Chapter 1, “Defamiliarizing the Brāhmaṇical World,” questioned the long-standing tendency to treat conceptual frameworks like “Brāhmaṇism,” “Brāhmaṇical identity,” and “Brāhmaṇical ideology” as trans-historical categories with a fixed and immutable content—as opposed to ones that are historically and geographically contingent, internally contested, and constantly and often self-consciously evolving. On the basis of engagement with a wide range of primary [[P1958]] sources from the classical period, we began to disaggregate “classical Brāhmaṇism,” revealing a range of competing tendencies and social and epistemological visions—different ways of “Being Brāhmaṇa”—already present within Sanskrit discourse. In particular, much as Dvivedi had suggested, an empiricist “Indian way of knowing,” encapsulated in the dictum that one should proceed according to context or circumstances—yathāsthāna—proved to be as integral to elite Sanskrit knowledge traditions as the more familiar programmatic vision of human action being guided by injunction (yathāvidhi), where theory as envisioned by elite Brāhmaṇa pandits supposedly always proceeded practice. Moreover, unlike their prescriptivist counterparts, these equally elite conceptualizations of rules and meaning as context-, discipline-, and community-specific proved to be deeply dialogical with the working presuppositions that also animated non-elite social realities and the quotidian experience of everyday life on the subcontinent.
Through close and careful reading and source criticism, we called into question many of the major evidentiary pillars that have been presumed to support an emplotment of Indic history that identifies the Gupta era as defined by the full-blown emergence of an irreducibly theistic mode of Brāhmaṇical religion, articulated in the idiom of śāstra, monopolizing resources, wedded to state power, and that ascribes a pastoral and disciplinary role to Brāhmaṇas while granting them a monopoly in the domain of religion. We also examined how the projection of an invariant “Brāhmaṇical ideology,” where Indic social theory and the operation of disciplinary power is wholly conflated with the ideological apparatus of varṇāśramadharma, to the detriment of responsible social history, serves to occlude a range of other emic discourses reflecting on the nature of social reality along with the other highly pertinent modes of disciplinary power evident in particularized historical archives. Towards this end, we attended to a widely shared, and unduly neglected, emic conceptualization found throughout a range of classical śāstra about the transactional nature of an extra-śāstric social [[P1959]] world and the problematic mutability of socially constructed identities that are product of particular regimes of pedagogy and conditioning. Our inquiry then took as its guide shared reflections and anxieties found throughout classical śāstra about institutions and paradigms of Indian sociality that are extra-śāstric, where legitimate authority is determined by documentary records, not scholastic norms, a realm where it is not the pandit or the poet but the scribe and the corporation who are the holders of institutional memory and the adjudicators of norms. As we saw, especially in combination with the embrace of the guiding principle that values and standards are site- and community-specific, these epistemic frameworks and social practices held significant implications for determining what makes someone a Brāhmaṇa, or more generally, a source of authority.
Ironically, one of the consequences of recognizing the pervasiveness of site- and community-specific norms—that this pluralist episteme is deeply imbricated in the intellectual and religious life of the first millennium of the Common Era—is that the conceptual object we call “Brāhmaṇism,” whose content we treat as a set of perennial persistent norms operating outside of history, itself cannot help but become pluralized. And when pre-colonial social history is no longer read as the story of moments of passing resistance against the fixed, uniform, and unchanging canon of oppressive Brāhmaṇical normativity, what begins to emerge is a representation of Indian premodernity that is neither hagiography or polemic, but that represents religious and social change on the subcontinent in a manner attuned to the messy particularity that define fleeting human lives lived out in specific historical circumstances. In fact, it is only after we engage in this process of pluralizing Brāhmaṇism and the legal and social world in which it was entangled that we are really in a position to capture the contours of those historical moments in which something like what we have imagined as a hegemonic [[P1960]] Brāhmaṇical Hinduism comes to dominate a particular regional and historical episteme, as we will see in the final chapters.
Chapter 2, “A Beginningless Transactionality: Recovering the Quotidian Institutional Realities of the Early Medieval,” acclimated us to the diffuse application of disciplinary power within everyday life on the subcontinent by introducing us to the wonderful world of premodern paperwork and the variety of institutional spaces within which it circulated. From slave contracts, to bills of sale, to instructions given to paid labor, from property deeds, to love letters produced on spec and thank you notes for visiting dignitaries, we quickly recognized the rhetorical and conceptual continuities of this transactional realm full of non-elite social agents with the idioms of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, generally viewed as circulating within much narrower networks largely restricted to twice-borns. A similar consonance in textual format and content again speaking to a rather greater degree of diffusion of these norms was also recognized in regard to the evidentiary dimensions of an Indian courtroom, where the testimony of witnesses is recorded verbatim and then transmuted to fit the demands of elite discourse. The chapter also introduced us to what would become one of the methodological mainstays of our investigation, namely, that by thinking about the workmanly dimensions of textual production in highly formalized genres where composition involves the use of templates, and surveying a range of analogous texts or material objects that are the product of the same kind of production process, we can begin to identify the deliberate choices and insertions being made by specific social agents as they adapt inherited forms in the service of very specific localized aims. The chapter concluded by suggesting how such a method can be applied to thinking with documentary records composed in old Kannada, which offer us an even richer presentation of early medieval quotidian social and institutional realities. [[P1961]]
Chapter 3, “The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge,” shows us how mechanisms for juridical pluralism native to the Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstras themselves recognized the legitimacy, within certain spatial constraints, especially the sovereign land grant, of specific communities having their rights adjudicated and their transgressions punished by representatives who are members of an administrative incorporated body drawn from within the community itself. Not only are such representative agents granted the authority to make these decisions, but, drawing upon their own canon of entextualized codes of conduct, they are to do so in alignment with community-specific norms. Such a framework provides the conditions of possibility for the capacious religious and epistemic pluralism that comes to define the early medieval Deccan. Even more specifically, it is this tacit acceptance of “difference,” vigorously defended by political authorities, that allows for the widespread institutionalization of explicitly Tantric social imaginaries. These traditions in turn produced entextualized accounts of their community-specific norms, crafted in a manner that renders them legible within the broader realm of juridical adjudication, which are then incorporated into Tantric revelation. Drawing first the time upon the unpublished eighth- to ninth-century Śākta-Śaiva Piṅgalāmata, a Pratiṣṭhā Tantra edited from manuscript, we looked at some concrete examples of these codes of conduct and in-community disciplinary procedures, which despite their often quite transgressive content formally replicate the evidentiary best-practices better known to us from their application within a Brāhmaṇical sabhā. Through offering close readings of what seems to be the only surviving work of scholastic commentary on a work of non-Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstra, the second half of the chapter introduced us to an emic juridical framework that explicitly presents itself as a comprehensive alternative to varṇāśramadharma, complete with its own mode of sociality, [[P1962]] form of political economy, and political theology. A model was proposed for situating the emergence of the root text, the mid-sixth century Śivadharmaśāstra, within the wider political and social history of the subcontinent, which marks the transition into the world of the early- medieval. The chapter further began to make the case for the utter centrality of the Śivadharmaśāstra, whose palpable influence will be in evidence in every subsequent chapter, and its manifold reception, for arriving at a working understanding of the early medieval Deccan. Extending our engagement with the multiplicity of modes of power that defines the early medieval Deccan, chapter 4, “Living in the Śaiva Age: Three Embodied Encounters with Authority and Responsibility,” offers us extended prosopographical accounts of the professional and personal lives of three non-Brāhmaṇa authority figures. In each instance, we are offered vivid and surprising portraits of how epistemic and juridical pluralism, inflected by teachings drawn from Tantric and pre-Tantric Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva value systems, shaped lived realities. We witness the religious awakening of a Śūdra big man participant in the military labor market, whose ancestors parlayed their involvement in extreme forms of Tantric ritual into a ticket out of untouchability, enabling their descendants to marry their way into hereditary non-Brāhmaṇa regional elite families. It is then this confluence of modes of influence that enables our protagonist to leverage his social connections in the service of expanding the Śākta-Śaiva power center overseen by his new Kālamukha guru. In the next case study, we examined the professionalization process of a Kālamukha pontiff as he seeks to balance his administrative commitments with his private life as a highly accomplished Śākta polymath and yogin. In the process, we were compelled to thoroughly reassess the Kālamukha religious imaginary and its immense institutional and economic footprint. What began to [[P1963]] emerge are clear indications that in the early medieval Deccan, at least by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Kālamukha communities, enacting forms of Trika, Krama, and Kubjikā worship, are integral sites for the transmission and performance of the Tantric Śākta canon, but that in practice these commitments seem to have been thoroughly entangled with site- specific modes of religious practice that reflect regional non-elite religious cultures. In our last case study, we turn to the biographical and autobiographical reflections of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya emperor Someśvara III. As rebuttal to Bilhaṇa’s much more famous kāvya, which filtered the values and life-worlds of the early medieval Deccan through the normalizing lens of conventional literary tropology and Brāhmaṇical normativity, Someśvara’s prose presents his family history so that it reflects the eclectic pluralized cultural and religious idiom of the Deccan, emplotting a story of how his grandfather wrestled with the conflicting demands of the prescriptions of the orthoprax Dharmaśāstrins and his own Śivadharmaśāstra-inflected Śaiva commitments, at first choosing the former with disastrous consequences before finally finding sanctuary and new hope through devotional surrender to Śiva. The chapter then concludes by presenting evidence that Someśvara III’s father, the illustrious Vikramāditya VI, whose fifty-year reign represents the defining moment in the history of the early medieval western Deccan, was an avid and unapologetic participant in the cult of the yoginīs.
With chapter 5, “A Substantive Intervention: Reading the Material Culture of the Western Deccan across Region and Dynasty,” we extended our purview to the study of material culture and landscape, all the while continuing to attend to similar methods and conceptual focuss, such as a deep concern with epistemic pluralism as manifested in everyday life, the place of Tantra within diversified Deccani life-worlds, and a methodological commitment to reading out intentionality from corpuses of formally analogous cultural artifacts by attending [[P1964]] to the places where they diverge from their template. Initially, we demonstrated how the temple culture that emerges during the reign of Vikramāditya VI enacts in stone the experience of inhabiting a pluralized episteme shaped by Tantric commitments, wherein each focal point constitutes a self-contained world and the esoteric and exoteric are situated right next to each other in a dynamic, unresolveable tension. In the second section, through surveying the changing placement and conceptualization of the deity Bhairava and his relationship with royal power, we took in the wider landscape of the western Deccan and the development of its highly specific mode of material culture. This in turn prepared us for a series of encounters with the material components and iconographic features of the institutionalized religious cultures of the Kālamukhas, which were shown to be pervasive features of the lived landscape present even in the very heart of elite Kannadiga literary culture. This visual and conceptualization vocabulary then enabled us to make sense of what remains of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya capital in and around what is now Basavakalyana.
In chapter 6, “Art and Terror in the City of Śiva: Śākta Artisan Imaginaries and the Making of a Material World,” through reconstructing artisan imaginaries, we shifted our focus from understanding the built landscape of the Deccan to recovering the life-worlds of the types of social agents responsible for its construction. First, we recovered accounts of artisans, called śilpins or kārukas, acting as yogins and making use of Tantric ritual technology within a formalized system of guild apprenticeship where they were under the guiding authority of their Tantric ācārya. Then, by reading a wide array of Tantric discourses, especially doxographies, against the grain, we recovered a prehistory, extending back into pre-Tantric sources, of artisans as adepts within Śaiva-aligned systems of praxis with their own textual canons, pantheons, and conceptual concerns. These systems in turn form an important antecedent to [[P1965]] elements now identified with specific Tantric transmissions, such as the Trika and Śaiva Siddhānta. It is these adepts, acting under the guiding directions of the Lākula and eventually Kālamukha lineages that become their initiatory and guild gurus, to whom we owe much of what remains of the documentary and material cultural record of the early medieval Deccan. By returning to the Piṅgalāmata, the culminating textual production of these earlier imaginaries, we are able to engage with both the pedagogy and theology that animated these communities, where acts of craft prove to be inseparable from acts of esoteric worship carried out in an epistemically pluralized world where meaning and rules are site-specific. With that understanding in hand, we tackled the Piṅgalamāta’s extraordinary account of the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of the institutionalization of a sovereign land grant and the building of a temple comes to us replete with a vivid and detailed account of Śākta-Śaiva practices of philanthropy and its maximally distributionist model of political economy. One dimension of this discourse of much broader interest in understanding the nature of community in the premodern Deccan is that the text is emphatic that these inaugural acts of institution building as well as their annual memorialization were incorporative of both initiates and the general, even non-Śaiva, public to whom concrete material benefits would be provided. Beyond the intrinsic interest of capturing something of the verisimilitude of a lived reality that was integral to Deccani imaginaries but has never been represented in Western scholarship, this case study also served as an important rhetorical foil for the markedly different prescriptive, Brāhmaṇical vision for the founding of a temple and the institutionalization of social space we will encounter in the ninth chapter, which the mid-thirteenth-century dharmanibandha, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, proffers as the replacement for long-established Śāiva and Śākta normativities. [[P1966]]
While our study had until this point been concerned with the more generalized religious and social imaginaries of the early medieval western Deccan that were the product of the wider networks of circulation associated with the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas, their vassals, rivals, and the religious and cultural institutions whose independence they defended, from chapter 7 onward, we narrow our focus more specifically to early medieval Maharashtra, seeking to isolate the sensibilities and values that were particular to this region so we can track their reformation in the wake of the reimagining of Brāhmaṇical normativity and the state-directed suppression of Tantric socialities and institutional cultural that is the defining feature of the second half of the thirteenth century. Belying general assumptions, especially within Marathi secondary literature, that the religious and social life-worlds of early medieval Maharashtra prior to the thirteenth century are basically unrecoverable, drawing on a combination of material cultural and folklore in which there is persistent and specific memory of the early medieval, chapter 7, “Remembering Medieval Maharashtra: The Early Seuṇa Yādavas in the World,” traces the emergence of a Maharashtra-specific mode of religiosity whose distinctive nature was recognized across the regions. This modality in turn provides us with a framework for making sense of the dynasty of the Seuṇa Yādava kings of Maharashtra, whose early history proves inseparable from their strong Śākta-Śaiva commitments and affiliation with Kālamukha and Kālamukha adjacent institutional networks. Through site studies, prosopography, documentary records, and a close reading of an unstudied but seminal work of old Marathi religious literature, chapter 8, “Śākta Cosmopolitanism: The Seuṇa Yādava Imaginary before Hemādri,” examined the values among the circles of affiliation that surrounded the last Seuṇa king, Siṅghaṇa II (r. ca. 1210–1246 CE), whose court was committed to Śākta cosmopolitanism. By re-embedding key documentary records in their institutional context, our analysis seriously [[P1967]] complicated Christian Novetzeke’s model of a Maharashtra in the era before Cakradhar and Hemādri as defined by a Sanskrit-promoting “Brahminic ecumene.” Instead, the imaginary that emerged from our investigation was already multilingual and committed at almost every level to a variety of Śākta-Śaiva traditions that held a complicated if not downright oppositional relationship to caste-centric Brāhmaṇical normativity. The result was a detailed portrait of the institutional and religious realities of the Seuṇa court in the generation immediately before Hemādri institutes a sea-change in values deliberately engineered to sweep away these pluralized Tantric pasts. They are to be replaced by a universalizing vision of dharma in which the Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrin is centered as singular locus of authority and disciplinary power within the realm of religion and culture.
