09: Universalizing Hindu Dharma

Chapter 9: Universalizing Hindu Dharma: Hemādri and his Legacy

Figure 1: Photo provided courtesy of Temple Trust: Hatnur Nāganātha before the renovation, side view.

Reinventing the Western Deccan: The Seuṇa Sea Change

In 2002, in the small town of Hatnur in rural Marathwada, the temple-trust responsible for the management and preservation of the early fourteenth-century Nāganātha temple undertook an ambitious program of renovation and refurbishment. Though the project was meticulously documented, for the historian or even the aficionado of heritage, the end result was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, one of the few surviving examples of a completely intact early medieval stone śikhara in the region—which had apparently become structurally unsound—was replaced by a colorful slender spire replicating the style preferred by the Marāṭhas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Figure 2: Hatnur, Nāganātha, after the renovation in 2002.

More constructively, in removing many centuries of debris and overgrowth, the committee’s efforts uncovered the full extent and majesty of Hatnur’s enormous stepwell (S. puṣkariṇī, M. bārava). With a tank that could comfortably accommodate three or four Nāganāthas, in both [[P1259]] scale and sophistication, its execution overshadows the rather plain and austere temple. Despite being located in a place that even today is scarcely inhabited, barely reachable by road, and somewhat desolate, the sheer scale of Hatnur’s stepwell echoes back to a time when traditional methods of irrigation, feeding into this vast tank, would have made the desert bloom. Perhaps this would have allowed for the support of a much larger population, comprised of a mixture of locals and pilgrims. While the temple itself was built in the reign of the Seuṇa Yādava King Rāmacandra, during a peculiar moment when he had temporarily reasserted his independence from the Delhi Sultanate, this step well is several centuries older. Even in its diminished condition, one has only to look at the surviving ornamental work on the edges of the stepwell, which introduces elegant and flowing lines into the stone, to say nothing of the remnants of the relief and sculptural components that would have been incorporated therein, to recognize a hand far finer than the one that shaped Nāganātha.

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Figure 3: L: Fragments of panel with three figures worshipping a śivaliṅga. R: Details of stonework, Hatnur tank.

The workmanship here is quite clearly in the style of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas. Compare the subtlety of the lines on these fragments with the much more roughly hewn even somewhat irregular renderings of geometric shapes in evidence on the doorway leading into Nāganātha.

Figure 4: Look at its blocky, almost polygonic Gaṇeśa— the only figurative work incorporated into this Seuṇa complex. Clearly, something must have happened in the intervening centuries that precipitated this marked shift in the aesthetic and visual culture.

Just how drastic this transition must have been becomes evident when we recognize that Hatnur’s Nāganātha lies only fifteen miles to the south of the temples at Charthana that we explored in the preceding chapter. Indeed, despite their vast divergence in focus skill level and style, Hatnur’s Nāganātha incorporates into its ceilings some visual features reminiscent of the otherwise unattested byzantine abstract geometrical formations one also finds at Charthana in the temple that celebrates Matsyendranātha in its garbhagṛha. As we explored in the previous chapter, Charthana’s temples, all of which incorporate numerous figurative and often narrative representations onto their pillars and most of which also present us with images of a wide range of esoteric deities and yogins, represented both in the round and in relief, were likely to have been constructed around the early portions of the thirteenth century. In other words, within precisely the same geographical region and in less than a hundred years, both what temples represented and how they were built altered suddenly, and—as the older style and prowess [[P1262]] was never to resurface— irrevocably.

Figure 5: T: Nāganātha interior. B: Detail of Renuka Devī, Charthana representing very different sort of gods: the pantheon of the Śākta Tantras.

In this regard, Hatnur is hardly unusual. Quite frequently, as I have discovered time and again in his travels within what was once Seuṇa territory, trusts overseeing rather tame late thirteenth-century Hemadpanthi temples engage in beautification projects that demand the draining of temple tanks only to discover that the bottom is often full of traces of a very different sort of material culture.

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Figure 6: Thanks to the efforts of the Hatnur Temple Trust, we are in a position to recognize that this rupture in both the visual style and sophistication of technique finds its almost exact counterpart in a change in religious sensibilities. In dredging up the bottom of temple tank, much to their surprise, the work crews under the direction of trustees found the deliberately broken remnants of older, larger, and somewhat ferocious images Hatnur: Top portion of a large standing image of the goddess commonly worshipped as Mahālakṣmī.

Thus, for example, the mahārāj who tends the temple at Parde Darda an hour from Lonar—a Hemadpanthi temple complex dedicated to the joint worship of Nārāyaṇa and a śivaliṅga also built in the reign of Rāmachandra—recovered from the temple tank on the edge of the property a treasure trove of older images that now fill his temple’s courtyard. Perhaps most memorably, these include an immense and highly unusual Rāṣṭrakūṭa style portrait of a dagger-bearing queen or female ascetic who holds a skull bowl in her right hand. Much as we have seen in our other case studies, Hatnur is of special interest not because it markedly diverges from the dynamics of its day, but because it provides us with a published paper trail associated with a corpus of material cultural evidence. Taken as whole, and read in relation to parallels at other places, this archive tells a surprisingly straightforward and unified story.

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Figure 7: Parde Darda: R: Portion of large Kāpālika portrait found in tank. L. Top: Early thirteenth-century doorway covered in images of yogins that is all that remains of the older structure. L. Bottom: The Hemadpanthi style temple that replaced it in the mid- to late-thirteenth century, itself subsequently renovated.

In both its form and content, the inscription at Hatnur¹ breaks from the chancellery scribal conventions of the medieval Deccan. Not only is it written in old Marathi instead of old Kannada or Sanskrit, but it has been executed by an artisan (S. sūtradhāra, M. sūtāru) who writes in a rather sloppy hand, did not bother to measure out the space where his inscription was to be located before he began engraving, is seemingly unaware of the existence of the anusvāra, and who somehow managed to misspell the name of his own profession (M. sūtārū) as well as the common word for temple (presadu for prāsādu). Nevertheless, the intention behind the inscription is quite clear. An authority named Puruṣadevapaṇḍit, a figure who, as this chapter will demonstrate, was infinitely more likely to have been a householder Brāhmaṇa [[P1266]] than a Śākta ascetic, enlisted an artisan with the strikingly Vaiṣṇava name of Harīdeo to both make (kelā) and “renovate” (vriddhi keli) a temple dedicated to Nāganātha. This combination of making and renovating is itself highly irregular, and not just because it is redundant. No matter how extensive the changes that are being made, when speaking of a single structure, inscriptional records in the Deccan speak either of the renovation of an existing temple or the construction of a new one. In light of the nature of Harīdeo’s project, one is tempted to see our artisan as employing these dual verbs with the intention of communicating something quite similar to the modern real estate idiom of “gut-renovating” a newly purchased “tear-me-down” home where the majority of the value lies in the property underneath the structure itself.

As one enters the temple of Nāganātha, the devotee is confronted with the following Old Marathi inscription, riddled with irregular spellings and scrawled in an indifferent hand, which awkwardly occupies an entire panel on the entry way pillar:

Oṃ saku. 1223 pḷava saṃchare. puruṣudeo paṇḍiti [sic. paṇḍitiṃ] nāganāthācā presadu [sic. prāsādu] kelā vridhhi keli sutārū [sic. sūtārū] Harī deo. Oṃ nāganātha namastu.

In the Śaka year 1223, [in the reign of Rāmachandra Yādava], the temple of Nāganātha was made and renovated by Puruṣodeopaṇḍita. The artisan was Harīdeo. Oṃ: Benedictions to Nāganātha.

Figure 8: Detail: Hatnur Nāganātha. The elaborate plinth is composed of a different type of stone and executed in a different style than the temple itself.

What our visual [[P1267]] evidence seems to suggest is that under Puruṣadeva’s direction, only the old black stone platform, which had rested underneath the prior structure housing the goddess and Bhairava—At a nearby town with the evocative name of Gosai Pimpaleswar, where the Mahānubhāvika sant Cakradhar once dwelt for an extended period of time, though we are lacking in inscriptions, a similar visual dynamic is in evidence. Here again the temple itself is exceptionally plain, though in this case efforts seem to have been made to incorporate some portions of the older “original structure.”

Figure 9: Pimpleśvara Hemadpanthi temple (mid/late-thirteenth century), front view.

Once again, a monumental but very simple crude structure occupies a space that had until recently been defined by a different aesthetic, grounded in a much more intricate and precise visual language, executed with greater skill, and communicating Śākta-Śaiva values. The grounds at Gosai Pimpaleśvara not only preserves beautifully rendered images of Bhairava and [[P1269]] his associates, but we are also lucky to have access to some of the portraits of the “gosāvīs”— most likely Kālamukha ācāryas and sādhakas—that adorned the original structure, looking down from on high upon the devotees. We can be sure that this was the original arrangement because, despite some ideologically inconvenient iconography, the thirteenth-century renovation of the site was intent upon preserving the older temple’s garbhagṛha. Perhaps because the end result would have been an eyesore and the engineers lacked the skills necessary to preserve the worship space intact, they preserved the most nondescript of the yogins in situ on its back wall and the door guardians inside.

Figure 10: Top: Pimpleśvara side view. Top R: Detail, the doorway into the garbhagṛha preserves older features, such as this skull staff bearing dvārapāla Bottom: Hemadpanthi interior.

Figure 11: Gosai Pimpaleśvara: Back exterior of temple preserving features of the older structure: R: Detail of yogin on exterior. [[P1270]]

Figure 12: : Top: Gosāvī ācārya. Bottom: Sādhaka. Both panels would have originally adorned the temple. [[P1271]]

Figure 13: Right top: Details of temple decoration recovered by villagers and now reinstalled lining step well. Middle Right: Small panel preserved on back of temple depicting meditating yogi. Bottom: Detail of an ascetic propitiating two squatting female deities with prominent genitals followed by image of ascetic in meditation (possibly a narrative panel). [[P1272]]

Figure 14: B: Select images of mūrtis, standing images of the mothers, and a seated form of Sarasvatī. An iconographically unusual and perhaps related standing female deity, heavily eroded from centuries of worship, continues to be worshipped by the dreadlock-wearing jogtī (female Śākta ascetic) who currently dwells behind the temple.

As the inscription from Hatnur tells us, Nāganātha was constructed in the year 1301 CE, during a brief period when the Seuṇa Yādava ruler Rāmachandra—in the absence of his ostensible foreign overlord Alauddin Khilji (who had conquered Devgiri in 1296 and then promptly vanished from the Deccan)—attempted to reassert independent rule. As one of nine significant dated inscriptions issued under the regnal year of the dynasty before Khilji returned from his military conquests in north India in 1308 CE² and resumed more direct oversight, [[P1273]] it is a testament to the priorities and vision of both the Seuṇas and the local powers that paid them homage. All of these texts, provided they do not commemorate an untimely death, resume the very same project. They reimagine the sacred landscape of the Deccan, the terms of its administration, as well as the dominant patterns of land ownership and patronage. Often implicitly, but many cases quite explicitly, they set out to dismantle the epistemic frames we have been exploring for the past thousand pages, erasing the Kālamukhas and comparable property-holding Śākta-Śaiva communities from the pages of history.

No. 463: “MASR (1929)124.no. 57 Kannada A.D. 1294: Belgami inscription, Saka 1216 (or 1218). Records the gift of the office of Heggadike (manager) of the Bherundasvami temple in Balligave (Belgami) made to Vaidyadasanna by Devarasa along with the Pattanasvami (the chief of the city) and the heads of the five mathas, etc., a plot of land of two mattaras situated in the estate belonging to a Jaina temple named Prathamasena basadi was also given away along with the land.”

No. 468: “MSP .9.2(Jan. 62) Marathi A.D. 1298 ARIE (1958-59)170 Koprad (sopara) stone inscription of Yadava Ramacandra. It refers to one Mahmud Prosrahi a ruler under Kanharadeva-the feudatory and general of Ramacandra Yadava. Some income has been assigned to a mosque. It is the only Yadava inscription referring to a mosque.” Rāmachandra issues a single inscription, in support of a mosque in 1298 CE, the year Devgiri is brought under Khilji’s control. The inscriptional record only resumes at the very end of 1300 CE, when Khilji has gone north and the Seuṇas resume acting as quasi-independent agents.

No. 469: “SMHD.1.79-81 (no.8,1) Marathi A.D.1300 Dec.5 Velapur inscription, Malshiras tal.,Sholapur dist. Saka 1222. Mentions Ramacandra Yadava, his Sarvadhikari Jaideva; his subordinate Brahmadeva and his brother Baideva. Baideva is recorded to have repaired the temple of Natesvara Jogesvara in Velapura which was situated in the Mana country.” Here we see an instance of the “renovation” of a temple dedicated to a Śākta-Śaiva form of the dancing Śiva into a Hemadpanthi temple.

No. 470: “SMHD.2.8 (no.12,2) Marathi A.D.1300 Velapur inscription, Malshiras tal.,Sholapur dist. Saka 1222. Mentions Ramacandra Yadava, his subordinate Jaideva his subordinate Brahmadeva Rana and his brother Baideva Rana. The last is recorded to have built a monastery and some rooms near Vatesvara at Velapura in the Mana Country. The writer was Maideva, the son of Damodara Pandita.” Here we see another instance of the “renovation” and deinstitutionalization of preexisting Śākta-Śaiva center, in this case resulting in its acquisition by the lineage of the old Marathi yogin/sant Caṅgadeva Vāṭeśvara, the disciple of Muktāyoginī.

No. 471: “EC.11.58 (Dg.26). Kannada A.D.1300 Harihar inscription, Davanagere tal.,Chitaldurga dist. Mysore State. Saka 1222. Records that in the 32nd year of the reign of the Yadava Ramacandra, Harihara, which was formerly a Brahmana endowment, andwhich[sic] afterwards Krsnaakandhara restored – that Harihara, Mummudi Liggaya-Nayaka’s son Khandeya-Raya, again granted, with pouring water at the feet of Visnu, and placing himself before the Brahmanas of Harihara.” [[P1274]]

As we will see through cases drawing upon documentary records in old Marathi, Sanskrit and old Kannada, sometimes this is accomplished through direct armed interventions into the previously sacrosanct domain of long established undying land grants, the forcible eviction of the governing Śākta-Śaiva authorities, the conversion of the grant into a taxable property under the purview of the state, and the installation of a new managerial class, usually comprised of Brāhmaṇas.³ In place of the well-worn formulas identifying the Kālamukhas to which we have grown so accustomed, we find instead emphatic evocations of the unimpeachable orthopraxy and impeccable ethical comportment of the pious Brāhmaṇas. Instead of merely hailing from Vedic gotras, the figures in question are depicted as actively engaged in the practice of Śrauta ritual. And where we would expect appeals to specific samayas and the doctrines of Lākulas and āgamas, the text extol the virtues of the study and [[P1275]] teaching of Advaita Vedānta. In the vast majority of cases, however, it is the sudden silences in our documentary record that cry out to us as places that had received unbroken reverence from every sort of ruler in the Deccan for many hundreds of years suddenly and permanently disappear from our records.

Quite specific and eminently recoverable conditions of possibility underwrite the Seuṇa Yādava reinvention of the preexisting and deeply Śākta sacred landscape. An introduction to this innovative interpretive project as well as the texture of the rewritten religious and institutional dynamics that will become increasingly predominant throughout the Seuṇa domain throughout the second half of the thirteenth century are compellingly conveyed through a close and contextual reading of an old Marathi inscription embedded in an exceptionally remote place now called Unkeshwar.⁴ Unkeshwar lies on the far edge of Marathwada near what is now the Telangana border. As late as the nineteenth century, the region was primarily home to Ādivāsis and jogīs, including traditions associated with the rasa siddhas. Apart from Mahur, sacred to the followers of Dattātreya and the Mahānubhāvikās, which lies an hour to the west, the area even today has no major cities and has yet to be the focus of any significant archaeological, ethnographic, or historical work, even within the modern Marathi academy.

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Figure 15: Unkeshwar: Entrance to the site. Stairs leading up the hill and past the fort to the hot springs.

Figure 16: Unkeshwar: Behind the gate, Sūrya Kuṇḍ (left) is one of the sulphur-rich hot springs. The inscription from 1278 CE (center) is on the exterior of the extensively renovated Hemadpanthi temple.

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For a rather selective demographic of tourists, however, Unkeshwar’s contemporary significance is not a matter of heritage or piety but a question of chemistry —compelled by utter desperation. The site where our inscription stands is a built on top of the only active hot springs in eastern Maharashtra, and the high sulphur content of the boiling water is seen as having curative potential—or at the very least providing relief—to lepers and other people afflicted by diseases of the skin, whose families bring them there in hope of a miracle. Close to crashing waterfalls up among hills that are riddled with caves, for five miles in every direction around Unkeshwar one finds geothermal pockets that heat the water to at least a hundred degrees. The surrounding plains are so overabundant with mercury that the farmers worry about it poisoning the crops and the companies committed to extracting coal and gold out of the ground must take precautions as they dig because it periodically oozes up from the ground. Succinctly, for the siddhas of the early medieval world, the site we call Unkeshwar must have amounted to an alchemist’s dream. Though a matter of informed conjecture, our inscription from 1278 CE is complicit in the almost complete erasure of this lurid zeitgeist. For precisely the same reasons, it seeks to manicure and domesticate even the classical Sanskrit tradition in the service of promoting a new kind of “Hindu” ethos, actively mediated through the prestige and authority of the state. The inscription reads as follows:

Oṃ, Salutations to Gaṇeśa! In the auspicious Śaka year 1201, known of as Vikrama Saṃvatsara, during the reign of the vigorous mighty one, auspicious Rāmacandradeva the Cakravartin, on this very day—right here—subsisting on the feet of him, the master of elephants—“bhāvakadeva”⁵—the chief minister Hemādipaṇḍita, the officer under his [Hemādri’s] direction (M. taṃniropītaḥ, S. tat-nirūpita), the nāeku (S. nāyaka), master scribe (M. kastu, S. kāyastha) Somadeyo Paṇḍita, at the time did it [i.e., oversaw the implementation of the grant as follows]:

In the tretā yuga, Rāma on the occasion of dwelling in the forest, came to the āsramā (S. āśrama) of Sarabhaṅga. To please Sarabhaṅga, he made the spring water become hot (S. uṣṇa). Since that time, this tīrtha was made by the god. [[P1278]]

By the grace of Harihara, the one who dwells at Mātāpura, Saraṇanāeka, belonging to the Kaṇva sāṣā (s. śākhā) and Kauṇḍinyagotra, the son of Maghadeva, commenced the making of all the temples (M. sakalaprāsāda). By the grace of Rāma, he made it complete. His homage to Harihara, to the group of the thirty-three [Vedic] deities who dwell in the temples. Homage to all the tīrthas [gap]. Homage to all the three times [when sandhyā is performed]. Whoever reads this will be victorious!!

The village of that place is a perpetual (M. nīti, S. nitya) designated land grant from the state (M. rājavaṭī, S. rājavṛtti).⁶ Thus, the terms of the grant run as follows:

[[P1279]]

On the surface a seemingly simple text, the first portion of the Unkeshwar inscription has much to teach us about the fundamental transformation of the relationship between religion and the state and the role played by Brāhmaṇas in popular worship under the last three Seuṇa kings, Kandharāya, Mahādeva, and Rāmacandra. We are witnessing here an extraordinary moment. On the edge of the Seuṇa Yādava domain, a duly credentialed (Kaṇva Śākhā, Kauṇḍinya Gotra) Brāhmaṇa named Saraṇa decides to undertake a program of massive investment in a sacred field, building a series of temples at a site sacred to Rāma. There is no acknowledgement of any preexisting religious institutions or infrastructure. Despite the fact that some of these are temples associated with Śiva and Rāma, the latter of whom is directly responsible for making the site sacred, Śiva is in absentia and Rāma himself is only responsible for the successful completion of the project. Instead, rather pointedly, the text twice attributes the capacity of the patron to undertake this project to the grace of Harihara, the distant god at Pandharpur whom our records show was heavily patronized both by the Seuṇa kings and his chief minister, and whose worship at this time suspiciously resembles a sort of state religion. Similarly, instead of aligning with particularized “local” pantheons and concerns or the deities of specific social communities, as had been typical of the inscriptional records in the Deccan for centuries, the text tells us that these new temples, built by a non-resident Brāhmaṇa, will be housing the thirty-three Vedic deities, hardly popular focuses of veneration.

Even in its invocation of its imagined classical pedigree, our inscription employs a certain sleight of hand in its deployment of canonical mythology. In both the Vālmīki Rāmāyāṇa and Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa,⁷ Rāma’s brief encounter with the sage Śarabhaṅga is one of the more bizarre moments in the epic. In the critical edition of the book of the forest, enroute to Citrakūṭa, the dying gandharva Tumburu encourages Rāma to swiftly seek out the āśrama of the sage Śarabhaṅga. This place lies along the Godāvarī river, which is to say roughly in the region of Maharashtra under discussion. As Rāma makes his way towards the sage’s āśrama, he sees radiant Indra and his chariots rushing towards Śarabhaṅga’s home. After many centuries of fierce austerities (ugreṇa tapasā), Śarabhaṅga, a great sage resplendent like the sun (maharṣiḥ sūryasaṃnibhaḥ), is getting ready to ascend into heaven. Thankfully, Rāma and his brother arrive just in time, right at the moment that Śarabhaṅga is about to step into the agnihotra fire and immolate himself. When he sees the descendants of Raghu, Śarabhaṅga is overjoyed and clasps their feet. The sage delights that he is there to welcome them, declares the moment most auspicious, and then, after offering them the hospitality of his house, he invites them to watch as he kills himself, shedding his body as a snake sloughs off its skin. Overbrimming with radiant tejas (mahātejas), Śarabhaṅga then steps into the sacrificial fire. It consumes his hair, flesh, and bones. Transformed into an elegant [[P1280]] youth, Śarabhaṅga’s radiant fiery spirit is seen ascending into heaven. In Vālmīki, Rāma is then welcomed by the Vaikhanāsa sages who dwell in that place, who encourage him to go kill some rākṣasas that have been troubling the region. For Kalidāsa and his ninth-century Kashmiri commentator Vallabhadeva, in contrast, the story of Śarabhaṅga primarily holds a didactic function.⁸ The moral of the story is that, in much the same way that it is a breach of etiquette to eat without first offering hospitality and food to one’s guests, it also a śiṣṭa faux pas to be eaten—in this case by agni kravyāda, consumer of flesh—without first going through all the social niceties.

[[P1281]]

In either case, in the classical reception histories of the story, Rāma and Śarabhaṅga share space for approximately five minutes and exchange fewer than eighty words. This is hardly enough time for Rāma to perform the miracle of the bubbling hot springs. Adding insult to injury, the very idea in the first place that Rāma making spring water become hot (M. udabhi udaka uṣḷa keleṃ) is the sort of thing that would please Śarabhaṅga (M. sarabhaṅgāprītyarthaḥ) belies even a passing exposure to the narrative. As we have seen, Śarabhaṅga does not exactly stick around long enough to be pleased by any additions to his āśrama. Perhaps even more significantly, the last thing in the world that a sage who is described as a miniature walking sun that constantly gives off ambient heat would need is someone else’s help in making things become hot. Much like Vālmīki himself, whose portrait of the “Vedic sage” Śarabhaṅga—elsewhere appearing as an ascetic in Buddhist literature— reads as an attempt at incorporating and sanitizing an external tradition of violent asceticism, in many ways akin to the proto-Tantroid worship of Rudra through self-immolation practiced by Aśvatthāman in the Sauptikaparvan. The author of our inscription seems quite intent on forcibly taming—and Vedicizing—a much wider, wilder world.

Though it contains some phrases that remain obscure, the purely documentary portion of our inscription⁹ also seems to be animated by an analogous Brāhmaṇizing ethos. In regard to the main grant within the central village, this establishes funding for food offerings and so forth to be given to the unspecified deity that rules the village (grāmādhyedevo bonayāṃ sthala), allots two fields so that their earnings will go towards repairing broken buildings (cākulivāṃci tathā pa – sthalaḥ), and assigns one field to be cultivated by tenant farmers, with the proceeds going to the temple of Rāma for the first several years and any remainder in subsequent years being put towards the funding of festivals (adhīk māse bhaṃgaleā kī rāmāsī ekadoṇi saṃvatsaraparyaṃta so (mo?)ḍale teṃciṃ karāveṃ maga suṣe ure teṃ koṭhiā caṇeyā). In perpetuity, two additional villages are dedicated to providing financial support and material resources to the temples to Unhapakadeva and Rāma (tathā grāmi unhapa[ka]devāḥ rāmā mele : / dasīṇe pūrve boyṃthīye dohiṃ devāṃ malāḥ / sāṅgaviṃyeṃ dohiṃ devāṃ malā). In this regard, the grant prescribes the installation of at least two more liṅgas (liṅgāṃ dohi devā malā), and, micromanaging the landscape, establishes a storage house for cloth (paṭavadeṃ sthalaḥ), lamp oil (taleṣala), as well as endowments providing jaggery and sugar (kāmatu guḍā sthala / taleṣala kāpa sakāragavāṃ sthala). It rations out which materials from plots of land [[P1282]] containing different types of trees have their products allotted to the temple (ciṃcavalī sthala piṃpalajai sāṃgaviṃ sthala) and even specifies which plots of land are to self-cultivated or to be tended by hired labor. Rather distinctively, for this dimension has no earlier known parallels, it also grants in perpetuity a “fertile field each to the Brāhmaṇas engaged in the work [lit., the path] of the king,” (nāvaṃ mahuseta [S. madhukṣetra] teyāṃcī brāhmaṇā pratyai rājamārgici), a phrase that most likely refers to the main minister Hemāḍi and his deputy Somadeva Paṇḍita.

The most stunning dimension of the Unkeshwar inscription, however, is the circumstances under which it was executed, for the text tells us at this remote place on the edge of Seuṇa world, the fulfillment of the grant was carried out in the presence of the master of elephants, whose identity we will discuss in a moment, the king’s most important (pradhāna) minister, Hemāḍi (S. Hemādri) Paṇḍita, and, acting under Hemādri and at his command, Somadeyo Paṇḍita, the lead administrator of the royal chancellery directing the scribes and record keepers. Now, as we have encountered ever so many time over the course of this study, in the context of the normative paradigm reflected in the documentary records of the early medieval Deccan, the establishment of a land-grant upon the building of a new temple entails both acts of dakṣiṇā on the part of the most prominent figures present as well as the transfer, either in person or in absentia, of the sovereignty of the space from secular to sacerdotal authorities an act marked by the washing of the feet of the local authority or ācārya. In [[P1283]] contradistinction, at Unkeshwar, none of the authorities present seem to be contributing anything at all—neither land nor resources—to the grant itself, either of their own accord or behalf of the state. Despite this being listed as an undying land-grant, there is no indication that sovereign authority has been transferred from the state to a new agent, or that the recipient of the grant has been endowed with new rights or no longer has to pay taxes. Instead, it seems that these high-ranking agents of the state are simply there to ensure that everything is being done according to the proper procedure, as part of a process that our prescriptive sources will call examination (parīkṣā).

In his edition as well as his earlier partial translation¹⁰ of the Unkeshwar inscription, Tulpule has assumed that for the inauguration of Saraṇanāeka’s new temple complex, four distinctive social actors were in attendance representing the Seuṇa Yādava state. In Tulpule’s reading, these would include King Rāmacandra himself, the master of elephants, purportedly a certain Bhāvakadeva, the chief minister Hemāḍi Paṇḍita, who as we shall see is none other than the great Brāhmaṇa polymath and author of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, and finally, acting explicitly under Hemāḍi’s authority, Somadeyo Paṇḍita, the leader of the scribes and record keepers. If, however, one examines the contemporary multilingual Seuṇa Yādava inscriptional corpus from this precise period, say, from the years 1260–1280 CE, attending to chancellery formulas and syntactical commonalities, as we shall see, it is evident that Tulpule is mistaken in respect to two rather significant details. Small as they might seem, they will have an enormous impact on the argument of the present chapter. His edition and translation of the second line reads as follows. The matters of contention have been highlighted in bold:

adyeha māhāprauḍhapratāpacakravartī śrīrāmacandradevaḥ vijayo tatapādapadmopajivi hāthisāhāṇī bhāvakadeva pradhāna hemāḍi paṇḍita taṃniropītaḥ nāekuḥ kastu somadeyo paṇḍita.

Today, in the auspicious Śaka year 1201, known of as Vikrama Saṃvatsara, the paramount sovereign, possessing great valour, Śrī Rāmacandradeva, with his devoted chief of the elephant division of the army [Bhāvakadeva], Minister Hemāḍi Paṇḍita, [[P1285]] and the deputy of the latter, Nāyaka Kāyastha Somadeva Paṇḍita, in his time [the present grant is made].¹¹

Tulpule believes that the Seuṇa Yādava king Rāmacandradeva was himself present at Unkeshwar solely because he rather unexpectedly construes the word that follows the king’s canonical list of titles—vijayo—as modifying the noun Rāmacandra—victorious Rāmachandra. This interpretation would place the king as one subject among many in the list of officials that soon follows. What Tulpule has overlooked is that this portion of the text is simply offering a shorthand form of an inherited chancellery formula signifying the date.¹² Within this convention, the name of the reigning king and his titles is immediately followed by a term such as vijayodaya, or vijayarājya, one occasionally even sees just vijaya, and the sense is that this is an expression akin to the Western calendrical notion of measuring time “in the year of our Lord.” In much the same way that if someone in medieval Europe were to speak of something happening in their hometown “in the Year of Our Lord 1290,” he or she would very much not be implying that Jesus Christ was present in the flesh right then in that very village, when a land grant in old Marathi refers to the regnal year, it is not invoking the actual presence of the king onsite. In Sanskrit, we would express this sort of meaning, which postulates a continuing state of affairs co-current with the actual matter under discussion, using an extended locative absolute. More than mere pedantry, this observation—that King Rāmacandra is present only in name and that other people are carrying out the affairs of the state—does not merely just set the stage for making sense of the other major place in this passage where Tulpule has gone astray. It also communicates something of vital interest about the actual workings of political authority within the Yādava state. Almost without exception, in both our documentary record and the old Marathi and Sanskrit texts, after 1240 CE, the Seuṇas appear simply as ciphers. In fact, the king rarely if ever leaves his court and instead delegates most if not all of his authority to another person who then acts out in the world “as if he were the king himself.” [[P1286]]

As we have seen in our earlier chapters, apart from when they are discussing a ruling overlord (such as the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya emperor) in discussing other strata of authoritative persons, the multilingual inscriptional records of the past five centuries have typically presented us with lists comprised of a diverse range of social actors and offices. Often to our consternation, these figures bear the same or comparable titles and it is very difficult to figure out their relative authority in relation to each other. Though to some degree this is a reflection of our own ignorance of the workings of early medieval courts, it also almost certainly the case that in the social realities we have been exploring, authority is commonly conceptualized as multicentric and diffuse. This is reflected in the proliferation of types of cabinet positions in the royal court, with the Cāḷukyas, for example, recognizing sixteen distinctive subject and discipline specific advisory positions, each of which held governing authority only within their respective domain.¹³ We have seen this pluralistic theorization of both knowledge and authority as site and community-specific at work in scholastic, juridical, mythological, theological, political, and social domains throughout our investigation. By now they may well [[P1287]] have become so familiar that one might see them as part and parcel of a Deccani ethos, unchallengeable norms written into the fabric of reality.

One of the defining features of the Seuṇa imperium in the half-century after the death of Siṅghaṇa II is that at virtually every level of expression, these norms are repudiated, even actively dismantled. This interpretive choice is reflected in the Seuṇa inscriptions themselves. Suddenly, for the first time in centuries, the chancellery formulas are emended with the aim of clearly delineating levels of dependence and authority among different social actors. Thus, while, in theory, the absent king himself sits at the top of the food chain, in the inscriptions it is the figure who subsists (tatpādapadmopajīvi)—one might even say whose livelihood depends—on the feet of the king who is the actual acting authority. This figure—always a single person who is often given a chain of titles specifying what would otherwise seem to be a series of unrelated responsibilities, offices, and specific accomplishments—is then seen as having at least one active subordinate. This position marked by the phrase, given various spellings, “taṃniropita,” followed by that person’s name and titles. Tulpule observes in his dictionary¹⁴ that tan-niropita/niropīta is a tadbhava form of the Sanskrit phrase tat-nirūpita, and while this is certainly true, one might suppose that the identification of this exact parallel entails that its programmatic usage in these old Marathi documentary records is transposed from the Sanskrit sources. Rather unexpectedly, however, digital corpus analysis of a substantial sampling of literature in Sanskrit as well as inscriptions makes it clear that not only is such a usage in this context seemingly unattested, but in fact the terms tannirūpita, tatnirūpita or tadanurūpita up through this time period are virtually never used in reference to [[P1288]] people or within a social setting. Instead, they are almost exclusively attested within high scholastic discourses, especially works of Navya Nyāya or discussions of the logic of figuration in Sanskrit poetics. In this context, they are terms of art signifying the absolutely determined subordination and logical dependency of one precisely specified thing over another, with the dominant subject being whatever is the intended referent of the pronoun “tat.” In short, what we have here is an example of a synthetic attempt to transpose the “artificial” logical clarity found in certain exalted registers of Sanskrit scholasticism down into the messy and imperfect world of human experience. As we shall see, this is precisely the interpretive project that occupies the majority of textual production in the court of the later Seuṇas themselves and that practically defines the oeuvre of the iconoclastic poetician, Dharmaśāstrin, public intellectual, administrator, and de facto ruler of the Seuṇa Yādava kingdom, Hemādri Sūri.

Our examination of the Unkeshwar inscription as the product of a specific chancellery culture with highly regularized formulas also prepares us for wrestling with Tulpule’s more significant misinterpretation, namely, his posting of a certain “Bhāvakadeva” as the master of elephants (hāthisāhāṇī) who subsists on the feet of the king. Were we to accept this reading, this would presuppose the existence of an entirely different, and quite plausibly higher-ranking person than the chief minister, Hemādri. On the basis of textual parallels, however, there is good reason to understand “Bhāvakadeva” not as someone’s name, but as one of many adjectives qualifying the main subject, Hemāḍri, who is himself assigned the office of master of the elephants amidst his many other titles. Here, it is not the old Marathi corpus, but rather a nearly contemporary inscription¹⁵ discussing Hemādri and his social role drawn from the [[P1289]] Sanskrit corpus¹⁶ that offers our strongest evidence. Though the text is issued on behalf of both Rāmacandra and the “acting king” Hemādri in 1289 CE, both figures are discussed solely within distinctive sets of locative absolute constructions set off from the rest of the text. They were not present at the drafting and distribution of these copper plates. Instead, that task was assigned to their subordinate, a certain Acyuta Nāyaka, who happens to be the grandson of the famous Jalhaṇa, military commander, master of the elephants, and compiler of the poetic anthology the Sūktimuktāvali. In any case, the relevant passage runs as follow:

Now while King Rāmacandra, moon to the lotuses of the Yadu race, brilliant with the series of all titles such as: “he who dries up the pools of the hostile monarchs’ glory by his most fierce heat [or, majesty], who adorns the girdles of the ladies of the quarters of space with lines of precious pearls arising his own stainless virtues, who displays the awfulness of a Nṛsimha by tearing open the surface of mighty foemen’s breasts, whose face-lotus is kissed by the bees which are the restless eye-corners of Śambara’s slayer [Kāma], who by his own arm has won the name Ekāṅgavīra, who is a treasury of all virtues, who is a Vīra-Nārāyaṇa to the demons his enemies, who by his life makes light of Grandsire [Brahman], a Grandsire of monarchs, who is the lord of the city of Dvāravatī, a lion shattering the elephants of the Gūrjara, an elephant in uprooting the tall trees of Tēliṅga, a blast of the Day of Doom in extinguishing the lamps of the Mālavas, a trees of desire possessing the virtue of liberality,” is reigning over the whole girdle of the earth;

And, while Hemādri, superintendent of all the elephant riders (hastipakādhyakṣe) inspiring men to appreciate the fineness of his virtues (nijaguṇasubhaga[bhāvuke] bhāvake)¹⁷ [emphasis added], conqueror of the province of Jhāḍi, crest jewel of ministers, a Rōhaṇa Mountain of the gem of virtues, is exercising the administration of the whole kingdom which has been obtained by his favor and is controlling the whole treasury.¹⁸

[[P1290]]

In the old Marathi inscription, the syntax in the phrase “hāthisāhāṇī bhāvakadevaḥ pradhāna hemāḍipaṇḍitaḥ” by itself is somewhat uncertain. As we have seen, it could refer to two distinct subjects, a master of elephants named Bhāvakadeva and the minister Hemāḍi Paṇḍita, or, as will turn out to be the case, it could offer a series of adjectives assigning specific roles to the single subject Hemādri. In contrast, the structure of the Sanskrit parallel, in which every compounded phrase placed in the locative must refer back to the single subject, is unambiguous. Here, we find, in precisely the same sequence, albeit with just a bit of further embellishment, that it is Hemādri that is being characterized as the one who holds the office of overseeing the elephants (hastipakādhyakṣe) and then, taking the compound literally, setting aside for a time its domain-specific connotations, “being the one whose good fortune is a product of his own good qualities” (nijaguṇasubhaga[bhāvuke]bhāvake).” While in the case [[P1291]] of the old Marathi, the grammatical work that this term “bhāvaka” is doing is somewhat obscure¹⁹—one possibility being that the term is again being used in the sense of lord of literary connoisseurs—what is quite clear is that the old Marathi text has drawn upon a preexisting formula for describing Hemādri’s various titles and that the text it is not in fact referring to two separate people. The Sanskrit copper plate also makes crystal clear that the enormous scope of the authority ascribed to Hemādri—as we shall see, most often by himself—“exercising the administration of the whole kingdom,” “controlling the whole treasury,” as well as having war elephants at his beck and call, was no fanciful literary trope but hard social fact.

Here we would do well to remember that, among the Seuṇas in particular, the master of the elephants held direct control over the most important component of the Yādava war machine–its pachyderm shock troops, the nuclear weapons of their day.²⁰ From the time of Bhillama V, this position seems always to have been held by a learned Brāhmaṇa,²¹ and its conferral seems to have served repeatedly as the fastest track to political advancement, often culminating in assuming the highest office in the land, after that of the king himself. In fact, except in the case of the apparently preternaturally talented Brāhmaṇa general Kholeśvara, [[P1292]] who appears to have used other tactics,²² it seems that most of the major victories of the Yādavas were dependent on the deploying of huge battalions of elephants in the service of crushing their enemies. Effectively, so long as the king did not object, the office of master of the elephants could decide when, how, and where to wage war, and could also bring the threat of physical violence to bear against those who resisted this authority. As the Thane inscription tells us, this is precisely what Hemādri seems to have done when he conquered the Jhāḍimaṇḍala, a region to the north of Marathwada, the reincorporation of which into the Seuṇa domain is never assigned in our inscriptions to king Rāmacandra himself. As we shall see in the next chapter, the master of elephants was also entrusted to prosecute the king’s own wars and, in the absence of the king himself, to receive the homage of subjugated rulers who the Seuṇa forces has defeated on the battlefield.

As both the Unkeshwar and Thane inscriptions make plain, in the case of Hemādri, sovereign “hard power” over the military found its complement in autonomous economic power through “managing the entirety of the royal treasury,” and soft power, in his capacity as chief minister and policy advisor guiding at least two generations of Seuṇa kings. Perhaps most critically, as śrīkaraṇeśvara, Hemādri assumed an active and direct oversight not only over the workings of the royal bureaucracy, comprised of scribes, accountants, and record keepers, itself, but ultimately, as he would reimagine the role, of the production, evaluation, and preservation of documentary record keeping throughout the Seuṇa world.

As we will soon see, Hemādri was at once a brilliant and original theologian and the architect of a new vision for articulating a powerful and pious “Hindu” state. His most immediately evident legacy, however, from an Indological perspective, are four surviving Sanskrit treatises, all of which suffer from poor transmission and inadequate editions. We have the “Resurrection of the Ayurveda” (Āyurvedarasāyana), his commentary on the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya;²³ the “Discrimination Regarding the Play of Hari” (Harilīlavivekā), his commentary on what is essentially a thematic index to key narrative episodes in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa;²⁴ and, the “Illuminator of Enstasy” (Kaivalyadīpikā), which ostensibly comments on his disciple Bopadeva’s anthologization of verses, the Muktāphala, from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.²⁵ And of course, we have the “Wish-Fulfilling Gem of the Four Classes” (Caturvargacintāmaṇi), a voluminous Dharmaśāstra nibandha.²⁶ And yet, without any exaggeration, in the entirety of the history of Sanskrit thought, there are few figures whose legacy had a greater concrete impact, within the medium of śāstra, in the domain of religion, and upon the wider social world.²⁷

[[P1294]]

Sadly, the remainder of our literature discussing Hemādri simply treats our author as an embodied instantiation of a perennial Brāhmaṇical worldview, often in a manner that directly conflicts with the theology in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, without consulting his Sanskrit works. Emblematic of this trend is the usually exemplary G. Sontheimer, author of what was until recently the most substantial essay on Hemādri, who relies exclusively on the old Marathi sources of the Mahānubhavikas in representing his subject. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer, “God, Dharma and Society in the Yadava Kingdom of Devagiri According to the Lilacharitra of Chakradhara.” In Günther-Dietz Sontheimer: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Law, ed. Heidrum Brückner, et. al., (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004), 305–326. Sontheimer’s model has been much expanded upon and refined to good effect in regard to the old Marathi sources in Christian Novetzke’s The Quotidian Revolution as well as in an additional essay composed for the Oxford History of Hinduism’s volume on Hindu law. Both of these works offer us vivid portraits of Hemādri as perceived by the Mahānubhāvika communities he persecuted. Novetzke, however, not being a Sanskritist, relies on Sontheimer’s characterization of Hemādri’s intellectual project, which alas is entirely uninformed by a study of his texts. Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Christian Lee Novetzke, “Vernacularization,” in The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmaśāstra, ed. Donald R. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 480–96.

A similar issue is in evidence in Mary McGee’s monumental dissertation comparing the representation of vrata practice in the nibandha literature, especially vis-à-vis the role of women, with the author’s extensive fieldwork among Maharashtrian women performing vratas. McGee is the only author to date who has studied and translated extensive selections from the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, treating whole vrata cycles. However, her representation of the “nibandhakāra” theology of vrata, against which she contrasts the lived tradition, rests upon a synthetic composite “nibandha theology” that is produced out of an aggregate of her sources without attending to the specific theological positions and procedures of the individual works. In the case of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, in the absence of reading the opening portions of the Vratakhaṇḍa or its Paribhāṣā, she ascribes a theology of vrata to Hemādri that is in many regards antithetical to the one propounded in his text, which we will explore in the next chapter. Mary McGee, Feasting and Fasting: The Vrata Tradition and Its Significance for Hindu Women: A Thesis (PhD diss., Harvard Divinity School, 1987).

Recent careful textual work, though restricted to the Dānakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, has been carried out by David Brick in the context of producing his edition of the Dānakāṇḍa of Lakṣmīdhara. Building upon earlier efforts, such as those of Trautmann, Florinda De Simini has added to our understanding by mapping out the subsequent reception of the text. David Brick, ed. and trans., Brahmanical Theories of the Gift: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Dānakāṇḍa of the Kṛtyakalpataru (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Oriental Series, 2015); Thomas R. Trautmann, “The gift in India,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 2 (2017): 485–496; Florinda De Simini, Of Gods and Books: Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the Manuscript Cultures of Premodern India (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). Brick’s work builds upon the pioneering efforts of Aiyangar Rangaswami, the Kṛtyakalpataru’s original editor, each volume of whose work meticulously documents the textual parallels between Lakṣmīdhara’s and Hemādri’s writings. Though its treatment of Hemādri in its first volume is disappointingly terse, P. V. Kane’s History of Dharmaśāstra incorporates references throughout, cross referencing Hemādri’s Caturvargacintāmaṇi within nearly every topic. P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 8 vols. (Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930–1962). Though it does not focus on the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, touching upon it only briefly, De Simini has also offered our first substantive study on the technique of the dharmanibandhakāras. Florinda De Simini, “Observations on the Use of Quotations in Sanskrit Dharmanibandhas,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 43, no. 4–5 (2015): 601–624.

In terms of the use of Hemādri’s work as a repository for Purāṇic citations, apart from the collected works of P. K. Gode, as examples of the practice one might fruitfully consults: Albert Henry Allen, “The Vaṭa-Sāvitrī-Vrata, According to Hemādri and the Vratārka,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 21 (1900): 53–66. Rajendra Chandra Hazra, Studies in the Purāṇic Records on Hindu Rites and Customs (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987). Discussions of the secondary literature on Hemādri’s in relation to Muktāphala will be reserved for the next chapter. [[P1295]]

As this chapter will make plain, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi reinvented fundamentally and irrevocably the discipline of Dharmaśāstra and the role of the Dharmaśāstrin. Under his direction, this knowledge, and as well as its practitioners, who had typically held the religion of ordinary people at best in thinly veiled contempt, is refashioned such that they become conceptually central to the lived practice of Indian religions. Through his intervention in the domain of śāstra, Hemādri takes up arcane hermeneutical strategies from the domain of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and the emergent tradition of the new logic, and for first time in the history of Indic thought deploys them in the service of offering a robust intellectual defense of the commonsense conclusions of every day Indian religions and its transactional economies of spirit-based favors. In doing so, the Wish- Fulfilling Gem of the Four Classes effectively made possible much of what is most familiar to us in early modern and modern Smārta Brāhmaṇical Hinduism.

