That Is Why He Created It This Way: Nondualism and the Culture of Material Images on the Path of Bhairava | 763 |
[[Pxx]]
| How to Learn the Āgama and How Not to Tell a Story: The Piṅgalāmata and the Sociology of Knowledge in Medieval India | 773 |
|---|---|
| Charity Starts at Homa: Radical Nondualism, Philanthropy, and the Making of a Śākta World | 808 |
| Revealing the Secret: Purity, Generosity, and the Worship of Caṇḍeśvara | 836 |
| PART 2 | |
| 7 Remembering Medieval Maharashtra: The Early Seuṇa Yādavas in the World | 893 |
| A Return to the Root: Encountering the Medieval in Folk Culture | 901 |
| Follow the Flows: Mahālakṣmī’s Travels in the Deccan | 933 |
| Seuṇadeśa: The Seuṇa Yādavas, the Somavaṃśa, and the Somasiddhānta | 983 |
| 8 Śākta Cosmopolitanism: The Seuṇa Yādava Imaginary Before Hemādri | 1062 |
| An Argument in Search of an Archive: Problematizing the Yādava Brāhmaṇical Ecumene | 1062 |
| Going with the Flow: Being a Brāhmaṇa Intellectual within a Śākta Imaginary | 1118 |
| In the Court of the Lion and the City of the Goddess: Visions of the Bindu | 1153 |
| Experiencing Liberation under the Umbrella of Advaita: The Post-Tantric Teachings of the Vivekasindhu | 1198 |
| PART 3 | |
| 9 Universalizing Hindu Dharma: Hemādri and His Legacy | 1258 |
| Reinventing the Western Deccan: The Seuṇa Sea Change | 1258 |
| Prelude, The Caturvargacintāmaṇi: Encountering the Text through Its “Lost” Division on Tīrtha | 1323 |
| Placing and Displacing the Dharmas of Place: Pilgrimage in the Tīrthakhaṇḍa | 1333 |
| Exercises in Excising a Śākta Landscape: Hemādri and the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya | 1387 |
| A Religion for Bureaucrats: Reinventing a Purely Brāhmaṇical Philanthropy | 1425 |
| Hemadpanthi: The “Reformation” of Temple Culture under the Law | 1459 |
| Outcasting “Difference”: The Making of the Tantric Subaltern | 1540 |
| 10 Why I Am So Clever, Why I Write Such Excellent Books, and What I Did to the Gods: Hemādri Reimagines Brāhmaṇical Thought | 1565 |
| Why I Am So Clever: Autobiography of the Pandit as an Egomaniac | 1567 |
| Universalizing Hindu Dharma | 1591 |
| Why I Write Such Excellent Books: Reading Like a Pandit, Judging Like a God | 1619 |
| What I Did to the Gods: Feeding Your Ancestors while Fending off Mīmāṃsakas | 1641 |
| Before the Age of Vedānta: Dharma without Devotion in Twelfth-Century Varanasi | 1718 |
| 11 Staging Devotional Advaita in Thirteenth-Century Maharashtra: Possession, Poetics, and the Anxiety of Influence | 1763 |
| The Essence of the Matter: A Brief Prehistory of Devotion, Non-duality, and the Śākta Tradition of Direct Experience as They Pertain to the Emergence of “Vaiṣṇava” Bhaktiśāstra | 1766 |
| Inventing Bhaktiśāstra: Reevaluating the Aesthetic Background of the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā | 1786 |
| The Two Devotions, or How to Render the Spontaneous Banal | 1830 |
| The Substance of Advaita: God, Personhood, and Materiality in the Kaivalyadīpikā | 1853 |
| Devotional Advaita in Early Medieval Maharashtra and the Fate of the Vīra | 1875 |
| Conclusion: Śaivakālasaṃhārasamkṣiptasāra | 1956 |
| Gadyānukramaṇikā | 1958 |
| Bibliography | 1974 |
[[Pxxi]]