Our last three chapters are each dedicated to a comprehensive engagement with a different facet of the Seuṇa sea-change in the second half of the thirteenth century as it is articulated in the oeuvre of Hemādri, particularly in the various sections of the vast, unstudied Caturgacintāmaṇi and the equally seminal and neglected Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā. Chapter 9 largely addresses how the Seuṇa reformalization of Dharmaśāstra deliberately articulates a new paradigm designed to undercut Tantric imaginaries and their lived realities. In contrast, chapter 10 takes up the vision of the universalization of dharma as theology and social philosophy, demonstrating at every step along the way its utter discontinuity with prior visions of “Brāhmaṇical normativity.” Finally, chapter 11 shows us how, in the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā, through a robust new theorization of bhaktirasa. Hemādri provides the conceptual mechanics for transmuting the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s philosophy of devotional Advaita Vedānta into a program of praxis rendered accessible and appropriate for all different types of people. [[P1968]]
Chapter 9, “Universalizing Hindu Dharma: Hemādri and His Legacy,” recovered from the documentary and material culture record the untold story of how after the death of Siṅghaṇa II in 1245 CE, the existing social contract that had animated Deccani institutional cultures for hundreds of years is suddenly called into question. Through a series of case studies of institutional disruption, including an account of the eviction of the Kālamukhas of Kukkunur we encountered in chapter two and four, we examined the evidence for the implementation of a new regime of delimited juridical and property rights that placed the management of previously autonomous spaces under the watchful eye of new class of “Brāhmaṇa” legalist regulators. Effectively, this eliminates much of the economic, social, and political power of non-Brāhmaṇa religious agents. This real-world socio-political program was shown to be thoroughly consonant with the prescriptive conceptual project articulated by Hemādri Sūri in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi calling for the universalization of dharma. On the basis of both documentary sources and his own testimonials, in a manner that is itself with few precedents in the history of Sanskrit literature, Hemādri emerges from the archive as a vivid, particularized, and highly opinionated personality. With great self-awareness, Hemādri innovatively set out to articulate a new episteme that reimagines the scope, theoretical foundation, and contents of Dharmaśāstra while offering a set of pedagogical tools designed to rapidly professionalize a vast new cadre of Brāhmaṇa authorities to fill the newly crafted roles whose proliferation is mandated by his manifesto. Through the power of his office, which marries the capacities inherent with being the chief advisor of the Seuṇa king and frequently the de facto ruler of the kingdom with a new kind of governmentality made possible by direct oversight over a newly centralized transregional bureaucracy that manages the activities of scribes and record keepers present within each and every institution, Hemādri was in a unique position to rapidly translate śāstric ideations into lived realities. [[P1969]]
Thus, in chapter 9, a specific historical account of on-the-ground social change recovered through a series of case studies of documentary sources and material culture finds its complement in a series of close readings examining different aspects of the prescriptive vision of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, which articulate the values that animated such a sea change. Exploring published resources contained within the CVC that have never been the focus of serious academic study, we examine in some detail Hemādri’s account of philanthropy (dāna), which, breaking from the stances staked out by its immediate predecessors, incorporates a retheorization of property rights that, couched in an ethical critique of non- normative social standards, effectively cuts non-Brāhmaṇas out of the gift economy. This extract from the Dānakhaṇḍa is placed into dialogue with parallel discussions, from the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Śrāddhakalpa, that with great precision seek to curtail the direct participation of a large swath of the population whose life-worlds were imbricated with the Tantric knowledge systems from any meaningful participation in a shared public religious life. Complementing this analysis in turn are a series of case studies, drawing upon unpublished manuscripts containing two extensive portions of the CVC previously assumed to be lost, [[P1970]] namely, substantial portions of the treatise on pilgrimage (Tīrthakhaṇḍa) and the opening chapter of the subdivision offering a Smārta retheorization of acts of institutionalization (Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati). Read in tandem, these two portions of the text reveal how Hemādri programmatically reimagines the very nature of Hindu pilgrimage to specific existing sacred centers in a manner that overrides site- and community-specific norms. Examining the practical application of these scholastic models, we will then see how our author reinvents the practices and values that animate the construction of new sacred centers in a manner that seeks to appropriate and dismantle the existing life-worlds of the Deccan artisans and their Kālamukha gurus. As we are committed to offering an account of premodern religion that is as equally invested in understanding the methods and practices that were constitutive of specific religious life-worlds as it is in the ends, real or aspirational, towards which such practices are deployed, considerable efforts will also be directed towards offering an account of Hemādri’s textual and exegetical practices—the assemblage methods out of which he builds the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. In this spirit, each of these chapters inculcates in the reader the specific modes of reasoning that the Caturvargacintāmaṇi was engineered to produce in those who studied it as a part of the process of the mass professionalization of a new cadre of Brāhmaṇa religious authorities of various degrees of erudition. At the same time, they also repeatedly demonstrate the fundamental discontinuity between Hemādri’s micro- and macro-textual interpretive choices and those made by his predecessors within Dharmaśāstra discourse. In chapter 9, particular attention will be paid to the writings of Hemādri’s most important antecedent, to which the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s repertoire of primary source texts is much indebted, the twelfth-century nibandhakāra Lakṣmīdhara, whose Kṛtyakalpataru is the earliest [[P1971]] extant work of dharmanibandha. By juxtaposing Lakṣmīdhara’s own parallel treatments of philanthropy (dāna) and institutionalization (pratiṣṭhā), which in both cases are much more deferent to the independent nature of the values that animate other life-worlds, the ideologically and socially innovative nature of Hemādri’s reimagined “Brāhmaṇism” will be brought into sharper relief.
While in chapter 9 our chief focus had been on attending to Hemādri’s disruptive interventions into the preexisting realities of the western Deccan, with chapter 10, “Why I am So Clever, Why I Write Such Excellent Books, and What I Did to the Gods: Hemādri Reimagines Brāhmaṇical Thought,” our attention shifts to making sense of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s reimagining of the world of Sanskrit śāstra, especially in terms of its hyper-ethicalized, theistic and devotionalized recasting of the values that animate Hindu law. Again, such an investigation necessarily entails seeking to understand both “what” extra- textual aims Hemādri is trying to achieve through his work as well as “how” he makes use of specific textual practices that involve the incorporation and reconstitution of inherited textual resources and preexisting hermeneutical strategies often in new imaginative ways.
Our initial focus is the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s iconoclastic theorization of a Dharmaśāstra discourse that is not concerned with the usual questions of the duties specific to particular varṇas and āśramas, but is instead invested in robustly theorizing a universal (sāmānya) dharma, whose general contours are applicable in all contexts and to which all human agents are subject. While in the previous chapter we had focused on how this conceptual architecture is used to systematically delegitimize and dismantle the existing institutional and theological norms that organized the western Deccan while at the same time reshuffling the labor force in a manner that lead to an immediate redistribution of resources to the detriment of non-Brāhmaṇas, here we consider the theology of the universalization of a nascent Hindu dharma on its own terms. Envisioned as a form of ethicalized natural law in a manner that has precious few Indic antecedents, the dharma theology of Hemādri places all human beings under the same shared norms, whose adjudication is conveniently confined to a new social agent, the Smārta Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrin who must have also mastered the canons of Advaita Vedānta. Iconoclastically, aligned with proffering an account of shared moral reality amounting a shared human nature, for the first time in the history of prescriptive Brāhmaṇical śāstra, Hemādri offers a vigorous and learned defense of the legitimacy of non-twice-born soteriological aspirations. Intervening in ongoing discussions within Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, Hemādri asserts that, despite their lack of direct access to the Śruti, Śūdras and women can indeed achieve liberation. Moreover, the methods for doing so, albeit using a canon of internally diversified Purāṇic sources that have to be interpreted in a special manner, are structurally analogous and functionally equivalent to the inquiry processes in orthodox Vedānta. This is to say, Hemādri emerges as the earliest recoverable articulator of some of the defining features of the instantiation of Hinduism in the colonial era imagination, namely, the apparent inclusion of all Indian subjects across caste lines within a shared religious framework governed by the same religious authorities and the positing of all of the varieties of Indian religious textuality as expressing a single shared worldview and unitary intentionality indebted to the tradition of Advaita Vedānta. [[P1972]]
Such an inclusivist intervention in what for many modern readers might seem to be the relatively low-stakes world of aspirational soteriology is not merely a passing eccentricity, but a defining feature of Hemādri’s discourse as a whole. As will become evident in the case studies that follow, quite unlike with the dharma norms of classical legal traditions, in a radical break from his predecessors, the theology and presuppositions of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi are those of quotidian, common sense, everyday Indian religion. For the first time in the history of the learned traditions, this ethos and its aims is articulated and defended against its scholastic objectors in the language of high śāstra. In a sense, at the very moment that he is taking away the real-world authority of ordinary people to internally manage their own religious affairs without resorting to an intermediary from outside the community, Hemādri goes to enormous trouble to affirm what was already obvious to ordinary people, namely, that they lived in a world that was really full of gods and spirits who had to be fed, attended, and appeased, that successful navigation of these matters bestowed benefits in the present and hereafter, and that ritual grounded in scripture was the means for making that happen. Our own study of this dimensions of his interpretive program will attend to the opening chapter of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s division on occasional religious observances (Vratakhaṇḍa), which offers for the first time in the history of Indian thought a representation of a “big tent” Hinduism as well as the theistic realist theorization of the feeding of the ancestors, treated not as a scholastic abstraction but as an actual affect laden engagement with embodied and disembodied entities, contained within the Śrāddhakhaṇḍa. Both of these elements are then read in relation to their marked utter discontinuity with any recoverable antecedents contained within the scholastic mainstream. Building upon our discoveries in the preceding chapter, what comes into focus is that both the Smārta values Hemādri seeks to inculcate and the conceptual strategies he uses to reimagine his sources represent a radically new kind of “Brāhmaṇical normativity” that the Seuṇa Yādava state seeks to instantiate a disseminate into the wider world through the mass training of a new sort of Brāhmaṇa religious authority. [[P1973]]
In the final portions of the chapter, through examining and even regionalizing the key antecedents of the dharmanibandha discourse that Hemādri so capaciously makes his own, the insights we have recovered from our close readings will be placed into a wider socio-historical context. We will see that such a broad-based historical perspective once again speaks to the relative marginality even within the wider purview of eleventh- and twelfth-century north Indian Dharmaśāstra of much that to our author holds most sacred. In particular, the chapter will conclude by rendering transparent that the north Indian nibandhakāra Lakṣmīdhara shares with his successor neither his valorization of personalist Vedānta as the crowning achievement of Indic thought nor his investment in devotional theology. These observations in turn will prepare us for the final chapter in our study, which will take as its focus precisely that peculiar marriage of non-dual Vedāntic philosophical reasoning with affective devotionalism, the articulation of which, though already evident in the Caturvargacintamāṇi, comes to play a far more consequential role in the final stage of Hemādri’s intellectual life.
Finally, chapter 11, “Staging Devotional Advaita in Thirteenth-Century Maharashtra: Possession, Poetics, and the Anxiety of Influence,” offers the first account within Western scholarship of Hemādri’s Vedāntic theistic devotionalism as it is expressed in his other great and equally influential contribution to Sanskrit scholastic traditions, the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā. This is the seminal work of the discourse of bhaktiśāstra, in which the theology of bhaktirasa to which so many early modern Vaiṣṇava traditions are deeply indebted finds its initial articulation. What this chapter aims to make plain is that main interpretive context for making sense of Hemādri’s theological commitments as well as many of the key intellectual strategies and conceptual models he will deploy in breathing into being his own bhaktiśāstra arise from the very episteme of the Śaiva Age that Hemādri invests so much [[P1974]] energy in discrediting and deinstitutionalizing. This chapter thus offers both an introduction to the core arguments of Hemādri’s bhaktiśāstra, the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā, while at the same time reading the text—which on the surface offers commentary on select verses from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa—as a sustained polemical and dialogical engagement with this preceding knowledge system. We will see that while Hemādri draws upon a range of textual resources originating in the elite milieu of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and its poetic traditions, his core conceptual resources and reoccurring problematics are directly appropriated from or the product of critical engagement with what are essentially Śākta knowledge systems.
We will begin by briefly locating the counterintuitive confluence of ambiguously philosophical non-dualism and the discourse of devotion within the early goddess adjacent traditions of the Mantramārga. We will then demonstrate that, while absent from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, both the central concern of the latter half of the Muktāphala—namely, theologizing bhaktirasa, as well as a key part of the organizational framework that orders the first half of Hemādri’s text, a particular framing of the opposition between rule governed ritual, spontaneity, and a theology of direct affective experience—find their earliest recoverable articulation in the writings of the Trika exegetes, especially Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. With these insights in mind, we then turn to a close reading of the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā’s discourse on bhaktirasa. By attending to its inheritances from the traditions of Sanskrit poetics, what will be revealed is that while Hemādri makes an essentially instrumentalist use of Alaṃkāraśāstra tradition, the real problematics that animate this part of the work are best accounted for as emerging out of critical dialogical engagement with Śākta values and Śākta critiques. We will also begin to examine how Hemādri reframes his new valorization of affectively charged “direct religious experience,” so that it ceases to be the [[P1975]] provenance of an elite of adepts, while at the very same time “authentic religious experience” is decoupled from questions of adhikāra. This is to say, we will tell the story of how bhakti becomes a universalizing social force precisely as the status “being a bhakta” ceases to index juridical difference or to correspond to social and material power within the transactional world.
Having made sense of Hemādri’s devotional theology and been introduced to some of its sociological implications, we then examine the nature of Hemādri’s theism. While substantively indebted to the Bhāgavata itself, Hemādri’s theorization of the nature of a personal god expands upon and even diverges from its core understandings. We will thus delve in some detail into the nuts and bolts of Hemādri’s theistic—even materialist—non-dual Vedānta, an important resource for later scholastic traditions which has never been addressed in an academic publication. Reconstructing our author’s core arguments will render transparent the eccentricity of his Advaita philosophy vis-à-vis our normative perceptions of contemporary scholastic Advaita Vedāntic discourse. At the same time, it will reveal the essential consonance of his Vedānta with the strikingly similar and equally unfamiliar ontological and epistemological models present within an array of literature composed in old Marathi, including the contemporary writings of Cakradhar and the late-twelfth-century Vivekasindhu of Mukundarāja. What will emerge from our explorations is an alternative localized history that speaks to the flourishing as the early medieval period draws to a close of a heavily devotionalized Deccani Vedānta growing out of older Śākta traditions. That this value system appears to have represented a widespread and popular theological tradition even in the absence of the hegemonical identification of Brāhmaṇical tradition with Vedānta as a knowledge [[P1976]] system poses a serious challenge to our normative narratives about the Brāhmaṇization and Vedāntization of “popular” religion. Hemādri’s intellectual project as a Vedāntin in fact suggests that we begin to think seriously about the “popularization of Brāhmaṇical religion” as playing a pivotal role in the history of the elevation of Vedāntic traditions. The chapter will then conclude by looking at the sociological implications of Hemādri’s new bhaktiśāstra, making sense of his appropriation and subversion of his Śākta antecedents in a manner that calls for a more general reappraisal of the concrete real-world implications of bhakti as a social form and its complex and occluded relationship to the life-worlds of the early medieval Śaiva Age.