As we will explore in the final chapter, working in a very different register, with the Muktāphala and the Kaivalyadīpikā, Hemādri articulates for the first time, seemingly ex nihilo, the affective aestheticized devotional theology of the Vaiṣṇava rasika.²⁸ As a wealth of scholarly literature, largely oblivious to the source of this discourse, has demonstrated, these values [[P1296]] and conceptual frameworks come to define a plurality of early modern Vaiṣṇava devotional traditions, especially those found in north and central India and Bengal. Concurrent to his Ālaṃkārika-inspired interpretive project, which will set the program for much of the theological writings of the Gauḍīya Gosvāmīs, though this influence remains even less recognized, Hemādri’s bhakti writings also present us with the earliest instance of scholastic reflection in the tradition of theistic Advaita Vedānta philosophy, prefiguring much of what has been assumed to be revolutionary within the writings of figures like Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. The grand irony, of course, is that in their early modern reception, what were originally two facets of a single interpretive project—affective devotionalism and theistic nondual Vedānta—would come to be seen as distinct and opposing schools of thought.

For a general survey of the literature see Raghu Nath Sharma, Bhakti in the Vaiṣṇava Rasa-śāstra (Delhi, Pratibha Prakashan, 1996). For a representative sampling of theorization on bhaktirasa drawn from a range of traditions: Neil Delmonico, “Sacred Rapture: The Bhakti-rasa Theory of Rupa Goswamin,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 75–98; David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001); Monika Horstmann, Crossing the Ocean of Existence: Braj Bhāṣā Religious Poetry from Rajasthan; A Reader (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983); Barbara A. Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Kṛṣṇa Bhakti (New York: Routledge, 2015); Lance Nelson, “Bhakti Rasa for the Advaitin Renunciate: Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s Theory of Devotional Sentiment,” Religious Traditions: A Journal in the Study of Religion 12 (1989): 1–16; James D. Redington, “Elements of a Vallabhite Bhakti-Synthesis,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 2 (1992): 287– 294; David Buchta, “Evoking Rasa Through Stotra: Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Līlāmṛta, A List of Kṛṣṇa’s Names,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (2016): 355–371.

Despite the undeniable significance of these learned contributions, comprising a neglected legacy that will receive ample attention by the final chapter’s closure, the present chapter anchors its inquiry not in reflection upon how Hemādri the brilliant scholar sets the agenda for the coming centuries, but rather on how Hemādri the strategist and effective [[P1297]] administrator brings closure to the ethos of the past. Despite his lofty position and self- identification with a Brāhmaṇical ethos, Hemādri does not envision spearheading a conservative restoration of the storied ideals of some imagined Brāhmaṇical golden age that has run afoul of the degeneracies of the kali yuga. Instead, rather candidly, he offers to his readers what amounts to a genuinely revolutionary program for social and religious change. With a degree of self-awareness—effectively otherwise unknown to the world of śāstra—that what he has to offer is radical and unprecedented, through his writings, Hemādri aims to establish new norms appropriate for a brave new world. Through the state and its bureaucracy, he makes those norms actionable. It is in this spirit that he writes in the introduction to the final book of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, the definitive deliberation concerning ritual timing (kālanirṇaya):

Of him [king Mahādeva], the Lord of all the śrīkaraṇas (sarvaśrīkaraṇaprabhuḥ) has the name Hemādri. Because of his munificence above all others, he [Hemādri] was capable of producing all forms of auspiciousness/wealth for everyone (sarvaśrīkaraṇaprabhuḥ). . . .

On the part of that lord of śrīkaraṇas, there was a certain cleverness when it came to writing. By him, the walls of the directions were quickly imprinted with the praises (praśasti) of [his] glory.

With his power, having wiped clean the flawed script has been written by the creator on the foreheads of the people, he [Hemādri] now pens this auspicious [script], and the creator/fate wondrously makes it authoritative (pramāṇīkurute). . . .

I imagine the ocean/treasury is becoming as if it is full of waves—with the water that is the charity he has given. Even at the end of the eon, he does not put things out of balance due to [the bends of the serpent Śeṣa/ the flaws that are the remainder (śeṣa) in the balance book]. And so, having discerned the security/surety of the state of the ocean, may [Nārāyaṇa], the enemy of the Daityas, sleep peacefully on the bed that is the body of the bull among serpents [Śeṣa].

What can we say of that marvel that is the substance of the deluge of rainwater that is his charity? In contrast to [such charity], the fame of the munificence of others takes on the value of a clod of grass. [[P1298]]

Fallen on the ground, that [rain of charity] erases the mud [on the feet] of the people who absorb it. When it is set down in the hands of the petitioners, it erases the evil script [fate] inscribed on the plank that is the forehead. . . .

Though he bears the guise of a twice-born, Hemādri alone is recognized as the “mountain of gold” (Hemādri). [As he is] possessed of a continuum of nobility, they say that his right arm is the wish-fulfilling tree.

Having seen that the three worlds were impoverished in stories of dharma due to the power of the kali yuga, to offer assistance to them out of compassion, he gracefully manifested the Cintāmaṇi.

Having uttered its four divisions, known by name as Vrata, Dāna, Tīrtha and Mokṣa, for the purpose of describing matters that supplement that, he composes the remainder (Pariśeṣa) division.²⁹

[[P1299]]

Beneath its wit and mythological allusions, this is poetry about bureaucratic administration, about providing social services, about banking, and most of all, about centrally directed social reforms. Hemādri—a name that quite literally means “the mountain of gold,” provides the people—especially ascetics and Brāhmaṇas—with an unceasing flow of philanthropy. At the same time, so that god and king alike can sleep easefully knowing their kingdom’s safety and success is secured, he ensures the financial security and social stability of the realm. In the effective absence of the slumbering king, his minister inscribes throughout the realm formalized proclamations (praśasti) praising his own glory. It is not the inactive and distant king, but the engaged minister, who can and has accomplished what more distant powers did not dare.

Hemādri rejects the fatalistic pan-Indo-European notion that each individual person’s destiny, long before they were born, was secretly inscribed upon their forehead by the creator deity at the moment of their conception. Breaking from the inherited weight of tradition and the claims it lays upon the individual, which he sees as fallible and constricting, our author asserts that he has drafted for humankind a new and better future. He has changed the rules of the game that everyone thought immutable, and so Brahmā must resign himself to making authoritative (pramāṇīkurute) —quite literally, to establishing new pramāṇas, whole new sets of world-ordering ordinances. In the manner of charismatic leaders everywhere, Hemādri claims that he has ushered in an era of unparalleled fortune and riches. But whereas, especially in early medieval or even early modern South Asia, we would expect such promises to be founded upon appeal to a higher authority, be it special messages from the gods, an esoteric transmission from a lineage, or declarations of one’s own divinity, instead, in an almost relentlessly “secular” manner, Hemādri grounds his righteous vision in the power of his office.

As we have already begun to see, our polymath was effectively the acting ruler under several Yādava kings in succession. In this capacity he was awarded a myriad of titles and a wide range of responsibilities. And yet, time and again in his writings, his rhetoric exalts above everything else what is at first glance a rather unassuming position, the office of sarvaśrīkaraṇaprabhuḥ or śrīkaraṇeśvara. The title quite literally means, “lord of all the scribal bureaucrats.” On the surface, this seems to speak to a rather restricted scope of influence. On this basis, the very little that has been written about Hemādri in the past has assumed that whatever his gifts as an intellectual, he was minor functionary. What such [[P1300]] analysis misses is that, as we shall see, while the comprehensive and felicitous use Hemādri would make of this office seems to be sui generis, though it was unknown to the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas and their allies, elevation of the śrīkaraṇeśvara to the center of government is not without precedent. Thus, for example in the Lekhapaddhati, a promissory note from 1267 CE bearing the seal of the kings of Valabhi, travelling as a sample document alongside a scribal template, provides us with confirmation that by the middle of the thirteenth century, the previously distinct roles of chief minister of the king (mahāmātya) and lord of scribes (śrīkaraṇeśvara) had, as a matter of course, become conflated.

Vyavahārapatra from the reign of Śrī Saraṅgadeva:

When the great minister, the illustrious Dharaṇīdhara, subsisting as subject to his lotus feet, was conducting the entirety of the business of the royal seal, from the illustrious [office of] śrīkaraṇa onward. . . .

Template for the production of vyavahārapatras, 1231 CE:

When the great minister, the illustrious Insert Name Here, subsisting as subject to his lotus feet, was conducting the entirety of the business of the royal seal, from the illustrious [office of] śrīkaraṇa onward. . . .³⁰

As a range of epigraphical evidence beginning in the late twelfth century from southern Gujarat and southern Maharashtra attests, this new office of śrīkaraṇeśvara (lord of the śrīkaraṇas) married the administrative, sacerdotal and apotropaic functions of the king’s chief councilor and master of mantras with command over a bureaucratic apparatus possessing the type of intimate local knowledge necessary for ensuring the extraction of revenue and the management of debts. Succinctly, were he to choose to make use of it, a śrīkaraṇeśvara had [[P1301]] both the influence and means for concretely reshaping South Asia’s cultural and religious landscape. As we saw in chapter two, śrīkaraṇas, called senobova in old Kannada, are a class, not a caste, of professional scribes, responsible for the composition and production of the ephemeral paperwork required of every institution if it wished to be legally legible. If the world, as Skandasvāmin had said, “runs on a never-ending transactionality,” the role with which the śrīkaraṇa was entrusted was at once to document those transactions and to formalize them into a standardized shape. Whether we are talking about personal correspondence, testimony in court, proclamations, contracts, minutes for a meeting, financial records, ledgers of debt and expenditure, or the text of an inscription, the task of the śrīkaraṇa is to rationalize the error-ridden messiness of lived human experience. If we treat the discussions in Dharmaśāstra as documentary as opposed to aspirational, regardless of its values and normativities, any political power or social body that wanted to ensure that, in case of conflict between communities or within the community, its rights could be adjudicated, would necessarily have had such people on staff producing meticulous records. In a world order defined by juridical and epistemic diversity, the office and praxis of the śrīkaraṇa represented a rare instance of a universal institution operating within a shared framework.

Up until the end of the twelfth century, neither our literary nor our documentary sources offer any suggestions of the scribe as anything other than an independent agent beholden to his specific community or teacher. In the middle of the thirteenth century, most pointedly under the Seuṇa Yādavas, however, what seems to happen is something with no prior precedent—the emergence of a brotherhood of scribes distributed throughout the pluralistically ordered world, but all answering to a centralized state. In other words, a bureaucratic apparatus [[P1302]] possessing intimate local knowledge, transcripts of every meeting, everyone’s genealogies, if they were invested in a hall of records, all the police records, all the contracts, as well as the ledgers that enabled the extraction of revenue and the management of debts were suddenly no longer beholden to the institutions of which they were a part. Instead, it seems their records, in theory, fell under the jurisdiction of the state, or more properly, under its śrīkaraṇeśvara and his acting officers. Beyond any ambiguity, we can situate Hemādri in this position by 1260 CE, when King Mahādeva effectively assumes the throne, but there is also some rather suggestive indications in the inscriptional record that Hemādri had already risen rather high within the ranks of the institution of managing the śrīkaraṇas as early as 1254 CE, when he first appears in our inscriptional record, already composing inscriptions.

If one had to identify a year and say “this is when the Śaiva age ended,” a particularly strong case could be made for 1246 CE, for this is when the great warrior, statesman, and Śākta initiate Siṅghaṇa II dies after reigning for nearly half a century. He is replaced on the throne by his son Kānharadeva, who would rule for a bit more than a decade (c. 1245/1247– 1258/1260, depending on your sources). In our documentary records—all at once—everything changes.³¹ With the singular exception of Siṅghaṇa II’s own guru, Sarveśvara, whose estate at Munavalli is supported into his dotage, the Seuṇa Yādavas cease to patronize the Kālamukhas.

[[P1303]]

Figure 17: Munavalli, Bhairava worshipped by Sarveśvara (life-size). [[P1304]]

Figure 18: Munavalli, companion to Bhairava with mātuluṅga, (miniature) [[P1305]]

Figure 19: Munavalli: Portrait of Sarveśvara, rājaguru of Siṅghaṇa and the last Kālamukha patronized by the Seuṇa Yādava court.

Except for a few sites with close ties to the court—most notably Ellora and Pandharpur— the Seuṇa Yādavas largely give up on issuing traditional undying land grants. In fact, there is also an almost total disappearances of instances in which the king or his representatives formally renew or acknowledge the existence of such institutions. Instead, as early as 1249, the formalized washing of the feet of a sacerdotal authority and acknowledgement of his and his community’s autonomy is replaced by new approach, which we see illustrated in an edict issued by an officer named Kanaya of behalf of the emperor Kānharadeva, in which “the worshipper of the sovereign’s feet, entrusted with the collection of taxes in the districts of Kolhapur and the whole of the king’s domain,” grants to some Brāhmaṇas in a village limited rights of use over land to be accompanied by regular taxation. From 1248 onward, often by force, the sovereignty of differentiated spaces, even those of great [[P1306]] antiquity, is revoked. Their territory and revenue production capacity is integrated into the apparatus of the state. The management of these now circumscribed land grants is almost invariably placed into new hands.

In the majority of cases, the new custodians, whether we are talking about temples or villages, are Brāhmaṇas who are represented through a rhetoric that extols quite specifically not just their lineage but their knowledge and active practice of Vedic ritual as well as their mastery of Vedānta. While Brāhmaṇas who seem to identify as Śaiva continue to form a substantial demographic, we also suddenly see the emergence of a range of types of Vaiṣṇava communities, now entirely independent from a central focus on the worship of Narasiṃha. In particular, there is sudden proliferation of temples dedicated to Gopāla or Kṛṣṇa as well as the installation of images of Kṛṣṇa into previously Śaiva ritual center centers. Beginning from 1248, where a gāvuṇḍa named Kaluvar Singa in Hebbali, Karnataka makes a donation in support of the “vārī” on behalf of Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur,³² we also see our first indications of popular Marathi devotional religion emerging on the local level.

[[P1307]]

The case of the Purasiddhēśvara temple at Haveri, a famous Śaiva ritual center south of Dharwad, though in some ways slightly eccentric, offers us a rather elegant illustration of many of these dynamics presented in rapid succession.³³ With our earliest, though decidedly unhelpful, inscription dating back to the time of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, in something like its present form the temple seems to have been established under Vikramāditya VI’s father Āvahamalla (1042–68 CE), though the agrahāra itself is plausibly of much greater antiquity, and we have records relating to the Cāḷukyas, Kalachuri, Hoysalas, and Seuṇa Yādavas. More specifically, we have a number of inscriptions issued during the reign of the Seuṇa Yādava King Siṅghaṇadeva II by a range of different types of social actors, one from 1227, two from 1228, and one from 1230 CE. Sadly, and this seems to be true for the whole corpus, each of these has [[P1308]] sustained damage in various places such that in one instance the donor’s name is illegible. That being said, in the time of Siṅghanadeva, in the cases where the donor is known—in one instance this is Jāyidevanāyaka, in one is it is the Mahāmaṃḍaḷēsvara Lakṣmīpāḷadēva, and in another it is some merchants, Decceseṭṭi and Māyiseṭṭi, acting with the permission of Lakṣmīpāḷadēva—when the relevant portion of the inscription is preserved, the figures in question promises to protect (pratipāḷaka/ pratipāḷisuvaru) the undying land grant (ācaṃdrārkkatāraṃbara/ caṃdrārkkasthāyiyaṃbaraṃ saluttamirě/ dharmma ācaṃdrārkkāṃbaraṃ).³⁴ Furthermore, when enough of the text is preserved to communicate the recipient—again in three cases—the chief benefactory acting on behalf of the god Siddhēśvara is a Śaiva ācārya. Depending on the nature of his relationship with the donors, this figure is referred to in slightly different terms. Thus, while he is called by the merchants, “our auspicious rājaguru Jñānarāśidēva” (śrīmadrājaguru jñānarāsidēvara), to an unknown [[P1309]] but clearly less intimately connected patron he is simply “the recipient of the donation being the main figure Jñānarāśidēvara (jñānarāsidēvaru mukhyavāgi pātra),” and from the perspective of the powerful Mahāmaṇḍalēśvara Lakṣmīpāḷadēva, he is simply to be addressed by name along with the council of ruling authorities whose social origin is here unmarked (jñānarāsidēvaruṃ mahājanaṃgaḷu). For our purposes what is most important is that this demonstrates that during the reign of Siṅghaṇadeva II, independent of personal affiliation, donors and most likely visitors to Haveri, whether they were making offerings to the main deity Siddhanātha or to secondary figure like Gaṇeśa, would have addressed themselves to the resident Śaiva authority and only secondarily to a village council of indeterminate social composition.

The contrast between this corpus of documents and the two inscriptions at Haveri issued in the reign of Kānharadeva are stark indeed. In what seems to be the earlier of the texts (though how early is uncertain as the date is illegible), the Yādava king sends his Daṇḍanāyaka, described as the “worshipper at the feet of the venerable Kandhara Deva, twice-borns, and gurus, and the subduer of enemy armies,” Cauṇḍa/Camuṇḍarāya, not to make a donation but to ensure the proper administration of the grant. Cauṇḍa we learn, had been ruling (rājyaṃ geyyuttamirě) on behalf of the king from “his palace at Puligere,” which is to say, he had taken over as his own property the decidedly Śākta-Śaiva undying land-grant at Lakṣmēśvara, with its open links to Somanātha and the Kāpālikas. As the inscription all but concludes, for we are dealing afterwards with a very damaged text, after honoring the controlling authority with the customary water offering—noticeably, nobody washes anybody’s feet—Cauṇḍa discusses the nature of the community that will manage the grant:

The greatness of the Four Hundred (nānūrvvara), for whom the customary water libation was performed (dhārāpūrvvakam māḍida), is as follows:

[S.] The dwelling place of Brahmā/Brāhmaṇas is the abode of the Vedas without remainder. It is encircled by the bearers of wisdom. It is the great oranament to the circle of the earth belonging to the twice-borns who are kings of Nalapurī. The circle of the uplifting assembly (sabhā) is worthy of praise every day and every moment by those asking questions and the learned epistemologists intent upon its renowned inspiration.

The Four Hundred are devoted to the yamas and niyamas, recitation of sacred texts, mantra repetition, oblations, meditation, conduct, and virtues (svasti yamaniyamasvādhyāyajapahomasamādhiśīlaguṇanirataruṃ); their actions are always benevolent for everyone; their minds are restrained by knowledge of the self through reflection (manana) and meditation (nididhyāsana) on the Vedas, Upaniṣads, Smṛtis, and Purāṇas; . . . . their pastime is the consideration of the composition of Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā śāstra, and they amuse themselves with their mistress, the Goddess of Speech.

It was based on these conditions that, in accordance with prior custom (pūrvvamāryyāděyiṃd(a)), while the Hoysala king Ballāḷa managed (naḍasu/naḍayisu) the agrahāra, it was handed down within the lineage (paraṃparāgatam) on the basis of the Four Hundred’s (nānūrvvara) fitness (yogyatābaladiṃ) and their capacity to curse and bless (śāpa-anugraha-samārtthateyiṃ).

Now, [Camuṇḍarāya] became intent (udyatan ādan) upon making (māḍal) dharma strong again (punar ūrjjitam), for it had disappeared [since the time of the Hoysala king Ballāḷa) because of the deeds of evil men (duṣṭakaṣṭara děsěyiṃda).³⁵

[[P1310]]

The most obvious difference between this inscription’s depiction of Haveri as it was administered in the time of Kandharāya and the previous corpus we have just explored is the complete absence of Jñānarāśi and the forces he represents. Apart from the usual frozen poetic tropes tying mythological allusions to the power and magnanimity of the class of officer warlords, our inscription has also become denuded of any specifically Śaiva references or theology. Somewhat less obviously but of equal significance, all of the technical language affirming Haveri’s status as a tax-exempt land grant that is the perpetual property of a specific managerial class has also vanished. As we can see, just as has happened to Jñānarāśi and his cronies, markedly Śaiva social actors and their systems of value have been entirely elided. They have been replaced with a sociality and semiotics that is resolutely, and self-consciously, not merely Brāhmaṇical, but hypertropically evocative of what we would think of as Sanskritic “orthodoxy.” While the so-called “Four Hundred” have incorporated into their accomplishments a modified canon of the usual Śaiva/Kālamukha occupations, these are completely overshadowed by emphatic claims that their conduct does nothing that hurts other people (sarvvajanaparōpakāracaritaruṃ), that they practice Vedāntic modes of inquiry and “meditation” that takes as its focus the Smṛtis and Purāṇas as well as the Vedic sources themselves (vēdavēdāntasmṛtipurāṇamanananididhyāsanātmajñāna-niyatacittaruṃ), and that they preside over what is at once a renowned juridical and scholastic council (sabhā), answering petitions nearly in the very same breath that they compose works on Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā. In short, what we are seeing at play here is a discursive dynamic that explicitly fuses together disciplinary power and the monitoring of decorum with the production and discussion of śāstric knowledge. As we shall soon discover, despite its marginality in the classical world of śāstra as a model for what it means to be Brāhmaṇa, it is precisely this imaginary linking of śāstra, especially Vedānta as theology, with Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā serving as its disciplinary handmaidens, so different from that of the prior generations, that comes to [[P1311]] dominate the vision of knowledge production in and around the Seuṇa Yādava court from the reign of Kandharāya to the demise of the dynasty.

Kandharāya’s officer Cauṇḍa treats his intervention as a simple restoration of the property to its original owners, the upstanding and properly Brāhmaṇical “Four Hundred.” Quite pointedly, Cauṇḍa juxtaposes the proper administration of the land-grant according to prior convention as occurring in an unbroken fashion: “while the Hoysala king Ballāḷa managed the agrahāra, it was handed down within the lineage,” and that the dharma had only disappeared in the short interim between the end Ballāḷa’s time and the present “because of the deeds of evil men (duṣṭakaṣṭara děsěyiṃda).” The subtext here is quite fascinating and unexpected. The good custodian, the Hoysala king Vīra Ballāḷa II (c. 1173–1220 CE) was the chief rival and enemy of the Seuṇa Yādava kings in their ongoing struggles to maintain and expand influence in the Kuntaladēśa. In contrast, the period during which dharma is said to have declined— in other words, when Jñānarāśi was active at Haveri—exclusively falls during the decades when Kandharāya’s father Siṅghaṇa II and his officers largely controlled this region of the Kuntaladēśa and patronized Haveri. [[P1312]]

It is here that our story starts to get complicated in a manner that makes very apparent the plasticity of identities over a couple of centuries, even among a group of people who bear some of the same names and signifiers. On the surface, Cauṇḍa’s representation of Jñānarāśi as a temporary interloper who displaced the long-standing claim of the Brāhmaṇical “Four Hundred,” whose property was originally bestowed upon them by the mythical hero Nala, looks plausible. Now it is true that the technical term for the Brāhmaṇical Four Hundred, “nānūrvvaru,” does not appear in the short inscriptions from the time of Kandharāya’s father, though one of them, the most official, does refer briefly but respectively to the mahājanaṃgaḷu, and these could potentially be the same people. As we shall soon see, it is also the case that as befitting Nalapuri’s reputation as a center for scholasticism and learning, the nānūrvvaru have a long history of being represented through a certain kind of hyper-Brāhmaṇical rhetoric. Alongside such core continuities, however, as one goes back, what it meant for the Four Hundred to be “Brāhmaṇical” undergoes substantive shifts.

In the only record³⁶ to survive from the time of the “good” Hoysala king Vīra Ballāḷa II, we learn that his main minister went to Nalapuri to help oversee a major renovation and refurbishment of the temple of Siddhanātha. Assisting him in these efforts were some sěṭṭis, very much like the ones who appear in Siṅghaṇadeva’s inscriptions, as well as the Brāhmaṇical Four Hundred “nānūrvvaru,” all of whom are now described as bhaktas (samasta bhaktaruvaṃ nānūrvvaruvaṃ) as well as the leader of the village Śri Śrī Śrī Hěggaḍě Vaijayyanu, a figure whose exact identity is uncertain, but who seems to occupying the same space later assumed by Jñānarāśi, right down to his intimate relationship with the merchants. The grant, needless to say, is to be protected forever (ācandrārkkatāraṃbaraṃ rakṣisuvaru). [[P1314]]

After the single Hoysala grant, we have a single inscription³⁷ issued under the Kalachuris. In this document, an officer named Keśirāja and his Daṇḍanāyaka Basava (tatpādapadmōpajīvi mahāpradhānaṃ sēnādhipati basavāsĕnāḍa purada daṇḍanāyakaṃ kēśirājananvayam ĕntěṃdaḍě) both of them acting in the service of King Bijjala, make offerings to the deities Siddhēśvara and Indrēśvara (siddhēśvaradēvarggě iṃdrēśvaradēvarggě). Given that, as we shall soon see, despite all its hyper-Brāhmaṇical rhetorical trappings, the material culture at Haveri offer us some of the earliest demonstrable instances of iṣṭaliṅga worship in the visual record, it is worth noting in passing that these two officers bear the same titles and names of famous Vīraśaiva śaraṇas and are acting on behalf of the very same King Bijjala who features in the Vīraśaiva hagiographical tradition. In any case, these two officers of the Kalachuri king are received by the Brāhmaṇical Four Hundred, but also by a village leader from the line of Rudradēva (hěggaḍĕ rudradēvananvayamaṃ), possibly a fellow referred to as the Brahmabhaṭṭāraka of Māṇikamaṭha, who rather surprisingly greets them by subordinating himself to their authority (pādapadmōjīviyĕnisida). Nalapuri, according to this record, was founded by the mythical king Naḷa who in ancient times assigned Rudradēva as the village’s leading authority (astu naḷacakravartti māḍida hiriya hĕṟiḍĕ hěggaḍĕ rudradēvapramukha). Though the record is here broken in a manner that does not permit us to figure out which attributes are just being assigned to Rudradēva and successors and which belong to the Brāhmaṇical Four Hundred, one or both of them are seen as singularly intent upon Śiva’s state (śivapadaika) at the same time they are “devoted to the yamas and niyamas, recitation of sacred texts, teaching of sacred texts, focused visualizations, vows of [[P1315]] silence, mantra repetition, samādhi, and conduct (svasti yamaniyamasvādhyāyadhyānadhāraṇamōnānuṣṭhānajapasamādhiśīlasaṃpannaruṃ) as well as Vedic ritual and sacrifice, recitation and instruction in Vedic texts (yujanayājanādhyayanādhyāpana).

Curiously, in a display of both ascetic virtues and śāstric knowledge, we are told they are attached to being recipients of a panoply of very specific forms of philanthropy, mostly stemming from the canonical list found in the Matsya Purāṇa, namely, gifts of cloth, gifts of girls, gifts of female water buffalo, gifts of black antelope skin, the hiraṇyagarbha offering, and the tulāpuruṣa offering (kanyādāna-vastradānatsyatradāna-mahiśīdāna- kṛṣṇājinahiraṇyagarbha-tulāpuraśādyanēkadānapratigrahanirataru). Here again, the stone is damaged, but as many of these titles will resurface, it is worth noting that the text now celebrates their performances of a range of Vedic sacrifices, (the vājapēya, agniṣṭoma, aśvamēdha) as well as their virtuous worship of guru and Brāhmaṇas (dvijagurupūjātatpara), their purified bodies (pavitrīkṛtaśarīraru), and their mastery of two bodies of knowledge, namely, śāstra (Buddhist philosophy, Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, logic, grammar, Vedānta, the meaning of the Veda and its aṅgas, metrics, poetics, poetry and drama) as well as an underspecified but decidedly Tantric esoterica (yogamaṃtrataṃtrayaṃtra). In other words, we are at one of the most Brāhmaṇical places in the Kuntaladēśa that is not purely a Brāhmaṇa agrahāra solely dedicated Vedic ritual, and yet what “Brāhmaṇical knowledge” looks like, even in the hands of practicing Vaidika ritualists, is a thoroughgoing fusion of śāstra with the Mantramārga. If a person were to trace this story back even further into the properly Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyan records, a task that will not detain us here, as we approach the time when the temple of Purasiddhēśvara was built, not all that much changes. The nānūrvvaru, those best of [[P1316]] Brāhmaṇas (dvijottama) are assigned ever longer and more elaborate canons of Brāhmaṇical accolades³⁸ at the very same moment they are characterized as one’s whose inner subjectivity is devoted to recollecting the feet of Śiva (haracaraṇasmaraṇāṃtaḥkaraṇa).

Even if we decide that Jñānarāśi really was an interloper, we still confront the enormous problem posed by the temple itself, for which Jñānarāśi is most certainly not responsible. Faced with the obvious issue that its iconography was inappropriate to mid-thirteenth century standards, someone seems to have taken a chisel and chipped out most of the panels. Thankfully for us, they missed some rather pertinent details that will assist in filling in the gaps. [[P1317]]

Figure 20: Śikhara of Haveri Purasiddhēśvara with images chipped off.

First of all, because the image was too high up on the śikhara and can only really been seen with a zoom-in lens, the pious vandals retained a dancing Naṭeśa suggestively carrying a skull staff. [[P1318]]

Figure 21: A more important indication of the actual nature of the religious tradition observed by our hyper-Brāhmaṇical but not so orthoprax Brāhmaṇical “Four Hundred” is suggested by the interior ceiling of the temple of Purasiddhēśvara itself. Here, again, the arrangement and iconography are so subtle that it would be likely to be overlooked by an outsider. Even if it was noticed, its significance would not have been readily apparent, at least if you do not spend much of your time either studying or practicing Śākta Kaula ritual systems. For person so committed or preoccupied, however, the significance of Purasiddhēśvara’s representation of a [[P1319]] fierce dancing Śiva, having just slain the elephant demon and holding the creature’s skin aloft in the air while encircled by vividly rendered images of—not seven—but eight mother goddesses is an unmistakable tip of the hat at the Kaula commitments of this temple and its esteemed caretakers.

Confusing the picture even more, as was earlier alluded to, Purasiddhēśvara also hosts a series of images evocative of the visual register of later Vīraśaiva traditions, where Śaiva yogins and deities offer worship to what will later be called iṣṭaliṅgas. In article from 1969 published in [[P1320]] Artibus Asiae, the great art historian M. S. Nagaraja Rao³⁹ analyzes and documents a number of images, some of them found scattered throughout Haveri that seem to have once belonged to the temple, and some preserved in situ. The figures in question include a Umāmaheśvara, a strange life-size figured holding an iṣṭaliṅga which he identifies as Viṣṇu worshipping Śiva, a standing figure of the goddess Mahālakṣmī of Kolhapur, an image of Sūrya, and some Nāgas. Once again, we have a pantheon that self-evidently speaks to the commitments of the Kaulicized tradition of the worship of Mahālaksṃī, one of the dominant forms of Śākta religion in the Early Medieval Deccan.

*Figure 22: * [[P1321]]

The denouement of our story is rather amusing. After investing all that time and effort in restoring Haveri to its rightful Brāhmaṇa owners, Kandharāya and its commanders seem to have eventually realized that despite their hyper-Brāhmaṇical affect, something about the Nānvvara and their actual mode of worship was not quite kosher. Granted, this is only a hypothesis, but this would certainly explain why, in the next grant at Haveri issued in 1255 CE during Kandharāya’s reign, not only are the nānūrvvaru nowhere to be found—indeed they seem never to resurface—but the focus of the grant is a temple formerly belonging to the god of blacksmiths (Kalmeśvara) and its purpose is to record the installation of a Śrī Gopīnātha.⁴⁰ Most likely, the god in question is a form of Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva, for in place of the nānūrvvaru and the descendants of Rudradēva, we find the descendants of a certain Bommarsa, the most important one (boṃmarsaruṃ avara putrapautrādigaḷuṃ mukhyavāgi) at the head of community of honored Bhāgavatas (bhāgavatajanaṃgaḷuṃ), Vaiṣṇavas following the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. As for what happens to Purasiddhēśvara itself, when it next surfaces under the reign of Mahādeva, the place has been given to the followers of the proto-Vīraśaiva saint Siddharāmeśvara of Sonnalige, who perhaps were responsible for the commission of the life- size image that now sits in the temple’s garbhagṛha, of someone —possibly a six-armed Viṣṇu— worshipping the śivaliṅga now addressed as Siddhēśvara. [[P1322]]

Setting aside such interesting digressions, it is striking how systematically the story of the re-institutionalization of Haveri at the direction of the Seuṇa state, in its disavowal of the realities of the immediate Seuṇa past, its tearing down and delegitimization of older Śākta- tinged social forms, its recentering of Brāhmaṇas judged by their sattvic conduct, in its elevation of Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya as newly indispensable defenders of an institutionalized Vedāntic theism, and its embrace of inquiry into the Purāṇic corpus as an authoritative source for religious guidance, is emblematic of the driving forces that animate the emerging Seuṇa episteme. It is this worldview that find its most influential and eloquent expression in the writings of the chief administrator, minister, and de facto ruler of the Seuṇa kingdom, the polymath Hemādri Sūri, whose vast Caturvargacintāmaṇi—the Wish-Fulfilling Gem of the [[P1323]] Four Classes—sets out transpose such a seemingly eccentric perspective into the dominant lived reality throughout the western Deccan.

Prelude, The Caturvargacintāmaṇi: Encountering the Text through Its “Lost” Division on Tīrtha

The great Dharmaśāstrin K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar begins his edition of the first volume of Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru,⁴¹ our oldest surviving dharmanibandha, by lamenting the disinterest of nineteenth century Indologists in the study of the later dharma literature. Essentially, once it was discovered that these vast works of jurisprudence did not contain the type of textual record of positive Hindu law that could be readily made use of by colonial administrators, and that in fact the texts were lousy with the type of “purely religious’” materials that the colonial powers had a deemed to fall outside of the purview of European regulation, the discipline was largely confined to the ash heap of history. So too, for that matter, were the practitioners of the knowledge system, for they represented the type of autonomous disciplinary mode of power, trespassing on the self-evidently “secular” domain of the law and often closely linked with the princely states, that posed an obvious challenge to the emerging values of the colonial project. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen enormous advances in our understanding of both the history of classical Dharmaśāstra as discipline and of its complicated reception history in the context of the colonial encounter. In this regard, we stand particularly indebted to Ludo and Rosane Rocher and their students, a legacy continued in the writings of Donald Davis, and of Patrick Olivelle, and his disciples. Throughout the current work, I have turned to these resources again and again in his analysis and it would be remiss not acknowledge once again how these writings have made his own [[P1324]] arguments possible. That being said, when it comes to the domain of the dharmanibandha (with the notable exception of the important contribution of a critical edition of the Kṛtyakalpataru’s Dānakāṇḍa by David Brick, a work that confines its engagement to its specific topic, as well as an insightful essay on textual reuse by Florinda De Simini), the study of dharmanibandha, either in terms of its history or as an intellectual practice, has seen scarcely any advances since the establishment of India as an independent nation. Where the texts are consulted at all—this in and of itself is none too frequently compared to their considerable influence—they are mined for citations with scant attention paid to textual methods and modes of argumentation as they are exercised by individual authors. It is simply assumed that nibandha authors, adhering to an ahistorical “Brāhmaṇical orthodoxy,” share a worldview and a common ideology that the texts presuppose but do not themselves explicate any further. The nibandhas, from this perspective, operate as mere encyclopedias compiling in a single place already well-known principles and practices. As we will soon see, in the case of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi in particular, such assumptions represent egregious misrepresentations of the actual contents of work that is in almost every domain self-consciously innovative, self- evidently constructivist in its approach, and abounding in extended—sometimes hundred page long—theoretical discourses on a whole range of topics, self-reflexively engaging with the very sort of methodological and theological questions that have been presumed to be absent from the discourse.

Apart from the general neglect to which the discipline of dharmanibandha has been undeservedly subjected, part of the reason that the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself has not received the attention that its outsized influence on the history of Indian religions warrants is the abominable state of the published text. In comparison with the Kṛtyakalpataru, whose every [[P1325]] division Aiyangar prefaces with a learned English introduction that not only carefully surveys the contents and structure of the text but presents numerous topical essays on history and method, Bharatacandra Siromani’s (1873–1911) Caturvargacintāmaṇi not only provides its readers with almost no meaningful paratexts in any language, but as we will soon see, prints a highly incomplete version of the root text that nowhere acknowledges its tentative and partial nature. As Hemādri himself tells us repeatedly, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi is envisioned as consisting of four topical divisions (khaṇḍas)—presented in sequence—on vrata, dāna, tīrtha, and mokṣa. This main portion of the text is then supplemented by a voluminous “Remainder Division,” or Pariśeṣakhaṇḍa. The Pariśeṣakhaṇḍa incorporates “extra materials” such as astrological calculations for determining festival dates, the procedures for temple construction and consecration, as well as a multivolume discussion of the different forms of śrāddha rites. These later books, contained within the Pariśeṣa, are explicitly envisioned as kalpa texts, supplementing the main focus of the work as found in the first four khaṇḍas. While the majority of each portion of the text consists of a curated array of textual citations on a given subtopic drawn from across a vast array of source, supplemented by commentary, prayogas, as well as vidhānas supplied by the author, Hemādri also tells us every division is to include a section on methodological concerns as they apply to the Dharmaśāstrin practitioner eager to translate textual study into real-world practice. Furthermore, each section also proffers theoretical and apologetic reflections addressing how the topics at hand relate to problematics drawn from the wider world of śāstra.

In this way, quite unlike his immediate predecessors, our author consciously sets out to justify the inclusion within the field of Dharmaśāstra of a set of “religious” concerns—namely, occasional religious vows (vrata), pilgrimage (tīrtha), as well as festival planning and temple [[P1326]] consecration—that had until recently fallen entirely outside the purview of the discipline of Dharmaśāstra. In the same spirit, in an unprecedented fashion, Hemādri has interwoven into his work what are essentially a series of mini-intellectual essays, addressing such matters as the relationship between Purāṇic worship and questions of caste as well as the real nature of Brāhmaṇa-hood. In essence, what the text sets out to offer its reader is an entirely new paradigm, at least within the realm of śāstra, for what it means to be a Brāhmaṇa who wields religious authority.

Unfortunately, the published edition of the text hardly does justice to this interpretive program. The Caturvargacintāmaṇi has only been published in a single four-volume (with seven parts in total) edition produced by the Asiatic Society of Bengal beginning in 1873.⁴² The edition in question prints an incomplete version of the Vratakhaṇḍa (missing a portion of its introduction), a competent version of the Dānakhaṇḍa, entirely overlooks the Tīrthakhaṇḍa (still extent in several manuscripts), and omits the lost Mokṣakhaṇḍa. Even more problematically, it prints only portions of the Pariśeṣakhaṇḍa—omitting the two parts of the pratiṣṭhā kalpa—and it does so in the incorrect order, effectively occluding the internal structure of these divisions of the text. By treating Hemādri’s division on śrāddha as an additional khaṇḍa, and not as a kalpa work as its author intended, the edition misrepresents the place of Śrāddha in his overall system. And then, as if to add insult to injury, with the exclusion of the original printing, so far as I can determine, every reprint of the text as constituted by [[P1327]] Bharatacandra Siromani have themselves omitted an entire volume’s worth of material contained within the śrāddhakalpa.

In other words, to be charitable, the text with which the edition presents us is both tentative and incomplete. Even more problematically, given the relatively early date of its production, when a more critical philology had yet to have been integrated into pandit culture, much as you might expect, the edition tells us nothing about the source materials. Though occasionally spare variant readings are given in the lower margin, in the absence of any reflection by the editor Bharatacandra Siromani, we do not even how many manuscripts were used in constituting the printed edition. Every indication suggests, however, that the quality of this source material was relatively poor and incomplete.⁴³

Indeed, the overall impression one has of both the reprints of the text (which reproduce all of the errors uniformly, including blurred text) as well as the original is that a decided lack of care went into their constitution. Facing such an admittedly monumental task, the editor Bharatacandra Siromani, who was responsible for several other Dharmaśāstra editions of much higher quality, may simply have delegated much of the work to retrained traditional scribes with minimal command of the language. It seems that in some cases they may just have transcribed what they found on the page with little if any reflection on the coherence of what they were printing. This would provide us with a charitable explanation for the sorry state of large swathes of the work, where whole pages are missing case endings and abound in ametrical verses. It would also account for the fact that the edition, which once again contains [[P1328]] no substantive introduction or apparatuses, offers us a number of obviously incomplete khaṇḍas presented in the wrong order. Indeed, despite the fact that Hemādri explains the structure of his project explicitly dozens of times across the divisions, the editor has mistaken the middle of the work, on dāna, for the beginning, which is about vrata. Bharatacandra Siromami also has incorporated an obviously spurious section on prāyaścitta, which does not confirm in form, function, or patterns of citation to anything that came before in the work.⁴⁴

Bharatacandra Siromani’s treatment of the two thousand, two hundred- and ninety- page Vratakhaṇḍa, which he misidentifies as the second division of the work, is particularly egregious. As printed, the text simply abruptly begins: “First division: Now, a praise of the author of the text” (prathamo ’adhyāyaḥ / atha granthakarttuḥ praśastiḥ). In contrast, the manuscript tradition in Devanāgarī (for example, Item 1620 from the Indic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Pennsylvania) consistently prefaces the quite extensive self- praise by our author with a verse honoring Kṛṣṇa, followed by a fifty-two verse “rājapraśasti” celebrating the line of the Seuṇa Yādavas. The text here is largely identical with the extract first identified and edited by Bhandarkar as clearly belonging to the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, but whose precise provenance that great scholar was unable to determine.⁴⁵ Reading the CVC’s Vratakhaṇḍa in some approximation of the form that its author intended—such that does not simply begin with Hemādri praising himself for most of the first twenty verses—a very different rhetorical structure is in evidence, and we suddenly have a substantive answer to the [[P1329]] pressing question of how a work such as this produced in a royal court under Seuṇa patronage, as printed barely mentions the dynasty at all in its first two-thousand pages.

In a similar spirit, it is quite certain that meticulous philological work making use of the available manuscript evidence would help us clear up many such mysteries. In an ideal world, an examination of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi would be preceded, at the very least, by the compilation and collating of a representative sampling of the manuscript evidence. Done properly, the sheer scale of the work that would be involved, to say nothing of the financial burden a researcher would incur in consulting and procuring in many cases hundreds of five hundred plus folio manuscripts, in and off itself is virtually prohibitive. It would take a team of people decades to simply to go through each exemplum, transcribe it, and collate them all together. In order to critically examine Hemādri’s use of his sources, and to choose among the variants, many of the Purāṇas he references would themselves have to be critically edited. In short, it is a project that could occupy a community of gifted scholars for entire lifetimes. Given the fact that nearly one hundred and fifty years have elapsed without even the slightest indication that any such critical effort might be forthcoming, during which one of the most innovative and influential works in the history of Sanskrit thought has simply been left to languish, it seems better to try our hands at working to make sense what are admittedly quite inadequate texts instead of waiting expectantly for perfect conditions that may never arrive.

Partially inspired by the disjointed condition of Bharatacandra Siromani’s edition, we will be approaching the vast Caturvargacintāmaṇi in very different fashion than its author would have intended. To this effect, we will commence our investigation not primarily by facilitating an encounter with Hemādri’s own wildly innovative and theologically rich representation of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s interpretive project (that will be the focus of the [[P1330]] next chapter), but by attending to the manner in which Hemādri sets out to reshape, redact, and transform the textual, cultural, and religious resources he inherits from the world of the early medieval Deccan.

In the sections that follow, our primary conceptual focus will be on reading Hemādri as a redactor and reimaginer of pre-existing textual and religious cultures. In these efforts, initially our primary archive will be selections from the unpublished Tīrthakhaṇḍa itself, which I read here from manuscript for the first time. After introducing the reader to the evidence recovered so far regarding the status of the unpublished Tīrthakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, we will begin by exploring portions of the theoretical framework for thinking about and performing pilgrimage that the text proposes in its first chapter. Our primary intention here is to clarify how Hemādri’s treatment of pilgrimage at once builds upon and repudiates earlier discussions of the topic in dharma literature as well as in relation to extra- Dharmaśāstra conversations about the nature and function of pilgrimage in broader circulation throughout the early medieval Deccan. Once we have reconstructed Hemādri’s overall theory of pilgrimage, we will then attend to what his śāstric prose might tell us about the specific intellectual resources that inform his mode of argumentation. Laying the foundations for arguments that will be more fully developed in the next chapter, which tackle head on how Hemādri justifies the use of Smṛti and Purāṇa as sources for religious guidance independent of the Vedas, we will see that Hemādri’s theory of dharmanibandha is at once subtly and heavily indebted to cutting edge thinking drawn from the realm of both Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā and the emerging tradition of the “new” and more emphatically theistic Nyāya.⁴⁶ [[P1331]]

Setting theoretical themes aside, in the next section, we will turn to an examination of how Hemādri reworks his sources in the service of denaturalizing the ethos underwriting the Tantric imaginaries of the Deccan. Here, our efforts will be focused on a close reading of a small portion of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa text that draws heavily upon the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya, found in the vulgate edition of the Skanda Purāṇa.⁴⁷ As we have already begun to see, within the Seuṇa Yādava imperium during the latter half of the thirteenth century, such efforts were no mere theoretical enterprise, but formed a plan of action for reshaping the actual religious landscape. The religious landscape we will be exploring in particular is the sacred fields surrounding the Śaiva tīrtha in Saurashtra called Somanātha, which at the time remained one of the most important ritual centers on the subcontinent. Retaining throughout this focus on specific “lived spaces” and the theological and juridical frameworks that make them possible, we next turn to selected portions of the Dānakhaṇḍa, where we find Hemādri hard at work reinventing the theoretical parameters of philanthropy (dāna) and offering a new standardizing formalization of philanthropic ritual. Through a clever manipulation of his sources, most of them inherited directly from Lakṣmīdhara, Hemādri excludes the types of social agents that populate the Śaiva Age while at the same time dismantling the legal framework that underwrites the institution of the undying land grant upon which Tantric knowledge systems depended for material support. [[P1332]]

Having arrived at some degree of understanding of how Hemādri manages the cultural memory about sacred spaces as well as the harnessing of resources that makes possible their establishment and institutional persistence, we will then turn to understanding the changing relationship within the tradition of Dharmaśāstra towards the construction and institutionalization of temples complexes by non-Brāhmaṇa agents using non-Brāhmaṇa knowledge systems. First, we will look Hemādri’s immediate predecessors in the world of Dharmaśāstra to see what they have to say about the relation of traditions of temple building to the social norms they seek to enforce. As will become apparent, though they share a century and make use of many of the same sources, the twelfth-century writer Aparāditya I of the Northern Koṅkaṇa and Lakṣmīdhara of Varanasi approach the topic from diametrically opposed points of view. From there, stepping back from the prescriptive realm of śāstra and back into the “real world,” we will see how the Seuṇa Yādavas in practice marshal the conceptual resources outlined in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi in the service of destroying the Trika-aligned Siddhakṣetra at Kukkunur, evicting its Kālamukha preceptors and esoteric Śākta deities and replacing them with pious Brāhmaṇas who conduct worship directed to “all the gods.” In reconstructing Hemādri’s own position, our analysis will draw heavily on the unpublished Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati of Hemādri’s Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s, one of the many components of the Pariśeṣakhaṇḍa that have not been included in the printed edition. Here, [[P1333]] we will see how Hemādri confronts head-on the epistemic values of the classical pratiṣṭhā tradition, exemplified by the Piṅgalāmata, wherein space is conceptually differentiated, multivocal ritual addressing disparate imagined audiences are conducted concurrently, and sacrality is defined by sovereignty. At his direction, this episteme is methodically replaced with a new theology for imagining and instantiating the Hindu temple that emphasizes the singular and shared nature of the ritual, utter transparency in its performance that leaves no space for secrets, and the continued dependence of the institution on the state. This will prepare us for the final chapter, where first we will engage with Hemādri’s intellectual project on its own terms as an emancipatory intervention in the world of śāstra as well as lived religion, and then with our author’s elevation of a theistic form of Advaita Vedānta aligned with the values of early modernity as the new and lasting core of Brāhmaṇical knowledge.

Placing and Displacing the Dharmas of Place: Pilgrimage in the Tīrthakhaṇḍa

In his groundbreaking Marathi language monograph Śrīviṭṭhal: Ek Mahāsamanvay, which Anne Feldhaus has felicitously rendered into English as The Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandharpur, the great autodidact Ramachandra Chintamani Dhere sets out to demonstrate the authenticity and antiquity of the Pāṇḍuraṅgamāhātmya, a major Sanskrit resource for the worship of Viṭṭhal.⁴⁸ Towards this end, Dhere assembles a considerable body of evidence to convince his reader that Hemādri’s Caturvargacintāmaṇi did in fact once contain a Tīrthakhaṇḍa and that the text had incorporated a reflection on the god at Pandharpur. Perhaps most convincingly, Dhere directs our attention to the Viṭṭhalabhūṣaṇa, a work by a famously meticulous nineteenth-century pandit by the name of Gopalacarya. As Dhere demonstrates, this text contains numerous citations that the author himself identifies as extracted from the Tīrthakhaṇḍa of Hemādri. Dhere proceeds to identify numerous shared citations from this work, preserved in the seventeenth-century Vīramitrodaya of Mitramiśra, also identified in situ as derived from Hemādri, as well as in the Tīrthasāra, an early fifteenth-century work of Dharmaśāstra composed by Dalapatirāja a mere hundred years after Hemādri would have died. In short, he proves conclusively that text was not merely composed but that it remained in [[P1334]] circulation, at least among royal libraries, into the colonial period. As Dhere quite helpfully explains:

Mahāmahopādhyāya Gopāḷācārya Aṇṇā Ghaḷsāsī Karhāḍkar. . . quotes ten verses, beginning with the words “bhaimyāś caiva taṭe devi. . . .,*” that he states are found “in Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa[khaṇḍa] (tīrthahemādrau), folio 122.” Gopāḷācārya also states clearly exactly where he saw the Tīrthakhaṇḍa: “This Tīrthakhaṇḍa of Hemādri’s is in the Raṅgamandir in Vṛndāraṇya. There are 600 pages of it there. The rest of it can be seen elsewhere, in the royal capitals of Aḷavara, Jambū, and so on.”⁴⁹

Gopalacarya seems to have been implying that even the six hundred folio version of the text then preserved at the Raṅgamandir in Vrindavan, which thus far remains untraceable, was itself hardly complete. This gives us some hint of the vast nature of the original version of the work as well as the inadequacy of the evidence with which we are working. Inadequate evidence, however, is infinitely better than no evidence at all. While neither the text nor even the location of the version preserved at “Jambū” can be determined, I have managed to retrieve images of the work Gopalacarya identifies was preserved at Alwar (Aḷavara), for even now the Royal Collection at Alwar does indeed contain an incomplete 349 folio version of Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa, which in fact transmits the very verses Gopāḷācārya has cited.⁵⁰

More importantly for our purposes, the manuscript contains virtually verbatim the exact passage cited by the Viṭṭhalabhūṣaṇa, which contains slight variants from the published Pāṇḍuraṅgamāhātmya. Viṭṭhalabhūṣaṇa: “tīrthahemādrau— bhaimyāś caiva taṭe devi dakṣiṇe tīrtham uttamam. . . .” Hemādri, Tīrthakhaṇḍa: bhaimyāś caiva taṭe devi dakṣiṇe tīrtham uttamam / asti kṣetre daivataṃ ca sarvotkṛṣṭaṃ sudurlabham. . . . pauṇḍarīkam iti khyātaṃ tat tīrthaṃ kṣetrapūjitaḥ / pāṇḍurāṅkaś ca tatrāste mūrtimān devatottamaḥ / tathā / puṣkarāt triguṇaṃ proktaṃ kedārāt ṣaḍguṇaṃ bhavet / vārāṇasyāṃ daśaguṇam anantam śrīgirer iti /. . . . ṣaṣṭivarṣasahasrāṇi divyadevatādarśanāt / yat phalaṃ labhate martyaḥ sakṛd eva hi tat phalaṃ / durlabhaṃ mānuṣajanma tatrāpy acyutasevanaṃ / Note in particular the retention of the archaic form of the name of the deity as “pāṇḍurāṅka,” attested in the inscriptional record, in place of the early modern “pāṇḍuraṅga.” [[P1335]]

Figure 23: The opening folio of Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa as preserved at Alwar bearing the seal of the king.

The image you see above offers a part of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa’s praśasti of the Seuṇa kings.⁵¹ Not only has the first folio, along with much else besides, been lost, but the text from which this was copied itself seems to have been compromised so that the scribe has indiscriminately copied onto single folios what would have formed entirely distinct sections within the original work. This would account for why the fourth folio in our manuscript abruptly transitions from Hemādri praising himself to a discussion, in media res, of Mahākāleśvara at Ujjain.⁵² Quite apart from the fact that in its present form the semantic content of the text is no longer contiguously transmitted and often has to be pieced back together, it would appear we are also missing a good portion of some early chapters as well as the entire end of the treatise.⁵³ Even so, we must be grateful that at nearly 350 double sided [[P1336]] folios containing eleven lines of roughly fifty-two akṣaras each, the text as transmitted offers us a substantive encounter with Hemādri’s chosen textual archives, certainly enough to familiarize ourself with his core methodology and editorial choices.

The sacred geography the Tīrthakhaṇḍa attempts to cover is vast and pan-Indic. It extends as far south as the Setubandha, Rāmeśvara in Tamil Nadu, as far west as Multan in present day Pakistan, at least as far north as Kashmir, and as far east as Puri in Orissa.⁵⁴ The Caturvargacintāmaṇi treats each of the different regions of the subcontinent in considerable detail, drawing upon a range of sources, mostly Purāṇic māhātmyas, many of which do not survive or are yet unpublished. Unexpectedly, in curating his canon of sacred sites, Hemādri’s selections do not in any way privilege either the Brāhmaṇical heartland of Āryavārta or the particular sacred geographies of the western Deccan contiguous with the Seuṇa imperium. Such comprehensiveness and impartiality in the realm of sacred geography diverges quite sharply from the only preceding work on tīrtha to emerge from the discourse of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra: the comparatively terse Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa of Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru.⁵⁵ At least among the surviving sources, the Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa marks the initial moment in the history of śāstra where pilgrimage (tīrthayātrā) is incorporated into a self-described common canon of “Brāhmaṇical” praxis deemed fit for scholastic reflection. This is quite fitting, for as we shall see, the surprisingly short Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa forms but a single division of the gargantuan dharmanibandha, the Kṛtyakalpataru, a work of [[P1337]] Dharmaśāstra that for the first time joins the discrete domains of Hindu law and Purāṇic religious practices. We will explore this text and its author, the Gāhaḍavāla chief minister and master of war, Lakṣmīdhara—who stands in many ways as the most significant antecedent and counterpart to Hemādri and his interpretive project—in considerable detail in the next chapter, where we will painstakingly contextualize Hemādri’s contributions within the history of Dharmaśāstra. For the moment, however, it is simply worth observing that while Hemādri is transparently indebted to Lakṣmīdhara—indeed the raw textual materials that structure the opening division of each of the major chapters of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi are transposed directly from the Kṛtyakalpataru—in nearly every case, Hemādri makes use of Lakṣmīdhara’s sources as a jumping off point for arriving at theoretically distinctive—even oppositional— conceptual ends. Both literally and figuratively, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi sets out to tackle a different terrain.

As a simple but compelling illustration of this dynamic, let us compare Hemādri’s transregional inclusivism with what we find in the Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa itself. In contrast with our text, after nine pages on tīrthayātrā in the abstract, Lakṣmīdhara dedicates one hundred and twenty-six pages to discussing a single place, Varanasi.⁵⁶ None too coincidentally, this is the most important sacred center within the Gāhaḍavāla realm. The text then proceeds in the following manner: Prayāga next receives sixteen pages worth of coverage, the Gaṅgā receives nine, Gayā gets twelve, Kurukṣetra gets eight, Puṣkāra four, and Mathura nine.⁵⁷ In other words, the vast majority of Tīrthavivecana takes as its focus a specifically north Indian sacred geography that centers the Indo-Gangetic Plain as the locus mundi in general and the [[P1338]] Gāhaḍavāla realm in particular. With the exception of the Narmadā river, though not strictly north Indian, also adjacent to Gāhaḍavāla territory, and the eleven other sacred centers that warrant their own chapter, places like Dvāraka and Kedāra all must make do with two or three pages. In fact, excluding the extensive section on Varanasi, at twenty-six pages in length, the longest division of the Tīrthavivecana is the chapter on the greatness of “various tīrthas” (nānatīrthamāhātmya).⁵⁸ While this portion of the text nominally acknowledges a long catalog of sacred centers found on other parts of the subcontinent, each place is allotted at best a few ślokas, and the whole discussion reads as an afterthought.

In contrast to the Tīrthavivecana of the Kṛtyakalpataru, whose sacred geographies, as we have just seen are largely restricted to the Indo-Gangetic Plain and are organized according to geographical proximity to the political territory of its patron, on the basis of surviving colophons, we can be certain that Hemādri originally organized the Tīrthakhaṇḍa’s presentation of sacred sites not on account of their location, but rather by type. While much of the theoretical apparatus of the text is not transmitted in our partial and disorderly manuscript, on the basis of the surviving internal colophons we know for certain that, following some initial chapters theorizing pilgrimage, at the very least the text offered in sequence a division on sacred fields (kṣetraprakaraṇa), on sacred rivers (nadīprakaraṇa), on sacred cities (purīprakaraṇa), and on sacred forests (vanaprakaraṇa). Though the precise definition of some of these categories remains a bit obscure, we also have strong internal textual indications that in its original form, each of the divisions would have been prefaced with sections where our author clearly delineated the exact meaning of the category under discussion and attempted to place them within the wider context of śāstric knowledge. In more abstract terms, Hemādri [[P1339]] breaks from his predecessor in that instead of deriving an organizational program for his śāstric treatments from the parameters provided to him by the world itself—such as the principles of geographical proximity and the exigencies supplied by the political sovereignty of his patron at a specific moment in historical time—he sets out to order the world itself so as to bring it under the domain of synthetic śāstric taxonomies.

On the basis of the Alwar manuscript and some of its more important surviving intertexts, especially the Kṛtyakalpataru, I have been able to reconstruct one substantial portion of the introductory prescriptive and theoretical framework that once prefaced the complete Tīrthakhaṇḍa.⁵⁹ As we will see momentarily, though it is currently preserved on non-consecutive pages between folios 230–240 of our manuscript, this portion of the discourse—almost certainly the beginning of our text—ostensibly offers further elucidation on the opening chapter of Lakṣmīdhara’s Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa. On the surface, what the text appears to be doing is incorporating—often verbatim and in sequence—not only five pages worth of Lakṣmīdhara’s curation of citations on the fruits of tīrthayātrā drawn from the Mahābhārata as well as a range of Purāṇas, but even a substantial portion of his admittedly sparse commentary—mostly consisting of glosses on some key terms contained in his proof texts. But whereas, beyond the bare fact that he for the first time incorporates “Purāṇic” religion into the realm Hindu law, Lakṣmīdhara in the Tīrthakāṇḍa has no discernable theological agenda guiding his selection and presentation of materials, nor does he display a hermeneutical commitment to making his grab bag of citations cohere intellectually, Hemādri’s intentions are vastly different. Succinctly, our author seeks to deploy the canon of sources he has acquired [[P1340]] from his predecessor with the radically distinctive aim of imposing order upon what he sees as a heterogenous original.

In preparation for our encounter with Hemādri’s project of building a new theological model out of what at first might seem to be isolated moments of textual exegesis—many of which build directly upon verbatim passages drawn from Lakṣmīdhara—before turning to the text, it is important we highlight the major contours of the argument interspersed throughout the Tīrthakhaṇḍa’s opening chapter. First, Hemādri domesticizes and reimagines the type of agent who performs pilgrimage, disassociating the act of pilgrimage from the performance of intense austerities. In blatant opposition to virtually all of his sources, Hemādri erases the understanding that the success or failure of a pilgrimage is largely predicated on how well the virtuoso practitioner has internalized a strident degree of ascetic self-discipline. This interpretive choice refashions the experience of pilgrimage into one that comforts the comfortably well to do. Second, again breaking from everything that precedes him, our author sets out to prove that all pilgrimages, independent of destination, are fundamentally the same sort of activity. On this basis, for the first time in the literature, he presents a standardized paradigm for how and why we do tīrthayātrā. Invoking the scholastic maxim of ekatra nirṇīta,⁶⁰ Hemādri asserts that just like different places (sthāna) within a text can be “harmonized” using reading strategies derived from Mīmāṃsā exegesis, so too can the ostensibly different modes of practice related to different places (sthāna) in the world.

Though particularly conceptually significant, this is just one of many instances where Hemādri implicitly as well as explicitly makes a broader case—namely, that the fundamental ritual vocabulary that needs to be deployed during pilgrimage is founded not on local [[P1341]] knowledge and practice but on a set of meta-textual scholastic practices, many of which are derived from Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā exegesis as well as the later tradition of Nyāya. When we reach the end of this section, we will thus look both at some of the philosophical and theological conversations that stand behind his discourse and inspire Hemādri as well as the impact of Hemādri’s own intellectual work in the Tīrthakhaṇḍa on his early modern Smārta successors.

On account of the close textual dependence of the opening portion of Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa on the first chapter of Lakṣmīdhara’s Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa, it is vital that we read the texts in tandem. Much as we had done earlier in chapters two and four when working with documentary texts produced in accordance with inherited scribal templates, attending carefully to the places where Hemādri has inserted extensive material or has actively sought to rethink or subvert the objectives of his predecessor provides us with a powerful analytical tool for accessing just what facets of our author’s interpretive project were most important to him and would have been perceived as such by an intended audience familiar with both works. Especially when complemented (where possible) with a careful reading of both authors’ source texts, such an approach also brings into immediate and stark relief the many moments in which our nibandha plays fast and loose with or actively seeks to override the intended meaning of his proof texts so as to advance his own extratextual agenda. By seeking out textual echoes further afield from the expected realm of Purāṇa and Dharmaśāstra, we are also able to familiarize ourselves with the specific śāstric discourses that Hemādri has been attentively reading and that he seeks to establish as key parts of the interpretive context for his reinvention of a newly theistic and devotional non-sectarian Dharmaśāstra, a discipline now viewed as the primary site for governing and adjudicating a cornucopia of modes of religious practice. [[P1342]]

In the Kṛytakalpataru, book eight, Lakṣmīdhara introduces the topic of tīrthayātrā by citing an extended passage from the Tīrthayātrāparvan found in book three of the Mahābhārata, where the sage Pulastya teaches Bhīṣma about the virtues of pilgrimage.⁶¹ This is a quite appropriate choice, as the text in question appears to be the archaic locus classicus legitimizing the practice of pilgrimage within Sanskrit discourse. While the vast majority of the Mahābhārata’s chapter offers a detailed itinerary for a network of sacred sites, mostly in north India, with the pilgrimage commencing from Pushkar in Rajasthan, Lakṣmīdhara’s opening selection incorporates only seven of the verses that preface this discussion. These offer a rationale for pilgrimage. Lakṣmīdhara’s interpretive choice here, which Hemādri continues, is itself quite interesting, as it, for the moment, removes from our consideration the actual opening of Pulastya’s discourse, which treats the specific type of person who is eligible to perform the practice. This is quite pointedly someone who has thoroughly disciplined his senses through austerities, a topic that Lakṣmīdhara will somewhat soften and Hemādri will actively seek to expunge from his discourse. Pulastya then continues by indicating that while Vedic ritual is effective in accomplishing the aims associated with the ancestors as well as reaching heaven, it is not possible (na śakyāḥ) for poor people (daridraṃ) to “obtain” the sacrifice, as yajñas entail a considerable expenditure of wealth and ritual materials (bahūpakaraṇāḥ, nānāsaṃbhāravistarāḥ). While kings and successful men can acquire such resources, they remain out of reach for poorer folks “who have only a single [[P1343]] body”—in other words, do not have servants at their beck and call. In this spirit of charity, the Mahābhārata thus teaches a vidhi, whose fruit is equal to that of yajña, that can be utilized even by poor folks. It calls this practice the supreme secret, proclaiming that it is at least as good if not better than doing Vedic ritual, and the section, as well as Lakṣmīdhara’s selection, then closes by suggesting that “real poverty” is not going on tīrthayātrā in accordance with the procedure enjoined by Pulastya. What is missing from this reusage, however, is any indication that in the original source, Pulastya’s vidhi is not some generic celebration of the concept of pilgrimage, but that the text offers instruction in a very specific linked set of practices, the observance of which is determined by travel to a fixed set of locations, evocative of a largely extinct proto-Śaiva sacred landscape. As the Mahābhārata makes clear, though bathing, honoring the ancestors, and feeding Brāhmaṇas are usually part of the package, at each of the different places the pilgrim will have to visit to fulfill the terms of the injunction, the practice engaged in and the rules that govern it are substantively different.

Lakṣmīdhara, to be sure, discards Pulastya’s precise itinerary. One can hardly begrudge him this choice, as with the passage of perhaps a thousand years many of the places the text incorporates had disappeared or been thoroughly reimagined. And yet, in many ways he stays true to the spirit of Pulastya’s discourse to Bhīṣma, for in the chapters that follow, the Tīrthavivecanakāṇḍa will represent pilgrimage to each of the different locations it covers as entailing divergent practices. Thus, while Lakṣmīdhara dedicates his first chapter—entitled the tīrthayātrāvidhi—to asserting the in many ways rather banal and delimited proposition that going to tīrthas releases one from sin, and then proceeds in the chapters that follow to offer the specific and often quite different practices associated with making pilgrimage to Kāśī, Prayāga, Gayā and so forth, as his Tīrthakhaṇḍa commences, Hemādri marshals the exact same [[P1344]] materials as his predecessor (only incorporating a few additional verses from Pulastya’s teaching), in the service of making a very different sort of argument.

Reading his source against the grain, Hemādri turns the inclusivism of the original text on its head. While not denying that people of little of means and who are intent on purging themselves of sin should undertake pilgrimage, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s real focus is advocating for the substantial incorporation of well-heeled men of property and paragons of moral and ritual purity in the pilgrimage process, and for the participation onsite of specialist Brāhmaṇa ritualists as the overseers of the sacred fields. The flipside of this framework is that exemplars of ascetic virtues, who in the source texts are singled out as the pilgrim par- excellence, are denigrated or sidelined, and their values are treated as basically irrelevant to the ethos of pilgrimage. As much of this work is happening at the level of subversive commentarial glosses, it is worthwhile to begin by citing a bit of Pulastya’s discourse as found in Hemādri’s text.

MBh: Making sacrifices with agniṣṭoma sacrifice and so forth, which involves a whole lot of money, a person does not obtain that same result as he does from going to the tīrthas. . . . Even having not burned the fires [through performing the Agnihotra], even by those who have just their own body [lit., with a single body] (ekātmabhiḥ) and are separated from their companions and who are devoid of assistance (asamhataiḥ), the ancestors are made to cross over and the grandfathers [are extracted] from the hells.⁶²

Hemādri: Where the texts says “who have just their own body” (ekātmabhiḥ), [what is meant is] who is without a wife (patnīrahitaiḥ). Where the text says, “who are not well [[P1345]] equipped,” [what is meant is those] who lack a Ṛgvedic and Sāmavedic priest and so forth. For this reason, the text says, “having not ignited the Agnihotra and forth.” Therefore, the fruit of each one of the four [rewards mentioned in the verses], namely, [from] the lighting of the fire for three nights, the going to the tīrthas, the giving of gold and cows is the absence of poverty. This is the sense.⁶³

Through a series of sly recastings of key terms, Hemādri has already begun to adjust our expectations for what constitutes an ideal pilgrim. Displacing the root text’s conception of pilgrimage as a boon for the genuinely impoverished, who have neither servants nor access to the materials needed in performing ritual worship, he inscribes in their place a very different sort of person, namely, someone who is traveling without his wife and who does not have access to the complete retinue of Vedic ritualists that might assist him in his performances of Soma sacrifices.

Having shifted the terms of the discussion so that this new context will alter the meaning of the materials he is about to import, Hemādri then briefly brings in a few verses from Pulastya’s original delineation of the characteristics of a pilgrim, once again at every step undercutting the simple denotative meaning of his sources where they do not suit his agenda.

Likewise, MBh: The one of whom the two hands, the two feet and likewise the mind are restrained (susaṃyatam), and who has knowledge, austerity, and fame, enjoys the fruit of pilgrimage.⁶⁴

Hemādri: Fame is in regard to good deeds. “Restraint of the hand” comes from leaving off of taking other people’s property (hastasamyamaḥ parasvagrahaṇanivṛtyā). “Restraint of the feet” means leaving off from going to countries/places that should not be gone to. Restraint of the mind means leaving off from contemptible desires. Vidyā [[P1346]] means knowledge of the qualities of the tīrthas and so forth. Tapas is characterized by dwelling and fasting at the tīrthas and so forth. . . .⁶⁵

MBh: One who has left off from holding property, who is satisfied with whatever he has, is devoid of ego, and he enjoys the fruit of the tīrthas. He has no preferences, he is without support (nirālambha), he has not obtained food, he has conquered the senses. Freed from all social contact, he enjoys the fruit of the tīrthas. O king, one who is free from anger, who always speaks truth, is firm in vows, and who is similar to the self in all beings [who sees the same self in all beings], he enjoys the fruits of all tīrthas.⁶⁶

Hemādri: Being devoid of holding property means immediately after one pilgrimage, then he proceeds directly to another pilgrimage. . . . Akalpaka means without fraud. “Without support” means being devoid of the conduct of acquiring money and so forth. “Freed from all social contact” (niḥsaṅga) means one who is not governed by attachment to people of his own gotra. . . . “Similar to the self means” he is passionate about the welfare of all downtrodden people. This is the meaning.⁶⁷

In the Mahābhārata, Pulastya begins his discourse to Bhīṣma by calling upon the great warrior ascetic to listen with a one-pointed mind (ekāgramanasā), a rhetorical choice that prepares us for his definition of the sort of agent who will find success on pilgrimage. That this person— whether a householder or a professional renunciate—is a yogin in all but name is self-evident in the root text, for he has restrained his body and his mind, has performed austerities, does not own property, has cultivated neither attraction nor aversion to any particular thing, sees the self in all, has mastered his emotions and has no ego, dwells alone, consumes limited food, and observes vratas. For Pulastya, then, the pilgrim must embody a set of ascetic virtues to a very high degree precisely because the elaborate vidhi he prescribes will [[P1347]] demand that he performs harrowing austerities at some of the key stopping points in its very involved itinerary.

In the service of advocating for a very different vision of the spirit of pilgrimage and what makes it efficacious, Hemādri systematically sets out to at once domesticate and ethicalize the defining features of a pilgrim. The figure that emerges out of his pen no longer has to have achieved mastery over the workings of the body and mind. He simply must meet a much lower set of prerequisites, being someone who does not steal, who does not stray into forbidden areas, and is not a prisoner of destructive obsessions. Instead of having acquired great learning and already performed intense austerities before attempting pilgrimage, he simply needs to observe such practices in situ as part of his performance of Purāṇic rituals, and to listen to and follow the right authorities. In place of abjuring the acquisition of property, having equanimity of vision, and withdrawing from the transactionalities of the social world— standard requirements for an ascetic—Hemādri simply requires the pilgrim to not hang around the pilgrimage site on holiday after he completes his observances and that he not commit fraud, engage in business dealings, or seek to advance the social position of his kin network while he is executing his religious duty. Finally, undercutting the famed teachings of the Bhagavad Gītā in a manner eerily akin to modern rereadings of scripture that substitute social justice concerns in place of spiritual attainment, Hemādri sets out to “secularize” the act of seeing the self in all beings, transmuting this into the pilgrim simply being “passionate about the welfare of all downtrodden people.” In essence, though from a position of privilege and wielding an almost unimaginable degree of institutional power what Hemādri is instigating is his very own sort of “quotidian revolution.” [[P1348]]

As we will see throughout this chapter, a highly selective curation of sources materials is a ubiquitous feature of the discourse in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, which through exegetical sleight of hand imagines into being an ideological consensus not evident in the sources. Through such efforts, our author systematically reinvents the nature, context, and function of religious practice and the place which it occupies in the social world. At once one of the most tellingly egregious and relatively straightforward examples of Hemādri’s preferred sort of scholastic alchemy that transmutes the simple denotative sense of texts into something diametrically opposed to the obvious meaning makes it appearance just a few passages onward from where we have just left off in our readings. Hemādri has already delineated the traits of the pilgrim and he has begun to explain the universal procedure (sāmānyavidhi) for performing a pilgrimage—a subject to which we will return momentarily—when he is temporarily detained from fleshing out his major argument by a related tangent, the obviously pertinent question of “how should you travel when on going on pilgrimage?” On this matter, all of the sources he invokes are quite clear. For example, the Matsya Purāṇa says:

But, for that man who goes by a vehicle (yāna), out of lordliness, greed, or delusion, all of [his efforts] will be fruitless. Therefore, one should avoid a vehicle.⁶⁸

This is about as transparent a statement as one is likely to find in the Purāṇas. To any reasonable person, its message is self-evident. Traveling to pilgrimage sites by means of a vehicle is strictly prohibited— no exceptions. Or, so it would seem. Much in the manner of a Vedāntin reading their specific theology out from the Upaniṣads by singling out specific statements in the body of the text as the opening (upakrama) and closing (upasaṃhāra) of connected piece of discourse, the significance of which is elevated above the surrounding [[P1349]] materials, Hemādri resolves this apparent clash between the vision of pilgrimage he wishes to promote and the message conveyed by his sources by directing his reader’s attention to the larger rhetorical framework in Matsya Purāṇa within which this apparent prohibition is embedded. Several verses beforehand, the Matsya Purāṇa introduces this wider topic by offering us as a cautionary tale a certain man (naraḥ kvacit) who is intent on making pilgrimage to Prayāga (prayāgatīrthayātrārthī) while mounted on a bull (balīvardasamārūḍhaḥ). This unfortunate soul, we soon learn, after his own demise for his misdeeds will reap the fruit of having to dwell in the terrible hells (narake vasate ghore). Such a scoundrel is then contrasted with the right sort of person, who feeds the ancestors and gives philanthropy, especially to Brāhmaṇas. Through his actions, in the next life he will dwell in the celestial realms. It is only at this point, when the grammatical subject being referred to has already changed and the seeker after Prayāga is no longer relevant to the discussion, that the Matsya Purāṇa presents the verse offering a general prohibition on vehicle travel that we have just encountered. For Hemādri, however, this brief mention of Prayāga provides him with an expedient means for extracting himself out of a hermeneutical dead end.

Hemādri: But this prohibition of the vehicle is only relevant to [the pilgrimage] to Prayāga, because such was stated in the Matsya Purāṇa. . . . Thus, the Kalpataru relates:

“Travelling by cow, he is said to be a cow killer. If one goes on a horse, it is fruitless. Going by means of a man, then there is half the fruit, and it is four-fold if one does it on foot.”

Hemādri: In this quote, “by feet and so forth,” on account of the non-concomitance of the ablative case [padbhyām] and so forth, there is [for the person going by foot] the fruit of the tīrthas along with extra merit; there is no fault in the usage [of these means of conveyance.]

Thus, when [we recognize that] the prohibition on the vehicle is blocked (bādhita), [one realizes that] in the case of rain and heat, an umbrella bearer [is to be used] and in the [[P1350]] case of the forest at night, a staff bearer would be the protector of the body. [Therefore], one should always go about with a vehicle.⁶⁹

Through hermeneutical feats that run roughshod over the transparent denotative meaning of simple declarative statements, our author’s logic runs as follows. Having first demonstrated that simple prohibitions on the use of vehicles apply only to pilgrimage to Prayāga, our author repurposes the narrow possibility of permitting “a vehicle” under some circumstances, found only in one source, as providing sanction for a whole host of pilgrimage related perks. Umbrella bearers we are told, should accompany the pilgrim in the rainy season, armed guards should escort him when travelling through forest. Since all of these things entail the protection of the body—and what protects the body best is a vehicle—Hemādri arrives at the entirely counter intuitive conclusion that one must always go by vehicle when going on pilgrimage. Even better, as he will observe later on, instead of going through all this bother of travelling to sacred sites in the first place, the savvy entrepreneurial pilgrim might just as well pay someone else to go on his pilgrimage for him—for all of the merit apart from what your employee gains from washing himself will be transferred to the patron.

“The one who goes for the sake of another obtains the sixteenth [part] of the merit.”

H: The meaning is—this is the fruit of the tīrtha that belongs to him who goes by proxy. “On behalf of another” means by a proxy taking wages [to do his pilgrimage] and so forth.⁷⁰

The hidden iconoclasm of Hemādri’s interpretive project—that under the guise of [[P1351]] theorizing Hindu pilgrimage he is surreptitiously reinventing Hindu pilgrimage—comes into sharp relief when we briefly juxtapose his mid-thirteenth century prescriptions with representations of Hindu pilgrimage from the early twelfth century composed within a similar geographical and social milieu. Indeed, the counterpoint provided here emerged within the court of the Kalyāṇa Cāḷukyas, whose sponsoring of the previously marginal Seuṇa Yādavas formed the necessary preconditions that made possible the emergence of the very institutional space in which Hemādri is operating. The text in question, you may have already realized, is the Vikramāṅkābhyudaya of Someśvara III, already explored at some length back in chapter 4. We have covered a lot of ground—conceptually as well quite literally—in the interim, so its perhaps worthwhile to highlight of few of the salient points from the earlier discussion. The Kalyāṇa Cāḷukya king Someśvara I is desperate to conceive a child. So, under the direction of a panel of learned Brāhmaṇas, he is directed to sponsor a series of ritual performances of the sixteen acts of mahādāna prescribed by the tradition of Dharmaśāstra, following the procedures outlined in the Matsya Purāṇa. The king does not perform these rituals himself, but has other people do the ritual acts for him by proxy. In part, it is precisely this decision, the text tells us, that causes the king to sire not a proper heir, but a sociopathic monster whose consciousness is dominated by rajas and tāmas. As you may remember, Someśvara I redeems himself and ensures the flourishing of his dynasty by going on pilgrimage. This is an activity that the kāvya seems to understand as falling outside the realm of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra and animated by a fundamentally antithetical ethos. Both rhetorically and conceptually, the text repeatedly orients its intended readers to this fundamental difference between the two domains of religious praxis by framing key moments in Someśvara I’s pilgrimage as repudiations of types of choices and values that were reflected in the king’s behavior during [[P1352]] the mahādāna rites.⁷¹ It emphatically insists on two dichotomies in particular. First, that while during the disastrous philanthropic rite ostensibly honoring Śiva, the king “worshipped” through proxy amidst a great retinue, he had to perform the far more effective pilgrimage with his very own two bare feet, bereft of retinue as well resources, in simple solitude. Secondly, while the first rituals were not merely elaborate but genuinely enjoyable affairs where the king was repeatedly indulged and his senses satisfied, in contrast, both enroute to Srisailam and while keeping the company of the god, Someśvara I observed intense physical austerities to an extent virtually unknown in the life of a householder.⁷² Through deliberately inflicting suffering and pain on his own body, the Cāḷukya king purified his body and his mind, completely one-pointed, and as the text quite plainly states, it was precisely this sort of practice [[P1353]] that caused the Lord, speaking directly to his devotee, to grant him a boon in the form of the child that would become Vikramāditya VI. This is of course the very regent whose fifty-year reign did so much to define the discursive and institutional worlds into which Hemādri was born and that he would do so much to deconstruct.

At Śrīśaila, Someśvara I worships the Lord himself (Someśvara, Vikramāṅkābhyudaya, pg. 43–44): tataḥ prabhṛti pratidinaṃ pātālagaṅgāsalilaparipūritaiś cāmīkaracārukalaśair bhagavantaṃ trilocanaṃ snapayāmbabhūva / tadanu haricandanacandanaghanasāramārga-dravair anulilimpa / tato vividhavihitasugandhikusumaviracitavicitra-mālyapañcopacārasubhagāṃ pūjāṃ cakāra / tathā pratibhaṭanarapatiśiraḥkirīṭakoṭitāḍananiratābhyām api svabhāvakomalābhyāṃ caraṇābhyām eva santataṃ virūpākṣaṃ pradakṣinīcakre / “From that moment on, every day, he bathed the three eyed lord with beautiful gold kalaśas, which were filled with water from the subterranean Gaṅgā. After that, he smeared the Lord with the essences of deer musk, camphor, sandal paste, and yellow sandal paste. And then, he performed a pūjā that was very auspicious with the five facilitating practices, with many types of flowers garlands that were fashioned with fragrant flowers of many sorts, as was enjoined. Likewise, he performed ceaseless circumambulation of Virūpākṣa with his own two feet which, even though they had had been engaged in the striking of crores of the crowns on the heads of adversarial kings, were tender by their very nature.”

Reconsidering the narrative illustrations of pilgrimage practice in the twelfth-century Vikramāṅkābhyudaya in light of prescriptions in the thirteenth-century Caturvargacintāmaṇi, we are met with a curious irony. In spite of the fact that Someśvara III was skeptical if not downright hostile, at least as it related to the realm of religious ritual, towards the tradition of Dharmaśāstra as well as its Purāṇic imitators of the sort we find in the Matsya Purāṇa, and while Hemādri is the discourse’s most strident champion, it is actually the Cāḷukya king and not our Dharmaśāstrin polymath whose vision of pilgrimage proves to be most faithful to the ethos we find outlined in the very Purāṇic proof texts on top of which the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa assembles its own arguments. Amusingly, this consonance is particularly striking when it comes to the passages that Hemādri has extracted from the Matsya Purāṇa. In any case, a plurality of the exact passages that Hemādri invokes, to say nothing of the wider context from which those passages were extracted, perceive pilgrimage as a domain animated by precisely the sort of ascetic ethos and sensibility, emphasizing clarity of intention, one-pointed focus, and above all else, and sustained individual effort, that Hemādri sets out to elide through his commentarial practice. Hemādri’s explicit project of consolidating and synthesizing a preexisting body of knowledge provides him with cover for what in actuality seems to be a radical—and at the time quite eccentric— wholesale reinvention of tradition. [[P1354]]

Indeed, the more thoroughly and carefully one reads the methodological portions of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa in particular, the more evident it becomes that the virtual absence of textual precedents for the type of interpretive work on display in Hemādri’s text within our surviving sources is not in fact a reflection of ignorance on the part of modern scholars of Dharmaśāstra. Nor can it simply be accounted for by assuming that, apart from Lakṣmīdhara, we simply lack access to an earlier lost tradition of dharmanibandha writers—well known to Hemādri—who come down to us only in form of a list names embedded in Lakṣmīdhara’s praśastis honoring his predecessors.⁷³ Such assumptions simply do not stand in light of how Hemādri handles his sources. With great consistency, when Hemādri asserts a doctrinal stance and then invokes the authority of “all the nibandhakāras” (sometimes specifically mentioning the Mitākṣara author and Lakṣmīdhara), or when he engages polemically with the “position” of a specific Dharmaśāstra author, the sources he invokes are only tangentially related to the specific topic at hand. Moreover, we have strong indications that the older discussions in question were not actually found in texts that were invested in exploring the topic of tīrthayātrā.

Making sense of Hemādri’s argument requires us to proceed slowly and methodically. Let us see how he starts to develop his case: [[P1355]]

[Identified by Viśvāsadevī as Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa]: “Whoever should go to the tīrtha pilgrimage, his fasts completed, being previously restrained (susaṃyata) to his own house, being zealous for a long time, he should worship Gaṇeśa, genuflecting with bhakti. The intelligent one should worship the gods, the ancestors, the Brāhmaṇas and also the sādhus. He should propitiate the fierce ancestors/the Brāhmaṇas, with effort, and with wealth, according to his ability. Having returned again and again, then again he should worship the gods, ancestors, and Brāhmaṇas. One who is acting in this way obtains that fruit stated to be from the tirtha. Of that there is no doubt.”⁷⁴

Hemādri: On the part beginning susaṃyata—On the previous day, the one who has performed the niyama that is exclusive devotion and so forth, who fasted on the day after that, then, having worshipped Gaṇeśa, the grahas, and one’s own chosen deity, having done a pārvaṇa offering, one should worship the Brāhmaṇas.

And this pārvaṇa has ghee as its principal substance (ghṛtamukhyadravyaka) based on this authoritative statement from the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa.⁷⁵

Up until this point in the chapter, though his interpretations have often been quite different, Hemādri has been dutifully reproducing Lakṣmīdhara’s main citations, for the most part in the exact same order. This passage from the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, which replaces some citations from the Devī Purāṇa in Lakṣmīdhara’s original, offers us his first extended choice of a new proof text. Taken in isolation, all that the passage seems to offer on its own is an extremely generic invocation of the practice of tīrthayātrā. It suggests that when you go on pilgrimage, especially if you have not been on one for a long time, you should make a point of honoring Gaṇeśa when you first get there and then eventually get around to feeding the ancestors, the sādhus, and the Brāhmaṇas. What Hemādri does with this rather banal material, for what seems to be the first time in the scholastic discourse, is he derives from it a formalized [[P1356]] ritual injunction and procedure. This is to say, he treats the Purāṇic passage as if it contains not merely a ritual injunction, but a nested series of dependent procedures. As we will see, as he continues to elaborate, this begins with the observation of the niyama that is bhakti, and ends on the last day with a veneration in sequence of Gaṇeśa, the grahas, and one’s own chosen deity, the making of a pārvaṇa offering (a type of śrāddha sacrifice) and the feeding of Brāhmaṇas. We should note that of these activities, only the initial display of bhakti, the veneration of Gaṇeśa, and the feeding Brāhmaṇas has actually been mentioned by the root text. Not only has Hemādri’s list interpolated in these other elements, but it is noticeably silent about elements actually present in his sources, such as the separate veneration of sādhus. What’s more, it has imposed from without a logical, sequential and hierarchical relationship between these elements nowhere in evidence in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa itself, even supplying in from an entirely unrelated source the specification—entirely absent from his proof text—that the performance of the pārvaṇa ritual “has ghee as its principal substance (ghṛtamukhyadravyaka).”

It is our author’s use of this technical language, “the main ingredient” (mukhyadravyaka) embedded within an awkward unnatural collocation, that provides us with our first indication what exactly Hemādri is really up to, for this term of art and style of discourse is unmistakably derived from the tradition of the Mīmāṃsā exegetes. As will soon become apparent, Hemādri is going to “derive” a universal procedure for performing pilgrimage from an intertextual reading of a range of previously logically discrete Purāṇic sources, a task he will accomplish by reading the text of these Purāṇas as if they were emerging from different śākhās of the Veda, whose procedures have to be reconciled. Succinctly, within [[P1357]] totally new textual environs, Hemādri is acting as if he were a Prābhākara Mīmāṃsaka interpreting the Veda.

What exactly does this entail? In the next chapter, we will explore in some detail Hemādri’s own articulation of this model as presented in the Śrāddhakalpa, which will prove integral to his defense of the authoritativeness of Smṛti and Purāṇa. For the moment, however, since it is basically impossible to understand what Hemādri is up to as an internally coherent intellectual project without some background, a bit of orientation is needed.⁷⁶ To offer a simple introduction to this very complex issue, following Jaimini’s second sūtra on codanā, all Mīmāṃsakas read through the Veda in search of injunctive statements—commands that there is something that has to be done. They identify these statements on the basis of the presence or absence of certain verbal forms (optative liṅ, imperative loṭ, Vedic subjunctive leṭ, and gerundive tavya as well as the present indicative under some special cases) that have an injunctive force. The iconic example, first mentioned by Śabara in his commentary on Jaimini but invoked throughout the literature is “svargakāmo yajetā,” which literally means the “one desiring heaven should sacrifice.” In his linguistic analysis of this statement, Śabara summarizes this injunctive phrase as yāgena svargo bhavati, literally “heaven comes into being by means of the sacrifice.” This reframing—which becomes standard practice for thinking with an injunction—enables the exegete to query every ritual injunction by means of a grammatical analysis so that it provides answers to three questions—1) what do you have to do, 2) what is the instrument you use to do your task, and 3) how, specifically, can the task be accomplished. [[P1358]] In this case, from a Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā perspective, “what you are doing” is bringing heaven into being, the ritual you are performing is the instrument, and the instructions for doing the task are the procedures that make up that ritual. This mode of analysis requires introducing a new term—the verb of being, bhavati—and with it a new concept, the idea of bhāvanā—bringing into being. For the Bhāṭṭa school of Mīmāṃsā, the idea is then that the injunctive verbal root in the verb conveys that the sacrifice somehow brings into being—by means of bhāvanā—a unprecedented (apūrva) state of affairs, which in this case is heaven. Succinctly, the one who desired heaven would not have attained heaven before he performed the ritual. By performing the ritual, at some point in the future, heaven will be attained. Kumārila, the founding figure of the Bhāṭṭa school, refines this model, proposing that bhāvanā actually works to bring two things into being, on the one hand causing “bringing into being” itself to happen (linguistic bhāvanā) and on the other hand bringing into being specific objects or elements in the ritual (arthabhāvanā), in this case heaven.