Some Necessary Aporia
Map is not territory, 1 if only for the very practical reason that the land we chart is vast, dense, and heavy, while humans are small, more immediately finite, and have a tendency to break [[P1977]] when they attempt to bear herculean loads. Since art is long and life is short, we regrettably have to make painful choices. Perhaps the most egregious omission from our exploration of the western Deccani canons excavated over the next two thousand pages is the deliberate bracketing out of a base reality that, though less familiar to Western academics, would be immediately evident to scholars from Karnataka and Maharashtra. Succinctly, a plurality of the specific sites and types of social spaces we will be exploring were also either simultaneously inhabited by Yāpanīya and Digambara Jain communities or at least regularly
participated alongside Jains in overlapping life-worlds in the context of trade, the construction of infrastructure and temples, participation in courtly cultures, and intellectual scholasticism. Indeed, the usual way of telling stories about pre-Islamic Deccani courtly cultures on the basis of their literary traditions tends to lead to the representation, at least equally inaccurate, of the greater Cālukya world, where the ruling powers typically had at least one Jain spouse and liberally patronized Jain intellectual and literary production, as a largely Jain imaginary. In the service of telling a coherent story about the making of Brāhmaṇical knowledge, we have made the counterintuitive choice, namely, of demoting the Jain contribution to a walk-on part. This approach also certainly cannot be justified on purely thematic grounds. Indeed, the very hallmark of Digambara Jain theology during this period is precisely its presentation of perhaps the most robust account of epistemological site- and community-specific pluralism to emerge from the sub-continent and thus is in a certain sense a natural fit for the story we have been telling. Instead, it should be taken as tactic, a form of epistemic bracketing that permits us to home in on and reconstruct one set of neglected life-worlds at the expense of another.
My excuse, such as it is, is that do the job properly would take another half a decade and a thousand pages. It would entail mastering a poetic canon in Apabhraṃśa and high literary Kannada only cursorily engaged with by the Western academy and traditions of vernacular śāstra, to say nothing of a multilingual commentarial tradition on Digambara doctrinal works, much of it composed in the western Deccan during the very period we have been exploring, that has yet to be the focus of any serious systematic study. Fortunately, the reader interested in such conceptual programs can get a [[P1979]] taste of two out of three of these domains of inquiry by consulting two equally ground-breaking erudite dissertations. Sarah Pierce Taylor’s 2 Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism as well as her subsequent publications look at the intersection of the deeply influential literary production of Digambara communities in the ninth- and tenth-century western Deccan and the theorization of royal power through poetic imaginaries under the Rāṣṭrakūṭa kings. This literary focus is nicely complemented by Eric Gurevitch’s Everyday Sciences in Southwest India, an excavation of the history of systematic scientific knowledge production in the fields of animal husbandry, bureaucratic mathematics, erotics, weather prediction and the treatment of disease as primarily carried out by Jain polymaths, aligned with courts of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas and Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas, who adapt the writing of śāstra into the Kannada language, producing a substantial and influential corpus of literature that here receives scholarly attention for the first time. 3 Sadly, we still await a comparably lucid and thorough treatment of the multilingual theological traditions of the Digambara and Yāpanīya Jains of a sort that would make possible a constructive querying of the core problematics we will be exploring relative to these canons. Nevertheless, it is my intention to more explicitly integrate a constructive response to these two productive avenues of inquiry into the published monograph that will emerge out of the present work.
Other paths not taken can be addressed much more concisely. At a relatively early stage in the composition of this study, I became aware of the considerable relevance of the “other” other Mīmāṃsā, the tradition of Prabhākara, to a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of pluralist thinking within classical Brāhmaṇical śāstra as well as its concrete [[P1980]] influence on later Dharmaśāstra exegetical traditions. In the absence of any comprehensive study of the Prābhākara tradition from intellectual historians on which the present work might build, this task, alas, is simply beyond my abilities. It is hoped that the eventual emergence of such studies, preliminary work on which is currently being undertaken by several researchers, will eventually make it possible to fill in this crucial piece of the puzzle.
In contrast, with regard to conversations that might more readily be contributed to in some detail, the present work also makes it abundantly clear, on the basis of a wealth of textual and especially material cultural evidence, the necessity of composing a replacement to David Lorenzen’s classic study of the Kālamukhas so as to orient general readers in Religious Studies to this specific and ubiquitous religious imaginary. 4 Such a work, building on the foundation provided by several chapters in the present text, needs to be organized around a concrete periodization and regionalization of our evidence for Kālamukhas as major social actors both within their own domains and in relation to major political powers. This will entail, in the manner modelled here throughout, systematically matching unpublished or retranslated textual evidence with its built context. However, the project will demand substantial additional fieldwork, especially in Telangana and Andhra. In the absence of such efforts, it simply too early to craft the type of evidence driven synthetic narrative contextualizing the history of Kālamukha traditions as central social actors across the Deccan that the reader may well desire. For now, we will have to make do with a nebulous sense of Kālamukha institutions as increasingly engaging in the transmission of a wide but underdefined array of Tantric [[P1981]] knowledge. A similar case holds true for this work’s sadly overgeneralized designation of “Śākta traditions” in the Deccan, which begs to be refined by a filling in the details on the basis of more particularized study of the specific Śākta Tantras whose composition can be located within the regions and periods under discussion. Even these efforts, however run up against the additional complication that I also see ample evidence for the existence throughout this period of non-Purāṇic, non-Tantric, and non-esoteric “Śākta” traditions with their own independent imaginaries which must also be studied and accounted for, especially through a judicious engagement with ethnographic evidence. Here again we must simply make do with an acceptance of the inherent polyvalence of the term, which, depending on audience, simultaneously has a number of discrete intended doctrinal referents.
On Archives, Evidence, Tactics, and Ethics
In lieu of a discussion of “method,” core dimensions of which have already been outlined in some detail while presenting an overview of the contents of the current work, it seems warranted to delineate and justify some of the atypical choices that organize the present investigation. At least from my perspective, Ending the Śaiva Age aims for a persistent archival originality joined at the hip with a relentless practice of source criticism, incorporating what the scholar of indigenous religions Sam Gill has helpfully framed as “story tracking.” 5 The [[P1982]] latter feature is directed both at the primary sources themselves as well as the existing historiography.
Assuming one treats distinct inscriptions as well as discrete subdivisions within particularly long multi-section works (often read from manuscript), the present study incorporates translations and text-critical work conducted in classical Sanskrit, Aiśa, old Kannada, and old Marathi from roughly 150 distinct sources. The vast majority of the texts under consideration have received virtually no attention within the academic study of religion in South Asia. Quite a few of them are unpublished works read from manuscript or published in such obscure places on the subcontinent that they are effectively not in circulation. Few of these sources have been translated before. In particular, Ending the Śaiva Age incorporates extensive original textual work from palm leaf manuscript on the unpublished codex unicus I discovered of the Śivadharmavivaraṇa, the late eighth-century Śākta Pratiṣṭhā Tantra, the Piṅgalāmata’s chapters on vyākhyāna, śilpa, prāyaścitta, iconography, and pratiṣṭhā based on three distinct palm leaf manuscripts, two of them in Nepalese scripts, and reconstructs from the Nāgarī paper manuscripts I discovered substantial portions of the opening and closing chapters of the “lost” Tīrthakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi of Hemādri, as well as, again from paper Nāgarī manuscript, the “lost” unpublished opening chapter of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Sarvadevatāpratiṣṭhāpaddhati. This work also makes the first extensive use of the many sections of the multi-thousand page published edition of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, translating passages from all of its divisions and digesting its contents, such that it can be entered into the conversations of scholars of Indology and Religious Studies. [[P1983]] A similar if less comprehensive effort is also made in regard to rendering the core conceptual logic of Hemādri’s Sanskrit Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā and Mukundarāja’s late twelfth- century old Marathi Vivekasindhu, the latter of which is made accessible to scholarly audiences for the very first time.
Otherwise, the sources analyzed include inscriptions in range of registers and languages (Pāṇinian Sanskrit, vernacular Sanskrit, old Kannada, old Marathi), prose and verse kāvya, works on Sanskrit dramaturgy and poetics, Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, Advaita Vedānta, Nirukta, and classical Vedic exegesis, scribal training manuals, commentaries and treatises on Nyāya/Vaiśeṣika philosophy, Āyurvedic text and commentary, treatises on mathematics and astrology, Pratiṣṭhā and Śilpaśāstra, Śākta and Śaiva Tantra, Dharmasūtra, Dharmaśāstra, Dharmaśāstra commentary, non-Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstra, dharmanibandha, Nīti, and the pleasures of the royal court, as well as non-dual philosophical writings in old Marathi. In other words, we repeatedly think about discourse outside the boundaries of genre and disciplinarity (Western academic or otherwise), attending throughout to avenues that allow for the recovery of polyvocality in culture above and beyond the voices of a presumed Brāhmaṇical mainstream. Such an approach offers as a portrait of a dynamic and multifaceted Indian premodernity where Indian knowledge systems and the cultural realities out of which they emerge are no longer simply equated with classical śāstra composed in Sanskrit. Complementing this extensive multilingual textual study is a thorough engagement with the material culture of the western Deccan. Much of these materials are also previously unphotographed and undocumented, and I have discovered several previously undocumented spaces that have evaded scholars in India or whose significance has yet to have been recognized. By and large, most of these places have yet to have been incorporated into Western academic discussions. I have visited and documented over two-hundred field states located throughout coastal Maharashtra, the region around Aurangabad, the border lands near Gujarat, [[P1984]] Marathawada, and the Konkana, distinctive cultural regions throughout both northern, central, and southern Karnataka, eastern Telangana as well as the parts of Andhra close to the eastern Karnataka border. On the basis of this broader archive, I have then selected for incorporation some key highlights drawn from this fieldwork offering particularly compelling case studies, especially privileging instances where we can match in situ inscriptions to material culture from the same period, sites of particular historical significance in terms of their premodern institutional cultures, archives that can be readily related to parallel cases, as well as particularly evocative and transparent presentations of Śākta material culture still in situ that have yet to be the subject of study. It is important to recognize, however, that from my perspective these specific case studies are typically expressions of more general sociological and discursive patterns that were equally in evidence at other field sites visited that were not incorporated into this study. In part, the extensive treatments of material culture within the present work, which often offer us examples of similar phenomena at geographically distanced locations, aim to demonstrate that the unfamiliarity of much of these materials should not be treated as evidence of their eccentricity but is in fact indicative of our broader failure at grappling with the lived realities that actually animated the early medieval Deccan.
Nevertheless, such a compilation of new and interesting materials would merely amount to a colossal and rather tedious data dump were it not be accompanied by a range of complementary approaches, extending above and beyond philological practices, to what is effectively “source criticism.” As this introduction has repeatedly suggested, at the heart of [[P1985]] this investigation is a self-conscious decision to treat both texts and objects as “made” things and then to try, in each case, to the limits of one abilities, to see how they were put together. When it comes to texts, such efforts begin with a critical engagement with citational practices, whether involving the direct invocation of a named authority or indirect allusion. In every instance, particularly when it comes to the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, whether or not such investigations were incorporated into this study, it has proven useful, when a work being cited is still extant or at least invoked in other texts, to consult the original primary source.
These efforts have been greatly enhanced through the application of the methods of the digital humanities, entailing regular GREP searches of an archive comprised of my own extensive private library of personal e-texts, complemented by resources from GRETIL and the Muktabodha Indological Library, though hard copies of many editions of Sanskrit works have also been consulted. In each instance, it has been my practice to programmatically reflect upon the wider context in which the specific citation is embedded, with the aim of determining whether it is being accurately represented, strategically and selectively deployed, or even outright falsified or reinvented. A similar approach, attending to inherited arguments and the use of particular terms of art, has been deployed when it comes to non-direct citation. This is to say, each scrap of text has been thought about in relation to what can be readily reconstructed of its intertexts.
An analogous approach has also been implemented when it comes to the study of inscriptions. Rather than treating these written expressions, much as if they were free standing citations, as self-contained realities, in all but a handful of instances I have made a point of visiting the site where they preserved in situ, relating them to the surrounding landscape and material culture. Often this simple choice radically undercuts the canonical interpretation of these documents when read as messages removed from context. Particular works of material [[P1986]] culture, whether individual sculptures or temple complexes, have also been treated in a similar manner. Each is seen not just as freestanding discrete representation, but is instead “read” relationally in connection with the wider environs, such as other objects or nearby temples, or in regard to parallel similar instantiations at other locations. In the case of early modern religious institutions and their imaginaries, considerable insights have also been gleaned by attending to their reception among living communities on the ground to whom I wish to express his profound gratitude for their knowledge, time, and hospitality. Though only select elements have been incorporated directly into the present work, either directly or through the interpretation of friends and assistants on the ground, my fieldwork has frequently involved many hours of engaging with the various inhabitants of the sites I have visited, especially religious authorities and practitioners committed to now mostly localized living traditions. Such passing anthropological vignettes not only enliven the analysis, but have frequently proved pivotal to helping me make sense of the deep pre-histories of patterns of social affiliation.
The application of a similar rigor in source criticism to the secondary literature, in contrast, is much more likely to be met with greater resistance. Within the Western academy, relatively little work, located within particularized space and time, has been directed towards the specific archives of the western Deccan with which we are primarily concerned. That being said, the general literature on “early medieval India” is quite extensive, as is that on epigraphy. Though I have invested the time in reading a plurality of these sources, starting from the mid- nineteenth century onward, also examining many of its analogues in Hindi and Marathi, by large they will make only the occasional explicit appearance in the present work. The justification is either this historiography is concerned primarily concerned with a specific [[P1987]] region, especially Tamil Nadu under the Cōḻas, where the prevailing material and political circumstances are hyper-particular but have nonetheless been analogically extended to other regions, or, in the case of more general models, a careful examination of the evidentiary basis for core claims contained therein reveal they leave something to be desired. To be quite frank, to the detriment of the field, especially when it comes to the study of inscriptions in the service of writing history with a broader focus, there is a cottage industry that has made whole careers out of “reading” strangely relevant concepts and projected ideas out of often very boring documentary records or very complicated Sanskrit discourse. Such interpretive choices are particularly common when the “larger” meaning of the actual text at hand is basically indeterminate, utterly uninteresting to the academy, or substantial portions of the record are borderline unreadable. These same examples, often receiving further embellishment, then get recycled into the standard secondary source treatments concerned with “characterizing” dynasties, recovering the ideological basis for bodies of literature, or “telling us” about the various facets of premodern Indian cultural life, after which they are imported without critical scrutiny into Western scholarship that is concerned with other topics and concepts. 6 With sad [[P1988]] regularity, attempts to trace the evidentiary foundations of these assertions back to the primary sources culminate in the discovery that nothing like what was claimed is actually in the text, that key parts of the argument are based on irresponsible uses of folk etymology, or even, that the primary source invoked is purely imaginary.