What is important for our purposes is that the Prābhākara Mīmāṃsakas, figures like Śālikanātha Miśra, object to this whole “bhāvanā” model. Asserting an even more staunchly empiricist stance than their Bhāṭṭa rivals, they reject linguistic bhāvanā as a fantasy with no empirical referent that needlessly complicates our understanding. Instead, they argue, just as Hemādri is about to do, that normative verbal suffixes just provide us with information about the grammatical number (singular, plural, etc.) and temporal status of the agent and objects in a textual passage. Effectively their position is that, unlike with the Bhāṭṭas, Mīmāṃsā does not need to consider the intentionality or subjectivity at all of the ritual agent, especially not to the extent of rethinking our philosophy of language (in this regard they are very much not like Hemādri, who will take his inspiration in this domain from the emergent tradition of the new [[P1359]] logic). They suggest we should shift our focus from trying to understand how the injunction impels the sacrificer to act and instead center our investigation on the bare fact that the agent is compelled to act and then investigate the nature of the action that is to be done. In short, what the Prābhākara tradition does is re-extend what Francis Clooney has called the decentering of the human.⁷⁷ When this is done, Mīmāṃsā becomes once again primarily about thinking through the local relationships between the discrete material elements in a ritual, especially theorizing the transference of ritual details from the archetype (prakṛti) for a ritual to its ectype (vikṛti), as well as context-specific attempts at deploying those rules in particular ritual settings. And as it turns out, these are precisely the two intellectual practices that dominate the Caturvargacintāmaṇi.

The Prābhākaras propose that what is apūrva in any given moment, in the sense of expected and not yet manifest, is not some transcendent result but the specific ritual detail that is needed in that given moment. This is why when the Prābhākara tradition glosses “svargakāmo yajetā,” it does so as “darśapūrṇamāsyayāgena svargam bhāvayet.” Whereas a Bhāṭṭa would understand this as bringing into being heaven by means of the specified sacrifice and fixating on thinking about how that bringing into being works, the Prābhākara instead provides us with an analytical matrix that, through proper reading, enables one to eventually locate that for performing this particular sacrifice, rice is the ingredient of the moment (mukhyadravya). In the metalanguage of the Prābhākaras, because rice will “accomplish the role of what is desired” it is the śeṣa, and thus we need to produce a new sentence, through viniyoga, that preliminarily reframes the above as “one should bring the X sacrifice into being by means of rice,” and ultimately as “he should bring about the result through six rites that [[P1360]] make up the full and new moon sacrifices using specific ingredients in particular relationship with various mantras, and so forth.” Dharma, in this formulation, entails the grasping (grahāka) of the śeṣa, constituting a heap of ritual items and steps situated in the proper context. It is this bundle of purely empirical elements that the tradition defines as “what you have to do,” the itikartavyatā.

Now, as we have just started to see, this sort of exegetical work is precisely one of the main projects that Hemādri keeps returning to throughout the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. As Hemādri will ultimately argue, because they find no explicit mention in the Vedic texts, all of the rituals discussed in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi fall under the category of ectypal (vikṛti) rituals. Like all such rituals in the Vedas, this means that we cannot simply consult a single source that discusses them in full—or even a single ritual canon—because such resources do not exist. Instead, just as Hemādri does throughout the CVC, the “standard” or universal form of a ritual, nowhere in evidence in the source texts, must be arrived at analytically through the application of metarules, reconciling apparent contradictions within and among texts, ordering the relative priority of different statements within a corpus, and then documenting some of the transformations applied to the common ritual procedure in different contexts and circumstances.

In this regard at least, much of Hemādri’s project would seem to be iconically Mīmāṃsaka. Where our author diverges enormously from his predecessors is in his choice of materials, for nearly all of Mīmāṃsā had proposed that their mode of reading, beyond a theory of the sentence, explicitly does not apply to non-Vedic texts—Vedānta even suggests it is inadmissible when it comes to the Upaniṣads—and that it was particularly inappropriate in treating the Purāṇas. There are many reasons why this would have been the case, starting from [[P1361]] the fact that most of the Purāṇas offer what Mīmāṃsā would label arthavāda, things such as stories that neither offer an injunction nor clarify ritual details. Certainly, one significant factor is that there was considerable doubt among intellectuals and theologians, even among those who valued Purāṇas, about whether or not they were all equally authoritative as well as if they formed a unitary textual corpus with a singular intention, essential preconditions for reading them intertextually. The dissonance between Vedic and Purāṇic textuality and thus between the proper hermeneutics for treating the texts for most readers seemed self-evident. After all, Mīmāṃsā had famously grounded the authority of the Veda on its apauruṣeyatva—its being a text without an author—whereas Purāṇas are explicitly compiled works, different portions of which are “authored” or spoken by distinctive gods.

For Hemādri, however, for reasons that he will make plain in the next chapter of this thesis, these discrepancies seem not to have been problematic. Thus, he habitually reads the Purāṇic corpus as a whole as if the details not found in passages in one work—such as the Brahmāṇḍa—can be readily supplied from another that seemingly addresses similar subjects. Much to the modern reader’s annoyance, he even does this when the connections between the two sources are hardly self-evident. Take for example, the following passage, which resumes immediately from the place where we left off in his discourse: [[P1362]]

Hemādri: And this pārvaṇa has ghee as its principal substance (ghṛtamukhyadravyaka) based on this authoritative statement from the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa:

Bhaviṣya Purāṇa: The king, having done the śrāddha [rite] with ghee (sarpiṣā), should go to another country; this is stated to be for the sake of yātrā in regard to “entry,” there is no doubt.

Hemādri: Some people say this [passage] is related to bestowing military victory, but, that is wrong. Because, there is a greater hermeneutical probability [lit. interpretive lightness] of construing [the word] upavāsa [in the verse] in the sense of a fast (upavāsa), because of this usage being relevant to the present context.⁷⁸

Since the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa’s bland and basically detail poor summary of tīrthayātrā does not supply us with enough information to actually perform the key acts involved in tīrthayātrā, Hemādri next goes searching elsewhere in the Purāṇas. Ultimately, he locates a statement in the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa that also contains a brief reference to yātrā, which specifies that in śrāddha rites, ghee should be used as the main element. This statement, however, is of dubious relevance, for the agent it specifies is not a pilgrim but a king, and the yātrā of which it speaks offers no indication that it is fact a pilgrimage. Sanskrit is of course a polysemantic language in general, and yātrā can refer to many types of journeys. The fact that the king is the probable agent and that the śrāddha rite precedes “going to another country,” however, suggest that the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa has in mind a very specific and conceptually unrelated context—that in fact the yātrā under discussion is the war processional. The division on yātrābheda, for example, in the Mānasollāsa of Someśvara III offers us a taxonomy of different types of yātrās, all of them in fact preparations for invading enemy kingdoms, organized according to astrological and prognosticatory factors and prefaced by a range of rituals, some of which do in fact involve the king offering ghee.

Hemādri is quick to try to rebut such suggestions, a task he carries out by invoking Mīmāṃsā-derived reading strategies pertaining to the relative authoritativeness and priority of different approaches for determining the precise meaning of key terms of art in the text and their logical relationship to each other. His effort here however reads as particularly forced. His invocation of the term “upavāsa” in the sense of fast as clarifying the intended context for [[P1363]] the text of the Bhaviṣya Purāṇa’s use of yātrā, runs aground of the simple fact that the word upavāsa does not actually appear anywhere in the portion of the Bhaviṣya which he has cited. It is in fact being supplied from the earlier quotation in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, which had characterized the prospective pilgrim as one whose fast has been completed (kṛtopavāsaḥ). In essence, Hemādri’s reading is only meaningful at all if we come to the table having already presupposed the intertextual dependence of all of the Purāṇas, that they are a unified corpus with a singular focus that can be read as if they are all providing us with different complementary parts to the same puzzle.

That Hemādri’s strained readings and usage of his sources are a sui generis phenomenon, predicated on the fact that he lacks any substantive antecedents in the tradition who are trying to make his same arguments, is perhaps most compellingly exemplified in a series of connected portions of his discourse embedded within the same delineation of the universal procedure for pilgrimage and its theoretical foundations that we have just exploring. As we will see momentarily, Hemādri frames much of this section of his text as a reply to a series of stances ascribed to a certain Dharmaśāstrin named Gaṇeśvaramiśra. This is a figure of considerable obscurity, but considering that determining the actual the nature of his contributions is quite pertinent to evaluating Hemādri’s own use of his materials, it is worth pausing for a moment to survey what little we can know about him.

In a magisterial survey of the early history of eastern Dharmaśāstra traditions completed in 1915, Rai Monmohan Chakravarti Bahadur dedicates four sentences to Gaṇeśvaramiśra, suggesting his contributions are known to us only on the basis of citations found in four later works of eastern Dharmaśāstra.⁷⁹ On the basis of the earliest of these— [[P1364]] the Smṛtisāra—Bahadur proposes that Gaṇeśvaramiśra probably lived in Mithila prior to the fourteenth century and that he wrote a work on ācāra. In his History of Dharmaśāstra, without acknowledging the extent of his debt to his Bengali predecessor, Panduranga Kane helpfully informs us while summarizing the Smṛtisāra of Harinātha—in which Gaṇeśvaramiśra is cited several times—that the work in question dealt with the sixteen saṃskāras, death rites, śrāddha and purification.⁸⁰ Kane (1962, pg. 372) also mentions another possibly related manuscript that covered many of the titles of law. A number of decades later, Ludo Rocher⁸¹ also ascribes to Gaṇeśvaramiśra a text on jurisprudence—entitled the Vyavahārataraṅga—quite possibly the same source noticed in passing by Kane, briefly reconstructing Gaṇeśvara’s position on the subject of vākpāruṣya—abusive speech—as it is remembered by later commentators. While Rocher’s parenthetical note has seemingly been ignored, it is Kane’s position that has been taken as canonical by later historians of the discipline. This is unfortunate, as Kane in his analysis rather unhelpfully proceeds to assert, seemingly based on the shared name Gaṇeśvara, that “it appears extremely probable” that the Gaṇeśvaramiśra under discussion is the same figure as Gaṇeśvara Ṭhakkura, the uncle of the famous Caṇḍeśvara Ṭhakkura, author of the Smṛtiratnākara, and that he must have been writing between 1275–1310 CE. Kane’s supposition is of course unambiguously refuted by the presence of numerous references to Miśra within the circa 1260 CE Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa.

Debunking this association has enormous relevance for our own investigation, precisely because the fourteenth-century Gaṇeśvara Ṭhakkura is remembered primarily for his [[P1365]] now fragmentary Sugatisopāna, a work that combs through the Purāṇas in the service of crafting a soteriologically-oriented Dharmaśāstra. The work is unpublished, but on the basis of what has been cited from it in manuscript, Gaṇeśvara Ṭhakkura’s work may well represent one of the earliest surviving scholastic responses to the intellectual project of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. Had the two Gaṇeśvaras been identical, as Kane had assumed, this may well have been indicative that Hemādri’s treatment of Tīrtha (and much else besides) was indeed dependent on an earlier lost tradition of Dharmaśāstra commentary. As we are about to see though, based on the internal evidence from within Hemādri’s own text, in contrast, far from combing through the Purāṇas in search of “a bridge to heaven,” within his own writings, the elder Gaṇeśvaramiśra’s incidental engagement with the theology of place was confined to some stray passages that discuss the relevance of Prayāga and Gayā to the performance of śrāddha rituals. Thus, there is every indication that it is Hemādri himself, appropriating Gaṇeśvara’s materials, and not some lost predecessor, who for the first time in the scholastic tradition is systematically theorizing tīrthayātrā in universal terms. Making sense of Hemādri’s argument requires us to proceed slowly and methodically. Let us see how he starts to develop his case:

Hemādri: Gaṇeśvaramiśra and the other say thus: on the day of the fast, also there is the [making] of a bald head. In Prayāga, during the tīrthayātrā, due to the separation from the mother and the father, one should perform the shaving such that he becomes bald.⁸²

According to the statements of the Smṛtisamuccaya, Śaṅkhalikhita and Viṣṇu, when one is intent on going to the tīrtha (tīrthagamane cikīrṣite)—wearing the garb of a renunciate—in the beginning there is shaving, this is the meaning. And immediately after the śrāddha, there is the resolution to go. Then, there is the bearing of the garb [of the renunciate].

That is stated in the Vāyu Purāṇa: [[P1366]]

Vāyu Purāṇa: If one is prepared to go to Gayā, having done the śrāddha according to injunction, having donned the garb of an ascetic, having performed the circumambulation of the village, having then gone to another village, then, there is the eating of the remains from the śrāddha. Then, every day that he should go, without receiving alms, at each step along the way there would be the fruit of the Aśvamedha on the part of the one going to Gayā.⁸³

Essentially, what Hemādri has accomplished here is a conflation of a whole range of previously discrete, context-specific practices that have their origins in distinctive sources. By presuming that these materials have a shared conceptual context—prakaraṇa, in the language of Mīmāṃsā, which is indicated, as we will see in the next chapter, by the presence of shared terms of art—having knit them altogether, our author then applies himself to the herculean task of trying to iron out all of the apparent contradictions so that this becomes a single, noncontradictory, and connected discourse. What such an approach elides is that the referents in situ in each of these discussions were originally quite different.

Gaṇeśvaramiśra it seems was not really talking about pilgrimage at all, at least as we understand it. Instead, the actual subject of his inquiry is into the precise procedure to be followed by the eldest son in a family immediately following the cremation of his parents. This is a process that famously begins, just as it does today, with the mourner having his head shaved, and generally entails the making of a śrāddha offering at either Prayāga or Gayā. These features of the discourse explain why, even in Hemādri’s summary, Gaṇeśvara speaks of becoming bald as being motivated by “separation from the mother and father” (pitṛmātraviyogataḥ). And while we do not know precisely what was in the recension of [[P1367]] Śaṅkha available to our author, elsewhere in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi Hemādri draws upon a version of Likhitasmṛti whose readings are very close to that of the published edition.⁸⁴ At least as printed, Likhita contains zero references to tīrthayātrā, or any other euphemism to that effect. Its only references to the shaving of the head appear in verses fifteen to twenty, where the subject under discussion once again is the specific śrāddha one is to perform following the death of one’s mother or father, a procedure that here as well entails the complete shaving of the head even before one offers the three-fold piṇḍa. For our purposes, what is important is that in each of these cases, what is under discussion is a highly particularized naimittika ritual. In this exact form it is to be observed only one or two times in a single lifetime. In other words, this is hardly the sort of activity that would be likely to form the template for “the general ritual procedure” governing any sort of pilgrim venturing towards any sacred place. In fact, even within the archive available to us roughly corresponding to Hemādri’s chosen sources, most of the highly specific details invoked by our author are uniquely associated with this kind of śrāddha rite. In Likhita, for instance, the other forms of śrāddha do not entail any act of head shaving at all.

The source that Hemādri invokes to complement this evidence—a passage from the Vāyu Purāṇa, adds even further complications. Hemādri is invested in this proof text because unlike the other parts of his archive, which were either maddeningly vague or, while outlining a highly specific practice inconveniently were not explicitly related to tīrthayātrā, the Vāyu Purāṇa explicitly mentions an injunction and then actually offers us some of the concrete steps that make up the procedure. Even this text, however, requires some tweaking if one is to make it appear to be perfectly on topic. Instead of taking Prayāga as its focus, it is concerned with [[P1368]] Gayā. Just as significantly, while it mentions the donning of the guise of an ascetic (kārpatīveṣa), nowhere does it allude to the shaving of the head. Again, these are not mere oversights, but instead reflect the fact that the ritual deployment of each of these elements prior to their reimagining in our nibandha was highly context, place, and time specific. In order to overcome this host of apparent shortcomings in his sources, which stubbornly seem to keep resisting perfect alignment with his intentions, rather than locating additional proof texts more favorable to his approach, Hemādri resorts instead to the strategic application of a series of further exegetical strategies that find their points of origin in the discursive worlds of Mīmāṃsā and late classical Nyāya. [[P1369]]

Hemādri:

Even if it is the case that this bearing of the garb of ascetic, having [first] worshipped Gaṇeśa, the grahas, and iṣṭadevatā,and the [specific] fruit derived from going [on pilgrimage] are known in scripture to refer only [to pilgrimage to] Gayā—even so—it [this vidhāna] is also to be understood with regard to going to another Tīrtha.

[This follows:] According to the maxim that what applies to one place also applies to another place [if the meaning of the śāstra is ascertained in regard to one place in the same text, it would also apply to another location] (ekatra nirṇīta), when there is the semantic expectancy (ākaṅkṣā) of a statement of the “fruit”/result, because it is revealed as “having the fruit of going on pilgrimage,” it is reasonable that in another location as well, it would “have the fruit of going on pilgrimage,” because it is included as a proximate component [within the same system]. But it is not, however, that the fruit is to be conceptualized according to the viśvajit maxim.⁸⁵

This is a dense passage, full of elliptical invocations of a meta-śāstric background in which Hemādri assumes his reader would have fluency, but which is utterly foreign even to most scholars of Indian religions for whom the mechanics of Smārta paddhatis remains an undiscovered country. Making it accessible will take some effort. Essentially, as we alluded to [[P1370]] earlier, Hemādri has been proceeding as if the sāmānyatīrthayātrā vidhi—in the language of Mīmāṃsā—is a vikṛti or ectypal ritual. This means that unlike the archetype ritual—say the darśapūrṇamāsa iṣṭi, discussed in detail systematically in a range of Vedic sources—this is a rite for which scripture does not provide us with direct instruction (upadeśa) regarding what is to be done (itikartavyatā), the materials used in ritual (dravya), or even the deity (devatā) governing the ritual. Indeed, all that scripture might give us directly is a cursory statement—“x ritual is to be done.” It is up to the ritualist to reconstruct the whole rite in a systematic fashion out of stray statements scattered throughout his sources. This is done primarily through the judicious application of the principle of substitution (atideśa). To simplify matters significantly, one of the many ways of determining whether or not two practices or elements can serve as appropriate substitutes is whether or not they serve the same purpose and are said to yield the same result. Another complementary principle in Mīmāṃsā exegesis is that if the passages delineating a particular ritual never specify the result of that ritual, rather than assuming the ritual bears no fruit, we can simply assume that its intended result is the obtaining of heaven at some point in the future. In fact, this principle is the very viśvajit-nyāya that Hemādri, intent on making it clear that the maxim does not apply in the case under discussion, explicitly invokes at the end of our passage. [[P1371]]

In short, part of what Hemādri is arguing is that even though in the sources he has cited, the specified ritual details of bearing the kārpatīveṣa and following this particular procedure of worshipping in sequence Gaṇeśa, the grahas, and one’s own chosen deity have been discussed solely in the context of pilgrimage to Gayā, in fact they apply to all sacred sites that have same designated fruit of “tīrthagamanaphala”—“the result you yield from going on pilgrimage.” In practice, what this means is that every time a Purāṇic text describes something as, “a fruit you get from going on pilgrimage,” Hemādri is saying the statements in that passage falls under this category and can be used to supply additional details for ritual. With any luck, this part of our author’s argument has been rendered a bit more lucidly, setting aside the fact that, unlike good health, a spotted cow, or even heaven, “the fruit you get from pilgrimage” is not a specific result, but originally simply a place holder for whatever results the text will go on to supply in detail. In other words, this systemization is based on nominalizing and reifying a mere tautology.

Rather unexpectedly, however, Hemādri then supplements what—apart from the non- Vedic nature of the texts he is analyzing—is pretty standard Mīmāṃsā-style reasoning with something genuinely arcane, an obscure exegetical rule—the ekatra nirṇīta nyāya, drawn from an even more gnomic discourse. This principle is not found within the standard Mīmāṃsā tool kit, but first seems to surface in the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri Naiyāyika Udayana, a radically innovator thinker in his own right responsible for the consolidation of the previously separate schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika into a single discipline and often perceived as the fore-father of the new logic.⁸⁶ Rather remarkably, Hemādri seems to have derived this principle from Udayana’s famous treatises that sets out to prove the existence of god, “The Bouquet of Reasons” (Nyāyakusumañjali), where the principle is invoked and explained at [[P1372]] some length in chapter five.⁸⁷ Chapter five of the Nyāyakusumañjali is mostly dedicated to offering a series of what at the time were thoroughly novel but to us are still nonetheless relatively straightforward proofs of the existence of God arrived at by means of inferential reasoning (anumāna). Sadly for us, what Hemādri actually decides to take up as an integral part of his intellectual apparatus is not this comparatively accessible material, but rather the argument with which the Nyāyakusumañjali closes, one of the most difficult parts of the text, the analysis of which has been scrupulously avoided to this date by Western scholars.⁸⁸ Though this is very difficult material, it is worth taking some time and wrestling with the sort of intellectual resources that are inspiring Hemādri, for as we will see they deeply inform his rethinking of the very nature of ritual and religion.

This last part of “The Bouquet of Reasons” has as its focus nothing less than the refutation of Mīmāṃsaka ritual mechanism and atheism, and Udayana sets out to accomplish this objective by deploying the very same tools and reading strategies that Mīmāṃsā had made use of in theorizing the injunctive force of Vedic statements. The position Udayana will ultimately arrive at—this is incidentally the very stance that Romila Thapar has retrojected back into the origins of Hindu thought⁸⁹ but is in fact first in evidence in the eleventh century—is that just as all injunctive statements in the optative that tell you what you should do presume the intentionality of an authoritative person (āpta), when it comes to scripture, the authority that enjoins specific ritual actions is in fact God. In Udayana’s language, injunctions (vidhi) signify the intention (abhiprāya) of the speaker (vāktṛ). An injunction enjoins a specific [[P1373]] activity (pravṛtti) or cessation from activity (nivṛtti) conveyed to the listener, and it does this by means of the bare presence of the optative verbal formation (liṅ and so forth). When the sound of the optative is heard by the listener—even before the exact content of that command is cognized—it instantly tells you that there is something that needs to be done or not done. In order to actually accomplish this task, however, the agent will have to first properly cognize its contents—this is his or her responsibility—and then they will have to make use of a procedure for accomplishing the specified task that actually works—which is the responsibility of the one giving the directions. In other words, in contrast to Mīmāṃsā, Udayana proposes that ritual injunctions (vidhi), and by extension ritual systems, are not a value neutral technology that is made effective by the proper execution of an inherited or derived ritual procedure. Instead, as we are about to see, he argues injunctions are always value-laden—this is what he calls vidhipratyaya—and expressions of a particular worldview, often one that is provided by the supreme creator.

Against the Mīmāṃsakas, who viewed all action as motivated and made possible by desire (kāma), Udayana argues that what structures activity (pravṛtti) is not primarily the desires of the ritual actor himself—these do not cause anything to happen directly—but rather the degree of effort (prayatna) that this actor consciously invests in executing what, if anything meaningful is to result, must be an efficacious procedure, the efficaciousness of which is judged by the agent responsible for its creation. A simple example will help us see what Udayana is really saying. Imagine a child whose parents yell from the other room—“Go Clean your room!” The child first hears their parents say the word “Go!” Their body, mostly unconsciously, responds with nervous physical energy, causing them for example to shift posture (Udayana calls this the kāyaparispandamātra). Only if and when child actually gets [[P1374]] up does any actual “going” take place. In other words, the child has to apply conscious deliberate effort if any action whatsoever is going to occur. If all the child hears is that initial “Go!”—this is of course a vidhi of sorts—all sorts of “actions” might well take place—out of fear, for example, the kid may take off and run out the front door—but it is very unlikely that the intended relationship between a command—Go!— and a specific outcome, the cleaning of the room, will emerge of its own accord. In order for that to happen, the child will have to experience the command acting upon his body as well as engage in a deliberate effort, but he or she will also have to realize that the statement is applicable to them specifically and then to listen to and understand the semantic content of the rest of the statement “Go clean your room!”

So far this is pretty straightforward. Udayana, however, then adds in one more very interesting observation. It is still not enough to recognize that the agent recognizes a command is given, that it applies to him, and then to cognize it in general terms. In order for the activity to be a success, action does not just have to be undertaken, but it has to be done in accordance with the standards assumed by the speaker doing the enjoining. In other words, if a child wants the act of “cleaning the room” to result in a positive response from their parent, they have to figure out what this particular authority figure really means when they say “clean.” While, for some parents, “clean” might mean simply that nothing should be on the floor in the room, or even just that specific items—just as dirty clothing—be removed, others might anticipate that everything will be put away in its proper place, the whole room has been vacuumed, or even that the base boards have been scrubbed by hand. What determines which of these requirements is applicable and will result in “cleaning the room” actually being a means towards the accomplishing of the desired goal (iṣṭasādhānatā) is not some abstracted logical relationship [[P1375]] or mechanistic activation of an arrangement of principles intrinsic to the architectonics that order our reality. It is nothing more or less than the inferred intentionality of the original speaker. For this reason, we must speak of any discourse—including the Veda—as comprised not simply of injunctions (vidhi)—but of a specific mental content that travels paired with that injunction (vidhipratyaya), the proper understanding of which determines the success or failure of the act or ritual. In other words, knowledge of an injunction does not really arise separate from knowledge about the object or focus of that injunction.

In the fifth chapter, Udayana arrives at the positions we have just been outlining through a very intricate, systematic, and sophisticated engagement with the philosophy of the Sanskrit grammarians as well Mīmāṃsā analyses of the working of linguistic philosophy.⁹⁰ In doing so he explores a whole host of possibilities, using the technical idiom of analyzing logical relationships in terms of their kāraka relationships, with the aim of examining whether or not injunctions are 1) attributes of the agent (kartṛdharmaḥ); (2) the attribute of the action (karmadharmaḥ); (3) attributes of the instrument (kāraṇadharmaḥ), before finally arriving at his preferred conclusion that the injunction is an attribute of the person that enjoins (niyoktṛdharmaḥ). We will take up very briefly just a few of these possibilities, namely, the stance that the injunction is an attribute of the action or the ritual sacrifice itself, which lies at the heart of Mīmāṃsā.

First, we need to have in hand a bit of his philosophy of grammar. Responding to Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s theorization of injunctive statements as having two dimensions of bhāvanā, the bare capacity for bringing something into being and the targeted capacity of bringing into being a specific thing or state of affairs (arthabhāvanā), Udayana proposes as an alternative that every verbal action can be parsed into at least two components, so that, for example, when [[P1376]] we say “he cooks (pacati),” what we are really saying is “he does the cooking (pākaṃ karoti). In other words, all verbs can be analyzed so as to be made to take what in English we would call a direct object and what in Sanskrit grammatical thinking at the very least is an implied object. Udayana insists it is this hidden verbal “doing”—whether mentioned explicitly the way you would with a compound verb in Hindi or hidden in the suffix applied to the verbal root— that in the case of injunctive forms of the Verb communicate to the listener the inseparability of effort (prayatna) to the successful completion of ritual action. In other words, he proposes that the entire Vedic theory about the nature of the impelling force (codanā) of injunctions as lying at the very center of understanding dharma is completely wrong.

A key part of the reason why he goes to all this trouble is that having established all of this within a framework legible to the grammarians as well as to Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā enables our author to offer from within the conventions of these disciplines a devastating critique of the standard Mīmāṃsā accounts, both Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara, of the iconic injunction “svargakāmo yajetā”—the one desirous of heaven should sacrifice. This, we must remember, is grounded in the conception that the real focus of “Vedic” religion is the identification and proper analysis of injunctive statements found in the Veda where the verb possesses certain formal properties. What Udayana demonstrates is that once you revise your thinking about how injunctions work, the whole picture offered by traditional Mīmāṃsā collapses upon itself into a heap of contradictions that violate other presuppositions central to the system’s theory of reading or generally accepted by Indian logic. Thus, for example, if [[P1377]] what injunctions conveyed to us were the desire for a specific result, rather than being the archetype for Mīmāṃsā style injunctive sentences, “svargakāmo yajetā” would bear the fault of inherent redundancy as svargakāmo and the verbal suffix would serve the exact same function, a major no-no in śāstra.

The real problem arrives, however, when we take this new theory of how injunctions work and then need to account for the role assigned to “apūrva”—the unprecedented—which for the Bhāṭṭas is what makes ritual work causally and for the Prābhākaras is what makes recovering specific ritual procedures possible. Unlike other human activities, emically speaking, from Mīmāṃsā’s perspective, ritual tells us to do something “unprecedented” that serves no human purpose. What Udayana asserts is that for some very good reasons, we cannot accept that the injunctive suffix in the verb communicates to us something about or is even logically related to the “unprecedented.” When we read sentences, regardless of whether we accept the Bhāṭṭa model that the sentence meaning is comprehended word by word or the Prābhākara notion that we mentally grasp whole sentences as syntactic units together, we are engaged in a cognitive process that takes words and their meanings as conceptual objects. In other words, our mind relates to the sentence in much the same way that it would when we see a table or a tiger. But the whole point of something being apūrva is that it brings into being some state of affairs in the future that does not and cannot exist in the present. As Udayana says, it is the absence of all possibility of previous perceptions. So here is the problem: if we cannot by definition know what a thing is or have any access to that thing, there is no way within the rules of Indian philosophy that we logically demonstrate that it has any relation to any of the things we do know. [[P1378]]

For example, how we know what words mean is that either we, or someone else, already knew what those words meant beforehand. Recall, if you will, the child who heard the statement “go [[P1379]] clean your room.” In order for any action to take place that is logically connected to the meaning of either those words or the sentence that contains them, both the speaker and the observer needed to know what all the words mean. This is why if you were to yell “go clean your room,” and the sentence is overheard by a salamander, an infant, or a person from Equatorial Guinea who has never heard English before, the room is probably not going to get cleaned. What Udayana points out, is that even if by some miracle said statement was made and then the amphibian or person who was being spoken to proceeded to crawl or walk away and go and clean the room, there is no logical grounds for establishing that a causal relationship existed between the two activities—in other words, that one thing followed necessarily from the other and will do so again in the future given certain circumstances. This is especially true as in several of the above cases, a key component in the sentence—the very idea of “your room”—especially as applied to a salamander or a culturally remote stranger, is about as unthinkable as the notion of apūrva. Were the cleaning of a room to happen, we would simply assume it was pure chance, or there is another actual causal relationship unrelated to the one we have been exploring that we have missed.

Expanding on this observation and addressing much more pointedly the objections of Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā, Udayana next goes on to demonstrate a further parallel problem. A statement like “svargakāmo yajeta” as interpreted by followers of Prabhākara implies a statement about what is to be done (niyoga), a specific sacrifice, and well as a specified result (niyojya), in this case, heaven. Since at the end of a yajna people do not rise up into the sky, however, we know that the sacrificial act does not produce its desired result at the moment of [[P1380]] its completion, but, we are assured, sometime in the future. But if ritual is the cause of heaven, we have a problem, because the ritual has completely ceased to exist by the time its apparent effect manifests. It is for this reason then the apūrva is posited as a subtle and lasting bridge linking cause and effect. The idea is that its existence must be implied by the injunction if we are to assume any causal relationship between sacrifice and heaven. Udayana’s response is once again that, if you accept standard Mīmāṃsā accounts about how we acquire authoritative knowledge, there is no logical reason to associate being unprecedented (apūrvatva) with being a cause at all. The reason this is the case is because there are only two ways we could connect them: an act of recollection or an act of inferential reasoning. The problem is that you can only recollect something you have already seen or known before, and apūrva, by definition, is a thing that has never been seen or known before. In a similar spirit, inference demands that we already know the relationship and nature of two things being connected, and that is precisely what we are trying to find out. Finally, since we do not know what apūrva is nor any of its properties, logically speaking, we cannot even determine if it is the same sort of thing or a different sort of thing than being a cause, any more than one could compare and contrast a camel and a “jsiozjgieha.” This is because, in any case, either the grasping of the differences between things (bhedagraha) or the non-grasping of a difference (bhedāgraha) always involves act of comparison, and you cannot compare and contrast two things when you know absolutely nothing at all about one of them. Udayana’s point is that apūrva is not just a philosophically questionable premise, but it really does not even amount to a form of nonsense, since we cannot even determine whether it does or does not possess any specific properties or has or does not have any particular meaning. As we discussed earlier, Udayana’s solution to [[P1381]] all these scholastic entanglements is to propose that the coherency of ritual—both what it means and how it works—is a property of the one who enjoins it (niyoktṛ), which in many cases is in fact the creator deity himself.

For Udayana, all the arguments we have just been exploring are leading up to a proof of the dependence of Indic ritual as a coherent system on God’s existence, one which in its particulars overlap in many places with Hemādri’s own positions as put forth in the Kaivalayadīpikā. And yet from the perspective of a social historian, utterly unqualified to stake lofty claims on such matters, this very same line of argumentation can also be read as arriving at a parallel observation, namely, that ritual becomes meaningful and actionable only when it is mediated by particular social relationships, whether between specific humans or between humans and nonhumans. As advocated by Udayana, this socialization of ritual knowledge— quite specifically of the types of ritual knowledge that Mīmāṃsā had claimed as its own exclusive purview—represents a shift in orientation, not only in degree but of kind. It offers an intellectual change in perspective akin to the trading off of logical positivism for phenomenology, with Udayana and those, like Hemādri, who are influenced by him, playing the role of a Wittgenstein, who takes methods from the first system and deploys them in the service of an entirely different sort of worldview. Once you make this transition, as Hemādri has clearly done, even when you are reading the exact same texts and applying shared exegetical techniques, you will end up doing different things with your sources because now and forever, ritual is inseparable from its social implications and the intentionalities of those authorities (human and otherwise) who enjoin its practice. In other words, everything you have to do is now inseparable from a certain given worldview.

As our exploration of the exegetical method that underlies the unpublished Tīrthakhaṇḍa comes to a close—a method that we have now seen in our author’s own [[P1382]] understanding is inseparable from a whole host of theological as well as methodological presuppositions—the last task on our agenda is demonstrating concretely that Hemādri’s theoretical work and choice of materials in the lost Tīrthakhaṇḍa, though sui generis in their own time, had a lasting impact on the subsequent history of Hindu religion, especially in terms of the Smārta discourses of Early modernity. This is a vast and mostly uncharted field, where most of the key texts remain either unpublished or unstudied. Rather than attempting to historicize Hemādri’s impact, we will have to make do with a single example of overwhelming direct textual influence. The text we will turn to as emblematic of a much larger story is Richard Salomon’s edition and translation of the opening division of the sixteenth-century Bridge of the Three Holy Cities (Tristhalīsetu) of the Deśastha Brāhmaṇa Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa.⁹¹ Though the influential polymath and public intellectual Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa was himself active in Varanasi, as Sheldon Pollock, Rosland O’Hanlon, and Christopher Minkowski have all discussed at some length, the Bhaṭṭa line from which he and his descendants among early modernity’s new intellectuals sprang had its origins in central Maharashtra, with the progenitor of the line, Rāmeśvara Bhaṭṭa, being active primarily within the Seuṇadeśa in the generation after Hemādri.⁹²

[[P1383]]

It is interesting in this regard to note that though Salomon seems ignorant of the existence of Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa, the introduction to his edition repeatedly seems to be inferring not only the existence of an unknown intermediary between this work and the Kṛtyakalpataru but assigning to this lost source an array of seemingly discrete topical concerns and allusions, nearly all of which are found in our Tīrthakhaṇḍa. As Salomon writes:

The general section of the TSS is by no means an entirely original work. This general arrangement of the text, and in many cases the specific wording, are derived from a tradition developed in the earlier texts on the subject of tīrtha. In a number of cases, NB borrows passages virtually verbatim from earlier tīrtha and dharmaśāstra texts such as the Tīrthacintāmaṇi, Smṛtyarthasāra, and Madanapārijāta, without acknowledging the source. . . . It is not until the time of Lakṣmīdhara (early 12th century A.D.) that we know of any independent dharmaśāstra text devoted entirely to these subjects. . . . The next important tīrtha text which is now available is the Tīrthacintāmaṇi (TīCi) of Vācaspati Miśra of Mithilā. . . . This text is quite advanced in comparison with that of Lakṣmīdhara, and since it refers to points of controversy not yet raised in the TVK there must have been at least one, if not several texts written on the subject between the time of Lakṣmīdhara and that of Vācaspati. One of these texts must have been by Gaṇeśvara Miśra, whom Vācaspati cites occasionally. . . but unfortunately the works of Gaṇeśvara are not extant.⁹³

Turning to the Tristhalīsetu itself, starting from the very title of this division of the text—sāmānyapraghaṭṭaka—Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa pursues an intellectual project, namely, to present “first, the general rules for tīrthas” which are to be “properly described,” and then to offer “the rules for the three tīrthas, beginning with Prayāga,” unimaginable without the Tīrthakhaṇḍa. As we are about to see, though he never mentions our work by name, even if we only take into account the tiny portion of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa we have been exploring, his text is saturated with examples and glosses drawn from our text. Where Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa diverges from our work, in fact, is primarily in offering a more fluid sort of discourse that is even less dependent on the specific proof texts that he invokes for its structure. In other words, [[P1384]] he is much better at organizing his sources into a single cohesive argument that does not get derailed by long tangents.

As the Tristhalīsetu begins, for most of the opening chapter on “the praise of the purposes of men,” the points of commonality are not so evident except at a purely conceptual level.⁹⁴ As the title announces, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s focus here initially is theorizing how ritual serves human ends, what specific ends those might be (such as happiness and the avoiding of suffering) as well as how we might reconcile or prioritize soteriological concerns with our quotidian aims. Right away he is telling us that ritual is about people and not about the internal coherency of scholastic symbolic systems whose purpose is in actuality to support human aims. It is only as the chapter closes that Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa turns to the proof text from the Mahābhārata with which Lakṣmīdhara and Hemādri both began. It is only when we see how he glosses key terms in this passage that it becomes clear he is following Hemādri:

MBH: Even by those who have just their own body [lit. with a single body] (ekātmabhiḥ), are separated from their companions (avaganaiḥ) and who are devoid of assistance (asamhataiḥ), the ancestors are made to cross over and the grandfathers [are extracted] from the hells.

Hemādri: Where the texts says “who have just their own body” (ekātmabhiḥ), [what is meant is] who is without a wife (patnīrahitaiḥ). Where the text says, “who are not well equipped,” [what is meant is] those who lack a Ṛgvedic and Sāmavedic priest and so forth.

Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa (trans. Salomon): Single men (ekātmabhiḥ) means unmarried men (apatnīkaiḥ). Unaccompanied men (asamhataiḥ) means men without the company of ṛtvijs and other priests (ṛtvigādisaṃghātaśūnyaiḥ).⁹⁵

Just as we have seen in our other studies of formalized textual production, based on divergences in word choice and syntax, it is clear here that Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa is not merely [[P1385]] blindly copying glosses from the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, but is instead reworking the material again and again to fit his own idiom and style, a state of affairs which if anything suggests an even greater fundamental continuity at the points where the two texts overlap because we can tell it is deliberate and selective. For the next four chapters—the general praise of tīrthas (sāmānyatīrthapraśaṃsā), the nature of tīrthas (tīrthasvarūpa), and secondary tīrthas (gauṇatīrthas), and those authorized to make pilgrimage (tīrthayātrādhikāriṇaḥ)—points of overlap, at least with the text we have been examining, are much more sparse. At each step along the way, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s main objective seems to be a focused form of clarification and delimiting of the topics under discussion. Thus, for example, the reason we get a subsection on secondary tīrthas is that one of his sources starts its discussion by listing actual places and then transitions into talking about such metaphorical “tīrthas” as truthfulness and philanthropy, resulting in our author feeling the need to pause and sort out the distinction.⁹⁶ In a major refinement of Hemādri, though building on the śrīkaraṇeśvara’s own tendencies, such discussions are typically focused in a single portion of the text that forms a discrete unit from what logically came before it. But once we get past this new organizational apparatus and come to the points of topical overlap with the early sections of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, the parallels suddenly become overwhelming, far more than a case of a few stray shared glosses.

Fully half of the very short next chapter, “the causes of varying degrees of benefit from tīrthas” is dedicated to exploring—again, with exactly the same proof text and shared glosses—the figure of the one who goes of tīrtha on behalf of someone else—which Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa also understands as a pilgrim for hire. The section that immediately follows, “varying degrees of benefit caused by particular vehicles, ”as you might already anticipate from the title, [[P1386]] begins by offering, albeit with half a verse more of the proof text than we find in the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, just what will befall you if you set out for Prayāga riding a bull.⁹⁷ It then provides the same the rule—that one should avoid vehicles—and the same modification of that rule cited by Hemādri. The commentary focuses on the exact same terms of art and is again nearly verbatim and it builds to the overturning of the rule forbidding the use of vehicles, once again using the very same proof text and arguments we saw in Hemādri.

Making an argument unknown to our Tīrthakhaṇḍa, by quibbling over a point of grammar, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa then responds to and refutes a new authority. At this point, in a more extended discussion than what we find in the earlier text, he resumes Hemādri’s enumeration of the scales of the relative karmic merit yielded by using different vehicles. New topics then ensue, unknown to the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, such as what happens if you only use a vehicle part of the way, or how do ships figure into this calculus. In the next two chapters, these are followed by highly technical considerations of the scale of bodies of water and astrology, also not found in the older text. But again, once we are back on the familiar topical terrain of the way of going to tīrthas (tīrthagamana), it is Hemādri’s text that sets the agenda.⁹⁸ In other words, what we keep seeing again and again is evidence that Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa, and not the works of Lakṣmīdhara, provides the topical and conceptual basis for the conversations of the next several centuries.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the Tristhalīsetu’s ninth chapter. Here, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s framework for the common vidhi for tīrtha is unmistakably identical with the one that Hemādri had “derived” using Mīmāṃsā principles from a passage in the [[P1387]] Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa. Indeed, the Tristhalīsetu not only quotes this same passage verbatim but it privileges and discounts the same elements selected by Hemādri. Our śāstrin’s next major subject is also identical with what we find in the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, namely, a debate with an opponent over whether the common procedure applies only to people going to Prayāga or is to be used during all pilgrimages.⁹⁹ Though Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa assigns this objector’s view only to “a certain someone,” the arguments being presented, such as the contestation over the role of shaving at the śrāddha and whether it is only to be done at Gayā, are the very ones Hemādri identified as belonging to Gaṇeśvaramiśra.¹⁰⁰ Nārāyaṇa’s presentation, which simply singles out and then refutes Miśra’s two objections, is both more terse and more clear. Along the way he even manages to integrate into the discussion some of the observations found earlier in Hemādri about the role played by ghee as the mukhyadravya in the language of Mīmāṃsā and the difference between abhyudayaśrāddha and pārvaṇaśrāddha.¹⁰¹ In each of these discussions, things that in Hemādri have to simply be inferred are stated outright. In Hemādri, as we have seen, all of these arguments are building up to the introduction of the ekatra nīrṇita nyāya, which teaches the functional interchangeability of sacred sites that have the same [[P1388]] specified fruit. But while this feature, retained by Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, also serves as the culminating topic in this part of the Tristhalīsetu, an important divergence has emerged, as we can see when we compare Hemādri’s own words with those of Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa. Parallels are marked in bold in the footnotes below.

Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa: Others, however say ‘So be it; the journey is beneficial. But nevertheless, this same benefit which is proclaimed for a journey to Gayā. ‘One going to Gayā gets at every step the benefit of an aśvamedha sacrifice.’—applies to all pilgrimages, according to the rule, ‘the meaning of a sacred text determined in one place (applies) elsewhere also.’

When the benefit of a pilgrimage is to be specified, it would be appropriate that this same benefit already mentioned be that benefit, as it is closely connected in that it is also a benefit of ‘going.’

Postulating the benefit to be heaven by invoking the rule of the Viśvajit sacrifice would involve an excessive effort in bringing that rule to mind, because it is only remotely connected to this case. This too is sheer foolishness, for in various places the benefits of pilgrimages are mentioned.¹⁰²

As we can see, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa retains much of Hemādri’s language but fundamentally misses the point of his argument. Perhaps this is because some of Hemādri’s core premises, such as that every tīrtha is worth going to and will yield some benefit, even if said benefits have not been carefully specified in a given proof text, have simply become common sense. As deployed by Hemādri, the whole point of the ekatranīrṇita nyāya is to arrive at the understanding that, in all cases where the benefits of different pilgrimages to various places are stated as having the same benefit, those places are functionally equivalent. Thus, in all such cases, one can use the same vidhāna. From this perspective, the invocation of a so-called “Gayā [[P1389]] principle” was never intended to promote the rather narrow idea that has been ascribed to the pūrvapakṣin by Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, namely, that for every pilgrimage where the result is not specified, “every step has the benefit of an aśvamedha sacrifice.” Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, in contrast, is totally uninterested in justifying that pilgrimages to specific places have intrinsic merit and yield specific benefit. For him, that seems to be a fundamental feature of the discourse on pilgrimage. What he is invested in is developing a hitherto unknown calculus for determining as precisely as possible the comparative virtues of different modes of pilgrimage. Indeed, as he alludes to shortly in the above passage, as he understands it, interpretive tools such as the so-called “Gayā principle” are problematic because they provide the pilgrim with loopholes that circumvent a now hegemonically established Smārta ritual world. After all, once you presume you only need one aśvamedha’s worth of merit, and you know you can get that already from taking a single step in a sacred space, why would bother spending the time and money taking part in the rest of the Smārta pilgrimage imaginary? In other words, Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa is defending a core part of Hemādri’s siddhānta by using a bit of Hemādri to refute another bit of a now problematically construed Hemādri. One could hardly ask a greater confirmation of just how completely the words and ideas of the author of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi have saturated the discourse on pilgrimage among early modern Smārtas.

Exercises in Excising a Śākta Landscape: Hemādri and the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya

In its published form, much of which corresponds virtually verbatim with the citations found in Hemādri’s Tīrthakhaṇḍa, the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya makes up the concluding portion of the vulgate Skanda Purāṇa. As its title conveys, the work is almost exclusively concerned with offering a guide for pilgrims to the history and ritual practices that lie behind the collection of sacred sites that surrounded the self-arising liṅga of Somanātha located in Saurashtra. The text [[P1390]] as it is transmitted within the Caturvargacintāmaṇi is self-evidently a product of an era subsequent to the desecration by Mahmud of Ghazni of what was then at its core a wooden temple. Most plausibly, as it is entirely unknown to the early twelfth-century dharma literature, the māhātmya in its current form was composed in the middle of the twelfth century, sometime during the reign of the Solaṅkī Cāḷukya ruler Kumārapāla (1143–1172 CE).¹⁰³ Such a point of origin would coincide with the massive program of renovation and renewal that repopulated the landscape with stone structures, which is reflected in our text.¹⁰⁴ In other words, the [[P1391]] “Purāṇic lore” that the mid-thirteenth-century Caturvargacintāmaṇi has drawn upon as an authentic source of traditional knowledge was at the time itself in many cases probably less than a hundred years old.

While numerous textual connections exist between our text and the corpus associated with the Picumata and its successors, exploring these matters at any length would take us far afield from our purpose in the present chapter. For this reason, to substantiate the point at hand, [[P1392]] we will briefly turn to two such self-contained and hitherto undocumented instances. The first of these surfaces in the frame narrative that organizes the whole māhātmya, which introduces us to the rationale behind Prabhāsakṣetra. Most likely this is because the text as it comes down to us—quite close to what Hemādri would have been using—is itself the product of a series of redactions, the dominant thread in which seeks to harmonize the materials it inherits with a more pointedly Brāhmaṇa friendly Śaiva Siddhānta influenced theology and sensibility. In these more often polished portions of the origin story, the liṅga at Someśvara is connected with the brahmāṇḍa, and the killing of Brāhmaṇas on its grounds is treated as a terrible sin that nonetheless has preoccupied misguided pilgrims in previous ages. In another thread, however, Someśvara is unambiguously identified with Bhairava in the form of the fire that consumes the world at the end of time and the field he occupies is depicted as emanating yoginīs and housing monuments to the Pāśupatavrata and Mahāvrata practicing Śaiva sages of past ages who merged into the liṅga.¹⁰⁵

It is to this earlier stratum that the following decidedly partial account, entitled by the editor of the translation of the vulgate “The Garland of Skulls and Tattvas” most likely belongs. In relating yet again the glory of Somanātha, we have just been told that this liṅga was the source from which the Garuḍa and Bhūta Tantras emanated and from which the khecarīs first emerged.¹⁰⁶ We are also informed that this is one of the main sites in the fields from which in each age the Siddhas have emerged to spread their doctrines. After reiterating the close association between the Someśvara liṅga and Bhairava in general, but especially the final Bhairava Kālāgnirudranātha who will consume this world when it ends, the goddess indulges in a seeming non-sequitur that points us in the direction of a much older register of religion. [[P1393]]

“If you are the great lord, the creator who is a treasure house without beginning or end, the cause of creator and dissolution, how is it that you [have] a garland of skulls?” Then, having laughed, the lord of the gods Śaṅkara spoke: “My garland shines forth with crores of skulls beyond counting. It has been made by thousands of the heads of Nārāyaṇas and ten-thousands of Brahmās and thus it is without beginning or end. In every kalpa, another Viṣṇu comes into being, and also another Brahmā. In every kalpa, I create Viṣṇu and Prajāpati. I alone am creator, O goddess. I am established in the field of Prabhāsa at the root of the liṅga of kālāgni, which is adorned with a garland of skulls.¹⁰⁷

In the text as it comes down to us, the goddess next begins to praise the Lord with a stava. The lord is pleased, asks her is she wants a boon. In an obvious interpolation, the goddess uses this promise to abruptly shift the entire focus of the discussion entirely away from the liṅga and towards Dvārakā, when she demands he recounts how and why did Lord Viṣṇu, suddenly praised in exalted terms as the creator and annihilator of the universe and the source of the Vedas and the system of varṇa, “cast off his body at Prabhāsa.” In yet further signs that the text here is a hodge-podge of influences, Śiva responds by largely ignoring her inquiry. Śiva corrects her attribution of higher order values to his lowly rival, and then launches into an extended delineation in sequence of the proximity to Somanātha of the sacred centers that make [[P1394]] up Prabhāsakṣetra. As we will see momentarily, this subject, which occupies the vast majority of the māhātmya, is precisely the body of materials that Hemādri will draw upon extensively but selectively in the service of his own interpretive agenda.

Our second example, which is found much further into the text, occurs in the discussion of the main pīṭha associated with Jñānaśakti at Prabhāsa,¹⁰⁸ who in the current age is called Ajā. In introducing this place, Śiva offhandedly remarks that this deity issued forth from his sixth mouth, which is perpetually worshipped by Brahmā.¹⁰⁹ The astonished goddess then asks Īśvara if there are any more heads he’s been hiding from her, and this is Śiva’s response:

O Goddess, this question asked by you is a good one. I shall describe to you what should be kept secret even from one’s own sons. It was originally arisen in an Āgama that is not well known. Earlier, from the inception of the Universe, O goddess, I in fact had seven heads. Five are familiar, Sadyojāta and so forth. The sixth is remembered as Ajā. The seventh was named Picu. Thus, I have seven faces. Ajā was given to Brahmā, and the Picuvaktra to Viṣṇu. In this way, O great goddess, now I have become five faced.¹¹⁰

As we can see, Śiva alludes to an even more complicated iteration of the Kaula cosmology presented by the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā. No sooner has this been introduced, directly credited to an obscure āgama (aprasiddhāgamodita), than our text readily and somewhat nonsensically assigns such knowledge to the past. The Lord insists into his perplexed wife that after his crazy youth he gave away the other weird heads. Nowadays (adhunā), honey, he informs us, I have just got the five faces you learn about in school. This is but one of a myriad [[P1395]] of examples in which the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya distances itself from the most “disreputable” aspects of its past.

The digression we have just been exploring immediately follows another story. In that account, we are instructed that in ancient times, at the ritual center associated with kriyā śakti, a king incongruously named Ajāpāla venerated Bhairavī to be rid of a debilitating illness. When the goddess appears before him, the king is rid of his ailment, which emerges from his body in the form of a herd of goats. The king dedicates himself to nurturing and protecting these animals until the end of his life, granting the center the name of Ajāpāleśvarī, the goddess who protects the goats. In other words, we are deep within in the sort of textual territory where the didactic programmatic approach of the Purāṇas bumps up against hyper localized, likely vernacular, particularized traditions of storytelling, of the sort one finds among people like the Dhangar, where narratives do not always have a clear beginning, middle, and end. It is precisely at these seams in the text that we encounter, travelling in tandem in symbiotic relationship, the Bhairavasiddhānta or Vāma traditions peeking out from behind a non- Brāhmaṇa vernacular.

In the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya itself, the persistence of this plurality of religious registers, where the rougher edges of the most transgressive forms of high Śākta and skull carrier traditions are smoothed over but not effaced entirely, becomes most apparent when the text interweaves among its catalogue of specific sacred spaces eccentric shaggy dog stories providing the background for individual tīrthas, many of which conclude with extended discussions of specific practices. For the writers of the māhātmya, however, the incorporation of these materials seems to have amounted to a necessary evil, for much of the task that it undertakes is dedicated precisely to the relegation of these values to the status of cultural [[P1396]] curiosity in favor of mainstreaming a more ecumenical and public Śaivism. Part of the way this task is accomplished is through the integration of other mythological registers and resources. But, quite unlike what we will find in Hemādri’s interpretive project, in the māhātmya, this task is hardly carried out in a systematically supercessionary fashion in the service of some simple domestication of the sacred landscape. Instead, what the māhātmya itself presents is a hodge-podge of eclectic influences, the most outlandish of which it seeks to temper. Somewhat counterintuitively, the best approach to arriving at a solid understanding of how Hemādri programmatically intervenes into this landscape and reworks its imaginary is acquired by attending to an extended portion of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi where our śrīkaraṇeśvara dedicates a number of folios to citing from the māhātmya almost in sequence and virtually verbatim. In contrast to the in some ways more tantalizing sections of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa where Hemādri draws upon Purāṇic source materials that are quite distinct from our published texts or describes less familiar sacred sites of unknown provenance, our archive here enables us to differentiate between the interpretive work being enacted by the Purāṇas themselves and conceptual project of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. In short, it enables us to make solid judgements about what is new and different about our nibandha. As we shall see, there is a definite pattern in what our author elides and the rhetorical impact of these decisions. The section we will be briefly surveying (comprised of chapters 123–165 in the vulgate), deals mostly with minor sites on the outer orbit of the main liṅga. Over the course of this part of the māhātmya, forty-three sites are discussed, several of them in great detail.¹¹¹ In [[P1397]] the vulgate, the chapters vary enormously in size, from three or four verses to a hundred verses in length. Almost every chapter commences with fixed formulas, most commonly “then, O great goddess, one should go to. . . (tato gacchen mahādevi)” followed by either the name of the site or the distance, measured in bow lengths from the previous site that has just been presented. In this same verse, we are then introduced to a dramatic persona, generally a Vedic sage, a supernatural creature, a king, or a god. We learn that this figure prayed or performed austerities at the site and then the rewards he or she received, and perhaps a short summary of site-specific practices, are then defined. For example, in the first stop on our itinerary,¹¹² delineated in a mere four verses, we learn that at Citrāṅgadeveśvara, twenty bow lengths to the south-west of the previous site, a Gandharva named Citrāṅgada performed austerities before a liṅga. Those who follow in his footsteps will attain the world of the gandharvas. In [[P1398]] his Tīrthakhaṇḍa, Hemādri leaves virtually all of these postage stamp size itineraries virtually intact just as they are given. Such passages, from our authors perspective, in fact represent exempla for what a tīrtha text should look and sound like, for as we shall see, Hemādri takes the chapters in his sources that do not fit easily within this formula and heavily redacts them so that they assume a similar shape and texture.

Hemādri in contrast discusses the following sites in sequence (bearing in mind the manuscript has been carelessly copied) under the following names, Citrāṅgadeśvara, Rāvaneśvara, Gaurīsaubhāgyadāyinī, Śāṇḍilyeśvara, Kṣemeśvaram, Akṣamāleśvara, Pāśupateśvaram, Dhruveśvara, Vaiṣṇavīśakti, Mahākālī, Puṣkarāvarttaka, Gaurīduḥkhāntakāriṇī, Citrādityeśvara, Tṛṇavidīśvara, [manuscripts damage], Vighneśa, Dharmarāja, Kūpakuṇḍaleśvara, Bhairaveśvara, Nāradeśvara, Hiraṇyeśvara, Brahamkuṇḍa, Ratneśvara, Vainateya, Satyabhāmeśvara, Ratnakuṇḍeśa, Rājabhaṭṭāraka Raivantaka, Vaivasvateśvara, Kuntīśvara, Mātṛgaṇa- ekavallavīrā.

Transcribed free from any corrections, here the Tīrthakhaṇḍa reads: tato gacchen mahādevi liṅgaṃ citrāṅgadeśvaram / tasyaiva [bharaiṣyat] bhāge dhanurviṃśātibhisthitaṃ / citrāṅgadena deveśi gandharvapatināpriye kṣetraṃ / pavitraṃ jñātvā vai liṅgaṃ tatra pratiṣṭhitam kṛtvā tapo mahāghoraṃ samārādhya maheśvaram / atha yo bhāvasaṃyuktas talliṅgaṃ saṃprapūjayet / gandharvalokam āpnoti gandharvair saha modate / caitraśuklacaturdaśyāṃ saṃsnāpya vidhinā śivam / pūjayed dvividhaiḥ puṣpai gandhadhūpair anukramāt / saṃprāpnoty akhilaṃ kāmām manasā yady adīkṣitaṃ While some of these differences result from minor corruptions, two readings in the Tīrthakhaṇṇḍa, which offer a different date and specify a non-Tantric initiate are likely worth considering.

Thus, for example, Hemādri’s fealty to the māhātmya’s treatment of Citrāṅgadeveśvara stands in considerable contrast to his vivisection of the chapter that immediately follows, which is dedicated to the tīrtha center of Rāvaneśvara.¹¹³ As its name already suggests, Rāvaṇeśvara [[P1399]] was remembered as a liṅga consecrated by the demon king Rāvaṇa. After the opening verse, the vulgate in this case breaks from the formula by telling an elaborate story. One day Rāvaṇa was out flying in his magical chariot when he encountered an invisible force field blocking his way. Astounded, Rāvaṇa descended from the heavens, where he encounters someone named Prahasta. This sage informs him about the greatness of Someśvara and that it cannot be passed over by anyone. Descending from his chariot, Rāvaṇa makes pilgrimage to Someśa and innocently sets out to worship the liṅga along with his Rākṣasa followers. The mere presence of all of these demons, however devoted they might have been, rather understandably scares away all the other pilgrims. As it so happens, a festival is approaching, when throngs of people are supposed to celebrate at Somanātha, but no one wants to come so long as the demons remain. To protect his other devotees, the voice of Someśa comes out of the liṅga. Thanking Rāvaṇa for his devotion, it suggests that he remove himself to a more obscure location for the festival season so that other bhaktas can come and pay the liṅga homage. Rāvaṇa agrees, retreats to a cave, and it is there that he installs the current liṅga that bears his name. At least, that is what happens in the root text. In Hemādri’s rendition, in contrast, all but the first verse and last seven verses of this twenty-five-verse text have been excised. We lose the whole story and the whole discussion of appropriate practices. What we are left with, then, is only the introduction to the place, Rāvaṇa’s program of worship (which is not to be emulated), and its supposed benefits. In fact, we know for certain that Hemādri’s source text looked quite bit like our vulgate, which is to say it travelled with the story, because his nibandha has incongruously retained a small portion of the text where the voice comes out of the liṅga. With the tale [[P1400]] excised, the liṅga, whose identity is nowhere made apparent, for no apparent reason speaks in the first person to Rāvaṇa and tells him to go to the cave and install another liṅga.

The text transcribed directly from the manuscript of the Tīrthakhaṇḍa reads as follows: tato gacchen mahādevi rāvaṇeśvaram uttamam / tasmād dakṣiṇānṛṣtyedhanuṣāṃ ṣoḍaśisthitam // paulastyo rāvaṇe devi rākṣasas tu sadāruṇaḥ / liṅgaṃ ca sthāpayāmāsa bhaktyā paramayā yutaḥ // tatas tam niyato bhūtvā sarvais tairākṣasaiar vṛtaḥ / pūjayāmāsa deveśi upavāsaparāyaṇaḥ // cakāra puratas tasya gītavādyena jāgaram / tato dvarātrasamaye vāg uvāca śarīriṇī // daśagrīva mahābaho parituṣṭo smi te [nadya] / mama prabhātrailokye vaśagante bhaviṣyati // atra sannihito nityaṃ [sthāsyamp] aham asaṃśayaḥ / yaiḥ caitapūjayiṣyeti śatrūṇāṃ rākṣaseśvaraḥ // yāsyanti paramāṃ siddhiṃ matprasādād aśaṃśayaḥ / evam uktvā vararohe virarāma vṛṣabhadhvajaḥ // rāvaṇe ’pi sa saṃtuṣṭo bhūyo bhūyo maheśvaraḥ / pūjayitvā tu talliṅgaṃ samārudya tu puṣpalaikaṃ // trailokyavijayākāṅkṣī iṣṭadeśaṃ jagāmaha /

Apart from some minor differences in the naming of the sites, the next four chapters, all terse and formulaic and thus matching Hemādri’s expectations, are retained nearly verbatim. It is only when we get to Sāgarāditya and Ugraseneśvara, both of which offer extended narrative and didactic materials (twenty-four verses in the first instance and fifty- three in the second) that the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya as it is retained in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi again undergoes major emendations. In the first instance, Hemādri simply inserts the first three verses introducing the site,¹¹⁴ while in the second he includes the first three and last three verses.¹¹⁵ The result rhetorically is that two very different sorts of places, one associated with the worship of a sun god and the other with a tale about an encounter between a king and a Dalit, are rendered almost interchangeable and, from our perspective, equally uninteresting. [[P1401]]

Our next chapter, eighty-two verses long in the vulgate, takes us to Pāśupateśvara, a site associated with the Mahāpāśupatas.¹¹⁶ In the vulgate, after an unusually long introduction [[P1402]] to this abode of the siddhas, we are offered a long narrative discussing the circumstances under which the previously wild rites associated with the Pāśupatavrata were “reformed” and replaced by a more pacific vow of simply bathing in ash from the fire while anointing the body with more Vaidika mantras. It seems that in a past age, both Nandin and the Goddess came to a place where the siddhas were engaged in their all-consuming praxis. Instead of treating them as guests, the Pāśupata siddhas were so absorbed in their austerities and meditation that they did not even notice the presence of any other deities. The goddess, annoyed, bothers her husband. Śiva explains that the siddhas will not even look at her because she is prakṛti incarnate. Enraged, the goddess curses the Pāśupatas, saying that in the kali yuga they will become obsessed with receiving gifts from kings and with the bodies of beautiful women. In the kali age, we learn as this section of the māhātmya concludes, the Pāśupatavrata has been redefined to begin and end with the ash bath and it is to be practiced only by Brāhmaṇas. Apparently, this was an important place, for Hemādri makes a point of retaining fifteen verses, introducing the siddhas who worship the liṅga. By simply culling at all references to specific Śaiva practices, the siddhas in question, though still called Pāśupatas, can be depicted as Brāhmaṇa ascetics (tapasvin) who observe celibacy, (brahmacarya) have conquered their anger (jitakrodha), and are peaceful (śānta) and self-disciplined (dānta). In other words, apart from their use of the aghora mantra, through selective editing Hemādri renders them all but indistinguishable from any of a number of other kinds of yogins. As for the long story about [[P1403]] the Pāśupatavrata in any of its forms, it is simply erased, reduced from a practice to a mere narrative trope.

It is important here to note that on a certain level Hemādri and his source material are effectively in agreement that the purpose behind writing a pilgrimage manual is an exercise in desotericization and domestication. Indeed, in some sense, the very idea of writing a comprehensive guide within a given landscape to all the sacred sites, including the very secret ones, so that anyone can access them intrinsically amounts to an assault upon the more capacious vision of a differentiation of domains with their own site-specific norms. But whereas the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya seeks to mitigate the extremity of praxis evident at some of these places, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi seeks to narrow and flatten the landscape and appropriate its power centers into its conceptual framework. This later dimension of the nibandha becomes most apparent when it comes to the rather different way it treats the goddesses discussed in this portion of the text. In the vicinity of Pāśupateśvara we find three such entitles, which in the vulgate are labelled Siddhalakṣmī, Mahākālī, and Śītalāgaurī. As we will see momentarily, two additional female deities, Sāvitrī and Bhūtamātā, and her special festival, are discussed in an elaborate fashion near the very end of this internal subdivision of the māhātmya. For the scholar of Tantra, the confirmation that this portion of the māhātmya is at least as old as the mid-twelfth century is invaluable, for it establishes for the first time concretely and unambiguously the concurrent co-presence operating at precisely the same moment in history of three discrete strategies for normalizing and domesticating high Śākta traditions. Let us begin with the most important of the sites, the place that is probably the historical Kāmarūpa.

Then, O great goddess, one should go to the supreme Vaiṣṇavī Śakti who is established not very far away in the eastern portion of Someśa. The foremost deity of the kṣetrapīṭha is called Mahālakṣmī. The primordial pīṭha, the egg of Brahmā is established differentially in Prabhāsa.

There, O goddess, are yoginīs with great bodies, who go about in the sky making the sound śū. They have dalliances with Bhairava and they play (krīḍā) according to their desire, O beloved. Jalandhara, Pūrṇagiri, and likewise Kāmarūpa. The supreme fourth pīṭha is known of as Auspicious Uddīśa [here follows a very corrupt list of sacred sites]. . . .

Of all the pīṭhas, the chief supreme one is in Saurastra. O supreme goddess, it is called Mahodaya, known by the name of the great goddess. In the Lāṭa country, it is the foundation, Kāmarūpa, which is in operation even today.

The goddess who has three forms is established in the pīṭhas. She is known of as Mahālakṣmī. She is the auspicious one who pacifies all sin and bestows all desires. Lakṣmī belongs as well to the man who should worship her on the auspicious fifth day, according to injunction, with devotion, with flowers and fragrances.¹¹⁷

[[P1404]]

There are strong indications that the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya’s representation of this primordial pīṭha does not merely offer a secondhand depiction of an until now overlooked but nonetheless integral Kaula ritual center dedicated to the melana with the yoginīs. It is indeed highly likely that the text is actively drawing upon a now lost Śākta scriptural source. Especially in Hemādri’s edit of the text, which excises some particular narrative and ritual details, what is most striking here is the dichotomy between the unapologetically high Śākta nature of the sacred center and the banal and basic practices—flowers, devotion, and incense— to be used in worship,¹¹⁸ which our text says can be equally effectively wielded by any person. [[P1405]]

In other words, both the māhātmya, but especially Hemādri, at least on paper, appropriate the space at the very same moment they are undercutting its sociology of knowledge. It is entirely possible that a phrase like “according to injunction” (yathāvidhi) was already present in the older source material. In that context, however, it almost certainly would have referred to a special mode of praxis outlined elsewhere in the Tantra involving the use of transgressive substances and that could only be accessed through modes of initiation that entailed direct possession by terrifying Śākta deities. Once it is repurposed and then re-embedded within a litany of other sacred sites belonging to diverse traditions with their own internal criteria for initiation into distinctive ritual systems, many of which happen also to deploy in their texts the common phrase according to injunction (yathāvidhi), in each case intending a different vidhi, something extraordinary seems to happen. Even without the added impact of Hemādri’s judicious edits removing tradition specific doctrinal and ritual materials, on the surface, it looks like all of the texts are directing their reader back to a commonly shared set of procedural “best practices” for performing worship. As we will explore in much more depth in the middle of this chapter, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi harnesses this emergent intertextual property and transforms it into deliberate strategy for harmonizing the totality of available scriptural resources in the service of making them seem to speak with a single voice. [[P1406]]

From Kāmarūpa, we next journey to a subterranean structure in a connected field that is dedicated to Mahākālī. In the māhātmya, it is prescribed that she is to be worshipped at midnight on the eighth day of the dark half of the moon with offerings of meat (kravya) and some sort of liquid. The text then goes onto to discuss a special fast that women can perform to ensure that they always have food to feed their families. In Hemādri, in contrast,¹¹⁹ the first ritual procedure is replaced by a terse reference that the ritual is to be executed according to the procedure for worshipping the goddess (devīpūjyavidhānataḥ). While the fast and its consequences are retained, Hemādri either interpolates in new material or adds his own bit of commentary. In a place where his source had referred in passing to the Mahākālīvrata, Hemādri interjects, “what is called Mahākālīvrata has as its intended meaning the supreme Devīmāhātmya.” As we will see again when we turn to the Vratakhaṇḍa, though we have no way of determining if such efforts are his own innovation, Hemādri offers us our earliest historicizeable moment in the reception history of the Devīmāhātmya where the text is deployed in the manner most familiar to scholars of Hindu traditions in both the Western and Indian academy, namely, as framework for appropriating and taming “local” and esoteric traditions of goddess worship under the auspices of the worship of “the great goddess” wedded to royal power and shaped by non-Śrauta Brāhmaṇas. Dwelling so close to the pīṭha of Kāmarūpa dedicated to the melana, it very likely that the Mahākālī in question would have been linked to pre-philosophical forms of the Krama of the sort promulgated by the Jayadrathayāmala, for we have other sites slightly further afield where some of the monikers [[P1407]] assigned to Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī make cameo appearances. Just as, through judicious editing, the Mahāpāśupatas have been rendered indistinguishable from other ascetics in their observances, in much the same way high, Śākta adepts have been rewritten as mere performers of the same calendrically determined observances practiced by ordinary people. In this way, just as the secret places has become conflated with everyday religion, the gaping divide between the razor’s edge path of virtuoso adepts and occasional religion is forcibly fissured shut.

The case of the last of the three goddesses, situated in close proximity near the field of Kāmarūpa, is somewhat different in its dynamics from what we have just been exploring. Here, Hemādri makes no adjustment to source material, for the text has already been adequately reshaped by the authors of the māhātmya in a manner that serves his interests. The māhātmya seems already to have taken a deity of Atimārga associated with salvific functions and demoted her into a “localized” goddess who brings disease. This entity was once called Gaurīduḥkāntakāriṇī, a name that suggests in essence an apotheosis of the key Pāśupata commitment of bringing about an end to the suffering brought about by transmigration. Recast in this humbler register, this same entity becomes the goddess Śītalā, at once the cause of smallpox and, prior to vaccination, the sole source for a cure.

Previously, in the age called dvāpara, she was known of as Śītalā. In the kali age, however, the goddess is again called the ender of suffering, since she, being always worshipped, enacts the end of the suffering of the living beings. When she is worshiped with a state of devotion, for the sake of suppressing smallpox pustules of children, she will make the bodies of the children cool and free from disease, and so she is called Śītalā. Smallpox pustules, boils, and the inner winds will be calmed. When Śītalā is worshipped with devotion, children will be pacified and free from disease. Śrāddha should be performed there, and then Brāhmaṇas should be fed.¹²⁰

[[P1408]]

This short passage probably contains the earliest reliably dateable allusion to the goddess of smallpox that has been discovered thus far. It is thus particularly interesting that it comes to us complete with the range of competing dynamics that define the much better documented later traditions, including the interplay between the heightened emotional states of the desperate worshippers and the attempts to bookend such a visceral vision of religion with canonical “Brāhmaṇa” social practices, such as śrāddha rites and the feeding of Brāhmaṇas. At the same time, we can also see in the textual record what is already evident for both the anthropologist travelling throughout the Deccan and the epigrapher working with documentary records that take non-court-based goddess worship as their focus, namely, that the cults of transregional deities linked with disease like Mārī, Kālubaī, and the village goddess Mahālakṣmī, who are focuses of veneration particularly for scheduled caste and OBC communities, are built on top of “elite” esoteric Śākta networks and retain within them fragments of these traditions.

Where the Caturvargacintāmaṇi exercises its most consequential reevaluation of this somewhat inconsequential section of the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya is in regard to the longest portions of the text. These are the Brahmākuṇḍa Māhātmya, the Sāvitri kathā and paddhati, and the utsava for Bhūtamātā. In the māhātmya, the Brahmākuṇḍa¹²¹ is lovingly characterized as a place where the water flows with the stuff of Siddharasāyana (vs. 12) so that the practitioner who comes to this hidden place can easily attain a variety of secular and sacred aims.¹²² Indeed, there is even said to be a special portion of the tīrtha designated for the [[P1409]] alchemists to bury their pots in the ground and to set up their crucibles for performing the work of transmutation. The pilgrim is advised to attend to the color and the smell of the liquids that pour forth through the different channels in the ground, as each is suited to a different purpose.¹²³ While some are fit for the conversion of silver or other precious metals into gold, others facilitate the cultivation over a period of three years of a divine body. Still others, where the current connects them to the fields of Sarasvatī in both her pacific form and as the vāḍavānala fire, are certain to bring the alchemist great wisdom and scriptural knowledge. In a glimpse of the social world of the practicing alchemist that aligns such figures very closely with Kālamukhas of the central Deccan, such a person, we are told, is erudite when it comes into śāstra and has mastered both the practice and pedagogy of the Tantric knowledge system and is the designated recipient for acts of dāna:

By the power of this tīrtha, they¹²⁴ become skilled in all the śāstras. The [enemy] pandits have become proud, skilled in the śāstras of logic. They go about in common with their noses in the air, dear one. They are not able to speak to or even look at the face [of one who has been to the tīrtha], and he destroys a thousand disputants by a mere glance. He conveys the śāstras quickly that have the meaning [assigned to them] by the wise: the Vimala, Pañcarātra, Śaiva, and Vaiṣṇava, Bhūta Tantras, Garuḍa Tantras, the Mahābhairava Tantras and the twofold Kulamārga.

With the speed of the best of chariots, the speech [of enemies] will become utterly erratic, All disputants are destroyed, just like the snakes by Garuḍa. There is no poverty, no sickness, no suffering of the mind. He will become honored by kings [with a grant] and highly respected by the favor of the Brahmā[kuṇḍa]. With cunning mind, he will live like a god, equipped with power and vigor. From the favor of the tīrtha, he will become the agent of philanthropy, the bearer of all rights [over the use of property] and eloquent.¹²⁵

[[P1410]]

Just as we saw happening on the ground at Uttaṅkeśvara, where the landscape provides us with every indication that before it was reimagined under the Seuṇa Yādavas, we were also dealing with a place dedicated to alchemical practice, within the textual environs of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, the fascinating and richly rendered Brahmākuṇḍa is much reduced into what our author calls the “condensed version of what was spoken in the brahmākuṇḍa māhātmya” (samkṣepataḥ proktaṃ māhātmyaṃ brahmākuṇḍaṃ). At Hemādri’s direction, we are simply presented with its location, a passing allusion to rasāyana, as well as a brief reference to an old affiliation with Brahmā, and then it is onward to the next destination. All the pointedly Śākta materials that cannot be readily assimilated into Smārta normativities as well as the narrative have been scrapped out.

As for Sāvitrī and Bhūtamātā, they suffer a somewhat different fate. Though reduced to brief allusions within the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, the textual passages dedicated to their worship are extracted from the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s division on tīrtha and transposed into the division on vrata with which the nibandha opens, where they appear in an abridged and transmuted form. Especially with regards to the tale of Sāvitrī, who is said to be fully present in the world only at a single spot to the northeast of Somanātha, in the original text, praxis, occasion, and place were treated as inextricable. Throughout the Vratakhaṇḍa, in contrast, by excising every mention of a specific place from his text, Hemādri methodically decouples place from practice. In keeping with the wider logic of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, practices become infinitely spatially transposable. The observance of vows aligned with these goddesses are now governed entirely by calendrical concerns. The vow as an institution is yoked to a specific point in the year and it is to be experienced in succession with a range of other “common” holidays. Most of these celebrations, which are for the first time beginning to resemble the “modern” Hindu [[P1411]] calendar, from the perspective of the historian of religion have also been also extracted out of what were previously theologically specific contexts. Whereas before they were pertinent only to particular religious communities, and took place on a staggered schedule, now they are made to coexist within a uniform time that governs all people equally. As will become apparent, when we set out to historicize the interpretive project of the Vratakhaṇḍa, this is a process for which we have minimal evidence anywhere in South Asia before the twelfth century.

This postulation of a neutral, all-inclusive time as the chief schematic for ordering religious practice is also a framework evocative of a set of values essentially antithetical to the world of the sovereign akṣayavṛtti. As we saw in chapter 6, within an eternal land grant—the institutional building block that organized the early medieval Deccan—the most important festival occasion was the five-day celebration of the precise moment in historical time when the space became sovereign. In becoming sovereign, in both theological and social terms, the undying land grant was transmuted into an institution capable of bestowing grace and concrete favor. During these five-day festivals, there was a substantive redistribution of food and wealth that had a concrete social and economic impact on the population across the region. Festivals such as these were also the central occasion when merchants from across the Deccan assembled adjacent to the temples and made exchanges with each other and hawked their products to the public. And they were when many key taxes and tariffs were to be paid by residents of the land grant. In essence, in a pre-capitalist society, they were partially constitutive of what we might call “the business cycle.” Since the precise dates for the founding of each “undying land grant,” though connected to a finite set of auspicious astrological conjunctions, would have varied substantially, distinctive “religious communities” moving through different networks would [[P1412]] have inhabited ritual and economic worlds governed by mostly unrelated rhythms and temporalities as well as distinctive authoritative social actors.

Just as the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, in contradistinction to its source material, sets out to place religious practice within a single shared governing temporality, it also seeks to assign its management to a single type of governing authority. Though such an arrangement is nowhere in evidence in the source material, and as we shall see, was expressly forbidden by normative Dharmaśāstra, Hemādri proposes that the management of these calendrically ordered ritual obligations is to be placed in the hands of the Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrin. To us this seems unremarkable. It is the “normative” Hindu arrangement that we convey to our students in the classroom and that the various political factions on the political subcontinent either celebrate as the essence of Bhāratīya culture or declaim as a core component of Brāhmaṇavādin oppression. It will thus come as quite a shock to the average reader that, despite its own “domesticating tendencies,” the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya, Hemādri’s hundred-year-old source material, repeatedly returns to an interconnected series of polemics directed precisely at what it sees as the upstart and undesirable office of the Brāhmaṇa as a jack-of-all trades overseer of the quotidian religious lives of the general population. Brāhmaṇas, the texts tell us again and again, fulfill their own dharma best when they stick to maintaining their agnihotra fires instead of dedicating themselves to religious modalities to which their talents are ill suited. As learned people, Brāhmaṇas make excellent reciters of kathā and can serve as beneficiaries of philanthropy at the end of festivals occasions, but the overall message is that they must participate alongside others in religious affairs instead of seeking to dominate them. [[P1413]]

One place where the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya pointedly communicates this message is in the tale of Sāvitrī, which at three hundred and nine verses is one of its longest chapters.¹²⁶ The kathā runs as follows. In the absence of his first wife, Sāvitrī, who was away performing penance, Brahmā decided he was going to perform an elaborate Vedic ritual. Since a yajamāna must always act in concert with his wife, Brahmā married again, this time to Gāyatrī. By overburdening each verse with terms of art from Vaidika ritual and ācāra, the text polemically and at some length deliberately communicates the “hyper Brāhmaṇical” nature of this whole affair. When Sāvitrī hears that this new upstart has taken her place at Brahmā’s side, she became furious. Arriving at the sacrifice as it commences, the irate goddess curses everyone in attendance. For the most part, these are the usual curses we find again and again in Purāṇas. Brahmā will have no temples. Śiva’s penis will fall off. Viṣṇu will have to be reborn in human and animal form repeatedly to atone for his sins. Lakṣmī, we are told, will become fickle as fortune never staying in one place, a typical trope, except that here the text inserts the extraordinary caveat that her true home will be among the Mlecchas and tribal folk. In any case, having dispensed with the gods, Sāvitrī now turns to the Brāhmaṇas:

Then Sāvitrī cursed all the Brāhmaṇas and the ṛtvijs: “You will always be going to holy spots and tīrthas out of greed, taking monetary gifts for your agnihotra sacrifices. [As a result, for you] the office of householdership and married life will bear no fruit. You will always be gratified only by the food that is offered by others. . . . You will perform rituals on behalf of those who are not eligible and deserving. . . . You will accept alms from despicable people. At death, you will become pretas.¹²⁷

[[P1414]]

Sāvitrī’s curse is somewhat tempered by the intervention of Gāyātri. She promises that Brāhmaṇas who persist in their agnihotra while keeping her name and form on their lips will attain a good reward after death and that in this world, they will be the recipients of food and philanthropy and will flourish in the sabhās of great rulers. In other words, the text juxtaposes two paradigms for “being Brāhmaṇa”: being a Vaidika ritualist with an esteemed position in the transactional world, and being a Brāhmaṇa who performs other sorts of rituals and engages with the culture of the sacred fields, exalting the first and denigrating the second. The Caturvargacintāmaṇi becomes the primary vehicle for the widespread dissemination of this once very popular vow, which, like everything else from the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya, until this point in history had yet to have surface in any work on ritual or dharmanibandha. As you might by now expect, however, despite the fact that the majority of the kathā is faithfully transposed, none of these materials defaming Brāhmaṇas—indeed defaming precisely the type of Brāhmaṇas who would make use of a dharmanibandha in observing their livelihood—make their way into the Caturvargacintāmaṇi.

The dynamic tension that is often in evidence between the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s commitment to comprehensiveness and its efforts at curating the knowledge it seeks to convey to bring its contents into alignment with the ideological vision propounded throughout the nibandha is even more strongly in evidence when it comes to the way the work handles the worship of Bhūtamātā and her annual celebration. This is far and away the most spectacular example of Hemādri’s efforts in what is effectively the redaction and sublimation not just of particular texts but of lived traditions.¹²⁸ In the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, the worship of this goddess, whom the māhātmya’s kathā associates quite explicitly with one particular place near Somanātha, is extracted out from where it would appear within the itinerary of a pilgrim at [[P1415]] Prabhāsakṣetra who was following the Tīrthakhaṇḍa. Instead, the text is transposed into the later divisions of the CVC’s Vratakhaṇḍa and the procedures are denuded of any specific affiliation with place. Such repurposing in and of itself is enough to fundamentally change the meaning of the practice—it is now seasonal, part and parcel of an emergent program of a unified “Brāhmaṇical calendar” as opposed to a localized matter of deśācāra, the management of which is the responsibility of localized, potentially non-Brāhmaṇa authorities. In fact, however, Hemādri also chooses to alter the date of the observance, shifting the festival from its original celebration on the first through fifteenth days of lunar fortnight in the month of Vaiśakha (roughly April/May) to the corresponding dates in Jyeṣṭha (May/June). Apart from the festivities now occurring at the very worst part of the summer months, this shift also decouples the Bhūtamātā celebrations as it is to be observed by “Brāhmaṇical society” from the apparently more archaic high Śākta reveries onto which the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya had attempted to symbiotically attach itself. As we will soon see, the māhātmya, at least in part, is composed in the service of coopting these festivals.

Through incorporating the Bhūtamātā utsava, the Purāṇa seeks to insert itself into what were apparently already ongoing performances, conducted by worshippers who have dedicated themselves to Bhairava and the goddess. In doing so, the intent is to interpolate into the wider discourse a competing system of semiotics that inscribes a different meaning onto Bhairavāgama-inspired public rites that, as we shall see, involved dressing up as ferocious Śākta deities. Hemādri, in contrast, sets out not only to manage meaning by shaping the publics’ reception of an unruly festival, but through rendering the original festival an “orphan” observance, out of step with shared social norms, to deinstitutionalize and delegitimize the old ways along with those who conducted themselves according to those values. To make sense of [[P1416]] our author’s exercise in the reinvention of tradition, we need to attend in some detail to the rites for Bhūtamātā.

In its usual fashion, the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya introduces this festival in the context of a conversation conducted between Īśvara and the goddess. Bhūtamātā, we are told, lives a hundred bow lengths to the west of the ritual center dedicated to Sāvitrī. There, she is constantly surrounded by ninety million gaṇas, pretas, and bhūtas. The goddess, we learn, is perplexed—not as one might imagine by the logistics entailed in the care and feeding of so many creepy creatures, nor regarding the geometrical conundrum of how one fit them all on a relatively small plot of land—but rather by the peculiar behavior of human beings.

In the name of Bhūtamātā, in every village and town, people run about singing, dancing, and laughing rapturously. As if they are insane, they prattle and babble. As if in a drunken stupor, they fall on the ground. As if enraged, they run about and drag others around as if they were corpses. People fracture happiness as if seized by the wind. Like ghouls, they wade through the muck—urine, water, and ash. Is this path (mārga) indicated by scripture? Or is it merely a worldly practice? O Lord, my mind is confused by this. Are you are able to explain? How is Bhūtamātā worshipped by people residing at Prabhāsakṣetra? Why did the goddess go there? When did she arrive? On which day and in which month is her great festival (mahotsava) to be celebrated?¹²⁹

[[P1417]]

Īśvara responds by reminding the goddess that long ago, in the dvāpara yuga, shortly after their marriage, he had been overcome by the sight of her body— her beautiful buttocks and lofty and firm and perky breasts. Consumed by desire, upon the peak of Mount Mandara, he engaged in divine play (divyakrīḍana) and made love to her without ceasing for a thousand years in the reckoning of the gods (surate divyaṃ varṣaśatam). In retrospective, one might well have preferred that the couple had used protection, for when they untangle their long- intertwined bodies, sexual discharge spills out on the ground and spawns some rather undesirable entities. From the female substance, there arises a dark-skinned potbellied being called Śivā whose accoutrements of a necklace of skulls, a crown of skulls, a khaṭvāṅga and ḍamaru recalls the Kāpālikas. Śivā, we learn, is the source of all the Brāhmaṇarākṣasīs in the world. While found all over our reality, including soaring through the sky making pheṭ sounds, the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya informs us that their preferred habitat is in the boughs of the śleṣmātaka tree. In much the same way, Śiva’s spent seed inadvertently sired a male counterpart to Śivā, a being who resembled Bhairava in his form of Gajasaṃhāra, whose retinue includes male monsters with the faces of lions and tigers.

The divine parents tell their offspring that their will power will reach its apex in the night and that the domain that is reserved especially for them is the supreme place at Prabhāsakṣetra where Bhūtamātā is venerated. Switching registers, very much in the manner of the sort of demonological treatises from which these materials were likely adapted, the text next offers us a detailed account of the types of places and conditions that favor these creatures. As in the older Bhūta Tantras, such as the Kriyākālaguṇottara and the traces of a Kumāra tradition redacted into the Netra Tantra, predatory entities are seen as taking residence in spaces where there is a disjuncture or imbalance.¹³⁰ Such breaks in normativity can be caused by sexual impropriety, by disabled people continuing to practice fire rites, by keeping on hand in the house human bones, by speaking harsh words and having conflict in the family, by haphazardly scattering about your possessions, by not bathing, by not honoring guests and feeding children—even—horror of horrors, by women who choose to pound their mortar and pestle while sitting on the lower part of the threshold of a door. These faux pas of course are [[P1418]] all extrapolations from an older logic surrounding the chāyāchidrā—the gap that creates a shadow or is itself a shadow—where ruptures in human normativity make it possible for supernatural creatures compelled by a terrible hunger to infiltrate their way into human lives and feed off the household.

What is new to our māhātmya is the introduction of another register of violation grounded in doctrinal claims as well as the extolling of devotional commitments as apotropaically efficacious. Demons are invited to take residence in places where Śiva is treated as an ordinary being or is not recognized as superior to all other entities, where the liṅga is not worshipped, where mantras are not repeated, and where the people do not display devotional affect. That this is not simply an expression of Śaiva chauvinism is made clear by the analogous designation of homes where Vāsudeva is worshipped with bhakti as equally off limits. This collection of nearly forty verses ends with a clear designation of the time when the festival is to be celebrated, its immediate benefit—it ensures creepy creatures do not reside in your home— as well as with a reiteration that those who chant the names of Viṣṇu or repeat “oṃ namaḥ śivāya” with devotional affect (bhaktibhāva) fall outside the jurisdiction of the mothers and the ghouls.

Most of the roughly fifty verses that make up the remainder of the text delineate in sequence the different activities that occur during the festival of Bhūtamātā. The rituals begin with the devotees watering the trees where these creatures like to reside, making offering of sacred threads, sindura, flower and incense, and then of grains and puddings. This is then followed by the performance of a series of morality plays called preraṇīyakas during the day and observance of the vigil (jāgran) of the goddess in the night, accompanied by loud [[P1419]] tumultuous celebratory sounds. This ritual in particular, which we will attend to shortly, our text discusses at great length.

Then, on the ninth or eleventh lunar day, within small pits, lamps are kindled. In that place, masks (mukhabiṃba) are made, either out of wood and plaster (lepa-dāru) or painted wood, depending on how one construes the compound. These artifacts are crafted so as to convey both ferocious and pacifying modes. They should depict the mothers, Caṇḍikā, rākṣasas, bhūtas, pretas, piśācas and śākiṇī, all of whose actions and gestures convey a range of affects (hāvabhāvakṛtāni, a Marathi-ism). On the inauspicious new moon, in a secret field (guptaṃ tīrthaṃ), hidden by many protections (rakṣibhir bahubhiḥ), during the daytime, those celebrating the rites gather and perform their rituals, filling the domain with the appropriate sounds. In a call back to the ancient idiom of the Atimārga, this coming together of bhaktas in the guise of the goddess and her retinue is called the diṇḍīmaṇḍalī. Then, at twilight, while wearing their masks and making the kīrtana of the kula and the great sounds of the pheṭkāra, the adepts should go to the place where people have encircled the goddess and are worshipping her. In accordance with the procedure called the conduct of the vīra (vīracaryāvidhāna), the lamp that accomplishes everything, they should then wander about the city at night. This procession of the lamps—the text is maddeningly unclear whether we are talking actual torches or whether the lamps in question are the costumed affect of the adepts—is to take place habitually up through the fifteenth tithi. So long as this happens, obstacles do not make their way into people’s homes and lives. After indulging in a bit more cryptozoology that provides further speciation of subtypes of piśācas and their preferred habitats, as well as a quite pointed polemic against those folks—including artisans—who worship piśācas as their chief deities, the text concludes by reaffirming that Bhūtamātā lives by the edge of the sea at Prabhāsakṣetra [[P1420]] and that those who worship her will have a special way with women, sire no ungrateful children, and live a life free from assault by supernatural entities.