At the root of the issue are far too many professionals studying documentary records or works of śāstra without actually being able to read the languages in which they are composed. This is a problem that plagues the Kannada academy in particular, where the study of epigraphy as objects and the study of epigraphy as texts take place in separate departments and are the intended end result of two separate professionalization tracks. But it was also alas a feature of the “elite” Delhi-centric Indian academy of prior generations, which taught generations of students to think and write like Western academics while failing to ground such a study in a deep pedagogical engagement with the study of non-Western languages on their own terms that is necessary when working with primary sources. The end result is a vast and on the surface lucid historiography, seemingly much more accessible and informed than what emerged from the pen of scholars affiliated with regional universities who write in a less sophisticated idiom. The problem is that this discourse runs on the habitual cherry picking of a few words extracted out from premodern texts, which are then combined with vivid narratives serving some, often quite laudable, extra textual interest. Because they are only nominally related to the primary sources, the study of such efforts are largely not relevant to the understanding of the premodern past. After much time wasted, I have concluded it is often better to simply return to the primary sources on which this literature is so loosely based and read them for oneself. [[P1990]]
A similar dilemma, namely, why are we so preoccupied with a meta-discourse that is basically only tenuously logically connected with the contents of the archive, is posed when it comes to the justifications for engaging with the enormous historiography debating rather worn-in-the-tooth scholarly metanarratives imported from early twentieth-century academia, such as the question of whether “early medieval India” warrants being categorized as “feudal.” The irony here is that outside of the study of India, this is a conceptual frame whose analytical utility has been seriously called into question. Here it is worth observing, before we even turn to the subcontinent, that among European medievalists, there is now a general consensus that feudalism, at least treated as a unitary social system, was never an actual on-the-ground reality but is itself a multilayered anachronistic synthetic scholarly fiction. Much as in the Austrio- German school of volkisch historiography, 7 which sought out to theorize premodern modes of governance in the absence of the modern state, had proposed in the early twentieth century, close comparative studies of the documentary records concerned with transactional governance [[P1991]] in medieval Europe unambiguously reveal the existence not of a single pattern of socio- economic relations, but of an enormous range of regionalized social and political forms that were constitutive of the lived landscape between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, virtually none of which correspond to post-eighteenth-century notions of state and society. Patterns of land ownership, modes of law, and questions of who has what sort of agency were not defined by a shared “medieval mindset,” but instead were largely a regional matter. What seems to have been determinative were such factors as localized political cultures with their own discrete pre-histories, topography, as well as the sort of labor involved in the cultivation of the local stable crop. In other words, to frame these observations in Marxist terms, the evidence does not support characterizing the “medieval” world as founded on a single shared mode of production. Just as significantly, key social identities, even when they have been apparently assigned the same labels, such as the scope and character of religious authorities like bishops or what it means to be a “king,” also varied enormously across region and time period. Succinctly, the distillation of these many variants into a single “medieval feudal system” proves an exercise in futility.
Indeed, as the extraordinary Susan Reynolds has been arguing to great acclaim since the early 1990’s, in her seminal work (1994) Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted and its more recent sequel (2012) The Middle Ages without Feudalism, even in [[P1992]] regard to the French archives that formed the foundation of academic perceptions of medieval Europe as defined by a unitary and long-lasting system of land tenure founded on hereditarily inherited relations of vassalship to a lord, the very idea of a medieval world in which the central structural element of medieval social and economic relations are the institution of the fiefs and social roles of vassal and lord are barely in evidence in contemporary European primary sources. 8 In fact, such frames make their appearance many generations afterward in the second order reflections of early European Church historians and bureaucrats. In a complementary manner, Kathleen Davis has demonstrated rather convincingly in her monograph (2008) Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time that the very ideas of “feudalism,” “the medieval,” or “a Feudal Europe” play essentially no part in the arguments and reflections of the medieval world itself. 9 Instead of being a feature of the self-understanding of agents inhabiting the life-world it seeks to describe, Davis shows us that such conceptual frames initially begin to emerge in the sixteenth century as part of a juridical discourse and ultimately find their articulation in a form that is recognizable to us in the context of the early Enlightenment.
To distill a much more complex argument, Davis argues that the “feudal” first emerges as a juridical concept (ius feudali) that sought to reconcile emerging canons of “modern” state- centric law, ultimately deriving in part from Roman common law, with traditions of regional “customary law” with their own prehistories. This is to say that the “feudal” was originally a [[P1993]] description not of the world of the past, but of the “contemporary” living pluralist traditions of non-state-centric practices. Parenthetically, this is to say that what Davis has reconstructed is a dynamic very similar to what we find in Dvivedi, where the existence within a single culture of two contradictory modes of legal reasoning is first recognized and then explained away through a process that accounts for the difference through temporalization. Davis then marshals an impressive body of evidence making the case that the feudalism we know takes shape within discourses justifying the expanded sovereignty of the modern state as well as the initial articulation of the colonial project. In situ, the imagining of the feudal or medieval aims not at a description of the past on its own institutional terms, but serves as a rhetorical foil or straw man, juxtaposing a chaotic, poor, and violent past defined by mass bondage with a glorious future of order and economic prosperity, made possible through the righteous subjugation of cultural and racial inferiors living in a global south that still adheres to archaic and barbaric feudal norms. In light of the evident anachronism of such frames to say nothing of their intended rhetorical impact in situ as tools aimed at delegitimizing the lived realities of non- Western world, maybe as scholars we should be asking ourselves: what do we really gain by saying early medieval India fits a Western-centric teleology now only of marginal interest even to medievalists?
But in actuality, when we turn to the conversations that define specifically Indian exercises in periodization, the state of our historiography is such that there is even less cause for treating such discourses as the indispensable necessary backdrop for any further investigations against which our own contributions must be repeatedly justified. To be blunt, the situation in practice is that conversations about the Indian medieval are still basically inseparable from an ongoing critical evaluation, both within the Indian and American academy, [[P1994]] of the representations of non-Western societies as found in the writings of Marx and Engels as well as the history of their reception among Marxist intellectuals. The core problem here is that, as Davis demonstrates, Marx and Engels themselves inherited an articulation of European feudalism that had precious little to do with medieval European historical realities but is simply an adaptation of Enlightenment era polemical discourses intent upon the appropriation of the material and cultural resources of the past in the service of state-building. Ironically, these Marxist representations of the “medieval” simply perpetuate anachronistic metanarratives that were aimed at legitimizing the very modern Western state and capitalist mode of productions these authors so abhorred. In other words, these are lenses that were designed specifically to systematically devalue the past in the service of justifying the present. In the absence of critical self-reflexivity, the use of such tools virtually guarantees that one will be not be engaging with the contents of our archive on anything remotely like their own terms.
Yet, even where the theoretical contributions of these nineteenth-century materialists more closely aligned to our archives in a manner that would allow for responsible cross cultural comparison, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, there is something antiquarian about how our discipline, under the guise of displaying erudition, is still clinging to this whole approach when it has ceased to be promoted in virtually any other corner of the academy. When even in India itself, traditional Marxist political agendas are basically irrelevant except along the margins, just why is it pertinent that any socially or historically rooted study first has to do due diligence and take up Marxist exegesis? 10 Outside of intellectual historians who take [[P1995]] political theory as their archive, why are we still avidly seeking to find out what Marx “really means” or emend his model to align with realities of the global south or directing our energies in a point-by-point refutation of the conceptual projects of the dwindling number of people with these agendas?
Along similar rather sorry lines, why, in a world where even 1960 is closer in time to the World War I than it is to the present moment, must the discourse on Indian premodernity continue to take as its touchstone responding to an understanding of what constitutes the cutting edge of critical thinking about “Western feudalism” that is largely derived the writings of Marc Bloch (d. 1944) and the Soviet intellectual E.A. Kosminky (d. 1959)? 11 Yes, both [[P1997]] scholars made groundbreaking contributions and one can still benefit from reading their work, but given the many subsequent historiographical revolutions and advances in methodology within the study of Europe’s premodernities, the problematics they offer, which have been subject to nearly a century of critique, are hardly the most pertinent and pressing points of reference against which to compare the Indian medieval. The problem is that when we critique the theoretical foundations of the vast majority of secondary literature that tackles post- classical pre-conquest India in “historically responsible terms,” this is precisely the field on which we are made to fight our battles.
These dynamics are all the more problematic as the key monograph, which self- consciously synthesizes and adapts Bloch’s and Kosminsky’s insights, to which the contemporary literature (including B. D. Chattopadhyaya, 12 Kesavan Veluthat, even many of [[P1998]] the writings of Manu Devadevan) 13 continues to respond, namely, R. S. Sharma’s Early Medieval Feudalism, 14 is not merely theoretically antiquated, but has effectively been disproven on his own evidentiary grounds. To put the matter simply, R. S. Sharma very candidly asserts that the origins of an imagined feudal India, following the collapse of the Gupta Empire, stem from the 1) decline of towns, 2) a decrease of the use of coins, and 3) the decay of long distance trade. These developments are seen as coinciding with a new cultural paradigm of state driven divesture through the granting of land grants, a paradigm that purportedly changes property relations, leading “just like in Europe” to radical inequality and the transmutation of the population into peasants, while at the same time “exporting” Brāhmaṇical ideology.
The problem with such a model is that all of these evidentiary grounds are no longer viewed as tenable by the very specialists concerned with study of these discrete topics. 1) The study of Prakrit epigraphy has now revealed that the institution of the autonomous land grant [[P1999]] was already an integral part of politics under the Sātavāhanas as early as the second century of the Common Era and never really fell out of practice. [^1999_57] In that context, the practice played a pivotal role in the institutionalization of Buddhism, not Brāhmaṇism. There is thus nothing particularly “early medieval” about land grants, nor do they seem to be the carriers of a specific religious ideology. Indeed the recent work of archeologists examining the same period, such as Aloka Parasher Shen of the University of Hyderabad, who has given us case studies of vibrant pre-Sātavāhana local state formations that endure under their rule and persist beyond their demise, should seriously call us to question whether we should even link deep social and economic change to large-scale dynastic state formations. [^2000_58] 2) Archeological studies, including [[P2000]] those specific to the western Deccan, centered on the Gupta and post-Gupta world, have revealed with startling consistency that there is almost zero correlation between the establishing of land grants in our documentary records and forensic evidence for changes in population settlement patterns. [^2001_59] Simply put, establishing a land grant does not mean that the [[P2001]] site suddenly has more people nor even that the patterns of consumption and ideological production, as reflected in disposal material culture, change in any meaningful way. Nor does there seem to be any archeological basis for that famous canard of Indology, the expanding Brāhmaṇical frontier. Instead of being located on the periphery, the vast majority of land grants being established, renewed, and re-established are already populated and were already engaging in the same kind of trade exchange with the domains of the donor. The emerging archeological perspective, made possible by the implementation of better methods than the old approach of digging one trench at a site away from extant structures (which are usually on top of the old city) and then striating its contents, is that, rather than making new realities, just as often it seems that the state or a donor merely uses land grants to recognize and codify into law what excavations reveal were already operant on-the-ground dynamics. A similar story seems to hold true for most “early medieval towns.” Most of these are located in roughly the same places as their classical predecessors. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing to indicate a general decrease in their population or prosperity, with the caveat that the early medieval period does often see the old center of a settlement become more peripheral, thus yielding fewer material artifacts, perhaps on account of new approaches to urban design. 3) [[P2002]] Numismaticians, such as Robert Bracey of the British Museum, have shown that there is little evidence for a post-Gupta era decrease in the production of coinage and none for a decreased dissemination of coinage such as would be indicative of sudden, severe, and enduring economic decline. 15 In fact, in actuality the historical trend is that the money supply in South Asia just keeps expanding over the course of centuries. Impressions to the contrary stem from taking the curatorial practices of collectors, which naturally privilege famous dynasties and beautiful mintings over run-of the mill currency, as reflecting patterns of in situ coin circulation. Especially when you take into account the fact that the multigenerational use of the same kinds of coins as legal tender was standard practice, the idea that the economy “contracts” and that culture and governance as a result has to become localized is simply no longer supported by our sources. Finally, 4) perhaps most familiarly to Western scholarship, the evidence for a lasting overall decrease in long distance trade, presumed to coincide with the collapse of the Buddhist silk road, simply does not really exist. 16 Instead, with the onset of a supposed early medieval, there is a proliferation of transregional trade guilds suddenly reflected in the inscriptional record. Again, to the west, we see dynasties such as the Rāṣṭrakūtas forming new strong connections with the Arab world via oversea trade routes, on the one hand, 17!while [[P2003]] starting with the Pallavas (probably even earlier) there is extensive exchange going on between Kaliṅga and the Tamil country with Southeast Asia and modern-day Indonesia.
Succinctly, the purely empirical foundation that underlies this whole mode of materially reductionist scholarship has been effectively falsified on its own terms. What is left, ironically, when concrete evidence is no longer in evidence, are a essentially a number of a priori ideological claims, many of them imported from Soviet era historiography, that define the Indian early medieval as a mode of false consciousness. 18 Typically, as in the writings of R. Champakalakshmi 19 and Kesavan Veluthat, feudal consciousness is then equated with a bhakti ideology. 20 This complex is then seen as serving the structural function of legitimizing [[P2004]] the inequitable property holding patterns of “Brāhmaṇized” upper classes and the power of the king. Modes of cultural production, such as temples, for example, are thus to be read as reflections of fixed patterns of class relations, such that “understanding” them is essentially an exercise in reconstructing these very same class relations.
A certain dogmatism is a key shortcoming of the whole discourse. Where their very own chosen documentary records do not reflect the pregiven conclusions of the interpreter concerning said patterns of social relation, for example when the records in Tamil repeatedly [[P2005]] indicate that the standard terms for property possession kiḷān and kiḷavan are rarely associated with Brāhmaṇas despite the supposed omnipresence of Brāhmaṇa landholders, authors like Veluthat offer ad hoc justifications for why the normative claim, apparently lacking an evidentiary basis in their own archives, should not be dispensed with. 21
Though by no means so egregious, parallel conceptual shortcomings, particularly an inability to think about the religious dimension of the archives as a part of historical investigations in a nuanced manner, are sadly also in evidence within much of the otherwise excellent “purely historical” work emerging out of the American academy that directly addresses the social history of early medieval imaginaries. Even in the case of Cynthia Talbot’s Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra, perhaps the finest empirically grounded work of its kind to date, “the religious” dimensions of the discourse under study are approached through repeated rhetorical exercises in “conceptual bracketing.” 22 Thus, for example, the Indian temple is described “quite apart from its religious significance” in terms of its integrative social function, as a site of prestige building, or in purely economic terms. While such descriptions are always insightful and often elegant, at the heart of the formulation is the presumption that social functions, the construction of reputations, as well as pre-market economics are conceptually and functionally discrete from some reified domain being designated as “the religious,” which apparently has to be approached “on its own terms,” in a manner that denies its causal impact on the real world and its institutions. What such a [[P2007]] model side-steps is another possibility, namely, that to tell premodern stories about “integrative social function,” about “prestige building,” or about “economics,” is a wasted effort in the absence of talking about and taking seriously those types of phenomena that we now label “religion.” Indeed, the second we extract out of from our archive an essentialized “social” or “economic,” notwithstanding that the phenomena we are labelling as such are often playing out on the grounds of temples and enacted by people who identify within the records as bhaktas or ācāryas, we are imposing modern Western ideas of a purely secular realm of instrumentalist tactical rationality. From my perspective, so long as we do not fall prey to equally anachronistic romanticizing or polemical fantasies expressive of our relation to our own present, our time is simply better spent immersing ourselves in multidimensional primary sources archives and seeing what we can excavate out of them when we attend to their individuated methods of assemblage on their own terms. Taking such an approach as a point of departure, we will then be in a much more enviable position for responsibly querying the archive concerning our own present-inflected itineraries on the basis of which we can present to our readers engaging representations that speak to wider shared interests. Indeed, if we have to frame our investigation as a dialogical response to preceding scholarly discourses, a more promising approach is to intervene in contemporary conversations, propelled by a community of scholars in close dialogue, which are still generating substantive and groundbreaking intellectual production. As we will soon discover, outside the realm of Indian philosophy, there are essentially two robust and primarily evidence [[P2008]] driven research programs within the study of premodern Hindu traditions in the contemporary academy that are primarily focused on dialogical engagement with Sanskrit sources. 23 The first takes as its concern the history of Dharmaśāstra, while the second is primarily dedicated to the recovery of the textual corpus of the Tantric traditions and their antecedents. Ironically, despite the existence of numerous points of obvious overlap these two conversations have been happening in almost complete isolation from each other. As its title promises, one of the major interventions of Ending the Śaiva Age: The Rise of the Brāhmaṇa Legalist and the Universalization of Hindu Dharma is that it seeks to place these two discourses into serious and sustained dialogue for the first time.
Until the early 1990’s, in the twentieth century, both within India and in the Western academy, with rare exceptions, the study of Hindu law had largely proceeded in alignment with two research trajectories, both of them heavily inflected by colonial knowledge. In the first Eurocentric approach, the study of topics and texts within Dharmaśāstra were habitually to be treated dialogically, either in relation to the Anglo-Indian traditions of jurisprudence imposed under the British Raj or the history of European legal thinking as rooted in Roman common law. Within such a paradigm, the core analytical activity became the careful recovery of the specific meaning of terms or titles of law in classical Dharmaśāstra works. This was largely to be accomplished through two approaches. The first involved demonstrating the [[P2009]] divergence of the classical term from its application in Anglo-Indian law. 24 The second sought to scrutinize points of commonality and differentiation vis-à-vis a shared European legal heritage that had informed the rendering of a Sanskrit term into European languages through the equation of specific Sanskrit and European lexemes. 25 While much of this microanalysis, informed by great erudition, stands the test of time, what is conspicuously absent from these conversations was the consideration of specific works of Dharmaśāstra taken as coherent and differentiated wholes.
A competing paradigm for thinking about Hindu law, often fiercely anti-colonial in its expression, began to be articulated in the early twentieth century in a variety of places on the subcontinent but especially in association with a community of scholars working in what was then the Bombay Presidency. Though they differed in their particulars as well as their chosen language of expression, what such scholars held in common was a deep devotion to archival work as well as a shared perception, inflected by nationalist and politically conversative sentiments, that Dharmaśāstra demands to be viewed as an internally coherent and comprehensive system of knowledge deeply rooted in the lived realities of Indian people that should be studied on its own terms. Such a perspective found its most spectacular expression in two magisterial and still indispensable works of scholarship: Pandurang Vaman Kane’s 6,500 page English language History of Dharmaśāstra: Ancient and Medieval Religious and [[P2010]] Civil Law in India, and the equally voluminous five-volume Sanskrit Dharmakośa, largely completed under the direction of Lakshmanasastri Josi at the Prajnna-Pathasala-Mandal at Wai. 26 In a certain sense, both of these works are “historical,” which is to say they periodize a body of knowledge in chronological sequence and recognize and document divergent positions in matters of doctrine. And yet, at the same time, both works presume a fundamental unity to the discourse of Dharmaśāstra, such that, while individual topics might be approached from a range of perspectives by different jurists, participation in the knowledge system was always dependent on a shared and singular view about what Dharmaśāstra was and what it was for.
The revolution in the academic study of Dharmaśāstra, which plausibly can be seen as commencing in 1989 with the publication of Richard W. Lariviere’s critical edition and translation of the Nāradasmṛti 27 but really takes off with the 1993 publication by Patrick Olivelle of The Āśrama System, 28 combines the careful micro-textual philological work of the European paradigm with a reorientation to reading specific works of Dharmaśāstra dialogically in relation to other conversation partners within the same discipline without presupposing a necessary intervention by Anglo-Indian and European counterpoints. At the same time, this new approach begins to break from both of its predecessors in its growing recognition of the existence of fundamental and irresolvable differences contained within the discourse of Hindu Law, not merely about this or that discrete topic, but about the very nature and purpose of Dharmaśāstra, the types of agents to which it is addressed, and thus the defining features of [[P2011]] what constitutes the center and periphery of Brāhmaṇical values. In a manner much akin to a similar intervention made by scholars like Jacob Neusner in the study of Rabbinical law, much of this work takes as its foundation, largely due to the efforts of Olivelle, the critical editing and translation of the foundational works of the discourse from the late Vedic period onward in chronological order followed by the production of second order comparative reflections about their contents with the aim of detecting instances of historical change. 29 Such efforts thus provide a shared framework and mode of acculturation allowing for ongoing informed conversations among an even wider range of scholars, carried out both on and off the page, that systematically seek to refine our understanding of particular topics and their points of intersection with other aspects of Hindu thought and culture in a most productive fashion.
We will be engaging in detail with some of the key findings of this research program in just a few pages within our first chapter, such that an extended discussion of these matters can probably be delayed. For the moment, it suffices to say that what this research program has revealed, at first almost inadvertently, is that not only do the individual constituent elements that make up most popular perceptions of “a unitary Brāhmaṇical ideology” not [[P2012]] emerge all at once in a fully articulated form, but they do not even emerge out of the same sources. Instead, we find these individual elements, appearing in isolation at distinct moments in the historical records, with no implicit logical connection being forged in situ to one another. In fact, the key ideas we think of as making up a shared Brāhmaṇical worldview are scattered across written expressions that at their own historical moments of articulation seem to have represented heated agonistic exchanges produced by competing communities with very divergent visions of what it means to be a Brāhmaṇa” and what sort of world “Brāhmaṇas” should aspire to bring into being. The working out the wider ramifications of such discoveries, largely tangential to this older research program, is an integral dimension of the current project.
In contrast to the relative lack of critical self-reflection about the history of secondary literature in the field of Dharma Studies and their continued impact on the discipline, to its considerable credit, Tantric Studies has repeatedly thought and rethought its origins, often in lengthy full-size monographs. 30 As such, a deep dive into these materials, telling yet again the basic story of the polemical marginalization throughout the twentieth century of those who for whatever reason chose to take up this “red-headed stepchild” of a field of study need not detain us. Suffice it to say that for much of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, at the very same time that popular reception of Tantric-inflected ideas thrived within occultist and [[P2013]] New Age movements 31 as well as among global guru movements, the academic study of Indian religions, to say nothing of Indology, clung to the notion that Tantra formed a tertiary part of the history of Indian thought and religion and that people who thought the topic was worth understanding tended to be weird and intellectually unserious. The grand irony here is that the cultivation of this “common sense” perspective is emerging out of colonial institutional spaces, especially in and around Calcutta but also to a substantive degree in Bombay, Masulipatam, and Mysore, where many of the very same elite local social agents (both Brāhmaṇa and non- Brāhmaṇa) collaborating with British authorities were themselves participants in Tantric imaginaries. 32
While individual researchers, especially Mircea Eliade, R. Gnoli, and André Padoux had already made invaluable contributions to beginning to have us think about Tantra as a knowledge system, the emergence of organized research programs producing communities of Western scholars engaged in dialogical research invested in understanding Tantra is a product of the mid-1980s and is marked by two almost simultaneous events. The first, in the western hemisphere, is the founding of the Society for Tantric Studies in 1986. 33 The second is the publication, in 1985, by Alexis Sanderson of “Purity and Power among the Brahmans of Kashmir,” followed shortly thereafter, in 1993, by his establishing of a graduate program at [[P2014]] Oxford University centered on the philologically grounded study of classical Tantric textual traditions. 34 In the absence of these two developments, the type of scholarship to which the present study aspires, which liberally draws on both traditions, would be inconceivable.
As its originary manifesto, penned in collaboration by the Sinologists Jim Sanford and Charles Orzech make plain, the Society for Tantric Studies aimed to “bridge the gap between. . . [the study of Tantra in] China-Japan on the one hand and India-S. E. Asia on the other,” 35 while drawing upon talent situated across a range of academic disciplines and engaged in the study of a multitude of religions. In other words, from its inception, the American research program was already global and interdisciplinary and willing to incorporate, or at least examine, both “emic” and “etic” perspectives in a manner that was basically unique within the American academy of its day. Above all else, the STS has fostered the notion that any understanding of Tantric knowledge demands we reexamine our own inherited methodological presumptions and adapt and develop new tools and perspectives that are better aligned, yet not merely coterminous with, the self-understandings presented by our sources, such that we can both capture them in their particularity and explain them with some nuance, not just identifying Asian versions of some already well-known Western reality. In its efforts to create a “stable interchange among interested parties,” 36 but also to craft a path for the professionalization of a multigenerational cohort of scholars with shared interests (incorporating a veritable Who’s Who among scholars in our discipline, including one of its key intended readers), the society [[P2016]] has moved from success to success, culminating in the acceptance of the discipline as a regular component of the American Academy of Religion. Many of the methodologies pioneered by its members have been incorporated (albeit sometimes without due acknowledgement) into a wider academic study of religion and few would now dismiss the idea that there is place within Religious Studies for thinking about Tantric traditions across a wide range of regions and time periods. Perhaps most importantly, Tantric Studies developed from being merely a shared point of interest into a shared discourse, with its own language, culture, techniques, and conceptual preoccupations into which new voices, myself included, could be acculturated. As any participant in such conversations will immediately recognize, though many of the core problematics we will engage with herein may differ, this study is deeply influenced by my enthusiastic participation, since 2005, within this thought collective and is thus indebted in ways both conscious and otherwise to nearly two decades of thought-provoking and life- changing conversations with mentors, colleagues, and friends invested in the study of Tantra.
If the Society for Tantric Studies demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Tantric knowledge and its surrounding cultures is “good for thinking with” and that we can learn not just about but “from” these traditions, if not always the lessons they seek to teach us, the contributions of what we might call the Oxford collective in Tantric Studies, comprised of the incomparable Alexis Sanderson and his many students, amounts to recovering and historicizing the canon of an entire civilization as well as a robust theoretical demonstration that textual critical methods can be utilized in the service of doing intellectual and cultural history of religions. 37 As Sanderson has now related to us several times with great clarity in [[P2017]] thinking about his own intellectual trajectory, 38 three foundational years of study under Swami Lakshmanjoo, the last great learned polymath of the “Kashmir Śaiva” tradition that inherited the mantle of the Anuttara Trika of Abhinavagupta, initially inspired efforts to engage in what was essentially source-criticism of Abhinavagupta’s and his disciples’ use of inherited materials. 39 Focused pursuit of such efforts, above and beyond the realm of printed literature, then lead to the discovery of the survival in manuscript, in multiple locations but especially within the archives of Nepal, of a vast array of textual resources previously thought to be lost or entirely unknown to scholarship. The painstaking reconstruction and periodization of these discrete traditions, offering what is now the standard mapping of Tantra as a knowledge system, 40 in and of itself represents the sort of contribution on which the leading figures in any [[P2018]] given field tend to rest their reputation. Careful textual work dedicated to the study of a corpus of materials, as opposed to the usual philological critical editing by an individual scholar of single discrete works, however, then revealed two rather unexpected realities.
The first was that the atypically high degree of intertextuality, the wholesale borrowing and adaptation across traditions that almost defines the texture of tantric textuality was invaluable not only when it came the reconstruction of individual sources, but in the service of historicizing the interrelationships between whole canons of knowledge and even across the boundaries of different religions. 41 The method that emerged from such an approach, now widely implemented by Sanderson’s students, 42 and which very much informs my approach to textual study, calls on the scholar to systematically read a chosen subject, often line by line, in tandem with the available array of textual parallels. Such an approach at once attunes the reader to the range of influences (both textual and extra-textual) with which a given composition presupposed its intended readers would already be familiar while at the same time honing the precision of the translation of terms of art in light of a range of emic explanations. In short, [[P2019]] even from a distance, Alexis Sanderson has helped to make all of us better readers in the Sanskrit sources.
It is the second contribution, however, that will ultimately have the most profound and lasting impact on the study of the religions of Asia. What Sanderson, and those who have responded to his preliminary research from their own methodological position within the STS collective, 43 have made evident is that far from representing a marginal dimension of the study [[P2020]] of religion in Asia, the history of religion in South, South-East, and East Asia during the classical period cannot be responsibly told apart from a concerted focus on the Tantric knowledge systems and the life-worlds they engendered. In fact, when it comes to the study of South Asia in particular, the primary recoverable history of the religions we now label Hinduism from at least the sixth century up to the Islamic encounter is essentially the story of the various Tantric traditions and their antecedents among the traditions of the Atimārga. Succinctly, Śaivism and the traditions it inspired to recast its own image formed the religious mainstream. Though it has yet to be received as such by the wider study of South Asia, this discovery represents an unprecedented historiographical revolution, in that it proposes that the core interpretive context we have been using for thinking about “Brāhmaṇical religion” in pre- Islamic South Asia is basically wrong. Even the most cursory reading of “The Śaiva Age” confronts the reader with a preponderance of documentary evidence that the vast majority of the history of the Sanskrit cosmopolis—of Sanskrit literary composition within courtly settings and pugilistic public intellectual contestation—takes place against a backdrop of an elite culture where the most powerful and prestigious social agents tend to be initiates into the [[P2021]] Tantric knowledge systems. 44 As a point of comparison, it is almost as if the study of medieval Europe had for centuries proceeded without any recognition of the existence of the medieval Christian church, let alone any reflection on how either its core doctrinal claims or specific elements of a hitherto undocumented and itself internally diversified Christian canon might have shaped the life-worlds of medieval Europeans.
In his most recent work, Sanderson’s path of inquiry has gravitated towards moving beyond taking the prescriptive textual corpus he has reconstructed at face value, to increasingly incorporating documentary records, thinking about Tantra across religions and its transmission outside of South Asia, the regional historicization of Indian Śākta and Śaiva traditions—even drawing upon ethnography—all in the service of recovering the multivalent quotidian realities that lie behind scriptural imaginaries. In other words, in the second decade of twenty-first century, the research program of the Oxford collective has effectively converged with the founding vision of its American counterpart in a manner that will hopefully make possible more productive exchanges across the boundaries of very different institutional expectations. [[P2022]] Nevertheless, at the very same time—indeed often in the very same texts—where such scholarship marshals copious evidence for reframing the institutional and conceptual realities of first millennium Indian religions as primarily to be accessed through lens of a Śaiva Age, even authors as sophisticated as Sanderson have continued to transmit and perpetuate the undigested residue of inherited historiographies, which simply presume the existence of a unified and institutionally empowered “mainstream Brāhmaṇical religion.” 45 It is in response to this “Brāhmaṇical” cultural form and its institutions and juridical norms, we are told, that Śaivas had to carve out an identity. The spatial foundations of this discourse, purportedly, are the long standing “Brāhmaṇical land grants,” identified as such, in the absence of temple donations, by the bestowal of dāna to social agents bearing “Brāhmaṇa” sounding names (x-śarman), the occasional ritual derived title (Atirātrin or Somayājin), and the genealogical markers of gotra and pravara. And though these documentary texts in and of themselves typically contain no specific theological or doctrinal content whatsoever, even in the Sandersonian corpus, there is nascent assumption that the ideological contents of such communities can be readily identified. In practice, what we find on offer is a very narrow cutting indeed off the many branches of the tree of Brāhmaṇical knowledge. Effectively, when the anachronism of its equation with Advaita Vedānta has been set to the side, “Brāhmaṇical ideology” is comprised of the epistemology and valuations of Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, fused with the language ideology of Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya, and then governed by the juridical and social norms prescribed by something called “Dharmaśāstra” (in actuality, almost entirely limited to a cursory engagement with the Mānavadharmaśāstra). This whole concoction is then held together by something called “Brāhmaṇical religion,” with its own specialized religious agents, modes of praxis, and textual authorities. The working presumption is that, probably from its [[P2023]] inception, but at least by the time of the Guptas when we can begin to reconstruct parallel histories concerning the predecessors of Tantric knowledge within the Atimārga, these currents amount to complementary facets of a unified system of knowledge and values in which the social agents we identify as “Brāhmaṇas” necessarily, to at least some degree, would have participated.