Through institutionalizing the Bhūtamātā utsava concurrently with the summer new moon, which is associated with the most transgressive Kaula observances, the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya itself sets out to socialize and normalize the yearly activities of Kaulācāryas and their communities, including the sort of mimetic observances of mudrās we find in the Jayadrathayāmala where adepts dress themselves up as Bhairava and the goddess. Indeed, the strategies it employs are eerily in line with still living traditions observed in the Kathmandu Valley where, for example, until recently, performance traditions aligned with Navarātra dancers were at once public affairs sanctioned by the state with didactic dimensions affirming the social order and yet still harbored a darker subtext where the dancers’ mimetic activities of embodying the dark were seen as extending to the clandestine abduction and sacrificing of children. The negotiations of different value systems our text conducts are hardly that dimorphic, but nevertheless, what is at work is an overcoding of a “conventional varṇāśramadharma morality” on top of a system of praxis that very clearly eschewed or at best barely tolerated such values.

In the Vratakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, Hemādri offers a rather radical redaction of this archive. We have already seen that by simply changing the date of the Bhūtamātā utsava so it no longer coincides with the older observances of the Śāktas, Hemādri fundamentally changes the social function of the festival. Succinctly, the older observances of the kula rites and the diṇḍimaṇḍalī, motivated by commitments whose origins lie outside of the world of Dharmaśāstra, are effectively out of step with the new universal calendar. Unsurprisingly, this sort of retrofitting is even more prominent when it comes to the actual [[P1421]] observances constitutive of the festival and the divergences from the source materials are even more drastic. In fact, Hemādri’s editorial sleight of hand somewhat sloppily even seeks to elide the textual point of origins of the Bhūtamātotsava. Our Vratakhaṇḍa does not even ascribe this selection to the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya. Instead, without specifying a textual source, the Bhūtamātā festival is introduced not as part of the interchanges between the goddess and god, but ostensibly as a component of conversation in which Yuddhiṣṭhira plays the role of inquirer and Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa provides the answers.¹³¹ It is almost certain that this repackaging is itself a matter of editorial subterfuge and not an indication that Hemādri was drawing upon parallel source materials preserved in another Purāṇa. Not only are large portions of the two texts verbatim identical, but in several places in the CVC’s version, Kṛṣṇa addresses the Pāṇḍava king with obviously inappropriate feminine vocatives invoking various names of the goddess.¹³² Precisely these same vocatives are found in the corresponding verses of the Skanda Purāṇa. There is no ambiguity between the direction of these textual borrowings, for as we have seen throughout his work, Hemādri cites copiously and, barring deliberate editorial decisions, directly from a Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya virtually identical to the printed work. This source material is not only at least a century older than this nibandha, but in situ the discourse it presents is frequently coherent without reference to metatextual frameworks in a way that the CVC’s repurposing of it is not. [[P1422]]

Though he erases all specific references to Prabhāsakṣetra, Hemādri retains a slightly trimmed version of the narrative of the origin of Bhūtamātā and her retinue, right up through the moment in the text where the male and female entities emerge from the spilled sexual fluids. Then the texts diverge, for while in both sources Hara offers these new creatures a boon, in Hemādri’s text there is no indication that these creatures and their followers are given dominion over the night. In place of the original’s extended crypto-zoological exercises in demonology outlining the habits of various types of entities as well the circumstances under which they can assail humans, all of which find no mention in the CVC, Hemādri interpolates a banal set of verses that prescribe a standardized mode of worship. “O goddess [sic],” we are told “a man who worships with candana, with dhūpa, and flowers with devotion,” and who also “feeds Brāhmaṇas with payasa, soup, barley and wheat cakes, will sire many sons, raise herds of domestic animals, and have good health all his days.”¹³³ Most importantly, and here our author resumes citing from the source text, “in his house, there should be no śākinīs, no piśācas, and rākṣasas, and his babies play and they become big without becoming ill.” Rather curiously, given how central such concerns are to his overall interpretive project, apart from a stray mention that this new program of worship is to be done “out of bhakti,” Hemādri’s selection of material expunges the ecumenical devotional theology of the original where fervent and embodied displays of either Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava religiosity were extolled as protecting one from the forces of the night. Such elisions, whose content on the surface would seem to be a perfect fit with Hemādri’s own commitments as a devotee of Harihara, make sense only once we see them as part of a larger project of demoting the goddess Bhūtamātā [[P1423]] from a deity whose worship is aligned with and sanctioned by the great gods of what will become Hinduism into a nuisance whose festival is valuable only in as much as it serves as staging ground for presenting didactic cautionary tales to the public.

As we have seen, in the original source material, the Bhūtamātotsava was comprised of an initial series of rites where, through stringing up threads and offering pāyasa and other puddings, trees are venerated for their role in housing predatorial entities. After the trees are worshipped, for several days, morality dramas called compellers (preraṇīyakas) were to be performed during the day while jāgrans honoring the goddess, complete with raucous celebrations and loud music were observed at night. As the festival draws to a close—the dramas cease and the celebrants don masks and dress up as the gods. During the day, in a secret place they perform their worship, and then at night in costume and in character, they wander through the streets of the city, bearing either literal or metaphorical torches. Of these varied dimensions of the festival, Hemādri’s rendition retains only two elements intact: the staging of the didactic dramas and the procession with torches. As we shall see, instead of distinguishing between a separate stage of respected mimetic worship that follows the dumb show, Hemādri redacts the text so that the two activities are conflated. In this way, instructions in general morality occurring in tandem with observations from the high Śākta Tantras are transmuted into a sustained polemic enacted in public against the Śākta Tantras themselves. The opening of this section, which incorporates a line of commentary by Hemādri, is worth quoting at some length:

The goddess who has all faults (sarvadoṣā bhagavatī) ensures the welfare of the children. She is worshipped with different names, [at] different times, with different rituals. In the Jyeṣṭha month, beginning with the pratipat day, up until the fifteenth date. . . .

Hemādri: It is said to be [observed in] Jyeṣṭha with the intention of it being [observed] during [the period in the month] that culminates at the full moon. . . .

Up through that time period, pūjā is to be done by the Preraṇī performers in the must- see dramas (preraṇīprekṣaṇīyakaiḥ). [Then] there will be shown the instruction concerning the results of bad actions, which is for the derision of the heretics. [It is performed] by men who, intent on being ridiculed, engage in “wonderous” activity. [[P1424]]

In much the same way that Hemādri rebrands the ritual focus of the festival by recasting what was previously a revered but dangerous esoteric goddess as “the one who has all faults,” he reimagines the performative focus of the festival into a pointed exercise in ideological criticism. In the previous chapter, we have already encountered the preraṇīpaddhati in the context of our study of Hemādri’s immediate predecessor Śārṅgadeva, who in his Saṅgītaratnākara has made it quite evident that in early medieval Maharashtra a mere generation before our author, this was a widely accepted multifaceted Śaiva performance tradition. As Mandakranta Bose has discussed at some length in her unpublished thesis (parts of which appear verbatim in her monograph Movement and Mimesis), prior to the fourteenth century, the dramaturgical and strictly musicological traditions seemed to have harbored substantively divergent understandings of what this artform entailed, for while “in sangita literature perana (or its variants, perana or perani) appears in almost every work as a form [of sic] dancing.”¹³⁴ In the Abhinavabhāratī, Abhinavagupta quotes from a lost work by some [[P1425]] under-specified “ancient authorities (cirantana) in which the preraṇa is characterized as having humor as the dominant element (hāsyaprāya). It is thus the dramaturgical understanding that seemingly much more closely aligned with the practice as evident in the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya. In the Abhinavabhāratī, Abhinavagupta’s theory of how humor operates assigns a rather substantial place to incongruity (anaucitya) as catalyzing laughter in an audience. What comic theatre does, he tell us, is it brings into our awareness the gap between the expectations we have derived from the social conventions we have inherited and what is actually happening on the stage, creating an experience that at once affirms and questions such norms. As we shall soon see, humor in the didactic “must-see plays” (prekṣaṇīya) enjoined by the Prabhāsakṣetramāhātmya and embraced by Hemādri seemingly serves a rather different function. Rather than staging scenes that derive their emotional power from violating our expectations, this kind of humor thrives on confirming our shared cultural biases, enjoining the audience to join in on the act of ridiculing not only the performance but the performers.

Out of greed for [the things of] this world, one who recites the sacred texts has been restrained upon the path. Behold! He is being “superimposed” (i.e., impaled) on the tip of the trident.

You all have seen that he has delighted in touching the wives of other men. Having severed his two hands, he is tossed by the Lord into the lotus pond. . . . The one who was delighted by coconut and palm [liquor] is cut with an umbrella. The one who does good deeds ascends to a white lion throne and reaches happiness.

Hey, people—do you not see? Another person, who reviles his lord (svamīdrohaka) is being rent by a handsaw. His insides burst forth and blood [wells up] from within. A thief, who causes everyone anxiety, has been caught and is being struck by blows from a staff by corporal punishment officers. Having been restrained, he is led away to be killed, his face hangs down in shame.¹³⁵

[[P1426]]

Granted, humor is often extremely culturally specific, and to be charitable one could well imagine that gifted physical comedians miming some of these activities might effect a certain charm. Still, Sanskrit kāvyas and especially dramatic farces are frequently still extremely funny for modern audiences, while this sort of thing, at least to the modern reader, simply resembles socially coercive gratuitous displays of violence designed to hammer home a message to the assembled audience about the terrible consequences inherent in all forms of moral impropriety. Most pertinently, for our purposes, the majority of the suggested episodes are particularly heavy with references to a Śākta imaginary, and the intention seems not merely to mock some bad apples out of the bunch, but to condemn these systems of value in toto as the poisoned fruit produced by the goddess who harbors all faults.

How Hemādri manages this, you may have guessed, is largely a matter of selective editing of his sources. The last figure to be mocked in his source material is a white haired old Brāhmaṇa man who has gone chasing after an elderly prostitute, a typical figure for Sanskrit parody.¹³⁶ In his dotage, this lecherous and greedy man, like a child, has taken on the great vow (mahāvrata) and now dresses as Bhairava (bhairavābharaṇa) his eyes lolling about (ghūrṇitalocanaḥ). In a similar manner, the woman he chases after is compared with a yoginī who goes about wearing a black blanket (possibly an allusion to the infamous nīlāmbara sect). Surrounded by children, she goes about dancing. In the root text, where the doctrine itself is [[P1427]] not the direct point of the critique, we encounter this amusing bickering couple and then the division of must-see theatre comes to a close, at which point the text introduces the entirely discrete topic of the procession of the vīras. In the root text, not only is this practice not a subject for critique, but it is actually taking place on entirely different days of the festival than the must-see parodies.

What Hemādri’s text does, through rewriting and reediting his source, is to dissolve these boundaries so that the vīra procession is now led by the actor who is dressed as a sad excuse for a Bhairava with the diṇḍīmaṇḍalī being led by the pathetic and crazy old crone (she has the garb of the insane, she who participates in the maṇḍali of the diṇḍis). With separate gatherings of Śākta practitioners now elided, it is now these actors who go on procession through the streets each and every day, up through the final day of the rite. In this instantiation of the tradition, the practice no longer culminates in Kaula-tinged celebrations conducted in the dead of night where devotees celebrate the goddess by dancing, singing, and making pheṭkāra cries. Nor on the last day are the piśācas and other such entities formally honored. Instead, Hemādri replaces this old practice with a new and rather banal form of celebration in the service of much more quotidian ends.

Thus, you should send the lamps on procession, up through the fifteenth day. On the fifteenth day one should do the great festival of the Bhūtamātā. One should bathe, and one should worship, and one should give fruit and sweets. Having bowed, being together with one’s own people, having caused to be forgiven, one should go to the house. For the one who does this festival, O Pārtha, year by year, an obstacle does not arise in the house for that entire year.¹³⁷

[[P1428]]

Perhaps nowhere is the distinction between the worldviews animating these two distinctive takes on what is ostensibly the same festival rendered more clearly than in their representations of the phalaśruti for the festival. Here is the vulgate:

This goddess was established in Prabhāsa to the north of the sea. He who understands the origin of the goddess that is destructive of sins shall never beget a despicable child. He is never assailed by the defects of the bhūtas, pretas, and piśācas. He shall be rid of all sins. He shall be endowed with faithfulness in marriage. He will obtain all his desires. He will delight the hearts of women. The devotees should accept and believe in the Bhavabhūtamātṛ, the bestower of freedom from fear through her laughs, graces, and services. Those devotees become happy in the company of their brothers, servants, sons, and kinsmen. They will be free of all kinds of disasters.¹³⁸

And here, at Hemādri’s hands, is how this passage is rewritten:

Those ones who honor, with the sports that make people laugh, the creator of the bhūtas on the earth who bestows fearlessness, become happy and are devoid of all misfortune, along with their brothers, dependents, sons, and relative folks, for a year.¹³⁹

[[P1429]]

For all the technicalities that underwrite the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s transmutation of its sources, the message it seeks to convey is simple and clear. From henceforth, Tantra as a knowledge system will be assigned a marginal and subordinate place in discourse and will occupy no special domain within our world.

A Religion for Bureaucrats: Reinventing a Purely Brāhmaṇical Philanthropy

In his introduction to the compilation of the great Ludo Rocher’s collected essays, reflecting upon his mentor’s representation of Hindu law as above all else a scholastic enterprise whose relation to what we call positive law—and with it concrete social practice—was hardly transparent, Donald Davis makes a rather telling observation that offers fitting prelude to our [[P1430]] own investigation.¹⁴⁰ Rocher had dedicated a lifetime to learning how to reason inside the conceptual framework of Hindu Dharmaśāstra with a meticulouslessness and precision unmatched by any other Western scholar. As the anthology Davis complied makes evident, the result was that when Rocher came upon an incongruity or point of disputation within the dharma literature, he was able to look at the problem and address it as if he himself were a dharmādhikarin relying on an implicit mastery of the intertextual resources constitutive of the discourse while deploying traditional modes of reasoning derived from the disciplines of grammar and Mīmāṃsā exegesis. Dharmaśāstra, in this representation, is thus less contingent on the study of any particular text than it entails an internalization of modes of exegetical reasoning that came into play wherever and whenever one set out to study and translate a specific passage found anywhere in this śāstra.

Like many of his pre-colonial predecessors, however, Rocher’s scholarship was primarily concerned with marshaling enormous erudition in the service of precisely determining the meaning of particular words or phrases so that one could make sense of their application in hyper-specific contexts. In short, its orientation is hermeneutical as opposed to conceptual. For all its many other strengths, his method and intellectual style was much less predisposed to thinking about individual texts—let alone textual corpuses— as conceptual wholes working within particularized social and historical moments to effect specific quotidian ends. On those occasions where he was asked to think in more general terms about the nature of Dharmaśāstra as Hindu law and to reflect on its social application, eschewing the prescriptive texts, Rocher would almost inevitably turn to invoking what were essentially [[P1431]] anthropological observations by non-Indian outsiders concerning the “actual” method animating Hindu legal proceedings. As Davis observes:

If Dharmaśāstra is a scholarly discipline in the first place (and not a set of practical laws) and if dharma is a unified, but complex subject (that does not become more law- oriented over time), then what does Rocher think is the connection between Dharmaśāstra, dharma, and law, if anything? Here Rocher takes his cue from an early Western observer of India, Father Bouchet, a French Jesuit from Pondicherry. Boucher, like Megasthenes 2000 years earlier, notes that the administration of law in his long acquaintance with India never occurred with reference to law books or written laws of any kind (Rocher 1984: 18). According to Rocher, ‘The main conclusion to be drawn from Bouchet’s letter is that. . . law was administered on the basis of unwritten maxims, which were transmitted from generation to generation in the local vernaculars, some of them applicable to the population of the area generally, others to specific groups such as the members of a particular caste only’. . . . Indeed, Rocher refers at several places in his writings to the importance of maxims. . . in the practical law of India. He connects the importance of legal maxims several times with larger questions about orality in India and the unlikelihood of written laws having much impact in such a committedly oral environment.¹⁴¹

Reflecting respectfully but not uncritically on his mentor’s legacy, while acknowledging that Rocher’s core insight of the centrality of oral dimensions of Indian legal discourse as it is enacted on the ground has much to recommend itself, Davis candidly tells his reader that he has “long been frustrated by the maddening vagueness of phrases such as ‘floating maxims’ and ‘traditional customs.’”¹⁴² When, in reconstructing Rocher’s position as it lies latent throughout his oeuvre, from the perspective of a hermeneutics of charity, Davis observes in passing that “Rocher does not make any connection between vernacular and Sanskrit maxims, nor does he explore the legal usage of either sort of maxim in any detail,”¹⁴³ it seems as though Davis is on the cusp of making explicit a very important connection, namely, that much of the later dharma literature itself can be more readily characterized as “collections [[P1432]] of maxims” (albeit in Sanskrit rather than the vernacular) than it can be seen as a purely intellectual exercises in textual exegesis aimed at attaining internal hermeneutic coherency.

Indeed, already by the eleventh century, starting it seems in and around southern Bengal, the dharma discourse has begun to move away from an exclusive privileging of modes of textual production that take the form of systematic readings of text—aimed at producing wide ranging commentaries and subcommentaries covering multiple domains—in favor of topic specific treatises on the one hand and vast compilations of dharmanibandha on the other. The chief virtue of these new prakaraṇa texts—addressing for example ritual impurity or rites of expiation—is that their topical organization made them ideal reference guides. The earlier state of the field was such that recovering what the traditional authorities had to say about, for example, the different types of ritual impurity virtually required a competent jurist to have an encyclopedic command of whole commentaries. This was the case because an author such as Vijñāneśvara, whose own text was organized in terms of an exegetical project of making sense of a root text, was highly unlikely to have presented the entirety of his own views on a given topic in a single, easily identifiable, and readily accessible portion of his treatise. Instead, it was likely that his siddhānta would have had to be reconstructed on the basis of locating the numerous parenthetical asides and theoretical observations intermittently interwoven throughout the whole of his commentary, which each jurist would then have to retrieve and synthesize anew. [[P1433]]

With the advent of topic specific prakaraṇa texts, a jurist having to weigh in a judgement about some highly specific matter or another could now resort to a single book. It would begin by defining the general topic in both practical and logical or philosophical terms and then index the rules and conditions specific to the relevant domain so that its intended reader could consult it at their leisure. Each of these specific headings and subsections, much like the dharmanibandha works we have been exploring so far, was primarily made up of compilations of discrete citations culled from a range of sources, upon which the author then offers an occasional comment or gloss. The entire orientation of such works, in other words, subordinates an older intellectual project of offering exegesis to the presentation of collections of proof texts that derive their relevance in situ from extra-textual—one might even say “real- world”—concerns about legal and ritual “best practices.” In this regard, they resemble nothing so much as subsections in a larger dharmanibandha work, just as the dharmanibandha genre itself reads as an entextualization of long-standing social practices, of the sort we saw briefly discussed in the Vikramāṅkābhyudaya, where kings and other authorities empanel a collection of dharmādhikarins from a range of traditions and then query their opinions on specific legal and ritual matters. In other words what we have been calling “proof texting” and what Rocher has been referring to as “maxims” are essentially the same phenomenon unfolding at divergent moments in Indian history. And in both cases, what we are actually talking about is not reducible to positive law, but amounts to a repertoire of resources that are inoperable and effectively meaningless independent from their skillful deployment by the embodied subjectivity supplied by individual Dharmaśāstrins. Speaking in general terms, the ultimate product of Dharmaśāstra as a discourse was not the production of a legal code of the sort that [[P1434]] we might associate with Justinian or Aurangzeb. Instead, the discourse aimed to produce a particular type of person. In the apt words of Nile Green:

In practical as well as in conceptual terms, knowledge was located primarily in persons rather than in books. Books were not considered independent sources of knowledge, but were appendages to the personal pedagogical relationships through which knowledge was transferred and within which writing served to provide only one dimension of the knowledge being transferred. . . . Books worked in the service of an anthropocentric model of knowledge, as mnemonic aids and adjuncts to the bodily incorporation of words in the person of the authoritative master and through him to his students. Correspondingly, those in search of knowledge looked for a master rather than a bookshop or a library.¹⁴⁴

Green, of course, is writing about a distinctive religion—Deccani Islam—at a later historical moment—the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries—and moreover, his focus is on what can roughly characterized as the esoteric ascesis-oriented as opposed exoteric juridically inclined dimensions of the religious culture that he is exploring. Nevertheless, Green’s pen portrait of entextualized knowledge as mnemonic aids as well as “appendages” to “personal pedagogical relationships” elegantly captures much that is integral more generally to the world of South Asian—especially Deccani—approaches to pedagogy and knowledge practices. Particularly insightful is Green’s pairing of the mediation of entextualized knowledge as always being accessed through the body of a specific teacher with the knowledge practice of composing texts that, taken as guides, in and of themselves are quite deliberately inadequate to the task of translating written prescriptions into embodied social practices. Within the resulting paradigm, books are effectively useless independent of the class of people who have spent their lives being fashioned into the right type of vessel for making using of their contents. In this regard, the emergence of Dharmaśāstra prakaraṇa works and nibandha as a general discipline through presenting more useful cribs that potentially lower the skill level necessary for someone to qualify as “the right kind of person” for making the knowledge contained in the texts actionable, reads for the most part more as a refining of this framework than an actual disruption. [[P1435]]

As you may well be anticipating, it is the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself that offers the first and most substantive challenge to what had been business as usual. While Hemādri’s recasting of the discipline of dharma does retain numerous domains within which the expert judgements of the legalist scholar will still prove indispensable, it also reimagines other aspects of social practices that fall under the purview of this discipline so as to make them readily navigable by less skilled “ordinary” Brāhmaṇas, of no particular erudition, provided they have at least a basic knowledge of Sanskrit. What makes such an approach viable is a radical change in compositional practice. For the first time, certainly in the history of Dharmaśāstra but quite plausibly more generally in Indic ritual, texts are crafted not merely as necessary but not sufficient adjuncts to an extratextual embodied form of knowledge. They are envisioned as comprehensive and independent step-by-step guides delineating precisely, in order, everything that needs to be done to successfully execute a particular ritual activity from beginning to end. As we shall soon see, Hemādri’s innovations here draw their inspiration from the institutional context in which he has been operating for decades in his office as śrīkaraṇeśvara, namely, the transregional world of scribal bureaucracy with its ceaseless production of highly conventionalized transactional quotidian paperwork executed in a myriad of languages.

Just what is new and momentous in Hemādri’s reinvention of the formal dimensions of śāstra concerned with the philanthropic process, and the sociological impact of such shifts in disciplinarity, becomes readily evident to the reader when we juxtapose the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s discussion of the practice of dāna with a work of the preceding century, Ballāla’s Dānasāgara. According to the epigram embedded in the text, the Sena King Ballālasena, student of Halāyudha and Aniruddha, the great eastern Dharmaśāstrins of the day, and ruler of southern Bengal, finished composing his “Ocean of Philanthropy” in 1168 CE. Today, Ballālasena is remembered by Indologists as well as Marxist historians almost solely [[P1436]] as the reviled restorer of varṇāśramadharma to Bengal as well as the plausible promulgator of the Kulin Brāhmaṇa system.¹⁴⁵ Indeed, such a role is famously hinted at by his ideological aside, found towards the beginning of his Dharmaśāstra treatise, rejecting the authority of the Devī Purāṇa and with it the wider Śākta ethos stemming from the Brahmayāmala.¹⁴⁶ In the realm of Dharmaśāstra, however, by contributing to the new efflorescence of single topic prakaraṇa works on discrete subjects of Hindu law, Ballāla needs to be seen as following in the footsteps of his mentors. And just like his predecessors, while Ballāla begins by presenting a theoretical introduction to the topic at hand organized in terms of the needs of practitioners of dāna rites, and not scholastic exegetes, when it comes to the actual presentation of individual philanthropic rites, his approach is deeply conventional. Succinctly, he presents us with a series of Sanskrit proof texts or floating maxims providing some guidelines for philanthropic donations, extracted from a narrative text and presented in meter, which he occasionally supplements with prose sentences from his own pen. In Ballāla’s own prose, what we typically find is a series of discrete sentences—denoting but not describing a specific part in the ritual process—which are daisy chained together through a series of gerunds. This style is very typical not only of contemporary non-exegetical works in Dharmaśāstra but more generally of paddhatis aligned with any ritual system available from this period. The benefit of such an approach is that, much as with our own “to-do lists,” for the ritualist consulting such a passage, [[P1437]] the precise sequence of ritual acts that makeup the ceremony he is conducting is rendered crystal clear at a glance. Due to the paucity of information provided about how exactly one is to execute each of the individual sub-acts at any moment in the rite, however, the success or failure of the rite is still dependent on the extra-textual inherited and embodied knowledge possessed by the individual ritualist.

Thus, for example, in the section beginning his explanation of the canonical sixteen mahādānas,¹⁴⁷ Ballālasena starts us off by citing the proof text from the Matsya Purāṇa that outlines the hierarchy of philanthropic rites and extolling their practice.¹⁴⁸ Ballālasena then offers us his own “contextualization” of the main aspects of the preliminary activities that preface the rite up through the formulation of the ritual intention (saṅkalpa).¹⁴⁹ In this way, using his own prose, our author provides us a concrete delineation of the relevant procedures, virtually all of which are not evident in the proof text he invokes. Ballāla’s analysis runs as follows: by the ritualist, first, there needs to be warding off of obstacles (nirvighnaṃ). Then for the sake of the accomplishing of the main part of the sacrifice, having taken the authority (anujñāṃ gṛhītvā), having enacted the pūjā of Vināyaka, Śiva, and Kṛṣṇa, and performed veneration, using cloth and so forth, to the Brāhmaṇas, then having washed the feet (of the patron) in the maṇḍapa, the ritual intention for the śrāddha rite should be declared. Having provided this brief itinerary, the king resumes his extended citation of the Matsya Purāṇa, [[P1438]] interjecting in his own two cents in just one terse remark.¹⁵⁰ When, after several pages of mostly proof texting spent defining the tulāpuruṣa rite specifically and providing the sets of Vedic and Purāṇic mantras that are to be used during its performance, Ballālasena returns to expounding upon the changing daily ritual program for the tulāpuruṣa, unsurprisingly he begins with a more detailed representation of the same preliminary rites he had alluded to earlier. This time, however, instead of a single line comprised of a series of discrete semantic discrete units joined by gerunds, the Dānasāgara presents us with a two-page gerund heavy run on sentence composed in the same style.¹⁵¹ First (prathama), for the sake of the pūjā to Viṣṇu, Śiva, and Gaṇeśa, you need to lead off with scents and flowers and so forth; for the worship of the Brāhmaṇas, you begin by offering scents and garlands; for the sake of the intoning of auspicious speech, again garlands and scents are needed. Then, having purified the ground, for the sake of constructing a maṇḍapa, you need the materials to make the pillars; for the sake of the homa, you need the ṛtvij priests and the big vessels, along with ghee, kuśa grass, and copper pots. . . . On and on it goes in this manner like a medieval grocery list without the corresponding recipes that would make sense of how much of each ingredient is needed to achieve the desired outcomes. Since the text in no way provides us with step-by-step procedural guides of the sort you would need to execute even the simplest of the tasks it [[P1439]] prescribes, absent the extratextual knowledge of a learned elite, it is impossible to imagine its translation into real-world actions.

In comparison, here is a taste of how, after having offered even more copious proof texts from the exact same sources, Hemādri introduces the very same material.

Now this is the sequence of the application of ritual:

From the day that is two days prior to the final day of the establishing of the philanthropic project (dāna), in the morning, the yājamāna, being well bathed, having enjoined the resolution (saṅkalpa), “I will establish this charity to [fill in the blank] (amuka), which may happen tomorrow (śvobhūte),” he, having worshipped Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Vināyaka, for the sake of warding off the collectivity (samūha) of obstacles [and] being approved by the Brāhmaṇas, should commence the ritual.

And now, having done the Vṛddhiśrāddha, immediately after that, having enjoined the choosing of the ṛtvij and having worshipped them using the madhuparka injunction, having entered the maṇḍapa at the western door, in the afternoon, he should enjoin the incubation (adhivāsana) of the deity. The definitions of all these things, the madhuparka vidhi, the preparation of the homa fire, and the maṇḍapa will be given in the metarules (paribhāṣā).¹⁵²

[[P1440]]

As we can begin to see, Hemādri has introduced two features into his approach to inculcating knowledge of ritual to his readers that are essentially without much precedent in the prevailing literature. First, he provides the ritualists (not just the patron) with a prefabricated written script the formalizes all of the spoken dialogue pronounced in the ritual. Instead of improvising their own appropriate Sanskrit sentences, all that each of the participants in the rites now will be required to do is to fill in the names of participants and the specific quotidian details pertaining to the specific rite and its intended outcome. In other words, we are provided with fixed ritual librettos with a pregiven theological and ideological content. They are instantly legible to observing authorities in precisely the same manner as a prefabricated legal document. This also means that divergences or deviations from the expected norms can be quickly identified and called out. Hemādri’s other great innovation is his seemingly banal introduction of a new indexing strategy. As we can see at the end of this passage, when he is introducing a block of sequential ritual procedures, Hemādri regularly informs his intended readers precisely where they can find detailed instructions for performing all of the required individual ritual acts that make up any given vidhāna and also where they might find definitions for all of the key terms of art used in the ritual. Instead of presuming a general degree of erudition and skill, Hemādri’s dānapaddhati—as it would come to be called across the Deccan in subsequent decades—offers to any would-be professional Smārta Brāhmaṇa an all-in-one kit comprising everything a person needs to act as an authority. [[P1441]]

Before turning to the larger implications of this intervention, it is worthwhile to look very briefly at a few more examples illustrating the care, precision, and degree of control over content that Hemādri’s scripting of ritual provides. In the passage we have just examined, which offers a brief summary of the steps taken prior to the formal declaration of the ritual intention at the very beginning of the rite, Hemādri refers to the selection of the Ṛg Vedic ritualists—or ṛtvijs. In earlier sources where this requirement is given—for, remember, it is absent from the Piṅgalāmata—the choosing of these ritualists happens off stage and is treated in an entirely cursory fashion. The main point is simply the bare fact that they are needed. Hemādri, in contrast, not only covers the matter in excruciating detail, but he makes this selection of both the supplementary Vedic ritualists as well as the ācārya in whom the power to oversee the transfer of a gift or the bestowing of a land grant or the inauguration of a temple is vested into a publicly enunciated and thoroughly formalized part of the ritual, one which takes pains to disseminate to the public the credentials of everyone involved:

With regard to that [tulāpuruṣamahādāna preliminary rites], this is the ritual application:

“Today I will sacrifice with the sacrifice of the philanthropy to [fill in the blank] (amuka). With regard to that I choose you as the ṛtvij, who are the studier of the [fill in the Veda], who are [fill in the śarman], who have [fill in the gotra], to do the ritual consisting of the homa and so forth that are subordinate components of that.”

“And, likewise, today, I sacrifice by means of the sacrifice that is the great philanthropy to [fill in the blank]. With regard to that, I chose you, as the ācārya, of the [fill in the Veda], who are [fill in the śarman], who have [fill in the gotra], in order to cause to be done and to do all the rituals that are subordinate components of that [main procedure].”¹⁵³

[[P1442]]

As we can see, adhikāra, or ritual eligibility, has been reframed as almost exclusively a matter of very precise Vedic pedigrees. This is in spite of the fact that the majority of the rites that are to be performed by these ritual actors are not only at best nominally Vedic but primarily consist of the prefabricated ritual templates authored by Hemādri and provided, for the first time, in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself. In other words, the hyper-Vedicization of the requirements governing what makes a person eligible to perform these roles has at its foundation a demographic preference that is in no way connected to ability or knowledge base. In a similar manner, the adaptation of the rite from something that happens offstage to a performative examination and public proclamation of each ritualist’s credentials has as its aim the establishing and dissemination of new set of norms and expectations. From here on in, Hemādri is proclaiming, every transactional act of the sort that keeps the social order afloat [[P1443]] will have to be punctuated by affirmations of the indispensability and universal applicability of performatively “Brāhmaṇa norms.”

With these new steady affirmations of “Brāhmaṇical norms” comes a new epistemology, animated by a system of values antithetical to those we found in evidence in our earlier study of the world of pratiṣṭhā rites, a ritual repertoire closely linked with acts of philanthropy. If the zeitgeist envisioned by the Piṅgalāmata and its successors is liturgically and conceptually centered on representing the world as animated by hidden secrets, Hemādri’s Dānapaddhati can be seen as preaching a gospel of total transparency and accountability. Formally, what this means is that virtually all ritual activity is now to be performed in public and before an audience. Instead of there being parallel exoteric and esoteric systems of meaning and signification inscribed upon each event or ritual act, with the internal visualizations and theological objectives of the main acting, largely non-Brāhmaṇa, ritualists bearing little resemblance to the self-understanding of peripheral agents or spectators, the Dānapaddhati scripts procedures where the public declarations of ritual intent, the physical actions undertaken by the actors, and the visualized inner world of the ritualist offer seamless reproductions of each other. Here, for example, is a sample script for a relatively simple philanthropic rite, which involves the bestowal of a black deer skin blanket on a Brāhmaṇa.

This here is the Dāna statement:

Oṃ. Today, to [fill in the blank gotra], and so forth, I present to you this black antelope skin, which is placed on top of a blanket that is placed on top of kuśa grass. I give you a heap of oil seeds, which are covered with a set of clothes. I give you a golden horn, a silver horse hoof. I give you a silver tooth, a string of pearls. A golden nābha adorned with five gems, accompanied by fragrance and flowers, along with a vessel made of brass, of whom Śiva is the deity. It is further endowed with a fourfold set of vessels, full of honey, yogurt, ghee, milk, which are situated in the four directions. I, having [fill in the blank desire], [declare]—it [this property] is not mine. Today, to the person [[P1444]] of [x gotra] and so forth, therefore, for the sake of establishing this gift of the black antelope skin, I bestow upon you this gold which is dakṣinā. It is not mine.¹⁵⁴

Much like the deeds from the Lekhapaddhati we had examined back in chapter two, on one level, what we have here is a concrete commemoration marking the transfer of property as well as resources along with explicit documentation of the surrender of rights of ownership and the exact moment and circumstances when those rights were conferred. In other words, the state is providing a common framework for regulating and documenting financial transactions, however paltry their contents might be. Such declarations also offer a public itemization of everything used in the rite. As we know from other sources, including inscriptions, temples and other institutions typically kept records of their own possessions as well as a catalog of the expected ritual expenditure for different festivals. At the hands of a newly interventionist state inserting itself with increased frequency into the oversight and management of land grants and institutions of all sorts, one might well imagine that such public proclamations offering periodic delineations of expenditures could also provide the transregional bureaucracy with information for auditing institutional budgets. For example, consistent discrepancies between the amount of resources deployed during ritual events and festivals and during the annual assessment might alert the authorities to indications of embezzlement and or the misrepresentation of assets during tax collection season. [[P1445]]

Recollecting our discussion in the introduction, we should remember that philanthropy (dāna) is not merely a ritual but at once the organizing economic model of the day as well as an integral feature of the epistemic foundation of the medieval world. As Yājñavalkya has said, dāna is the highest dharma, and as we have seen in our explorations of the undying land grants found throughout the region, philanthropic endowments and their periodic renewal formed the social and legal building blocks that made possible Tantric sociality. Moreover, it was this social institution of inaugurating and then reaffirming land grants that provided much of the framework that renewed the ties of these Tantric imaginaries to dynastic regional polities. In short, by mandating a prescriptive standardization and formalization of dāna as rite as well as act of property transference, Hemādri, as the de facto head of an empire, is intervening in the workings of the region’s economy, changing the rules governing who can and cannot participate in the social and economic order of the day.

At the same time that this new formulation renders the economic aspects of philanthropy transparent to outside observers, the same textual strategies make the exact parameters of the ritual accessible to the general public assembled in situ as well as to outside authorities. As the script makes clear, the ritual actor now effectively has to provide a running narration that accompanies each and every ritual act or manipulation of ritual materials. Thus, when he is transferring the deer skin blanket to its new owner, the donor not only declares to all the article in question, but makes explicit its physical position—placed on top of a blanket that in turn is resting on kuśa grass—vis-à-vis all the other items on the ritual grounds. Where the rite specifies the use of vessels of various kinds made of distinct materials and containing specific concoctions—the sort of thing that observers of the ritual would be unlikely to directly perceive themselves— every dimension of the arrangement is publicly declaimed in a manner that effectively renders the clandestine interpolation of the types of transgressive Śākta rites that had previously resided at the heart of the means and methods of production all but [[P1446]] impossible. At the same time that pains are being taken to exclude such theologies as well as their promulgators, through the somewhat awkward integration of scholastic shorthand derived from Mīmāṃsā—such as the identification we see in this passage of the vessel being used in this rite as “having Śiva for its deity (devatā)”—Hemādri is crafting a formalized ritual repertoire abounding in rhetorical features that systematically align a new approach to ritual with a new mode of ritual analysis, both of which can only be accessed through the study and mastery of his Caturvargacintāmaṇi.

That the values that animate these new techniques undermine the Śākta-inflected imaginary of Cāḷukya Deccan in general, but even more specifically are effectively antithetical to the peculiarly Maharashtrian Śākta cosmopolitanism and emergent public culture so central to the Seuṇa Yādava court well into the thirteenth century, is hardly an accident. Indeed, though such an interpretation is uncharitable as it does not take seriously Hemādri’s seemingly sincere commitment to the decidedly unorthodox theology we will encounter in detail in the next chapter, one is tempted at times to see Hemādri as having reverse engineered his system with the deliberate intent of rendering the old paradigm outmoded and no longer functional. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, keeping in mind this sociological backdrop helps makes explicable one of our text’s most significant, surprising, and unheralded innovations: Hemādri’s reappraisal of the scope of Brāhmaṇical philanthropy. As we shall see, breaking from a consensus as old as the Guptas, and by this time deeply entrenched in the commentarial tradition on the Nārada and the Yājñavalkyasmṛti, our author offers a vision of Dāna that explicitly inhibits royal and individual patronage and financial support for non-“Hindu” traditions and non-Brāhmaṇa collectivities. [[P1447]]

Making sense of such developments demands a closer engagement with the framing of chapters 2 and 3 of the Dānakhaṇḍa itself. As we have already seen in regard to the Tīrthakhaṇḍa, and as both Aiyangar and Kane have noted in passing, Hemādri typically constructs the beginning chapters of each part of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi around a sizeable core of proof texts appropriated from the twelfth-century Kṛtyakalpataru of Lakṣmīdhara. In the case of the Dānakhaṇḍa, Hemādri even begins his own glosses by paraphrasing his predecessor, a state of affairs that has led the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, when it has been noticed at all by scholars, to be characterized as a derivative and unnecessary expansion upon an elegant original. What such a glib representation fails to recognize however, is that our author habitually deploys this inherited material in the service of new and radically distinctive conceptual ends. Sometimes, as we will see in a moment all it takes to instigate such a rectification of values is changing a single word. Just what is at stake and how our author engineers this shift will become clear to us when we place the largely parallel passages from the Kṛtyakalpataru and the Caturvargacintāmaṇi side by side:

Kṛtyakalpataru:

Devala: And now, I will explain the rules of gifting. The bestowing of wealth upon a prescribed recipient with a spirit of generosity (śrāddha) is designated as “gifting.” An analysis of that will now be stated:

L: “Prescribed” means “taught in the scriptures.”

D: Gifting is said to have two causes, six bases, six components, six effects, four kinds, three types, and three means of destruction.

L: [Causes of Gifting:] Whether small or large, the size of a gift does not bring about its benefits, but rather the spirit of generosity and capability associated with a gift—indeed, only these two things cause prosperity or ruin.¹⁵⁵

[[P1448]]

Caturvargacintāmaṇi:

Now Devala [says]: What is called philanthropy is the bestowing of wealth, accompanied by śraddhā, to the prescribed recipient.

H: The stated one means the one expounded in the śāstras. Namely, it is the bestowing of money unto a recipient—in other words, it is the relinquishing that culminates in the removal of one’s own ownership.

D: It is endowed with two causes, six bases, six components, and six effects. Philanthropy has four types, it is three-fold, and has three means of destruction.

H: By him himself was stated the elaboration on this: Whether small or large, the size of a gift does not bring about its benefits:

H: Śraddhā and bhakti are known to be the two producers of the flourishing or destruction of philanthropic activity. Śraddhā is the mindset of believers. Bhakti is meditation prefaced by emotional attachment.¹⁵⁶

Unmistakably, both of our authors introduce the topic of dāna with same quote from the Devalasmṛti: “philanthropy is the bestowing of wealth accompanied by śraddhā to the designated recipient.” That what we are looking at is direct textual dependence as opposed to a simple sharing of some canonical sources becomes inarguable when we attend to such details as the fact that both authors then open their commentary on this verse with an almost identical, and by no means self-evident, gloss on the past passive participle udita.¹⁵⁷ In Lakṣmīdhara, [[P1449]] said gloss is the entire extent of his commentary on this portion of the text; he continues on to cite at length a long explication of the different factors that speciate philanthropy, presenting without interruption some of the very same quotes Hemādri will later interweave into his work.

Hemādri, in contrast, though addressing himself to the very same text, eschewing the privileging of textual exegesis as an end in itself, with pedagogy in mind breaks the materials up into digestible chunks and clearly states the purpose and nature of the philanthropic act. Since he is not a prisoner to the external demands of an exegete who is impelled to explain every unclear feature of the root text however tangential, he rapidly rattles off the traditional taxonomy of explicating dāna in terms of two causes, six domains, and six ripenings—all offered with further explanation—before getting to his “real point,” which is that the success or failure of philanthropic activity is essentially determined by the giver having śraddhā and bhakti.

Bhakti, you may notice, is actually absent from the common recensions of our proof text. Undeterred, Hemādri simply adds it in, reducing the more common reading that we find in Lakṣmīdhara, śakti, in the secular sense of capability, to a mere afterthought.¹⁵⁸ Thus, with all the pieces now in place, our author has the materials on hand to harmonize his thinking in the realm of law with his wider theological program. In his superb dissertation, David Brick has noticed this peculiarity and proposed that Hemādri’s decidedly strange gloss of śraddhā as āstikyabuddhiḥ intends to affirm that the giver must believe in the efficacy of the philanthropic process itself.¹⁵⁹ As we will see momentarily, however, reading deeper into Hemādri’s corpus [[P1450]] provides us with a simpler answer. Here, for example, is how our author addresses a similar conceptual concern in the opening section of his Kaivalyadīpikā, the oldest substantial commentary on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, to which we will turn at length in the last chapter:

The purpose is obtaining kaivalya. The subject matter is bhakti yoga. The qualification of the eligible person is purity (sattva) qualified by lack of self-interest; [adhikāra is] not [dependent on] caste, stage of life, and so forth. Envy is not enduring the greatness of others. Purity is being a believer (āstikatva).¹⁶⁰

Succinctly, for Hemādri, notions of “faith,” eligibility for participation in religious life, and ontic purity of being are all but inseparable. If such purity is in part a matter of comporting oneself in accordance with what would later be called Vaiṣṇava dietary and social habits, at the same time it demands a sort of “mental hygiene,” what our author labels having the mindset of “being a believer,” as opposed to a nāstika. When we turn back to the Dānakhaṇḍa, we find unambiguous confirmation for this interpretation of the term in the following chapter in its discussion of unsuitable recipients. There we are told, “A knower of dharma should not offer [philanthropy], even once, to an unbeliever (nāstika) or a logician, or to any of the heretics (pāṣaṇḍa), or to someone who does not know the Vedas.”¹⁶¹ Hemādri’s gloss on these passages, which tells us that a nāstika is one who is empty of the traces of the other or supreme world and that a logician is one who, on the basis of argumentation, challenges the existence of such a state, make explicit that his rejection of such social actors is fundamentally a matter of beliefs and values. Succinctly, though such notions are entirely absent from his sources, our author is imposing an ideological litmus test over what constitutes the boundaries of acceptable religion at the very same moment that the very same conceptual resources are being deployed in the service of excluding those social agents and religious modalities that fall outside the purview of his worldview from having any access to substantive social capital, resources, or disciplinary power. [[P1451]]

As once again the raw materials on top of which Hemādri installs his interpretive project are inherited from Lakṣmīdhara, it is worth looking at how the Caturvargacintāmaṇi diverges from its sources. As Brick has shown us, Lakṣmīdhara dedicates most of the third chapter of the Kṛtyakalpataru to compiling what are mostly pretty prosaic praises of Brāhmaṇas, speciating them at great length in terms of their individual attainments and forms of merit. While Lakṣmīdhara is quite clear in communicating that as a class, Brāhmaṇas are the best recipients (satpātra) for dāna, from his perspective, such statements are by no means intended to exclude non-Brāhmaṇas from being fit vessels for philanthropy. It is perfectly acceptable to offer most kinds of things to Śūdras and other such folks, though you do not yield quite as much merit from doing so. In this spirit, he liberally cites a range of proof texts in favor of this position, a representative sampling of which we will quote here:

Yama states: A gift to a non-Brahmin yields an equal reward; a gift to one who is a Brahmin in name only yields twice that; a gift to one who is learned yields one-hundred-thousand-times that; and a gift to one who has mastered the Vedas is infinite. . . .

Bṛhaspati (14.10, 11–12) states: According to tradition, a gift to a Śūdra yields an equal reward and a gift to a Vaiśya twice that. A gift to a Kṣatriya, they say, yields three- times the reward, while tradition holds that a gift to a Brahmin becomes six-fold. . . .