In essence, when the two fields of inquiry we have just been surveying converge, we meet with a single story: the ending of the Śaiva Age coincided, and not at all coincidentally, with a pivotal moment in the transformations of Brāhmaṇical knowledge systems and religions as well as of the core epistemic claims they promulgated. Indeed, the very nature of the Śaiva Age—whose vast and varied prescriptive textual canons both reflect and instantiate a pluralistically imagined India, in which knowledge and power are wielded by a wide array of social agents, whose scope of influence is site- and community-specific—itself has to be rethought. Succinctly, we should not understand it as an unexpected interruption in the longue durée history of Brāhmaṇical social and ideological hegemony. For, when we disaggregate the evidence from an ahistorical narrative of “Brāhmaṇism as a timeless religious essence,” what comes into focus is that it was only with the dismantling of the institutions and life-worlds of the Mantramārga, its antecedents and aspirational successors, and the suppression of the outsized cultural influence of the social forms that they had come to epitomize, that the conditions of possibility come into play for something resembling a unified “Brāhmaṇical” religion that assumes regulatory capture over the quotidian implementation of religious life above and beyond the boundaries of site- and community-specific practice. [[P2024]]
This then, is the tale of how dharma was reimagined as universal. Its protagonist, kept off-stage waiting in the wings until well into the third act, is that peculiar polymath Dharmaśāstrin, Hemādri Sūri. Our setting, requiring extensive introduction, is the early medieval Deccan and its largely occluded institutional norms and social forms. With this program serving as your itinerary, now is the perfect occasion to the commence the epic tale (approaching the length of the Mahābhārata) of the ending of the Śaiva Age and the invention of modern “Brāhmaṇism.” [[P2025]]
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As Jonathan Z. Smith himself acknowledges, his famous dictum “map is not territory” is adapted from the writings of Alfred Korzybski where it serves the purpose of helping to introduce “a general theory of semantics.” What has gone unnoticed, however, is that Smith appropriates Korzybksi in the service of making an argument that is effectively antithetical to the worldview that this statement was originally intended to express, and that his revision and very deliberate elisions have serious methodological implications for the scholar of religion, particularly one who embraces a constructivist program. In this regard, the passage is itself worth attending to:
↩︎“Let us take some actual territory in which cities appear in the following order: Paris, Dresden, Warsaw. . . . If we were to build a map of this territory and place Paris between Dresden and Warsaw. . . we should say that the map was wrong, or that it was an incorrect map or that the map has a different structure from the territory. If, speaking roughly, we should try, in our travels, to orient ourselves by such a map, we should find it misleading. It would lead us astray, and we might waste a great deal of unnecessary effort. In some cases, even, a map of wrong structure would bring actual suffering and disaster, as, for instance, in a war, or in the case of an urgent call for a physician.
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map. . . . If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must be considered only as maps. A word is not the object it represents; and languages exhibit also this peculiar self-reflexiveness, that we can analyse language by linguistic means. . . . If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. The only usefulness of a map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the material world and the map-languages. If the structure is not similar, then the traveller or speaker is led astray, which, in serious human life-problems, must become always eminently harmful. If the structures are similar, then the empirical world becomes ‘rational’ to a potentially rational being, which means not more than that verbal, or map-predicated characteristics, which follow up on the linguistic or map- structure, are applicable to the empirical world.”
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity; An Introduction to Non- Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Brooklyn: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1958), 58–61. [[P1978]]
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Sarah Pierce Taylor, Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016). Interested readers should also consult Sarah Pierce Taylor, “The King Never Dies: Royal Renunciation and the Fiction of Jain Sovereignty,” Religions 12, no. 11 (2021): 986. ↩︎
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Eric Gurevitch, Everyday Sciences in Southwest India (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2022). ↩︎
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Lorenzen’s work remains the most substantial treatment of both the Kāpālikas and Kālamukhas in monograph form and does invaluable work assembling and then engaging with important previously unexamined sources. As we will see, however, advances in our understanding of the history of Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva traditions have rendered much of the work obsolete and as the present work makes plain, one of its core arguments, namely, that the Kālamukhas were an unobjectionable orthodox Brāhmaṇical Śaiva community whose supposed transgressive nature is polemical slander is simply no longer tenable. David N. Lorenzen, The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). ↩︎
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Gill, a student of both Eliade and Smith, anchors his articulation of this method around a study of how Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane as well as in Australian Religions: An Introduction, but also Smith, in his own source critical critiques of Eliade’s use of Aboriginal materials, both made highly selective even distortive use of materials concerned with narratives about the Numbakulla world pole they found in the archives in the service of making theoretical arguments specific to the Western academy of their day and largely not present in their sources. Gill takes this observation as a point of departure for studying the assemblage process and life-worlds of the original Western colonial era investigators grappling with attempting to document and understand Aboriginal religion for their own purposes upon which both Eliade and Smith rely. Gill arrives at a new valuation for the necessity of first looking at each selective engagement on its own terms and then studying the points of interlap and deliberate omissions among the second-order receptions that make up our sources in the service of piecing together what we can of the shared reality to which they might refer while also appreciating each reception as a form of play or experimentation. See: Sam D. Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Sam D. Gill, The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). ↩︎
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A single example of how these games of scholarly telephone become constitutive of entire historiographies full of just so-stories with no firm evidentiary basis will suffice for our purposes. Beginning in the sixth century, a community called the Bōyas appears in a range of epigraphical and literary sources from Karnataka and greater Andhra, often in a surprising range of capacities, from serving as Brāhmaṇas, to living in temples where they tend to ritual matters, to bestowing gifts of cows. Especially as this community has a range of descendants and appears also in the colonial era anthropological historiography, where they are usually identified as a borderline criminal caste, dividing their time between hunting, petty brigandry, and serving as soldiers, with some select communities acting as Poligars, independent lords with their own forts. Making sense of the multiplicity of occupations and self-understandings of the community through rigorous historical work is clearly a worthwhile task. What we find in the secondary literature, in contrast, is a very different picture, which can be distilled down into the following elements. Several inscriptions from the fifteenth to sixteenth century, all issued from the same general region in Nellore district, refer, it seems, to the toponym Bōyavihāradēśamu, without any further details as to its significance. Some others use a similarly unspecified phrase Bōyavidu. Importantly, said toponyms seem never to appear in the classical inscriptional record. There are also a large number of sentences, in both Kannada and Telugu, which incorporate both the noun bōya and variations on the lexeme kŏṭṭam or kŏṭṭa. Now it is true that kŏṭṭam as a noun in Dravidian languages can mean either fort or cattle-pen. In inscriptions, however, a far more common occurrence is the formally similar but semantically unrelated lexeme kŏṭṭa most commonly found as part of a past tense verbal formation. One thing that seems to be happening in the secondary literature is that some of our authors seem to keep conflating these two terms, sometimes melding together the two unrelated lexemes into the synthetic compound Bōyakŏṭṭa/Bōyakŏṭṭam not present in the texts and that is grammatically illegible. These seemingly extraneous stray details should be kept in mind when one looks at a passage such as the following, which stands near the end of many decades of “reception”: “Almost from the time of the foundation of the Vengi Kingdom, the Eastern Calukyas appear to have cast their greedy eyes on the Boyakottams. The very second king in the line, Jayasimhavallabha (A.D. 643-673) issued his Pedammadali plate from Udayapura, identified by scholars with Udayagiri in Neliore district evidently from the Boyaviharadesa. Jayasaimha took the proud title vajasiddh (scorer of victory) and his Polimburu plates were issued from Vijayaskandhavara (victorious war camp). But he was silent about the name of the king on whom he waged the war and scored the above victory. However, it be surmised that in his efforts to expand his kingdom southwards, Jayasimha came into conflict with the Boyas, defeated their chief, but was silent about his name as he was too insignificant for him to be mentioned. With this victory of Jayasimha, the Vengi Kingdom extended southwards into the very heart of the Boyakottams.” B. S. L. Hanumantha Rao, “The Boyas in Medieval Andhra Society,” in Dr. Venkataramanayya’s Commemoration Volume, ed. R. Subrahmanyam (Hyderabad: The Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1987), 77–92. Essentially, what has happened here is that on the basis of lexemes of radically underdetermined significance present in documentary records from a nearly thousand years after the period being analyzed, Hanumantha, following in the footsteps of many generations of scholars, presumes the existence of an Ur-Bōya homeland and then treats the occupation of said geographical locality in the seventh century as the originary moment of the dispersal of the Bōyas. This is decision is made notwithstanding the core reality that the Sanskrit language Pedammadali plate from Udayapura nowhere refers to Bōyas, kŏṭṭam or kŏṭṭa, let alone Bōyavihāradēśa. On the basis of the nonexistent lexeme kŏṭṭam, which again appears nowhere in his primary source, he then presumes to describe this totally imaginary place as defined by forts (twelve of them in fact) controlled by the Bōyas and even suggests that the existence of said forts, about which again we know nothing, in the wholly imaginary territory of the Bōyavihāradēśa, is the actual (though entirely unstated) impetus for the expansion of the Eastern Cāḷukya Empire into the region. This just so story is then itself used to make sense of the sudden emergence in the inscriptional record within this region of numerous śāsanas offered to social agents with the designation -bōya in their name. But in fact, the situation gets even more preposterous. For, drawing on a different strain of equally evidence-free scholarship, in trying to describe the culture of the bōyas, Hanumantha then takes the same lexeme kŏṭṭam, again treated as a noun, in yet another of its senses, namely, as a cowshed. On the basis of this discovery, we are then told, the Bōyas are identified with the community called the gŏllas, who are represented as cattle pastoralists in documentary records. The Bōyas themselves then are also cast as primarily “pastoralist herders,” notwithstanding the fact that there is zero ethnographic evidence for them carrying out this social role (though there is evidence for them as cattle rustlers and the inscriptional record itself points to them being recipients of donations of cows as a form of wealth). The end result is that, when the term surfaces in her sources, even as careful a scholar as Cynthia Talbot, while noting the incongruity, inherits certain problematic assumptions from this previous scholarship: “Herders (boyas) were the other prominent group of male donors at coastal Andhra’s large temples and comprise the social category most closely linked with patronage of these sites. While they are similar to merchants and artisans in being more mobile and less bound to specific territory, the extent of the herder preference for the major temples is rather surprising. Indeed, practically no herders figure in inscriptions from the interior as either donors or trustees of livestock grants.” She later comments, “And the fact that the words gopa (the Sanskrit word for ‘cattle herder’) and golla (the Telugu equivalent of gopa) are used as synonyms of boya underlines the term’s significance. The title boya referred to the occupation of herding, rather than to a particular community.” Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59. As she observes in a related footnote, the only evidence available to her for equating the whole community of Bōyas with herders runs as follows. “Certain boyas are referred to as gopa in SII 4.1370, SII 10.284 and 333; boya and gollas are equated in SII 5.197.” At best, the evidence on hand (much of it located in terse fragments) indicates that a small subset of the Bōya community at three specific sites acted as pastoralists. The evidence for characterizing the whole community as such is simply the inherited hearsay of the historiography we just examined. [[P1989]] ↩︎
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While in the usual historiography the practice of social history is treated as a product of the French academy and seen as aligned with a left political perspective, there is an equally strong case for seeking its origins in volkisch traditions within the German academy, which despite an often dubious political agenda pioneered the sources driven approach to social history, incorporating the perspectives of multiple types of social agents, later equated with the Annales school, a state of affairs made all the more confusing by the deliberate post-war adoption of Annales-inspired technical frames as part of the process of de-Nazification. One of the most important works in this tradition is Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1984), which for the first time in modern historiography offers a robust case against methodological anachronism when it comes to the study of the past, imploring the necessity for excavating premodern conceptual and institutional frameworks out of the archive and then studying them on their own terms. Brunner’s key argument is that nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic discourses studying politics and law either project modern conceptualizations of state and society into the medieval past against the evidence of the archive or, in the absence of locating it in their sources, present the world of medieval Austria as an incoherent broken society existing on the edge of anarchy. In contrast, Brunner seeks to reconstruct two medieval political institutions and social forms that are alien to modern state thinking, namely, “the feud,” or the conventions that govern acts of targeted violence between lords, and the relationship between localized land rights and law including how taxation works in a world where it is inflected by logics of obligation that are not purely market driven. That, in a morbid parody of current trends that seek to continually recast one’s research to align it with topics of interest to the current zeitgeist and grant writing agencies, the second edition of Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria is rewritten so as to thoroughly align it with the political vision of the Nazi state, with the institution of the feud being used to normalize the violent actions of the SS, a process Brunner reverses in the third and fourth editions, is a cautionary tale that does not undercut the work’s considerable contributions to the practice of regional social history. ↩︎
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A good point of entry into this conversation and the surrounding historiography is Ian N. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For Susan Reynold’s seminal argument dismantling the very existence of feudal relations see: Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). For her work envisioning how a post-feudal model of the medieval might proceed, see Susan Reynolds, The Middle Ages without Feudalism: Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2018), as well as the honorarium volume Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, Jane Martindale, and Susan Reynolds, Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). For a fascinating archive-driven study of both knighthood and “strategic” voluntary serfdom in rural France, explicitly undercutting Marc Bloch, see: Dominique Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). For a localized case study in Frankish lands of the changing nature of political authority marked by the counterintuitive decline of the role of king and his personality, commencing in a new social formation within the medieval around the eleventh century, see Charles West, Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the student of South Asian history, the most important takeaway is the futility of looking for feudal formations, based on European expectations, in the Indian archive that are no longer believed to have ever even existed in Europe. ↩︎
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Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). In contrast to the prior historiography, this is a book that every scholar of South Asian religions and cultures should be required to read, for in its second half it explicitly dialogues with Indian historiography (albeit in a colonial and post-colonial context). ↩︎
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To be quite clear here, the objection here is not that Marxist inspired historiography, wherever we might find it, is intrinsically defective or a problem, but rather that when it comes to the study of premodernity, Indian Marxists by and large have not even integrated into their discourse the types of nuanced self-reflection found already in 1973 in the decidedly Marxist British historian EP Thompson’s exchange with his Polish counterpart Leszek Kolakowski, ironically in the service of seeking to refute Kolakowski’s turn towards what he sees as a much more philosophically inflected and “religion” centric Marxist imaginary. As the proudly atheist and materialist Thompson observes, talking about how one needs to study past ideological conceptualizations that one does not share: “I share and accept, in my work as an historian, your imaginative sympathy and intellectual respect for Christian forms, movements and ideas, which as you insist (and as Christopher Hill in this country has long insisted) must be studied in their own reality and autonomy, and not as figments of ‘false consciousness’ in which other more real and material interests were masked. . . . But your other proposition touches more closely on history: ‘religious consciousness. . . is an irreplaceable part of human culture, man’s only attempt to see himself as a whole—that is to say, as both object and subject.’. . . . There are many statements, of fact and of value, and of value disguised as fact, in that short statement. One may readily grant that the religious consciousness has been a part of past human culture. How far it has been present in all past cultures is a highly technical question, in answering which we would not only have to consult anthropologists but would also have to define the term ‘religious’ and decide how far any myth (whether supported or not by a doctrine, by priests or holy men, whether entailing or not notions of an after-life, rewards and punishments, etc.) may be defined as religion. The definition of ‘religious’ would clearly influence very largely our conclusions. . . . Point Two: If we accept that religious consciousness has been part of past human culture, then it follows that it has been irreplaceable, since we cannot replace any part of what is already past. . . . Three. If ‘irreplaceable’ is a statement not of fact but an imputation of value then it is a very different order of statement. . . . It is not because I wish to close the doors to imaginative sympathy towards forms of religious consciousness, whether past or present, but because I resent being drawn back into a fruitless argument upon terms which I reject, that I offer these objections.” E. P. Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,” The Socialist Register 10 (1973): 14–17. Sadly, by and large, even when reading otherwise exceptionally intelligent scholarship, one searches in vain in the study of the early medieval Indian imagination for these nuanced kinds of insights, let alone the type of particularized reconstructions of specific elements and practices from early medieval life-worlds, first presented on their own terms and then subject to further critical reflection, that for my lifetime have been common when it comes to Western scholarship engaging with Western premodernity. ↩︎
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Though his impact on the Western academy was much more limited, the Russian medievalist E. A. Kosminsky has had a determinative impact on how the Indian academy thinks about questions of social stratification within landed feudalism both in the context of scholarship and in terms of pedagogy within Indian schools. His key work, which was received as updated adaptation of Marc Bloch’s models, is Eugeny Alexeyevich Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, trans. Ruth Kisch (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1956). For an examination of its impact in the 1950’s and 1960’s on Anglo-American historiography, see T. H. Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For his considerably greater, albeit contested role in Soviet Bloc countries, some of which is relevant to traditions of Indian Marxism, see Yuri Valenskii, Academician E. A. Kosminsky and the Question of the Interpretation of the History of the Middle Ages in the Soviet School (Munich: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR,1954). ↩︎
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A good point of orientation to the debates between different schools of thought in Indian historiography is Harbans Mukhia’s edited volume Harbans Mukhia, ed., The Feudalism Debate (New Delhi: Manohar, 2014), composed in response in part to the defense of Indian feudalism presented in D. N. Jha, ed. The Feudal Order: State, Society, and Ideology in Early Medieval India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Chattopadhyaya, whose main archive is northwest India and Rajasthan, has produced probably the most sophisticated model to emerge from the debate. He incorporates important, though north India specific, critiques from B. N. S. Yadava’s work, which rejects the existence of feudalism in medieval India. B. N. S. Yadava, Society and Culture in Northern India in the Twelfth Century (Allahabad: Central Book Depot, 1973). In response, he articulates a modified model of what he calls “Sāmanta feudalism,” a political great chain of being involving multiple statuses of vassalage adapted to the Indian case. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Whatever its relevance to specific regions in northwestern India, where the specific titled roles the model refers to do in fact appear with some frequency in both the documentary records as well as in prescriptive texts, the inadequacy of his approach to Deccani archives is made evident in his case studies that attempt to fit his model to making sense of social and political change in rural Karnataka, which offer misreadings of the evidence presented. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2017). Kesavan Veluthat, in contrast, represents a direct continuation of conservative traditions of Marxist historiography, redirected to treating south India (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka) as a unitary cultural and socio-political system whose different elements inhabit different progressive stages in a teleological account of social development, with the inner workings of that system explicated through exegetical engagement with Das Capital. Thus, in the introduction to The Early Medieval in South India, Veluthat defines the south Indian [[P1998]] medieval as comprised of six shared transregional developments: “1. transformations of an economy characterized by cattle-keeping and subsistence agriculture into one of wet rice cultivation and a considerable surplus, 2. replacement of simple exchange with the instituted process of trade and the subsequent development of urbanism, 3. transmutation of a relatively undifferentiated society into one divided sharply by caste and the consequent ‘casteization’ and peasantization of tribes, 4. acceptance of an organized religion with its ideas and institutions suited to the new economic and social order, 5. the emergence of the state to suit the newly evolved social order, and 6) a large number of other attendant developments, including the defining of the regional.” Kesavan Veluthat, The Early Medieval in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14. Many of these features, even on the surface, represent a gross departure from historical circumstances. To take just one example, contrary to the first dimension of Veluthat’s progression, outside of the Cōḻa heartland, far from being a dietary staple whose production defined patterns of labor, rice cultivation has made a largely negligible contribution to the diet of people in most of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, and even much of Kerala. In all these places, within living memory, it was typically defined as a “rich man’s food,” while the staple was barley, millet, wheat, or gram, all of which demand different labor conditions, less intensive cultivation, and smaller labor pools. If you are working from a model where modes of production are determinative of cultural conditions, it is a virtual truism that “rice cultures” work differently from cultures defined around other crops. For recent discussions of such models, see for example T. Talhelm, “The Rice Theory of Culture,” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 4, no. 1 (2022): 1–18. In more general terms, Veluthat’s programmatic projection of these features onto the archive serves the larger purpose of rendering south Indian cultural systems analyzable in terms of the principles outlined in Das Capital, often at the expense of overdetermining what is in his sources to fit his model. Thus, for example, in his essay “Labour Rent and Produce Rent: Reflections on the Revenue System under the Cholas” (Veluthat 2009, 100– 107), discarding as irrelevant five of the seven major modes of taxation actually found in Tamil sources, Veluthat limits his attention to two of them, veṭṭi and kaḍamai. The former refers to a mode of occasional community directed labor in lieu of financial payment, which with some variations was a ubiquitous feature of almost all premodern societies from the time of the emergence of writing. The latter comprises a variety of different forms of tax on land. In Veluthat’s hands, however, artificially separated from other tax modalities, these two are reframed as labor rent, “the primeval form in which the extraction of surplus value expresses itself” (Veluthat 2009, pg. 104), and produce rent. A single extended example in the author’s own words should suffice in showing the reader the limits of this sort of historiography. When we observe the change in the relative distribution of the proportion of these two rents over the centuries, what we discover, Veluthat asserts, is “that veṭṭi goes on decreasing as time progresses while kaḍamai goes on increasing. In other words, the incidence of labour rent is inversely proportional to that of produce rent. This is very significant. In the classical analysis of the genesis of ground rent in the capitalist mode of production, Karl Marx has characterized labour rent as the primeval form of surplus labour. Labour which is over and above what is absolutely essential for the maintenance and reproduction of the labourer himself is directly appropriated by the ‘owner’ of the means of production. On the other hand, in the case of rent in kind, it is the fruit of such surplus labour that is appropriated from the direct producer, which presupposes ‘a higher stage of civilization’. ‘The transformation of labour rent into rent in kind,’ however, writes Marx, ‘changes nothing from the economic standpoint in the nature of ground rent’. The mode of production, therefore, remains the same. Another significant feature is that veṭṭi continues to obtain at a lower frequency. . . . In other words, labour rent is not completely replaced by produce rent; the former exists even while the latter becomes the dominant form of surplus extraction. Even this is natural. . . according to Marx” (Veluthat 1988, 104–5). What the reader for whom Das Capital is not an inherent source of veridical authority is supposed to do with such analysis is an open question. ↩︎
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Manu Devadevan’s work is at once extraordinary in the richness of its archival engagement and a cautionary tale in regard to what happens when history of the Tantric Mantramārga as a knowledge system is written out of the history of Indian religions. Importing a historiographical move from Maoist critiques of Lamaist Tibet, Devadevan argues that before early modernity in the Deccan there is no such thing as “religion” among the common people, for what we call religion is only the concern of a small class of elite “religious professionals” and temple culture is in fact virtually non-existent until the tenth century. As a preface to offering an extraordinary account of early modern Kannada religious imaginaries, Devadevan asserts that the popular yogin-centric religion of the Deccan, which is not Hindu, needs to be read as an adaptation of Sufi models of social formation and community cultivation that is then copied/transposed onto figures like Matsyendranātha. What is missing from this narrative is a recognition that the very features being attributed to Islamic influence were already integral to Tantric institutional imaginaries. Nevertheless, there are many useful insights and some fabulous social historical accounts, particularly concerning the differentiation of the politics of caste from other localized power dynamics, to be found in his two book length studies from which a reader is bound to benefit. See Manu V. Devadevan, A Prehistory of Hinduism (Berlin: De Gruyter Open, 2016), as well as Manu V. Devadevan, The “Early Medieval” Origins of India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ↩︎
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A deeply influential figure both in terms of the Marxist school of historiography within the Indian academy as well in regard to the composition of many of the source books and textbooks used in Indian schools, R. S. Sharma’s understanding of early medieval India continued to be refined throughout his long career, in terms of the core evidentiary basis that was offered for what remained essentially the same socio-historical model. While the interested reader can trace its development from 1965 through the twenty-first century across a range of related works, the starting and ending point of his investigations will suffice for our purposes. Ram Sharan Sharma, Indian Feudalism, C. AD 300–1200 (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1965); Ram Sharan Sharma, Early Medieval Indian Society (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003). ↩︎
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As we await the publication of this research in a monograph form as part of the output of the research project of which it is a part, the reader is directed to R. Bracey, “Money Supply, Quantity Theory, & Feudalism in Sixth Century India,” Part 1, Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State in Asia SOAS, London, December 12, 2017. The two parts of the talk are available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK119NhSgkI; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scVoW4d7W5Y. Bracey’s talk is framed explicitly as a refutation of Sharma’s arguments about coinage and the early medieval but also serves as a master class introduction to the methodology of cutting edge numismaticians and what they have to offer to the study of Indian history and sociality. On the fifth-century redistribution of foreign trade, correlated with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and two waves of Hunic invasions, see the analysis I present in the second division of chapter 3 of this study. ↩︎
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For some concrete case studies, see Ranabir Chakravarti, “Coastal Trade and Voyages in Konkan: The Early Medieval Scenario,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 35, no. 2 (1998): 97–123; Ranabir Chakravarti, “Merchants of Konkan,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 23, no. 2 (1986): 207–215; Ranabir Chakravarti, “Monarchs, Merchants and a Matha in Northern Konkan (c. 900–1053 AD),” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 27, no. 2 (1990): 189–208; Ranabir Chakravarti, Dipak Chandra Bhattacharyya, Devendra Handa, and Bratindra Nath Mukherjee, “Overseas Trade in Horses in Early Medieval India: Shipping and Piracy,” in Ranabir Chakarvarti, et. al., ed., Prācī-Prabhā: Perspectives in Indology (Essays in Honour of B. N. Mukherjee) (New Delhi: Harman Publishing House, 1989). ↩︎
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Starting with the Pallavas (probably even earlier) there is extensive exchange going on between Kaliṅga and the Tamil country with Southeast Asia and modern-day Indonesia. ↩︎
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A particularly candid representation of this perspective, where the “medieval” and the “feudal” are no longer identified on the basis of concrete patterns of socio-economic relations but as a “mentality” of hierarchical relations, a position whose influence on the India academy we have severely underestimated, is offered by Eugenia Vanina of The Centre for Indian Studies, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. See her monograph: Eugenia Vanina, Medieval Indian Mindscapes: Space, Time, Society, Man (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2012). ↩︎
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The later portion of Champakalakshmi’s career has been largely dedicated to reading the history of Indian thought and culture through the lens of an ideological consolidation made possible by bhakti: “Developing into an ethical and moral principle, capable of evolving new value systems, the bhakti concept succeeded in providing the basis for a dominant ideology, consciously promoted by the ruling families. . . . The political role of bhakti in Tamilakam would appear to have overshadowed its socio-religious purposes” (Champakalaksmi 2011, pg. 19). Bhakti, then, in this reading, normalized a new kind of state (exemplified by the Cōḻas) and a “new agrarian system based on land grants to brāhmaṇas or Caturvedis along with special privileges” (Champakalaksmi 2011, pg. 19). Champakalaksmi’s model treats bhakti, deliberately encouraged by state power, as an agent of cultural and institutional consolidation. In the realm of pure ideology, bhakti is aligned with the Purāṇicization of the Tamil country (through the adoption of the alien gods of Śiva and Viṣṇu) and in the material realm it is the impetus for centralized urbanization centered around bhakti temple complexes controlled by Brāhmaṇas and Brāhmaṇizers, drawing in populations from the countryside and reformatting them to accept the ideology of caste and recognize the dominance of kings on the basis of the bhakti model of subordination to a higher power. As we will see throughout the present work, very little of this model, which runs on gross generalizations, is founded on a close reading of either the empirical record or the theological programs articulated in the relevant textual corpuses. Succinctly, Champakalaksmi’s approach here is founded on method that is as facile and ungrounded from close readings of primary sources and documentary records as her earlier work was exemplarily grounded in them. See: R. Champakalakshmi, Religion, Tradition, and Ideology: Pre-colonial South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially the essays “From Devotion and Dissent to Dominance: The Bhakti of the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars” (pg. 53–86) and “Ideology and the State in South India” (pg. 606–636). ↩︎
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Veluthat’s account of bhakti ideology, treated again as the defining value system of the medieval, is much more explicitly reductionistically Marxist: “It has been shown that the bhakti of the Tamil saints was devotion to Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava deities consecrated in temples, and not just to ‘god’ or even Śiva or Viṣṇu in the abstract. It is also seen that earlier saints. . . had their sphere of activity in the Pallava territory which got extended to the Kāvēri valley. . . . An analysis of the distribution of temples sung about by the later Āḻvār and Nāyaṇār saints shows a concentration of temples. . . in the Cōḻa country on either side of the Kāvēri. The temple in the south as this time was emerging as a huge landed magnate and also the centre around which the brahmanical settlements revolved. When such centres became the rallying points of a social movement such as the bhakti movement, it was naturally the ideology of the brahmanical landed magnates that it carried with it as the leitmotif. It has been brought out that the bhakti movement legitimized the entire gamut of relationships in the social, economic, and political spheres. The graded hierarchy of economic relations with various shades to rights of land, the equally graded hierarchy of social relations with different shades of ritual status and the corresponding graded hierarchy of political relations with different shades of power and authority—this was reflected and legitimised in the religious world. While the bhakti movement has been shown by earlier historians as representing a veritable social reform movement spearheaded against caste and other forms of inequality, our analysis shows that it helped in consolidating the new social and political order in south India in the early medieval period. It strengthened and gave support to the new monarchy; and by favouring the ideology of the brahmanised sections in society, it helped the entire upper class to send its roots deeper in society.” Kesavan Veluthat, The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2012 [1993]), 35–36. As I aim to demonstrate over and over again by the end of the present work, even on the level of class analysis, most the claims that make up this model are demonstrably not correct. Far from being the impetus behind temple institutionalization, the discourse of learned twice-borns not acclimated in the Tantric knowledge systems are by and large ambivalent if not hostile to temple construction and the life-worlds it engenders. They are not the primary holders of land near temples, the main donors, nor the main beneficiaries. Indeed, the same holds true by and large for the very types of top-of-the-food-chain monarchical power with which Veluthat wants to associate the emergence of temple culture, for the royal temple, though atypically spectacular, as an institution is a minority actor throughout most of this history, with the vast majority of temple construction being at the impetus of localized political authorities or at the behest of guilds or community collectives from a range of non-elite backgrounds. Moreover, through the eleventh century, learned “non-Tantric inflected” Brāhmaṇical intellectual life is largely resolutely hostile to bhakti theology. Furthermore, in our earliest sources, bhakti prescriptive texts do not envision a “graded hierarchy of social relations,” but rather present the bhakta, vis-à-vis the non-bhakta, as a baseline social agent with religious and juridical privileges equal to his fellows. And far from acclimating the individual outsider to the norms of varṇāśramadharma, the earliest bhakti prescriptive literature envisions “bhakti ideology” as a wholesale substitute social contract, a position that persists in the imaginaries of elite agents well into the thirteenth century and beyond. If we are to seek a social basis for bhakti traditions, it is not within Brāhmaṇized society we must look, but in institutionalized social modalities of a very different sort, such as the imaginary of the maṭha (which, ironically, Veluthat sees as impetus for the suppression of bhakti ideology by Brāhmaṇas). ↩︎