Yama says: It is said that a gift to a Śūdra yields an equal reward and a gift to a Vaiśya three-times that. They say a gift to a Kṣatriya yields six-times the reward, while tradition holds that a gift to a Brahmin becomes ten-fold.

Dakṣa states: A man should give to any person who seeks him out and begs for the sake of a calamity, a disaster, or a debt or for the sake of his family—this is the prescribed rule for all gifts. . . . Whatever is given to a parent, elder, friend, gentleman, benefactor, indigent, pauper, or distinguished individual is fruitful. Indeed, one who desires prosperity should give gifts to indigent, poor, and distinguished individuals, for those who do not give gifts to such people are reborn as those who must live off others’ good fortune.¹⁶²

[[P1452]]

Though indeed privileging Brāhmaṇas, Lakṣmīdhara and his sources thus embrace a sort of catholic vision of philanthropy where, at least in regard to most types of philanthropic rites, being a “proper vessel” is not determined by and large by one’s caste, religious commitments, or ideological positions. The only types of people whom he specifically identifies as not serving as fit vessels for philanthropy, quite pointedly, are thieves, slaves, quack doctors, gamblers, frauds, as well as Brāhmaṇas who teach Śūdras the scriptures for a living (but not Śūdras themselves) or anyone who habitually displays a lack of integrity. In other words, he is making a qualitative and not a normative judgement. Indeed, while he shows little interest in scrutinizing the claims of Śūdras, who are after all both fit vessels for dāna as well as appropriate donors, provided they do not use Vedic mantras in their rituals, and even less concerned with the lower ranks of twice-borns, Lakṣmīdhara is quite invested in exploring the intricacies of the intra-Brāhmaṇa pecking order. Towards this end, he directs the reader’s attention to a curious passage, ascribed to the Śātātapasmṛti,¹⁶³ that identifies six-classes of “so-called Brāhmaṇas”: 1) the Brāhmaṇa who takes his wages from the king, 2) the one who is a professional trader, 3) the one who performs yajñas on behalf of many (in other words, who sells his Vedic rites), 4) the one who sacrifices on behalf of a village, 5) the one on the [[P1453]] payroll of a village or the payroll of a city, 6) the twice-born who does not observe the sandhyā rites at the three junctures of the day. All of these, it is said, should be regarded as the equivalent of Śūdras, who, once again, are still fit if not ideal vessels for receiving philanthropy. Without more context it is difficult to determine for certain what this passage originally was actually about, but one plausible reading is that represents the continuation of an ancient inter-Vedic quarrel expressing the hostility and anxiety of Yajur Vedic communities who champion a Śratua sacrifice oriented a model of the “triple Veda” over and against the largely Atharva Vedic advocacy for the purohita as Vedic ritualist par excellence. Such a reading explains why most of the so-called Brāhmaṇas identified in our passage are deemed suspect simply for performing large scale rituals on behalf of royal authorities or civic formations.

Regardless of such niceties, for Lakṣmīdhara, the cited passage offers a transition into consideration of non-Brāhmaṇas as suitable vessels for philanthropy, albeit on a graded scale. The passage’s use of the term “non-Brāhmaṇa” as a term of art specifically referring to the six- fold classes of so-called Brāhmaṇas also enables Lakṣmīdhara to reconcile some contradictions in the calculus of force multiplying the merit derived from donations based on the statuses of the recipient. The problem runs as follows. Three key Dharmaśāstra proof texts say that by giving to a non-Brāhmaṇa, one achieves merit equal to the base line amount of puṇya stipulated by a scripture. So, if, for example, a specific philanthropic act is said to provide the donor with the merit from one hundred horse sacrifices, giving to a non-Brāhmaṇa would provide one hundred horse sacrifices worth of merit. The same text then goes onto to assert that, in cases where giving to a Brāhmaṇa is not stipulated by the text as a component of the ritual, one gets double that merit—two hundred horse sacrifices worth of puṇya instead the measly one hundred—for giving to a Brāhmaṇa. So far, so good. Where the trouble arises is that a greater [[P1454]] variety of sources offer a more classic pattern of caste-specific escalation that substantively diverges from this norm. In these texts, where the donor type is not specified, the philanthropy to Śūdras produces merit equal to whatever is stipulated in the base form of a rite, philanthropy to Vaiśyas doubles that merit, and giving to Kṣatriyas triples it. If the recipient is a Brāhmaṇa, these sources say, you get six times the merit for your buck. The contradiction here is quite obvious—namely, does giving to a Brāhmaṇa merely double your merit or does it multiply it six-fold? Lakṣmīdhara’s solution to this not terribly pressing problem is to stipulate that where the first text is contrasting the relative merits of giving to a non-Brāhmaṇa versus a Brāhmaṇa and asserting that you only get double the merit, the text is not speaking of any non-Brāhmaṇa person, but exclusively the six-classes of “so-called Brāhmaṇas” identified by Śātātapa. In other words, rather than having to pick between these two seemingly conflicting standards for calculating karmic merit, he sets out to prove that there is no contradiction at all.¹⁶⁴

Hemādri, as we should by now anticipate, takes this same set of proof texts, augmented with a few more of his own, and deploys the same rhetorical trick, taking the term “so-called Brāhmaṇa” out of Śātātapa and equating it with the other references to the “non-Brāhmaṇa” found in his other sources.¹⁶⁵ Departing markedly from Lakṣmīdhara, however, he equates the concept of the “non-Brāhmaṇa” (abrāhmaṇa), which is to be systematically equated with Śātātapa’s “so-called Brāhmaṇas” wherever that lexeme appears, not merely as linked to one discrete lexical item but as functioning as a conceptual unit with a plurality of synonyms. In fact, what Hemādri seems to be asserting is that, since as he will establish, for most acts of [[P1455]] philanthropy only Brāhmaṇas are the appropriate vessels, wherever in the proof texts a “non- Brāhmaṇa” of any sort is treated as a fit vessel for philanthropy—even when the referent used is one of the other varṇas or jātis—we need to understand the passage as solely referring to Śātātapa’s six-fold canon of “so-called Brāhmaṇas.’ In other words, when a passage says that “Śūdras get the same merit and a Vaiśya twice that, but a gift to a Kṣatriya. . . yields three times the reward,” the words Śūdra, Vaiśya, and Kṣatriya are all being used in a metaphorical sense. The actual topic under discussion is the relative virtues of donating to the different types of “so-called” Brāhmaṇas. It is these strategies that rather counterintuitively enable Hemādri to frame analysis of a compilation of passages whose plain sense conveys the message that Śūdras and the other varṇas are appropriate recipients for philanthropy in a manner that aims at radically circumscribing the participation of non-Brāhmaṇas in the real economy of medieval India.

In these passages, when it comes to the non-vessels who are claiming Brāhmaṇa status for non-Brāhmaṇas, the designation of “being a vessel” has as its subject forms of dāna that are distinct from the dāna of giving cows accompanied by mantras and so forth: “When dāna is given to a ‘non-vessel’ preceded by [Vedic] mantras, then having, first severed the hand of the donor, he should cut off the tongue of the recipient”. . . . Because there is a prohibition on the conferring of the designation “vessel” in cases where cows and so forth are given preceded by the mantras, the representation of “being fit vessels” when it is applied to Śūdras and the like has as its scope of applicability [solely] philanthropy that entails the giving of food.¹⁶⁶

[[P1456]]

It is important we begin to recognize that the framework that Hemādri is proposing here is no mere abstract aspirational scholastic exercise in proposing preferences but, as we shall soon see, is actively enforced by disciplinary power that has the backing of the state. This model effectively curtails Śūdras and other non-Brāhmaṇa agents from participating in the most expedient means from accumulating non-perishable property, just as further stipulations, which we will not be examining in detail, all but prevent most of these same social agents from functioning as the primary class of philanthropic donors. As we have seen time and again throughout this study, non-Brāhmaṇa social formations under the guise of Kālamukhas and Mahāpāśupatas of various sorts, as well, of course, as Jains, were the dominant property- owning communities as well key makers of institutions, institutional cultures, and infrastructure throughout the medieval Deccan. Non-Brāhmaṇas were also largely responsible for funding these institutions and generating the lion’s share of religious merit. Thus, what Hemādri is proposing amounts to a radical redistribution of privilege, wealth, and resources that effectively dismantles the economies of his day.

Now at first glance, one might be inclined to assume that what Hemādri is asserting here is nothing more than a reversion to a hardline affirmation of intrinsic Brāhmaṇical privilege. Something decidedly more interesting is going on, however, for Hemādri’s characterization of the “proper recipient,” the Brāhmaṇa, takes a rather unexpected form, offering a denaturalization of Brāhmaṇical privilege and that the very same moment that it is transferring disciplinary power and agency to a very particular type of Brāhmaṇa. Thus, just after offering the usual platitudes—there is no god equal to a Brāhmaṇa, there is no guru equal to a Brāhmaṇa, there is no injunction more authoritative than a Brāhmaṇa—our author starts invoking sources that drastically restrict the very nature of what “being Brāhmaṇa” means:

“Neither caste (jāti), nor family (kula), nor the study of scripture, nor the śruti are the causes of “Being Brāhmaṇa,” O king. Conduct alone (vṛttam eva) is the cause of “Being Brāhmaṇa.” What is the benefit of lineage to a corrupt soul devoid of conduct? Do worms not arise in flowers that smell good? O king, there is not a single textual reading that is to be taken up exclusively! O dear one, seek out conduct—[after all,] even among the rākṣasas there is great erudition! [[P1457]]

What is the use of a lot of rehearsal as if one were a bad-minded actor? It [the Veda] is studied or heard by [any] one who practices the ritual [regardless of their character]. Just as, if one tastes milk or water that is inside a skull bowl, it is degraded on account of the fault [deriving] from [the] place [that it occupies] (sthānadoṣena), it is the same for scripture that is devoid of conduct (vṛttahīna).

Therefore, O king, know conduct to be the defining characteristic of a Brāhmaṇa. One who knows the four Vedas but has bad conduct (durvṛtta) is remembered to be lower than a Śūdra. Truth, restraint, austerity, philanthropy, non-violence, restraining the senses, in whom these are seen, O Indra among kings—he is remembered to be a Brāhmaṇa.”¹⁶⁷

Throughout this study, we have seen that across a whole host of social positions and levels of articulation, for at least half a millennium the dominant paradigm in operation throughout the medieval Deccan had embraced an episteme organized around context- and site-specific forms of knowledge and praxis. On a juridical level, these commitments had been translated into something akin to what the Anglo-American legalist tradition would be inclined to represent as a positivist vision of law, where what constitutes law is largely determined by the social facts on the ground as practiced by actual communities—and a pluralist vision of the nature of authority. When framed in terms of the philosophy of ethics, the sort of stances we keep encountering bear a family resemblance to what the philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin has famously referred to as “value pluralism: “the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational (for rational we might read logically internally coherent), fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and [[P1458]] deriving light from each other.”¹⁶⁸ Such pluralism denies there is any single all pervasive source of reasons either motivating or vitiating action. In doing so, it also necessarily rejects the existence of a single dominant value and standard for evaluation. Much like the evidentiary model we have seen at work in the evaluation of the claims staked by individual samūhas within the Indic legal system, these positivist visions of law assume that sources of value and internal standards for valuation are not absolute and universally true, but emerge within specific social and institutional bodies at documentable moments in sacred or secular time and that they are grounded in reasons that are best understood by people from within that community who have objectively mastered its canons of value. It is this confluence of ideals that renders internally coherent conceptual frameworks such as Bṛhaspati’s seminal invocation of a deśācāra where, “In the east, [people] are fish eaters and women are devoted to infidelity. In the north, the women drink liquor and they are to be touched by men while menstruating. . . . according to this conduct, these things are not demanding of punishment or expiation.”

Within the tradition of Western political legal history, legal positivism and its various medieval antecedents find their counterpart in the principle of lex naturalis—natural law, a conceptual framework that views that legality is not a matter of observing and the enforcing the actual codes of conduct practiced by communities, but in making normative judgements based on abstract standards. As the humanist political philosopher John Locke wrote in 1620, effectively distilling several thousand years of Western discourse on lex naturalis: [[P1459]]

Natural law is a fixed and permanent rule of morals which reason itself pronounces and which persists. . . . firmly rooted in the soil of human nature. Hence human nature must needs be changed before this law can either be altered or annulled. . . . Since all men are by nature rational, and since there is harmony between this law and rational nature, all men in the world are morally bound by this law. . . . In fact it seems to me to follow that. . . if he is a man he is bound. . . to fulfill the things appropriate to rational nature in the same way that it follows. . . that a triangle. . . [must have] three angles equal to two right angles. . . . Furthermore, this natural duty will never be abolished; for human beings cannot alter this law because they are subject to it, and it is not the business of subjects to abrogate laws to their liking. . . . For, since God has made man such that these duties of his necessarily follow from his very nature, He surely would not alter what has been made and create a new race of men, who would have another law and moral rule.¹⁶⁹

Just as it did for many of his intellectual predecessors, for Locke, that idea that “there is a fixed and permanent rule of morals,” “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature” by which human beings are obligated to abide forms an integral component of his theory of legitimate authority. As we see in this passage, the existence of a universal and rational canon of values that orders our existence makes it incumbent upon each and every person that they have a “natural duty” to submit to the sovereign authority that defends and enforces these intrinsic norms. Just as the permanent rule of morals in Locke’s representation is singular and unchanging, so too is sovereign authority, whether we are talking about God in his heaven or the king and his state upon the earth, unitary and without any “other.” [[P1460]]

Succinctly, what Hemādri has done is to reintroduce a normative theory of the nature of law into the world of Dharmaśāstra. But unlike his predecessors, he grounds this prescriptive vision not in the self-justifying authority of the Veda, but in a universal theory of ethics that makes moral comportment—good conduct—the determining factor in deciding whether any discourse, agent, or human activity has intrinsic value and should be treated as authoritative. As we will see at some length in chapter 11, as befits a theory of natural law, Hemādri’s discourse on ethical comportment is virtually inseparable from his ontology of purity (sattva) so as to render “being ethical or good” effectively the same thing as being legitimate or even [[P1461]] real. What this essentially means is that any divergence from what are now being proposed as all-encompassing ethical norms, what the positivist tradition had inclined to see as “site- or context-specific” emendations to the general rules—like when a Bengali is permitted his quaint customs of open adultery—is to be seen not as a difference that the authorities one must respect and protect, but as an abrogation of intrinsic duty nullifying an agent’s rights, authority, and privilege, regardless of his reputation or cultural patrimony, Vedic or otherwise.

Apart from its vivid imagery and intrinsic interest, part of what is so astonishing about the otherwise unattested passage we have just been exploring is that the conduct (vṛtta) it has presented as the defining feature that makes someone a Brāhmaṇa has strong parallels with the ethicalized reimagining of dharma as a universal discourse—equally applicable to all four castes—for which, as we shall see when we turn to the next chapter, our author has so elegantly and forcefully advocated in the opening section of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. In fact, the two lists diverge only in that the universal dharma expected of everyone actually entails a greater more demanding range of virtues than are ascribed here to Brāhmaṇa-hood. What is being proposed here then, is something like a republic of virtue, in which the universalizing standards of a universal sāmānya dharma overturns all particularized domain-specific logics, including the various community-specific samayas and the pluralistic theory of property rights and sovereignty that made them possible, that animated an older Cāḷukya inflected world order. Thus, at the very same time that Hemādri sets out to drastically curtail the ability of Śūdras and other such folk to occupy a pivotal role in networks of circulation and exchange, he is also establishing an ideological litmus test for what constitutes a legitimate Brāhmaṇa whose authority should be respected. Unstained by any sustained contact with systems of knowledge that, by advocating untoward conduct degrade the intellectual and moral integrity of those who [[P1462]] participate in them, the Brāhmaṇas in question have found a new source of guidance that helps them to lead upright moral and ritual lives. The source of guidance in question, of course, is none other than the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself, which (especially in its original extended form) provides to its imagined reader a wealth of ready to use templates and resources that streamlines the degree of skill and knowledge necessary to execute or oversee a wide repertoire of socially and economically significant rituals. In essence, it offers itself as a guide for professionalizing Brāhmaṇas, on the spot, to assume the role of a new kind of Smārta dharma authority, ready to assume a host of functions—for which there were minimal precedents in the world of Dharmaśāstra—previously occupied by the very demographics they have displaced with assurance that they will have the complete backing of the Seuṇa state, morally, politically, and economically.

As any vulture capitalist can testify, displacing entire classes of people from the key positions that they have traditionally held within the networks of circulation governing the transfer and movement of resources, ideas, people, and money, and dismantling long standing institutions liquifies previously frozen forms of capital, enabling its transfer to new communities and sites of accumulation. As we saw in the last chapter, well into the thirteenth century, far from being dominated by a Brāhmaṇical ecumene, the Seuṇa domains in Maharashtra as well as the borderlands comprising what are now parts of Karnataka and Telangana were a world where “pakka” Brāhmaṇas had to carve out an often relatively humble place for themselves in the shadow of Kālamukhas and other Śāktas who were intimately linked with royal and military power centers. To be Brāhmaṇa in this world—as opposed to being an initiated vīra—granted a person access to no private clubs and held no promise of privilege or substantial financial compensation for one’s activities. As this chapter has begun [[P1463]] to make clear, in the middle of the thirteenth century, emerging from the heart of the Seuṇa court and the pen of a man who was often the kingdom’s de facto ruler, we see a radical reorientation of values and priorities that seeks to reestablish Smārta Brāhmaṇas as disciplinary agents, as authorities, and as the pillars of their communities at the expense of other demographics. A key part of what makes this utterly ambitious and socially disruptive interpretive project feasible in practical terms is that it enables a radical redistribution of resources, out of the hands of institutions and agents embedded within older Śākta-inflected ecumenes and into the hands of the expanding ranks of upwardly mobile “professionalized” Brāhmaṇas. That this sea change in values coincides with a staggering redistribution of real- world resources is made evident in many of Hemādri’s own verses, which celebrate his efforts as acting as a veritable mountain of gold to the Smārta community. Let us look at just two examples.

By him, every day, 36,000 Brāhmaṇas, learned in the Veda and its aṅgas, were fed with rice, [rice which served] as the abode [housing] different types [of food,] stuff to be licked, sucked and savored, accompanied by a broth and endowed with relish and sweets, all of which are placed in an array according to the propensities of their various qualities. And he led them in an instant to supreme joy with a whole lot of gold strewn all about.¹⁷⁰

By him, money was given beyond counting—[so much money] such that it made the courtyards belonging to whole clans of Brāhmaṇas glimmer from the wonderous rays [from the gold] that he had redirected away from taking entry into the treasury of the King. Praiseworthy for his lovely deeds, his good conduct and discrimination, Hemādri’s glory is made even greater by the thickness of his love for the beloved of Nanda (Kṛṣṇa), who is pleased by his hosts of intense vows.¹⁷¹

[[P1464]]

In order to be viable, social revolutions have to enlist a demographically sizeable social base comprised of a class of people who are dissatisfied with their place in the current social hierarchy and possess socially significant skills. To the Brāhmaṇas of Maharashtra who were not revered on the basis of their initiations into ever more rarefied bands esoterica within the Mantramārga, used to be being also-rans once they stepped outside of their agrahāras, Hemādri held out the promise of real wealth and real influence. Clearly, he delivered. If, setting aside much poetic hyperbole, we take the concrete claims offered in his verses basically at face value, by sometime in the 1250s, it would seem that the Yādava state was feeding 36,000 Brāhmaṇas a sumptuous feast every day and then showering them in gold. To help us orient ourselves to the scale of this endeavor, thinking comparatively, in the thirteenth century the city of Paris was the largest urban center in Europe. It had a total population of about 80,000 people. In other words, every day, at Hemādri’s direction, the Seuṇa empire set out to feed and publicly reward a community of Brāhmaṇas just a bit shy of half of the population of Paris. Or if you prefer an Indic standard of measurement, albeit one that we can thus far not identify as extant in Hemādri’s own lifetime, Purāṇic chronicles that focus on the Koṅkaṇa, when speaking of the great deeds of the cultural hero of coastal Brāhmaṇas, Paraśurarāma, celebrated as unparalleled his accomplishment of settling 36,000 Brāhmaṇas along the coast of the western Deccan.¹⁷² Such tales treat these quasi-mythical progenitors as the sires of virtually all of the subsequent lines of Brāhmaṇas in the region. Succinctly, whether we take his claim literally or otherwise, Hemādri presents himself and the state he represents as the most [[P1465]] generous of patrons, eager to recruit a vast vanguard of the under-represented to carry out his cultural revolution.

Hemadpanthi: The “Reformation” of Temple Culture under the Law

In comparison to the many other things we do not know about the highly schismatic dynasty that called themselves the Śilāhāras—such as where precisely they came from, what language was spoken at their courts, or why they chose to call themselves “meat offering on a rock”— the peculiar rhetorical choices made by the king of Thane that he should live on in the memory of his people and its institutions almost exclusively in terms of the story of how his enemies effectively annihilated his kingdom without taking him hostage is, at best, a minor sort of mystery. Nevertheless, in the handful of copper plate inscriptions produced during the relatively long reign of Aparāditya I, erstwhile king of the northern Koṅkaṇa, as well as in the records produced his largely insignificant heirs, once one peels away the usual cacophony of rhetorically inflated birudas, the only concrete accomplishment assigned to this ruler by subsequent Śilāhāras is that “he was the king who lived.” As the Vaḍavalī plates, found on the outskirts of what is now the city of Vasai tell the story:

There was a certain demon of the Andhaka [i.e., Yādava] dynasty by the name of Chittukka.¹⁷³ So that he could shatter the world, he dispersed/obliterated the assembled circle of the vasal lords [beholden to Aparājita]. When the gurus had “departed,” when the wealth of dharma was ruined, when the radiant abode [i.e., the palace at Sthānaka] was obliterated, when the entourage of the people at the ruined city had perished, along with the prosperity of the kingdom, it was him [just Aparāditya I] all alone—with one horse, and the pair of his arms, and a sword.

Looking up from within the frenzied battle, [Chittukka] saw him. He [Aparājita] quickly caused that opponent to take flight. It was not known by [Chittukka] clearly, [[P1466]] how to fight or how to flee. From fear of him [Aparājita], having extracted his army [from the battlefield], [Chittukka] went to rest in the domain of the Barbarians.¹⁷⁴

But for its substitution of the sword for the more typical machine gun and the absence of various large things exploding, the picture being painted for us here resembles nothing so much as an action movie from the 1980s. King Aparājita assumes the role that in the American century would be assign to a Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, or Jean Claude van Damme. The plot is simple. Our hero, his family and friends eliminated, the stability of his whole world destroyed, looks down upon the smoking ruin of the battlefield. As the sound of the symphony introduces the soon to be incessantly recurrent theme, tonally marking our protagonist’s vendetta, looking up from the battlefield, the eyes of his arch enemy meets those of our hero. The bad guy glowers. Our hero grimaces. The enemy gives a signal, turns away, and he and his hoodlums escape into the night. Sitting in the audience, given the hyperformalized conventions of the genre, we know these very same bad guys will be encountered later on as the film draws to its close. In keeping with the simplistic moral universe of Reagan’s America, we know for certain that, after wiping out his rival’s forces, our hero will track down his nemesis. He will confront him. Then, after avenging the deaths of his friends and family, he will kill the wicked man, perhaps by throwing him off a building or beating him bloody with his cold bare hands. The details are immaterial, for the narrative structure is predetermined and the message it conveys is that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, so long as justice arrives armed to the teeth. [[P1467]]

Things worked out somewhat differently for poor king Aparājita, more commonly called Aparāditya I. It is true that over the next few decades, he managed to cobble together much of the territory that traditionally made up his ancestral domain, and by the end of his reign, though they were not entirely contiguous pockets of land paying him allegiance extended from the heartland of his kingdom—in and around what is now Mumbai—as far south as the caves at Panhale Ganj just a few hours from Kolhapur. As far as we can tell, however, he never again encountered, let alone conquered, the ferocious Chittukka who had laid waste to his world. Instead, sometime after the reoccupation of the Śilāhāra capital city of Sthānaka, located in what is now the city of Thane, the singular Aparājita—or as he called himself, “the Second Sun”—amidst the ruins of his palace, began to compose the Sanskrit treatise for which he is best remembered, an extended and often very acerbic commentary on the Yājñavalkyasmṛti entitled the Aparārka. Referring to the very passages that will soon occupy our attention, namely, the commentary on verse 1.7, which is concerned with determining what sort of authorities have validity, Alexis Sanderson has described the Aparārka as taking a “conservative stance,” and characterized Aparāditya as one “who devoted much learned effort to resisting the drift into acceptance of the initiated Śaivas” into polite society.¹⁷⁵ Based on such a representation, which arises organically from the rhetoric of the treatise itself, in the absence of any further historical details, a reader would naturally assume that the “conservative” Aparāditya I embodied the efforts of the social establishment to restore a well- worn status quo, newly infringed upon by upstart social climbers holding noticeable Śaiva [[P1468]] commitments. As we are beginning to see, however, our documentary records overwhelmingly speak to a very different sort of dynamic, one in which Aparāditya I and the values he champions stand at the geographical and conceptual periphery. Far from representing the status quo, as modern scholarship has supposed, Aparāditya’s hyper-Brāhmaṇism reads as a marginal force in the political and social realities of a western Deccan thoroughly dominated by the very sort of “initiated Śaivas” that he lambastes so vituperatively, and impotently, in his writings, among whose ranks one can indisputably include the enemies who levelled his kingdom.

As for the “demon” Chittukkarāja, though history knows him primarily by another very different name, he went on to what at the time would have seemed a much more illustrious political and military career. Having laid waste to the heartland of the kingdom of this minor northern rival, after taking everything of value one could carry away, including many slaves and prisoners, the person historians typically refer to as the Kadamba king Jayakeśin II—son- law of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya king Vikrāmaditya VI—would have boarded his vast fleet of war ships and began the long journey home down India’s western coast.¹⁷⁶ Most likely, as Aparāditya I himself suggests, Jayakeśin and his armies would have first laid anchor eighty miles to the south of Thane at the port city of Chaul in modern Raigad district. Just as our inscription speaks of a domain of the barbarians (mlecchāśraya), at this time Chaul was under the control of an Arab merchant colony, whose mercenaries the Kadambas would often employ against their enemies. His armies fed and the storehouses of his ships refurbished, booty in hand, Jayakeśin and his army would have set a course for the Kadamba capital of Candrapuri, modern day Chandor in the state of Goa. It is here that our story gets interesting, for, as Mark Dyczkowski has shown at great length in his multivolume introduction to the Kumārikā [[P1469]] Khaṇḍa of the Manthānabhairava Tantra, not only do the Śākta tantras of the Western transmission treat Candrapuri in the Koṅkaṇa as the last dwelling place (veśmān) in the age of kali of the goddess Kubjikā in her form as the mother of the Koṅkaṇa (Koṅkaṇāvva), but they identify the Kadamba kings themselves as numbering among the Śākta siddhas responsible for the transmission of her teachings throughout the Deccan.¹⁷⁷

Now, we know of two Kadamba kings with this very same name. The first of them, Śaṣṭhadeva I, is known to us only from certain Kadamba vaṃśāvalis, though after the dynasty becomes established, many of these begin to omit him entirely, posing the possibility this king might well be mythical. In any case, this Śaṣṭhadeva allegedly ruled from 998–1013 CE, a somewhat problematic proposition as these same dates would encompass in their entirety the period of rule ascribed to his son and successor Nagavarma as well as Nagavarma’s son and successor Gūvaladeva I (c. 980–1005 CE), the first Kabamba King for whom we have proper documentary records. It is Gūvaladeva, incidentally, who established the dynasty’s connection with the Arab merchants at Chaul, for it seems they rescued him after his ship, which was making pilgrimage to Somanātha, was lost at sea. Gūvaladeva’s own heir was Śaṣṭhadeva II, famed for his piety, whose long rule and considerable influence render him a more plausible candidate for the Śaṣṭhanātha of the Kubjikā Tantras. In his inscriptions, Śaṣṭhadeva, the great-grand uncle of Jayakeśin II, is celebrated for making a joint pilgrimage to Somanātha in Saurashtra and then Kolhapur in the southern Koṅkaṇa, with explicit intent that he would pay homage first to the god Mahākāleśvara and then to his consort Mahālakṣmī. In other words, even without the additional corroboratory evidence provided by the Śākta texts of the Western transmission, we have ample reason to accept that the Kadambas in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had aligned their dynasty with the authority of an elite Kaula tradition into which the ruling monarchs would have been at the very least nominally initiated and that this is taking place at the very same moments when the Kadambas have established strong ties to the major source of political authority in the western Deccan, the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas. See S. L. Shantakumari, The Kadambas of Goa and their Inscriptions, as well as S. G. Kadamb, Sources of History of the Kadambas of Goa Inscriptions (Panjim: Broadway Publishing House, 2013).

It is against this very different backdrop that we must reassess the expected elocutionary effect of a minor regional ruler—one moreover who has recently lost most of his kingdom—penning a diatribe questioning the legitimacy of Tantric scripture, Tantric personhood, and the construction and maintenance by Tantric practitioners of Tantric temples and institutions. What this wider historical context renders transparent is that Aparārka’s voice [[P1470]] speaks to us from a position of vulnerability instead of strength, expressing the views of a heterodox minority and not the “mainstream.” This is a state of affairs that diverges radically from the position Hemādri’s Caturvargacintāmaṇi, its prescriptive vision wedded to a powerful state, would assert for itself a mere century later.

The ostensible occasion for Aparārka’s commentary, which runs dozens of pages, is a single verse in the Yājñavalkyasmṛti that sets out to delineate “the foundation of dharma.” As we shall see in the next chapter, this is very same textual locus upon which Hemādri will anchor a key part of his own in many ways very different hegemonic assertion of a new Brāhmaṇical dharma. For this reason, it is worth taking a moment to orient ourselves to the issues at hand. Against Gautama, who spoke solely of vedamūlatva as dharma’s foundation, Yājñavalkya proposes that dharma can be founded on the 1) śruti, 2) smṛti, 3) sadācāra, as well as 4) that which is pleasing to one’s own self (svasya priyam ātmanaḥ). In the Mitākṣarā of Vijñāneśvara, composed, we should remember, in the court of the father-in-law of Aparāditya I’s arch enemy, the verse in occasion is of minimal interest, warranting just a few lines of prose, two supplementary proof texts, and a series of short inherited glosses. Vijñāneśvara treats śruti as meaning the Veda (śrutir vedaḥ) and Smṛti as referring to the Dharmaśāstra, interpretations he justifies with a well-known citation from the Mānavadharmaśāstra (śrutis tu vedo vijñeyo dharmaśāstraṃ tu vai smṛtiḥ).¹⁷⁸ Somewhat less straightforwardly but still none too unexpectedly, the third component—sadācāra—Vijñāneśvara interprets as the ācāra practiced by the śiṣṭas (satāṃ śiṣṭānām ācāro ‘nuṣṭhānam). For our purposes, it is this last interpretation that is the most important, for it stakes a position that essentially legitimizes any form of social practice so long as it is well known that it is practiced by highly respected [[P1471]] Brāhmaṇa authorities. As we have seen time and again, upon such foundations of clever exegetical strategies was the Tantric social imaginary built. It is precisely this position that Aparārka sets out to refute vigorously and at great length. The last element, originating with Manu, carves out a space for individual acts of the human will to be seen as bearing merit, a position that Vijñāneśvara basically accepts and Aparārka, as we are about to see, contorts to mean something entirely different. With this in mind we can begin to turn to Aparāditya I’s commentary.

On that matter, when it comes to the agnihotra and so forth, Śruti is the root of certainty. Smṛti [is the root of certainty for] varṇāśramadharma and so forth, [and] good conduct (sadācāra) for the holāka [festival] and so forth. An action is said to have “satisfaction of the mind” when it is enjoyed as delimited by satisfaction of the mind. As, for instance: “When a certain action is done, there would be a heaviness of his mind, regarding that [set of circumstances], one should perform austerity until it causes satisfaction.”¹⁷⁹

In redefining the canon of a nascent “Brāhmaṇical” religion as comprised not of texts open to reinterpretation but of discrete practices, ideological stances, and events, Aparārka is already departing liberally both from contemporary interpreters and from the inherited tradition. Since the authority of the Veda is unchallengeable and yet at the same time much of what the Veda contains and prescribes departs substantively from an emerging vision of what it meant to be Brāhmaṇa in the early centuries of the next millennium, the scope of the Vedic must be confined to a recognizable set of ritual performances. In a similar spirit, as the canon of “accepted” Smṛtis has over the centuries expanded to incorporate textual authorities, such as the Śivadharmaśāstra, that advocate for values and practices that provide legitimacy to the very religious modalities Aparāditya I is about to condemn, the category of “remembered [[P1472]] tradition” (smṛti) must be taken to as referring not to a class of texts, but to specific doctrinal stances, epitomized by the acceptance of varṇāśramadharma, amiable to our author’s perspective. Perhaps most importantly, instead of reading sadācāra as synonym for the conduct of the śiṣṭas, drawing upon arguments in Śabara’s Bhāṣya on the Jaimini Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, Aparāditya equates good conduct with a hyper-delimited set of “popular” festival events that find mention in the Vedic corpus but whose means of performance is never outlined in these works. For the Mīmāṃsā tradition, as epitomized by holāka, the predecessor of the modern festival of Holi, the specific delineation of a discrete number of’ “acceptable” non- Vedic festivals that find mention in the Veda has as its more fundamental intended meaning a blanket prohibition on the celebration of other sorts of “local” religious festival by pious Brāhmaṇa authorities.

Reinscribing sadācāra with this hyper-delimited meaning has two other consequences that will prove absolutely essential to the Aparārka’s attempts at delegitimizing the Tantric world. The choice effectively removes from consideration the textual foundations for the tradition of legal pluralism, which treats community- and site-specific codes of conduct (ācāra) as legitimate sources of dharma, and devolves deliberative authority over those varied ācāras to a range of community-specific agents, many of whom are non-Brāhmaṇas. Just as significantly, Aparāditya is seeking to erase one of the mainstays of the classical Dharmasūtras, namely, the very notion that dharma can be discerned through observing the conduct and actual practices—the śiṣṭācāra—of learned and respected Brāhmaṇa authorities operating in the real world. For Aparāditya, this conceptual choice is absolutely indispensable, for “the real world” he lives in abounds in illustrious lines of Brāhmaṇa authorities of impeccable pedigree who are also initiates in the Śākta and Śaiva Tantras. [[P1473]]

Now that he has redefined the legitimate sources for knowing dharma, Aparāditya I is ready to turn to his main task in this part of his commentary, the delegitimization of Tantra.

Vyāsa says: “By those who are desiring to obtain purification by/of dharma, nothing other than the Vedas is needed. The cause of dharma is pure, everything else is called mixed.”

A: “Purity” means the state of not being mixed. “Dharma” means certainty about dharma. “Pure” means not flawed. “Mixed” means that in which flaws have been brought into being.¹⁸⁰

“Now, that is the supreme dharma, which is learned from the Vedas. That which is remembered in the Purāṇas and so forth is known as the lower [dharma]. One should practice with effort the ritual action that was remembered long by the sages, the best of the knowers of the meaning of the Vedas, but avoid what is forbidden by them. For, one should not deliberate about the dharma that was shown, out of compassion for the welfare of the worlds, by those knowers of the truth of the meaning of the Vedas. Even if there is ignorance about the meaning of the Vedas when one cognizes it for oneself, what doubt can men have when it is certified by the sages? Whatever would denote dharma other than that, know from a good distance such a thing is understood to have delusion as its foundation.”¹⁸¹

[[P1474]]

Aparāditya I’s doctrinal stance here is as transparent as it is self-serving. In the hierarchy of sources for knowing about dharma, the knowledge we get from the Vedas about ritual performance resides at the very top and our access to it is entirely mediated through the knowers of meaning of the Veda, namely, Mīmāṃsakas and perhaps Vedāntins. This entire body of knowledge not only overrides all other sources for knowing dharma, but it itself cannot be questioned or made the subject of “deliberation.” Following his proof text, Aparāditya I concludes by asserting that all of the other things that call themselves sources for knowledge about dharma—which is to say a good portion of even what the textual mainstream of śāstra has considered to be sources for dharma knowledge—are illegitimate and must be entirely discounted. It is on this doctrinal foundation that our author now seeks to comprehensively demonstrate, through what he imagines to be rigorous logical argumentation in the manner of a philosopher, that the traditions of the Atimārga and Mantramārga must neither by studied nor practiced by any human agent. Towards this end, he proposes, entertains, and then discards a series of distinctive pūrvapakṣas that set out to defend the legitimacy of Tantric knowledge as having sanction in orthoprax canons delineating ritual obligations. Aparāditya I is not a particularly brilliant stylist nor is he a well-organized polemicist; indeed, at times it simply seems like he is jotting down a whole range of potential objections to his opponents’ positions and has not even bothered to place them coherently in sequence so as to make a convincing argument. These are features of his discourse that may well suggest that the Aparārka actually was composed by the king himself and not by some pandits on his behalf. For this reason, our present purposes will be best served distilling his argument down to a few key points. [[P1475]]

Aparāditya I really hits his stride as a polemicist when he turns to dismantling quite specifically the arguments in support of the authoritativeness of what he calls “Śaiva” knowledge. In essence, the Aparārka identifies, in order of priority, three major ways in which Tantric knowledge diverges from the norms preferred by the vituperatively vocal but decidedly minority Brāhmaṇa viewpoint he represents, and his construal has much to tell us about the social perception of Tantric knowledge systems and their practitioners by outsiders. First and foremost, our author objects to the core claim that tantric initiation—dīkṣā—confers a change in caste status that has real-world social consequences. His lengthy attempts at refuting this idea, and with it the very idea of Śaiva identity as legitimate, offer what is one of the richest intellectual moments in the whole treatise. Second, our author sees the Tantras as perpetuating and normalizing to an unprecedented degree acts of ritual violence, especially through sorcery, as well as the ritual use of transgressive substances, which he asserts is forbidden in the kali yuga. Finally, our author seeks to query the claims that because some of the doctrinal and practice elements found in these texts correspond to what we find in the Veda, we can readily accept whatever “innovations” these revealed texts might offer that do not explicitly conflict with Vedic knowledge. For our purposes, we will confine ourselves to engaging with the first of these arguments. In this spirit, let us begin with our author’s arguments regarding initiation and caste:

A: When it comes to the worshipping of the gods and so forth, only the procedure that is well known from the Narasiṃha Purāṇa and so forth should be taken up, and not others. Thus, this is to be understood regarding dīkṣā as well. For, in the dīkṣā that is well known in the Purāṇas, there is no purification of caste. However, in the Śaivāgamas, [it is said:]

“First is the stationary class, then are the things creep. The third is the class of birds, and the fourth is the class of hunted animals. The fifth is the class of domesticated animals. The sixth is the Untouchables. The seventh is the class of Śūdras. The eighth is the class of Vaiśyas. The ninth is the class of Kṣatriyas and the tenth are known of as Brāhmaṇas. These classes are purified by Śiva, the Lord of jātis.”

A: By this statement and so forth, by the demonstration that there is purification [of caste], there is as a consequence non-eligibility [of the purified ritual agent] for Śrauta ritual. “The Brāhmaṇa should establish the fires,” “the king should sacrifice with the rājasūya,” “the Vaiśya should sacrifice with the Vaiśyastoma”—by these and so forth, Vedic ritual operates only in regard to someone possessing a class (jāti).¹⁸²

[[P1476]]

Confirming what we have been arguing throughout the present work, namely, that the teachings of the Śivadharmaśāstra, as well as the receiving of dīkṣā were quite regularly construed as having a concrete real-world impact that rendered those who were governed by these strictures no longer subject to the regime of varṇāśramadharma, Aparāditya I seeks to contrast the acceptable modes of initiation taught in other, often Vaiṣṇava sources, with this disruptive “Tantric” innovation. Whereas the Tantras themselves, in teaching that “dīkṣā liberates,” ontologically as well as sociologically, for through it Śiva either makes one become a Brāhmaṇa or purifies one of caste identity entirely, saw such intervention as emancipatory, Aparāditya asserts that while such initiations do have real-world consequences, their actual impact is to render the initiate socially illegible and to inhibit his participation in Vedic ritual of any sort. Since, so he suggests, all Vedic texts specify specific marked identities of caste and stage of life as being governed by their ritual injunctions, the second one is “purified” by Śiva’s touch or glance, even if he started out a Brāhmaṇa, a person is stripped of the very identities that were the foundation of their original eligibility for performing the rituals.

In keeping with our author’s rejection of the positivistic legal pluralism upheld by the mainstream of the Dharmaśāstra traditions most evident in the Deccan, including the Yājñavalkyasmṛti itself, in which a multiplicity of ācāra can serve as meaningful source for knowledge about dharma, the other key portion of our author’s polemic about the implications of Tantric ideas about caste sets out to refute the very idea that one can meaningfully designate any group of people as “Śaivas,” which is to say that there exists any social demographic for whom the practice and study of Tantric knowledge might be appropriate. [[P1477]]

[PP] Now one might object, just as it is the case that the Vedas and the other śāstras operate in regard to some certain limited group of people, the Śaiva and other similar śāstras should be taken in that same way as pertaining to those possessing a certain caste—Śaivas and so forth..

A: [To that we say] no. [For, it is said:]

“That one of whom the injunction that has arisen, by means of the mantras, beginning with the anointing and ending with the cremation ground, of him there is eligibility in regard to this śāstra and not of any other.”

A: Thus, by this statement and so forth it is shown by Manu and others that only twice- borns are eligible in regard to their own śāstras, and not so for Śaiva Brāhmaṇas with regard to the śāstras of the Śaivas and so forth.

[PP] Let it be the case then, that a Śūdra is eligible with regard to the Śaiva and other śāstras.

A: No. Because this is not understood to be the case with regard to Smṛtis and other śāstras. And furthermore, there is no such thing as a Śaiva by caste towards whom might be addressed a certain Śaiva śāstra. However, according to Pāṇini’s sūtra (4.3101), by applying the suffix aṇ, “Śaiva” means the śāstra that has been spoken by Śiva. And from the same base word, “Śaiva,” one reapplies the suffix aṇ, thus “Śaiva” means “one who studies that [i.e., the śāstra of Śiva]. Then, by applying luk [which erases the previous function only in this particular case], one who knows or studies the Śaiva śāstra is a “Śaiva.” Thus, we have the Pāśupatas and others.

Since, thus, the Śaiva and other such śāstras do not by nature operate with regard to a certain delimited group of people, acquiring [this knowledge] is like seeing pictures in the clouds. [In other words, it is not a real form of knowledge acquisition]. That being the case, it is to be abandoned with regard to practice.¹⁸³

Clever scholastic maneuvering aside, again it is important for us to recognize that Aparāditya I’s argument is founded upon claims that in the medieval Deccan most authorities would have considered rather questionable. As we saw in chapters two and three, the ideas that disputes should be adjudicated by people who belong to the communities under discussion and not by outsiders, and that collective social formations, whether defined by theology, caste, or profession, should be governed according to the principles outlined in “their own śāstras,” [[P1478]] were widely accepted textual norms held in common both by the living traditions of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra descending through Yājñavalkya as well as Tantric and other “heretical” ecumenes. Even more importantly, as we have seen many times throughout this study, these idealized textual prescriptions largely match up with the state of affairs reflected in our documentary records and material cultural resources. In contrast our author’s preferred notion that only twice-borns have a right to consult and be governed by “their own śāstras” as late as the twelfth century seems at best to have represented a minority position confined to a specific textual corpus and largely absent from the documentary record. Ironically, the pūrvapakṣin’s second suggestion, also deflected by our author, that the Tantra as knowledge system is the religion of Śūdras, while only occasionally represented in our documentary record, will actually become the preferred Siddhānta of the more “inclusive” dharma traditions of early modern north India, such as the Śūdrakamalākara of the Maharashtrian Brāhmaṇa Kamalākara Bhaṭṭa. In contrast, outside of a minority of Vaiṣṇava sectarian theologians, Aparāditya I’s preferred stance—that no one is eligible to become a Śaiva—would continue to find few adherents among the emerging tradition of Smārta Dharmaśāstrin ritualists that would dominate elite early modern knowledge production, especially in Sanskrit, on the subcontinent.

If being Śaiva, our author suggests, is intrinsically illegitimate, the sort of practices these dubious texts put into circulation are at least equally disconcerting. From the perspective of an outsider looking inward, the Mantramārga seems to be offering two concrete products that influence the lives of non-participants in these knowledge systems. The first of these is black magic,¹⁸⁴ and the second the production of material culture. Drawing upon a range of [[P1479]] classic textual resources, including the Śabarabhāṣya and Manu, the Aparārka sets to establish that in the present age, the use of transgressive materials in ritual is prohibited and deploying of ritual magic against one’s enemies brings about a fall into untouchability. But while the lurid details he has culled out of various lost Tantras offers us a candid glimpse of why outsiders to the Tantric knowledge systems would have been quite justified in holding the practitioners of these sorts of rites in abject horror, taken as a polemic here again, Aparāditya I has offered up a rather stale argument that any reasonably talented rival could readily rebut simply using passages from the Tantras themselves. Thus, for example, the very same grounds for discounting magic acts found the Tantras would prove equally applicable to the Atharva Veda in either of its recensions, both of which abound in almost exactly the same sort of offensive magical rites explicitly directed at parallel ends.