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See, for example, Veluthat (2012), The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India, 81–82. The issue at hand, namely, how much do Brāhmaṇas own and control the land and with it the temple estates that Veluthat sees as the central vectors for the dissemination of bhakti ideology, is pivotal. If Brāhmaṇas, who purportedly embody “mainstream Smārta values,” do not in fact own and control these early medieval institutional spaces, on Veluthat’s own terms, a material reductionist account of the early medieval as defined by a Brāhmaṇical bhakti ideology that serves to naturalize Brāhmaṇical privilege and material interests collapses. ↩︎
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Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). ↩︎
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The other robust dialogical research program is, of course, Bhakti Studies. However, by and large, excluding some engagement with earlier Tamil sources (on which one may fruitfully consult the work of Karen Pechilis, Archana Venkatesan, Francis Clooney, and Vasudha Narayan, for instance), this domain of research takes as its primary focus Indian religions in early modernity. It is only relatively recently, in the writings of Hamsa Stainton (in relation to kāvya), Christian Novetzke (in relation to the early medieval western Deccan), Monika Horstmann, and Tyler Williams (thinking about yoga and nirguṇa movements in relation to scholastic communities in Rajasthan), Anand Venkatkrishnan (thinking about the Bhāgavata Purāṇa in dialogue with both elite Sanskrit pandit culture and subaltern Keralan traditions), and Elaine Fisher (reimagining vernacular Śaivism in light of its Sanskrit sources) that examining continuities between vernacular bhakti imaginaries and their formative antecedents within earlier Sanskrit discourse and thinking about bhakti with and in relation to Brāhmaṇical imaginaries has begun to emerge as a consistent part of this conversation. ↩︎
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For a masterful distillation of this literature, although much of it is centered specifically on the problem of ownership, see Christopher T. Fleming, Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12–27, 33–60, 158–207, which builds upon Ludo and Rosane Rocher’s work. Rosane and Ludo Rocher, The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014). For an encounter with Anglo-Indian comparative legal reasoning in practice, the reader can consult nearly any essay in J. Duncan Derrett, Religion, Law and the State of India (London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 1973). ↩︎
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This is exemplified by the masterful semantic studies offered by Ludo Rocher, which have been compiled into a collected essays by Donald Davis. Ludo Rocher, Studies in Hindu Law and Dharmaśāstra, ed. Donald Davis (New York: Anthem Press, 2014). ↩︎
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P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval religious and civil law in India), 8 vols. (Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930–1962); L. S. Joshi and G. Kelkar, Dharmakośa (Wai: Prajna Pathasala Mandala, 1959–2000). ↩︎
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Richard W Lariviere, The Nāradasmṛti: Critical Edition and Translation (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001 [1989]). ↩︎
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Patrick Olivelle, The Āśrama System the History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). ↩︎
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Olivelle’s programmatic text-critical engagement with classical Dharmaśāstra and its major intertexts proceeds as follows: Patrick Olivelle, The Law Codes of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2002); Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasūtra Parallels: Containing the Dharmasūtras of Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005); Patrick and Suman Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Manava-Dharmasastra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Patrick Olivelle, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya’s Arthasastra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Patrick Olivelle, The Law Code of Viṣṇu: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra (Delhi: Primus Books, 2018); Patrick Olivelle, A Treatise on Dharma (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). On the basis of this methodological reconstruction of the textual foundations of early religio-juridical discourse, what has emerged is a larger interpretive conversation, contributed to especially by Donald Davis, Timothy Lubin, Jarred Whittaker, Mark McClish, and David Brick, that takes these established resources as its point of departure in the service of meticulous close readings and cross-corpus historicization of the emergence of concepts. For two important collections of essays historicizing core dharma concepts across the boundaries of genre and religious tradition made possible by this textual groundwork, see especially Patrick, Olivelle, ed., Dharma: Studies in Its Semantic, Cultural, and Religious History (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2009); Patrick Olivelle, ed., Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎
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See, for example, Douglas Renfrew Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Hugh B. Urban, The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009); as well as the opening essay to David Gordon White, ed., Tantra in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). ↩︎
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G. Djurdjevic, India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Julian Strube, Global Tantra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). ↩︎
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An important under-recognized intervention here is the study of “Arthur Avalon” as a composite author function combining the skills and abilities of the English jurist Sir John Woodroffe with that of his Śākta guru Śivacandra Vidyārṇava. See Kathleen Taylor, Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: ‘An Indian Soul in a European Body?’ (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012). ↩︎
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For a two-part history of the STS, see: G. A. Hayes, “Tantric Studies: Issues, Methods, and Scholarly Collaborations,” Journal of Hindu Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 221–230. ↩︎
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For an account of the impact of Alexis Sanderson on multiple generations of students and scholars, see Dominic Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson, “A Note on Alexis Sanderson and Indology,” in Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honor of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson, ed. Dominic Goodall, et. al. (Leiden: Brill, 2020), as well as the subsequent bibliography covering his contributions up through 2020. A partial listen of his many students or those who have benefited from his tutelage who have made substantial contributions to Tantric Studies includes Andre Acri, Jason Birch, Parul Dave, Csaba Dezső, Paul Gerstmayr, Anya Golovkova, Dominic Goodall, Jürgen Hanneder, Shaman Hatley, Gergely Hidas, Madhu Khanna, Csaba Kiss, James Mallinson, Libbie Mills, Nina Mirnig, John Nemec, Srilata Raman, Richard Salomon, Michael Slouber, Péter-Dániel Szánto, Ryugen Tanemura, Joel Tatelman, Judit Törzsök, Anthony Tribe, Somadeva Vasudeva, and Alex Watson. ↩︎
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Cited in Hayes, “Tantric Studies,” 223. ↩︎
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Hayes, “Tantric Studies,” 223. ↩︎
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The most recent autobiographical review of his research program forms pg. 2–6 of Alexis Sanderson, “How Public was Śaivism?” Tantric Communities in Context, ed. Nina Mirnig, Marion Rastelli, and Vincent Eltschinger (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019), 1–46. ↩︎
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For an account of the impact of Alexis Sanderson on multiple generations of students and scholars, see Dominic Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson, “A Note on Alexis Sanderson and Indology,” in Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in Honor of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson, ed. Dominic Goodall, et. al. (Leiden: Brill, 2020), as well as the subsequent bibliography covering his contributions up through 2020. A partial listen of his many students or those who have benefited from his tutelage who have made substantial contributions to Tantric Studies includes Andre Acri, Jason Birch, Parul Dave, Csaba Dezső, Paul Gerstmayr, Anya Golovkova, Dominic Goodall, Jürgen Hanneder, Shaman Hatley, Gergely Hidas, Madhu Khanna, Csaba Kiss, James Mallinson, Libbie Mills, Nina Mirnig, John Nemec, Srilata Raman, Richard Salomon, Michael Slouber, Péter-Dániel Szánto, Ryugen Tanemura, Joel Tatelman, Judit Törzsök, Anthony Tribe, Somadeva Vasudeva, and Alex Watson. ↩︎
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A good example of this kind of this type of work is an early essay that seeks to establish that the position of the Mālinīvijayottara, the root text to which the Tantrāloka responds, is not non-dualist: Alexis Sanderson, The Doctrine of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra,” in T. Goudriaan, ed., Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantrism: Studies in Honour of Andre Padoux (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 281–312. ↩︎
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Sanderson’s schematic mapping of the Tantric traditions, which at once offers an account of their historical evolution and their doctrinal diversity, has gone through a number of iterations. In its current form, it proposes that what we call Tantric traditions emerge out a confluence of two prior religious imaginaries. The first of these, the Atimārga (the “path beyond”), which had its own ascetic traditions, is now understood to contain three divisions: 1) the Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas, whose core surviving scripture is the Pāśupatasūtra, who bathe themselves three times in the ashes of the cremation ground 2) the Lākulas, whose ascetics carry a skull and embrace a theology that rejects questions of purity, but whose core cosmology and theology is deeply influential on later Tantric Śaivism 3) pre-Tantric Kāpālika traditions, venerating Bhairava and emaciated goddesses, who in an equivalent manner are the predecessors of later Śākta traditions of the Kulamārga. The second input, in contrast, is what Sanderson understands as pre-Tantric “lay Śaiva” traditions as exemplified by the Śivadharmaśāstra, which we will explore in more detail in the present study. What we call Tantric traditions, however, is the second of these religious imaginaries, known as the Mantramārga (the “path of mantras”). Within this domain, it is important to note as there is much confusion regarding such matters, stemming from discarded prior models, that the word “Śaiva” is a general referent, equally inclusive of a number of Tantric traditions of Bhairava and Goddess worship as it is of the Śiva-centric traditions that will come to be conflated with the dualistic theology of the later scholastic Śaiva Siddhānta. It is this larger “big-tent” Śaivism, then, that is the intended referent when Sanderson speaks of the “Śaiva Age.” In actuality, as the present work will continue to demonstrate, it is becoming apparent that these Śaiva traditions at the level of the actual scriptures do not propound the programmatic dualism that is ascribed to them by Śaiva Siddhānta exegetes beginning with Sadyojyotis in the seventh century, but instead express a range of perspectives both concerning the relationship of the individual soul to the god-head and vis-à-vis other Mantramārga traditions. In this regard, freed from their exegetical reception, they are frequently much more akin doctrinally to the ambiguous quasi- bhedābheda positions presented by the rest of classical Tantra. Finally, following Abhinavagupta, in his most recent publications, Sanderson now recognizes the legitimacy of a Tantric domain, superseding the Mantramārga, which he labels Kulamārga, the defining feature of which is communal orgiastic modes of worship along with, in some strains, a radical rejection of purity that offers an epistemological critique of the nature of reality. The Kulamārga emerges organically out the pre-Tantric Kāpālika traditions in much the same manner that much of the Mantramārga is an evolute out of the Lākulas. In practice, the vast majority of the scriptural sources available to us, including even the sole surviving complete classical Bhairava Tantra, the Svacchanda, contain sections that have incorporated or been colonized by Kulamārga imaginaries. In fact, in practice, the vast majority of scriptural works in the traditions of the Trika and in regard to the pre-philosophical scriptural Kālī Krama represent a synthesis of archaic Śākta but pre-Kulamārga traditions with the innovations of the Kulamārga. At the level of practice, these boundaries were even less defined. Indeed, much of this speciation of traditions, apart from its vague memory of historical evolution, seems to be a scholastic exercise with polemical dimensions. ↩︎
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In this regard for the debut of the method, see first Alexis Sanderson, “Vajrayāna: Origin and Function,” in Buddhism into the Year 2000. International Conference Proceedings (Los Angeles: Dhammakāya Foundation, 1994), 89–102. For a delineation of its theoretical dimensions, see Alexis Sanderson, “History through Textual Criticism in the Study of Śaivism, the Pañcarātra and the Buddhist Yoginītantras,” in Les Sources et le Temps, ed. F. Grimal (Pondicherry: Institut Français d’ Indologie/École française d’ Extrême-Orient, 2011), 1–47. ↩︎
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I was myself introduced to this approach while having the privilege of studying under Somadeva Vasudeva. ↩︎
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For more than a decade prior to the publication of “The Śaiva Age” (2009), a case, emerging from within the STS collective, was already being made for the centrality of Tantric religion to the study of greater South Asia, first proffered by David White implicitly in The Alchemical Body (1996) and then much more pointedly in the introduction to Tantra in Practice (2000) and Kiss of the Yogini (2006). David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–3. The introduction to the latter of these, whose conceptual project the present work seeks to extend into a range of additional geographical and demographic domains, is worth quoting in full: “The life of Tantric practitioners has never been limited to textual exegesis alone; nor has it been solely concerned with the fabrication of worship images or the ritual propitiation of the Tantric pantheon. Yet such is the impression one receives when one reads one or another of the types of scholarly literature on the subject. Here, by paralleling these three types of data, as well as attending to accounts of Tantric practice and practitioners found in the medieval secular literature, I intend to reconstruct a history as well, perhaps, as a religious anthropology, a sociology, and a political economy of (mainly Hindu) Tantra, from the medieval period down to the present day. In so doing, I will also lend serious attention to human agency in the history of Tantra in South Asia. Most of the South Asian temples upon which Tantric practices are depicted in sculpture were constructed by kings—kings whose involvement in Tantric ritual life is irrefutable. When the king is a Tantric practitioner and his religious advisers are Tantric “power brokers,” how does this impact the religious and political life of his kingdom? What is the relationship between “popular” practice and “elite” exegesis in the Tantric context? What has been the relationship between “pragmatic” and “transcendental” religious practice in South Asia? These are questions whose answers may be found in texts and in stone, in medieval precept as well as modernday practice. This book will grapple with these questions, and in so doing resituate South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial forms at least, at the center of the religious, social, and political life of India and Nepal. For a wide swath of central India in the precolonial period, Tantra would have been the “mainstream,” and in many ways it continues to impact the mainstream, even if emic misappreciations of Tantra tend to relegate it to a marginal position. In present-day Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, Tantra remains the mainstream form of religious practice. . . . For what reformist Hindus and the scholars who have followed their revisionist history of South Asian religion have in fact done has been to project—backward onto over two millennia of religious history, and outward onto the entire population of South Asia—the ideals, concerns, and categories of a relatively small cadre of Hindu religious specialists, literati, and their mainly urban clientele. While it is the case that those same elites—the brahmin intelligentsia, a certain Indian aristocracy, and the merchant classes—have been the historical bearers of much of Indian religious civilization, their texts and temples have had limited impact on the religious culture of the vast majority of South Asians. . . . The distorting effect of the hegemonic voices of these elites on the ways that twentieth-and now twenty-first-century India has imagined its past has been the subject of no small number of scholarly works, if not movements, over the past twenty-five years. The critical (or postcolonialist, or subalternist) approach to Indian historiography has been quite successful in deconstructing colonial categories. Where it has markedly failed—postmodernisme oblige?—has been in generating other nonelite, noncolonial (i.e., subaltern) categories through which to interpret the history of Indian culture. Yet such a category exists and is [[P2021]] possessed of a cultural history that may be—and in many cases has been— retrieved through literary, art historical, and ethnographic research. That category, that cultural phenomenon, is Tantra, the occulted face of India’s religious history. In many ways the antitype of bhakti—the religion of Indian civilization that has come to be embraced by nineteenth-to twenty-first-century reformed Hinduism as normative for all of Indian religious history—Tantra has been the predominant religious paradigm, for over a millennium, of the great majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. It has been the background against which Indian religious civilization has evolved.” David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yoginī, 1–3. ↩︎
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For all of the brilliant recoveries and reconstructions “The Śaiva Age” offers of specific Tantric traditions found in other parts of the Tantric Age, in my experience it has been Sanderson’s systematic assemblage of documentary evidence, dynasty by dynasty, demonstrating that virtually every political authority known to Indology is imbricated in Tantric knowledge that has had the biggest impact on newly convincing readers outside of Tantric Studies, even those skeptical of Religious Studies in general, of the centrality of Tantric knowledge to classical Indian civilization. ↩︎
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Thus, for example, Sanderson writes even in his most recent publication: “It was necessary also to seek to understand how the Śaivas had understood and negotiated the relationship between their Śaiva obligations and those of mainstream brahmanical religion and the extent to which the latter had accepted or rejected its claims. As one would expect, it became clear that this relationship was subject to change and was far from constant across the range of the Śaiva traditions in different regions and periods and that the history of Śaivism was in important respects the history of this unstable relationship.” Sanderson, “How Public Was Śaivism,” 3. For all of its invocations of the plasticity of the interrelationship between Śaivism and “mainstream Brāhmaṇical religion,” such an approach still seems to be presupposing that there is already in existence a unified “mainstream Brāhmaṇical religion” discourse with which the historically fluid life-worlds of Śaivism interact. ↩︎