Just how unpopular the Aparārka’s agenda must have been is laid bare when we turn to the second dimension of our author’s searing critique of the social consequences of Tantric normativities, namely, his discussion of the dominance of the world of material cultural production, especially the construction industry, by those pernicious Śaivas and their systems. In this case, however, faced with what seems to be a cold hard reality that the very technology that makes possible the production of material culture is largely derived from texts reflecting [[P1480]] with Śākta commitments, against the even more extreme disavowals attributed to an even more stringently orthoprax imagined opponent, our author seeks out something of a middle path, allowing for the use of the technical materials found in these texts provided that their doctrinal elements are discarded.

PP2: Thus, in regard to ritual installation (pratiṣṭhā) as well, only the procedure stated in the Purāṇas and so forth is to be accepted, not anything else. Because they [the Purāṇas] alone are accepted in the Bhaviṣyat Purāṇa as being authorities regarding “mixed dharmas.”

And thus, in the Bhaviṣyat Purāṇa—“The Eighteen Purāṇas, and likewise the story of Rāma, the Viṣṇudharmaśāstra and so forth, and the Śivadharmas, O Bhārata, the Kārṣṇa, which is the fifth Veda, which is known to be the Mahābhārata, the Sauras, O best of kings of dharma, those stated by the Mānava, O lord of the earth, men say that victory is the name of these ones. . . .¹⁸⁵

PP: But also, in the Devī Purāṇa [it is said:]

The one who is the knower of the Vāma and Dakṣiṇa paths, who has gone to the far shore of the knowledge of the mothers, would be the best of ritual installers (sthāpaka) of the goddesses and with regard to the mothers. He is skilled in the meaning of the Pañcarātra. He is skilled in the system of the mothers. He possesses the house of Viṣṇu. He is always praised as a brahmacārin and giver of pacification. He is a knower of the śivadharma [śivaśāsana]. The one who knows the purpose of the gaṇas, the mothers and the grahas, being a householder or chaste student, is renowned as a ritual installer. . . .

PP1: This is also not an indication that the practice [of this system] is that of the “outsider” Āgamas, [which are condemned].

PP2: [However this is to be rejected], because its practice is forbidden in the Matsya Purāṇa. As it is said in the Matsya Purāṇa:

“O twice-borns, listen to the characterization in its entirety of the sthāpaka. He is skilled in the mantras of the Vedas, endowed with all of the limbs. He is a knower of the Purāṇas and is a knower of dharma. He is devoid of arrogance and greed. He arises in the country where the black deer goes about. He has an auspicious form; he is always [[P1481]] intent on the conduct of purity. He is not in contact with the lineages of the heretics”. . . .[^14??]

326]

A: Nor is it to be said that an installer of images who works with supplementary materials derived from the Tantras that constitute his own dharma—for example, ritual installation—has knowledge of [such] Vāma and Dakṣiṇa transmissions [i.e., a special capacity as sthāpaka] strictly on the basis of having taken initiations stated in those [Tantras].

Because, this [idea] is not accepted in the Smṛtis and other śāstras—because, it is not established that it is the Vāma and Dakṣiṇa transmissions as stated that delimit one’s being an installer and so forth. Because, given that upon one’s own examinations, the Left and Right transmissions, preceded by the demonstration of their own exegesis, have their doctrines supplemented in a dependent manner with the supplementary materials of [knowledge derived from] various vidyāsthānas, and therefore, the Left and Right transmissions merely convey supplementary assistance from one’s own Pratiṣṭhā Tantra by [offering] purely easeful and complete instruction.”¹⁸⁶

[[P1482]]

In this section, the Aparārka introduces two distinctive pūrvapakṣins. The first of these insists that when establishing a structure or installing an image, only Purāṇic authorities can be consulted, for these are the sole resources prescribed for engaging with the so-called “mixed dharmas,” mostly pertaining to quotidian human needs and desires. At the same time, this stance prescribes that the ritualist who is to conduct the installation must be a-twice-born learned in the Veda and Purāṇas who was born in Āryavārta and has had no contact with heretics and their doctrines. For a Deccani king seeking the support of local Brāhmaṇa authorities who resides in the Koṅkaṇa, it is easy to see why such a definition would have [[P1483]] proven too stringent and narrow. Living in the Śaiva Age, complete non-contact with the heretics—in other words with the ideological and theological systems in evidence in most courts, was basically non-tenable for anyone who ever left their agrahāra. Even more importantly, for someone based in the twelfth-century Deccan, the Matsya Purāṇa’s emphatic insistence that the only person who can oversee construction sites and install images is someone born in what was by now a narrow belt in north India increasingly under the control of “foreign invaders” was highly impractical. Such a standard not only would have entailed that the overseers for all temple building and construction projects would have been culturally and linguistically distinct from the crews they deployed, which in practical terms would have been a disaster, but it excluded from consideration any of the Brāhmaṇa communities residing in the king’s own domain, the very people who would have represented the most logical allies for his Brāhmaṇizing project.

It is the second opponent’s stance, invoking the Devī Purāṇa, however, that proves most relevant to our own interests, for what it asserts is that the ideal sthāpaka is none other than a Śākta Kaula following the Vāma path or Bhairavasiddhāntin adhering to the Dakṣiṇa transmission. This is to say, in the context of the medieval Deccan, that the sorts of authorities that the sthāpaka should consult are texts like the Piṅgalāmata and the type of person who should be in charge of installing images in the first place must belong to the very same demographics as the kārukas and their skull carrying Kālamukhas guru overseers. Moreover, the text makes plain that such a person has mastered the Śivadharmaśāstra and is employed to perform the Śāntyadhyāya to pacify bad circumstances and malignant entities. In his terse prose commentary, immediately following this quote, the imagined opponent sets out to establish that far from representing an outsider (bāhya) order of values, the Devī Purāṇa is [[P1484]] perpetuating “mainstream” values, and in a certain sense, as we have seen throughout our own investigations, he is basically correct.

Aparārka begins by acknowledging what to him must have seemed a sad state of affairs, namely, that it is logistically impractical to dispense with a methodology that thoroughly dominates the existing market. In other words, unlike Ballālasena, he is unwilling to simply declare that the Devī Purāṇa, which transparently advocates for the Śākta Tantras as pramāṇas, and its ilk are fraudulent sources that solely transmit delusion. How he seeks to circumvent this dynamic, which seemingly entirely undercuts his claims that the acquisition of Śaiva knowledge, like looking at the clouds in the sky and comparing them to different objects or animals, serves no concrete human end, is by asserting that the all of the actionable knowledge found in the texts of Vāma and Dakṣiṇa transmissions does not originate in these transmissions themselves nor is it causally conditioned by their doctrinal or theological tenets. Instead, he claims, everything of value in these texts actually is derived from the Brāhmaṇical traditions of the vidyāsthānas. Accessing this knowledge through the medium of Śākta Tantras is merely a matter of convenience for the users, since these sources offer particularly detailed and well-organized discussions of the relevant source knowledge. As we saw repeatedly in chapter 6, such a perspective of course is entirely in conflict with the emic understanding of the Śākta sthāpakas themselves, for they believed the capacity to craft and enliven images and empower structures that are so integral to temple design and construction emerge directly and organically from an esoteric awakening. When the craftsman receives the transmission from their teacher, or a teacher from their own guru, as a byproduct of śaktipāta, there emerges a new capacity to align with, transfer, and manipulate different registers of energy, śakti. By adopting the bhāvas of the different gods as they work, the craftsman becomes able to replicate [[P1485]] their presence in permanent form within animate objects and spaces. In short, professionalization in this model is fundamentally dependent on the ability to cultivate at will the states of altered of consciousness or experiences of possession that are defining features of Kaula discourse and are most certainly not a regular part of the repertoire of classical vidyāsthāna pedagogy.

By attending to the interpretive choices that were made by Aparājita I’s near contemporary, Lakṣmīdhara, in the relevant portions of his own Kṛtyakalpataru, we get a much clearer sense of the eccentric nature of Aparārka’s compromise position even within the “Brāhmaṇical” discourse of the day.¹⁸⁷ Lakṣmīdhara invokes nearly exactly the same corpus¹⁸⁸ as Aparārka, namely, the Narasiṃha Purāṇa, Matsya Purāṇa, Bhaviṣya Purāṇa, and Devī Purāṇa. But in contrast to his counterpart, who, as we have seen, while not rejecting the text outright is noticeably embarrassed by much of what it advocates, for Lakṣmīdhara, it is the Devī Purāṇa that provides the most important conceptual resources that he will use in structuring his treatment of pratiṣṭhā. In fact, when it comes time to define the characteristics of the sthāpaka, the Kṛtyakalpataru embraces the very same passage that had caused Aparāditya I such consternation. Not only does Lakṣmīdhara cite from the text, offering a much more extended version of the passage that does much to clarify its actual intent, but the very passage in question actually supplies the guidelines he will use throughout his treatise in determining just how one should approach the consecration of the different types of deities.

L: Now the installers (sthāpaka):

It is said in the Devī Purāṇa: [[P1486]]

“Brahmā spoke: In the Śaiva system, within the Siddhānta of Śiva belonging to Śiva, the entrance [into the work of installation] is to be done. Whether a householder or a brahmacārin, the installer (sthāpaka) serves the cause of liberation. The one who is a knower of the Vāma and the Dakṣiṇa who has gone to the far shore of the knowledge of the mothers would be the best installer of the goddesses and even of the Mother. The one who is skilled in the meaning of the Pañcarātra, the one who knows the nature of the mothers, [installs] on behalf of Viṣṇu. He is a knower of the mantras, a householder, and a brahmacārin who keeps the fires. The one who is a knower of the śivadharma, who knows the purpose of the gaṇas and the mothers of the house, the one who knows the meaning of the solar deity system, is an installer of Sūrya, who bestows auspiciousness.

The twice-born ṛtvij Brāhmaṇs who knows the nature of the meaning of the Veda and the Veda, and with regard to the other [deities], the installers who are knowers of their own śāstras who do auspicious worship: [all these are acceptable]. The Śaivas who are householders and best of twice-borns [can do installation] with regard to all [ritual systems]. And the ones are authorized who know the meanings of the mantras and the installation [procedures for] all of them.”¹⁸⁹

[[P1487]]

The text continues, offering additional specifications for esoteric Śākta systems, before concluding by specifying what types of social agents are not eligible for performing pratiṣṭhā and serving as sthāpakas.

Now in regard to the Guruvetāla Tantra and in the Bhūta Tantras in the Dakṣiṇa system, in regard to the Kālikā in the Vāma Tantras the one who knows [the installation in all those systems] is a conveyor of noble auspiciousness. . . . Having known the form [image] that is [for] the installation of the goddesses—[that is the] entry way into the work [of ritual installation]. There would be twelve forms of Viṣṇu, of the one enjoined of [that] path and so forth. Having known the procedure for the door station deity, that installation would be auspicious. Otherwise, he would bring about an agitated quarrel, death, and great terror.

In [the context of] the kingdom, in regard to a yajamāna, a king, or installer who is without the Āgama, those contrary entrants [into the work of pratiṣṭhā] will be cooked in the Avici hell and so forth [and likewise] those Brāhmaṇa sthāpakas who are devoid of the procedures (vidhi) belonging to Viṣṇu or Śiva. . . . O Indra, otherwise, the fashioning that is done using a common procedure will bestow terror. In general, the pūjā and the entry into the system (niveśanā) are different according to different doctrines.¹⁹⁰

[[P1488]]

Now that he has provided a whole range of options for different types of sthāpakas as befit different purposes, Lakṣmīdhara next turns to the question of who exactly has adhikāra for performing ritual installations. Again, it is the Devī Purāṇa that provides him with his answers.

L: Now, the ones who are eligible. The Devī Purāṇa says:

The gods should be installed according to the division of varṇa and āśrama and not otherwise. Brahmā is to be installed by Brāhmaṇas, he being auspicious and accompanied by the Gāyatrīs. Now, Viṣṇu is established by the four varṇas, having been caused to be installed by the ones desiring happiness. But Bhairava, however, [is installed] by the four varṇas and by the untouchables, according to their doctrines.¹⁹¹ All the people install the Mothers who are the best of the gods.

Having caused a liṅga to be installed, a householder or even an ascetic should worship it always. Śiva being installed bestows health, a kingdom, and likewise, a son. However, a Lord of Yoga (yogeśa) who is endowed with yoga should be installed by those who know yoga. Otherwise, a loud substantial commotion will arise in the city.¹⁹²

[[P1489]]

In comparison to what we saw prescribed in the Piṅgalāmata, in a certain sense, the Devī Purāṇa is here advocating a socially “conservative” position within which only specific agents can engage in particular activities in a manner conditioned by caste identity, and within which there are potentially dire consequences for transgressing such norms. What is conspicuously absent from such a disciplinary order, however, is any effort at creating a systematic privileging of the authority of Brāhmaṇas. Instead, the ordering principle here is that pantheons and their associated regimes are essentially community-specific. While Brāhmaṇas have exclusive sovereignty over the installation of the images of the god Brahmā, they possess this right for precisely the same reason that professional yogins are given a monopoly over the installation of “yogic deities,” a logic of sympathetic magic in which like aligns with like.

Before setting these materials aside and returning to our account of how Hemādri remade this world, we might also make note that the religious landscape that the Devī Purāṇa formulates and that Lakṣmīdhara proceeds to formalize draws a fascinating and somewhat expected distinction between two kinds of social inclusivism in the domain of religion, one that should render plain that even in regard to the early medieval world, histories of caste are often entirely different and distinct from histories of untouchability. As the Devī Purāṇa understands things, Vaiṣṇava traditions acknowledge the adhikāra of “all four varṇas”—in other words Brāhmaṇas, Kṣatriyas, Vaiśyas, as well as Śūdras—to act as religious authorities, at least in the domain of installing images. This is substantive inclusivism that does indeed go beyond typical post Vedic-era Vaidika visions of who is eligible to act in the religious domain. As such, it would be easy to overlook that such a system deliberately skips over any mention of the people we now call Dalits, were it not for the fact that the Devī Purāṇa deliberately juxtaposes this delimited inclusivism with the ethos of the Bhairava tantras, which, from an etic perspective explicitly treats people from an antyajāti background as religious authorities. It is only in some of the Śākta sources, building upon the archaic Atimārgic legacy of the Śivadharmaśāstra where, at least in some domains, allusions to caste simply fall away. One [[P1490]] order of preferentiality is then replaced by a different hierarchical order. This founded, in theory, on initiations and esoteric attainment, but in practice quite likely was powered by networked social connections that linked people from disparate backgrounds on the basis of shared commensality in a ritual setting.

As we have seen in the Piṅgalāmata and the inscriptional record, in the world of the late medieval Deccan, one of the primary occasions for experiencing such ritual commensality was precisely the festivities surrounding acts of pratiṣṭhā as well as the subsequent annual celebration of such occasions. This was when kings, warrior chieftains, the local big man, or other analogous political authorities, drawn from a range of castes, the religious professionals responsible for the management of sacred domains falling outside of the purview of the state, by this period largely Kālamukhas, also from a range of castes, acting as the primary transmitters of the Śākta Tantras and Bhairava Siddhānta, and the ostensibly Śūdra or Dalit professional artisan and artist builder and performance classes who made the lived reality and composed the soundtrack that ordered much of lived experience, came together and shared space and affective emotional experiences while supping on the transgressive witches brew that marked them as brothers. As we have seen throughout this study, it was these moments and these spaces that formed key bonds that ordered an otherwise almost overwhelmingly pluralistic world whose differentiated domains rendered much of influence and social capital site and praxis specific. Instituting a new world organized around different values would necessarily therefore demand disrupting this existing order and undercutting the mode of social relations that it fostered.

At Kukkunur, in the courtyard that stands before the Navaliṅgeśvara temple, the stone themselves speak of such continuities. There, on single sheet of stone, in varied hands spanning two centuries, five inscriptions from the Cāḷukyas, the Kālachuris, and the Seuṇa Yādavas [[P1491]] express their intentions to protect the long established siddhapīṭha in accordance with “its own dharma” (ī dharmmamaṃ svadharmmadiṃ sāsirvvaru pratipāḷisuvaru).¹⁹³ The chief focus of each of these records is an affirmation of and investment in the oldest site at Kukkunur, corresponding to the original place of its founding (mūlasthāna). A few kilometers away from the Jyeṣṭhā temple, we find the site is marked by a now heavily renovated Rāṣṭrakūṭa structure, somewhat older even than Navaliṅgeśvara, that is dedicated to Śiva.¹⁹⁴

Figure 24: Kaḷlēśvara temple, Kukkunur as it appeared before the recent renovations. Published in Gerard Foekema, The Cāḷukya Architecture. Vol II. p. 642.¹⁹⁵ [[P1492]]

For this reason it is hardly surprising that in the documentary portions of the śāsanas under discussion, the bulk of which were produced during the floruit of Kaḷēśvara’s predecessors and successors, alongside consistently offering homage to these sacerdotal authorities, acknowledged with varying degrees of intimacy as gurudēvaru, svāmigaḷu, and pūjāri, we find evidence of financial support to the Brāhmaṇas at the local brahmapurī, variously characterized either as Ṛg Vedic or (somewhat implausibly given the register of expression in evidence) those who have crossed over the farthest shore of the four Vedas (cartvēdapāragarappa [sic]) but also of oja/ojja artisans, garland makers, and makers of song (hāḍuvargam), and of ascetics, possibly committed to the worship of Khaṇḍobā/Mailāri, engaged in austerities (ekkōṭi tapōdhanaru). Though each of these texts is pretty terse, there is [[P1493]] considerable consistency across the corpus not only in the sort of social agents and institutions to whom the donations are addressed, but even in the circumstances under which the endowments are being made.

Figure 25: The maṇḍapa that abuts the front of the Kaḷēśvara temple at Kukkunur. The now heavily whitewashed images on top seem to be older than the interior, which has many Vijayanagar period modifications.

Four of the five donations were made during solar, lunar, or combined eclipses, with two of them being made during eclipses during the new moon (amāvāsya) typically one of the least auspicious days of the Indian calendar.¹⁹⁶ All five of the inscriptions, it almost goes with saying, understand Kukkunur as an undying land-grant, to be managed in perpetuity by the overseers of its temple complexes, figures who explicitly and implicitly are recognized as having juridical authority over the management of the space and whose affairs fall outside the purview of state intervention. This dynamic, in fact, which simply takes the sacred autonomy [[P1494]] of the siddhakṣetra for granted, holds true throughout the entire inscriptional corpus without a single exception, independent of how aligned the donor is with the institutional values of the site. Thus, for example, a copper plate from 1183 CE issued by a Kalachuri ruler speaks of how:

The King of Kings. . . renewed the endowment of the great divine field known of as Kukkunur, which is the domain of the mother of the world, the illustrious Goddess Jyeṣṭhā, which is contained within the 300 charter of Beluvala, having villages endowed in perpetuity with well-known limits, along with its gardens, stones, water, buried treasure, deposited wealth. . . . endowed with governing authority has mastery over the eight enjoyments. . . . It is endowed with [exclusive rights concerning] all the collections of substances, taxes, duties, customs, correctional authority, juridical authority. . . [jurisdiction over] artisans, garland vendors, and worshipping officiants, and is entitled in perpetuity not to be “pointed at” [repossessed] by the king.¹⁹⁷

[[P1495]]

In a similar vein, less than a decade beforehand, the inscription dedicated to celebrating the siddha Kaḷēśvara concludes by rather emphatically declaiming: “To the one who protects the unperishing dharma, there will be a destruction of all sin. May it be so! [But,] for the person who even thinks about the ruin of this place, a complete destruction of their family line will ensue.”¹⁹⁸

The very last inscription produced at Kukkunur during its heyday is scrawled on the bottom of a floor to ceiling stone plate that still stands in the courtyard before the Navaliṅgeśvara temple.¹⁹⁹ Rather significantly, it was issued in the twenty-first year of the [[P1496]] reign of Siṅghaṇadeva II, the Seuṇa Yādava king. It is unclear whether it was the king himself or one of his representatives who made the pilgrimage to Kukkunur to perform worship of the honorable feet of the ācārya of the gods. By this time, it seems, Kaḷēśvara, either deceased or retired, had been succeeded by a certain Virūpākṣasvāmi, and it was this authority that the Seuṇa power implored to perform rites directed at removal of “obstacles,” both sacred and secular. As part of the bargain, it almost goes without saying, the Seuṇa kingdom affirmed the sovereignty of Kukkunur and its Kālamukhas in perpetuity. The year was 1231 CE. Hardly anyone could have imagined that two decades later, the Śākta power center at the heart of Kukkunur would be wiped off the face of the earth let alone that this would take place under the explicit direction of the Seuṇa king’s own son.

[[P1497]]

At Devagiri, in the assembly of the king, it was announced by the king Śrī Kṛṣṇa himself that Kukkunur [was to be made] a garbhagṛha for all the gods (sarvadevatāgarbhagṛham). He [the commander, Cauṇḍarāya], being commanded by the king “do it, for the sake of the flourishing of our kingdom,” had obtained the seal of the king for that purpose.

Given that there was a transgression of dharma (dharmaprasaṅga), according to the statement “whoever owns the earth at which time owns the fruit,” the general welfare indicated that the great agrahāra of Kukkunur, which is the crest jewel of the fields of all the siddhas, had to be taken over [lit., released (mukta)]. In the seventh year of the reign of Śrī Kānharadeva, who is the wheel turner proud with splendor with the power of the arms of Nārāyaṇa of the Yādava clan, Kukkunur was made an agrahāra with fixed taxes (niyatakara), to be paid with gold dinar (niṣka). . . .

Due to truth, the sun illuminates the world; the deities have arisen from truth. From truth, the earth bears fruit. In truth, everything is established. Thus, being addressed by them, Śrī Cauṇḍarāja, with supreme bhakti, preceeded by the washing of the feet, gave Kukkunur to those great Brāhmaṇas of various gotras along with showers of gold.

Regarding the protection of this dharma, the fruit is the earth, which has been enjoyed by many kings beginning at creation. To whomever it belongs at a certain time, his is the fruit. . . . Whoever disregards [this] in action, thought, or speech will become a Caṇḍāla at that very moment, cast outside of all dharma.

The seat of all dharmas, the breath of all embodied beings, the instruction of future kings: by him [Kandharāya], this order has been given. Let this be made free from [[P1498]] deficiencies, with no defects, by those who are knowers of faults. May dharma be eternal, and embodied beings be happy.²⁰⁰

As we seen throughout this chapter, the Seuṇa Yādava King Siṅghaṇa II was at once the perpetuator of the old ethos of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas and the promoter of newly emerging popular Śākta ecumene specific to Maharashtra. Rather unexpectedly, his death almost at once sparked a sea change in values. With the ascent to the throne of his son Kandharāya (c. 1247– 1259/60), a new sort of centralized policies emanated from the Yādava royal court and down into the real world, leading to the rejection of an older order of values founded on a different vision of the comity between religion and law. In this copper plate issued in 1255 CE, a mere five years before the release of Hemādri’s Caturvargacintāmaṇi, an undying land-grant that for centuries had been under the direction of non-Brāhmaṇa Śākta-Śaiva religious authorities tending to a pantheon of potent and even somewhat terrible esoteric deities is summarily terminated and its custodians are evicted—or in the bitterly ironic idiom of the Dharmaśāstra, they are forcibly granted mukti. [[P1499]]

Placed under new management and reinvented as an adjunct of the state subject to fixed taxes, much like we saw in the Marathi language inscription at Unkeshwar, the new Kukkunur is designated as a sacred center that is to house a pantheon comprised of “all the gods.” This is to say, the existing focuses of worship—Kālī, Jyeṣṭhā/Siddhayogeśvarī, and the Picumata Brahmayāmala’s Bhairava— are replaced by a decidedly non-popular and non-Tantric Vedic pantheon. In contradistinction with everything we have seen from our earlier sources, which addressed the merchant and artisan devotees of the Kālamukha gurus as the primary local authorities, oversight for their worship as well as all local affairs are placed in the hands of a collectivity of Brāhmaṇas. Indeed, instead of offering a hymn to a deity, such as the now ousted Jyeṣṭhā, the Kandharāya copper plate addresses its praises at tedious length precisely at these Brāhmaṇas themselves—all one thousand and two hundred of them. It is these gods on earth, four faced on account of their study of the four Vedas, singularly intent solely on sattvic things—and them alone—that the document sees as providing the source of sacral authority that makes Kukkunur great. And instead of being privileged for their great learning, the text celebrates our Brāhmaṇas primarily for their purity and their piety—in other words, for their conduct. The inscription concludes with emphatic affirmation of the necessity of protecting and enforcing dharma. It is dharma itself, and not the institution at Kukkunur, that is deemed eternal. [[P1500]]

Indeed, radically departing from the formulations as we find in the grants of the Cāḷukyas, Kalachuris, Hoysalas and prior Yādava kings, our text ascribes the locus of dharma not to some particularized samaya or svadharma that must be protected or to the authority of an enumerated samūha, but rather to the body of the king himself. It is Kandharāya, and by extension agents such as his chief minister and military commander (mahāpradhāna daṇḍanāyaka) Cauṇḍarāja, Hemādri’s immediate predecessor in the most powerful office in the land, that is “the seat of all dharmas, the respiration of all bodies, the instruction of future kings.” In place of site-specific pluralism, inflected by variations in time and context, now and forever, it is the state as embodied in the acting sovereign that is source of all legitimate authority and that sets the standard for what constitutes all acceptable human action.

In the realm of geopolitics, the reign of King Kandharāya was marked militarily by a series of rebellions. For reasons that are unclear, and which may well have to do with the sudden rejection of longstanding norms in the realms of governance and religion, virtually all of the Seuṇa vassal powers residing in Karnataka, for example the Guttas, the Sindhas, and the Rattas, attempted to break away from Seuṇa oversight, and each of them was brutally suppressed. In contrast, on the home front, the period saw an unusual degree of comity among the Seuṇa aristocrats themselves. Rather than offing his siblings, a very common strategic approach in these circles for consolidating power, Kandharāya entrusted them with key duties in helping to manage the Seuṇa realm. Most importantly, he embraced his younger half- brother, Mahādeva, first appointing him as the prince in waiting and designated successor (yuvarāja) and then actually sharing the throne with him in the last years of his reign, a dynamic that in the inscriptional records leads to a repeated representation of Kandharāya and Mahādeva as a second Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa or even Yuddhiṣṭhira and Arjuna, in the kali age. Thus, already, during the lifetime of his predecessor, certainly by 1251 CE, when he is no younger yuvarāja, Mahādeva seems to have begun to assemble his own personal court of commanders and advisors with the express blessings of his brother the king. [[P1501]]

In the absence of the publication and comprehensive study of the complete Seuṇa Yādava documentary records as they have been uncovered by various Indian institutions, especially the ASI, we are not yet in a position to accurately reconstruct the officials that would have made up either of these Seuṇa cabinets, which is to say who were the exact people who would have stood witness in the assembly of the king at Devagiri while King Kandharāya announced that to ensure the stability of his realm, Kukkunur as it currently existed would have to be destroyed. There is little reason to doubt, however, that a young Hemādri, already working within the chancellery and the treasury and working hard on what would eventually become his Caturvargacintāmaṇi, would have been among them. And while access to such resources may well serve to clarify once and for all the direction in which such influence is flowing—in other words, whether Hemādri is simply entextualizing an newly emerging Seuṇa imperial ethos already in evidence in the early days of his professional life or whether, as his writings assert, he himself was a key architect of this conceptual project, one thing that is certain is that the considerable conceptual and rhetorical overlap between documents like our Kukkunur copper plates and the prescriptions of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi can hardly be an accident. In fact, as we are about to see, it is the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself that provides the interpretive context for making sense of how seemingly incidental efforts at remedying individual “breaches in dharma” could usher in a new world order.

As was alluded to at some length earlier in this chapter, the published edition of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi leaves much to be desired, for it prints a text that is disordered and in many places very incomplete. As we do not, at least as of yet, possess a copy of the Mokṣakhaṇḍa, and the Tīrthakhaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi was unknown to its editors, in its current state the text as printed transitions from the division on dāna, a proper khaṇḍa, right to the Pariśeṣa, or supplementary portion. In Bharatacandra Siromani’s edition, this Pariśeṣa section begins with the two volumes containing the Śrāddhapaddhati and concludes with the astrological guidelines provided by the kālanirṇaya. One has only to read Hemādri’s [[P1502]] own preface to the Śrāddhapaddhati, however, to recognize that the text itself presumes that the Śrāddhapaddhati was to have followed at least two additional topical divisions within the Pariśeṣa:

And on that matter in the first [prakaraṇa of the Pariśeṣa], brilliant Hemādri who has an auspicious heart, speaks the śrāddha injunction joined with a praise of the result.

There is stated in the beginning, during the installation pertaining to liṅgas and images and so forth, [the procedures] for worship of such deities as Śiva, Viṣṇu, Gaṇeśa, and so forth. Immediately after [in the text], during the section on the installation of the cows, there was stated the procedures for the ārādhana of Harihara and so forth, as well as the wish-fulfilling cows who are Nanda and so forth, [all of whom] have the form of deities. Now, regarding the installation of those having the forms of Brāhmaṇas and so forth. . . is stated the worship of deities who have the form of ancestors (pitṛ). . . .²⁰¹

Thus far at least, the second, and potentially quite pertinent part of this paddhati, which would have told us in detail about what Hemādri envisioned regarding the worship of Harihara—Viṭṭhal at Pandharpur—as well as how Nanda and the other companions of Kṛṣṇa fit into this part of our story, has yet to surface. What we do have on hand, however, almost entirely intact, is the opening division of Hemādri’s unpublished and thus far undocumented Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, which we will read from the manuscript currently in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay. Here is how it begins:

There was a king known of as Mahādeva who was the ornament of the Lineage of the Moon, of whom there was a multitude of gracious [lit., autumnal] qualities. . . . Of him there was a lord of all the śrīkaraṇas named Hemādri. . . . Of that lord of the Śrīkaraṇas, there was a paddhati pertaining to all the gods (sārvadaivikī), which was exceptionally clever in showing the path of the Śrauta and Smārta rituals. In that paddhati, this is the first śloka:

Having approached the Pañcarātras, all the Purāṇas, and the entirety of the Śruti and Smṛti, and having “examined” the Āgamas, the Karmapaddhati is laid out for the benefit of sacrificers.

By Hemādri is stated the dyadic iṣṭāpūrta, which are the sanātana dharmas of all twice- borns, conveying the rituals of the Śrauta and Smārtas [and] who [abide by the] sadācāra.²⁰²

[[P1503]]

Eerily foreshadowing the idiom of early colonial and modern Hindu apologetics, Hemādri states that the purpose of the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati is to teach one dimension of the sanātana dharmas to his preferred demographic, namely, all twice-borns of unimpeachable conduct. On the surface, the religious modality he is promoting is made up of a two-part synthesis of Śrauta—or “Vaidika”—and Smārta elements, with the latter term in this context referring to a heady brew of Dharmaśāstra, Purāṇa, and repurposed extracts from both the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions of the Mantramārga. In actuality, however, in the sources we will be examining, the Śrauta contribution is mostly confined to some mantras and the liturgical use of Vedic hymns, often in strikingly new ritual settings, as well as to the rhetoric of Brāhmaṇical normativity. Almost all Hemādri’s key conceptual resources are drawn from an expanding canon of Smārta religious resources, which have themselves been extracted from rather disparate points of origin. We might notice as well that in Hemādri’s formulation, “the Āgamas” are set apart rhetorically and syntactically from the other elements, even being governed by a different verb (instead of being “attained” (samāsādya), they are “examined” (nirīkṣya)), a state of affairs in alignment with the subordinate incorporation of this discourse that will be on display throughout our text. While many of these elements are themselves hardly new, when the Caturvargacintāmaṇi was composed, one could have found precious [[P1504]] few precedents that were more than a century or two old for treating these practices and values as forming complementary parts of single system, or for labelling that system “Smārta,” let alone for proclaiming, as Hemādri is about to do, that this Smārta canon serves superior religious ends than Śrauta knowledge and praxis. In other words, our author is seeking to identify as constitutive of what is orthoprax and orthodox a body of knowledge that in fact, among learned Brāhmaṇas, has only just barely begun to pass into the realm of social acceptability.

As is often the case, before moving onto the Hemādri’s use of the term iṣṭāpūrta as comprising the union of Śrauta and Smārta dharmas, with the Smārta elements taking conceptual as well as rhetorical priority over the Śrauta, it is instructive to look to Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalptaru as a rhetorical foil. Lakṣmīdhara raises the matter of iṣṭāpūrta in an extremely brief manner towards the beginning of his Brahmacārikāṇḍa,²⁰³ in the context of the wider consideration of the different dimensions of varṇāśramadharma that opens his nibandha. Citing the Kālikā Purāṇa, we are told that iṣṭāpūrta is a dvandva compound made up of the Smṛta (and not Smārta) and Śrauta dharmas as accepted by the śiṣṭas (śiṣṭasammata). Iṣṭa is comprised of yajña and so forth, while pūrta is made up of things like pratiṣṭhā, a term Lakṣmīdhara helpfully clarifies he understands as referring to the installation of the gods through methods such as jalāśayotsarga and so forth (devatāpratiṣṭhājalāśayotsargādi). Iṣṭāpūrta, the text tells us, bestows both enjoyment and liberation (bhuktimukti), though it is [[P1505]] somewhat unclear whether these two outcomes are native to both domains, or if the pūrta gives “worldly enjoyment” while the iṣṭa results in heaven. Lakṣmīdhara next introduces his last proof text on this subject, drawn from the Mahābhārata, which seeks to further clarify the practices we should group under the two terms. Iṣṭa, we learn, entails the observance of the agnihotra, the keeping of the fires within the homes, and dāna. Pūrta, in contrast, is comprised of setting up wells, step wells, and tanks, the building of temples to the gods, the giving of food, as well as the making of gardens. Rather than representing the foundational elements that make up “pure” Brāhmaṇical observances, the purpose of these passages in situ is merely establish in passing that these practices are accepted—and acceptable—among twice-borns. Just as importantly, no attempt is made by our commentator or by his sources to align these two elements with specific canons of textual authorities, and this is in spite of the fact that the Kṛtyakalpataru, for the first time in Dharmaśāstra history, makes liberal use of Purāṇic textual resources. Lakṣmīdhara’s real objective here, as is made clear by the following citations from Manu and several other dharma works, help clarify the relationship between Varṇāśramadharma as a system in the abstract and the specific dharmas allotted to particular varṇa subsets, a topic that occupies him for quite a bit of time. With this in mind, we can return to considering how Hemādri will make use of the very same sorts of raw materials.

H: Among those two, the iṣṭa bestows the fruit of heaven and the pūrta is known to bestow mokṣa. The iṣṭa is defined to be the agnihotra, austerity, truth, and the recitation of all the Vedas, the honoring of guests and the viśvadeva sacrifice. Wells, step wells, tanks and so forth, and the temples of the gods, bestowing food, and sweet [speech] are called pūrta. [Thus it is said:]

“One who makes eastern gardens or reservoirs, and likewise, one who makes trees grow, one who bestows women, builds bridges—he obtains heaven, there is no doubt. Of whom there are tanks and so forth, and reservoirs resplendent with wells, and gardens, and shelters, the bestowing of food and who has lovely speech, there is wealth and the higher world. Those dedicated to building bridges and those dedicated to purifying tīrthas, the makers of the wells and step wells, are released from the great [[P1506]] danger, and one who performs the improvement (saṃskāra) in the step wells, the gardens, and the tanks, and in the temples obtains the fruit belonging to original founders [of a settlement].”²⁰⁴

The first thing that should be obvious here is that there is a gaping theological divide between the ideas espoused by Hemādri in his prose preface and his chosen proof texts.²⁰⁵ In the prose, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi seeks to align the pūrta practices of making “wells, step wells, tanks and so forth, and the temples of the gods, and funding (people/endowments)”— what it defines as the Smārta dharmas—with the obtaining of the higher order goal of liberation (mokṣa). There is imagined to be a contrast here with iṣṭa practices of Śrauta religion, which at best merely lead to a temporary rebirth in one of the heavens. The problem here is that as Hemādri’s very first proof text itself proclaims, “he obtains heaven, there is no doubt” (svargam āpnoty asaṃśayaḥ). In other words, his sources themselves draw no such distinction, for they treat the pūrta practices as simply, at best, another way to win heaven (svarga) or the other world (paraṃ lokaṃ) and in fact mostly commonly align them with the gratification of mundane human desires.

[[P1507]]

If we want then to understand why Hemādri has chosen to foreground these precise proof texts, despite the fact that they explicitly undercut one of his major assertions, we have to look at the other rhetorical features evident in these particular passages that are hardly ubiquitous in this sort of discourse. And what we find, not merely in the verses we have just examined, but also in the remainder of the text that has not been provided up to here, is an atypical emphasis on “purifying” or “renovating” existing material culture, whether we are talking about water sources or ritual centers, as producing the same exact karmic benefits as building something new, a stance that travels together with the conspicuous absence of the usual invocation that the protection and preservation of existing endowments and structures on their own terms by political and religious actors is the highest form of dharma. In other words, these proof texts offer sanction for a massive project to refurbish “public works” in a manner that brings existing institutions into closer alignment with the best practices and values of the people doing the “renovation.” Such an aim, which invokes that it is better to do things according to the right set of rules, provides a logical bridge to the next major focus in the paddhati, which seeks to align material institutional renewal with the instituting of new rule governed norms:

A man becomes devoid of greed by not being intoxicated/impassioned and by means of proper rules. Having given to twice-borns by whom the Veda is caused to flourish [lit., who are made venerable by the Vedas], he is released from sin. The one whose food, given with a pleased mind, is consumed by hundreds and hundreds of Brāhmaṇas does not become an animal. By the giving of food, a man does not follow a bad course. Therefore, food is to be given in a manner that does not violate the rules. . . .

H: Thus, by informing about the pūrta, he continues to relate the installation (pratiṣṭhā) of the god in context.²⁰⁶

[[P1508]]

Essentially what Hemādri is doing here is proposing that the procedures for establishing institutions are dependent on a new and necessary context. This context has as its constant point of reference norms that benefit or elevate Brāhmaṇas directly as well as norms concerning what is “proper” that Brāhmaṇas alone are in a position to adjudicate. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this represents a marked departure not only from influential pratiṣṭhā texts such as the Piṅgalāmata, which recognize no such normativity, but also from the canon of Purāṇic materials invoked by earlier Dharmaśāstrins such as Lakṣmīdhara. Ad hoc though they may be, these standards serve to harmonize these broader categories comprising different types of installation practices with Hemādri’s reinvention of the philanthropic procedures in general as an almost exclusively Brāhmaṇa-centric domain.

Since the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati has never been discussed anywhere in print, it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect a little on the structure and rhetorical strategies being deployed at least in the opening portions of the text, especially as much of what we see is less than transparent. Immediately following the theorization of iṣṭāpūrta we have just been exploring, the text offers a small section on determining the timing for installing different types of deities (tatra pratiṣṭhākālaḥ). All of this material is Hemādri’s own prose. The text then proceeds to offering a series of what it calls “paddhatis,” offering detailed accounts of the particular ritual sequences to be used for the different deities. Again, within these individual paddhatis, the material seems to be composed just for the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. Stylistically, these portions of the text look very much like the later portions of the Dānakhaṇḍa we looked at earlier, in which long run-on sentences organized around a chain of gerunds in order sequencing a set of activities are interspersed with fully scripted and frequently quite lengthy ritual pronouncements, outlining to the public everything that is going on in the ritual. Where these sub-paddhatis touch upon an issue of general relevance to all the procedures, either concerning the nature of a specific ritual agent or of the acts or objects he is making use of, however, the compositions interrupt the flow of the step-by-step instructions to offer topical treatments of the particular issue. In these cases, Hemādri consistently supplies us with his understanding of the defining characteristics of the ritual actor and the meaning of the technical terms of art, an approach that often demands the insertion of proof texts from other sources. [[P1509]]

One very useful way to think about this repeated alteration between these long hyper formalized stretches of prose and the introduction of some of the authorities they lean on for support is as an act of code switching. Just as we saw when looking at the world of transactional quotidian Sanskrit in chapter two, an attentive reading of these stock preliminary summaries of long ritual sequences reveals that through them the author is repeatedly instantly rendering legible the key details that a professional ritualist is trained to extract and identify from his sources. Just as significantly, at the same time as this is being accomplished, these elements are being translated into a conceptual vocabulary shared with Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. The rhetorical impact of this approach is to demonstrate over and over again that pratiṣṭhā ritual comes entirely embedded within and is inseparable from both a learned Brāhmaṇa and specifically Smārta framework and ethos, and that this is the case even in places where for dozens of folios the text is offering his reader cosmological visualizations and reams of mantras extracted from different corpuses within the logically unrelated tradition of the Mantramārga. For, as we are about to see, at the same time that a Smārta framework is being presupposed as indispensable, our Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati deliberately elides the tradition-specific theologies and methodologies pertaining to the veneration of the individual deities, such that, in the end, a functional equivalence is simply presumed between Viṣṇu, Śiva, the Goddess, and Sūrya in a manner that prefigures early modern pañcāyatana pūjā. As we have seen in many places within the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, we can recognize the intention behind such efforts as an act of deliberate obfuscation, because sometimes Hemādri’s redactions sloppily leave behind fragments from older value systems. With this background in mind, we are ready to turn to the text. [[P1510]]

Now there is the procedure for the ritual application regarding the installation of Viṣṇu.²⁰⁷

The general (sāmānya) rituals apply to all the gods (sarvadevānām), the particular (viśeṣa) is described here.²⁰⁸ [Now, the prayoga:]

Now, in the region (deśe) to the northeast of the ritual space (āgāra) belonging to the yajamāna, which is smeared with pure stuff [i.e., cow dung] and accompanied by a rangoli, he performs ritual sipping (ācamāna) and is well ornamented with white garments and ointment with gold, silver, kuśa grass, water. . . . Having pronounced the occasion, on the astral conjunction that was indicated by the astrologer, for the sake of the completion of the intended ritual, which involves the installation of the gods or so forth, which is desired to be commenced without obstacles, and for the sake of satisfying wonder-dispensing Gaṇeśa who is acting as a necessary subordinate component [utilized] at the time of the pacification of all the obstacles regarding all undertakings; [Then,] having offered gold, clothes, candana, pan, and fruit, having done the pūjā of the sun, having bestowed a tilak on the swami, having offered pūjā to Mahāgaṇapati, success will be obtained; [As per the quotation”]

“For a man who is desiring to do the pratiṣṭhā ritual of the gods, having produced the needed implements with regard to all the rituals of the yoginīs. Haivng taken recourse to the five nights, the four nights, three nights, or even one night, such that on the final pakṣa the karmasiddhi will take place, having considered the right day, directly, according to the śāstras, for the installation of the gods, having made offerings on the seven day from the day of the installation of the gods and so forth. . . he should practice the offering of the sprouts of all seeds of karma. Having approached the charming śālā, having satisfied the śilpin, having obtained image and indeed the liṅga of the śilpins, having examined the goods/materials—one should mount it on the chariot and adorn it. . . .” Then, according to the vidhi, one should practice the incubating in water of the god.

On the day of the beginning of the pratiṣṭhā, having worshipped Gaṇeśa, one should articulate the conditions for the accomplishment of the ritual. And, having worshipped the Brāhmaṇas, having formed an intention for the ritual installation, one should practice the warding off.²⁰⁹

[[P1511]]

Deploying a terminology strongly reminiscent of the inscriptional record, Hemādri begins by suggesting that while the core format for conducting a ritual installation is to be applied to “all the gods,” a specialized or particular modification of these procedures is to be employed when the object of worship is Viṣṇu. Having introduced this meta-rule, Hemādri then proceeds on to offering a summary of the ritual activities that preface a ritual installation. Every element of his presentation translates these rituals—all of which originate outside any of the ritual realms that Vedic exegetical traditions would have recognized as legitimate—into a Mīmāṃsā idiom. It is for this reason that at every step in the process, we are repeatedly reminded which ritual agent holds authority over which dimension of the ritual procedure, that the key rituals are labelled using technical terms, like karman, even when such designations would seem superfluous, and that we are constantly being explicitly told what purpose (artha) individual steps in the ritual will serve. The most elegant illustration of how Mīmāṃsaka models are shaping this discourse is almost certainly its representation of the role of that Gaṇeśa plays in the ritual proceedings, for Hemādri takes great pains to demonstrate that he is not serving as “a devatā” in the Mīmāṃsā sense, but is only acting as “a necessary subordinate component (antaraṅgabhūta)” whose scope of influence is confined to the opening pacification rites. [[P1512]]

When we turn to the unspecified textual sources from which Hemādri has analytically derived this ritual procedure, almost immediately, we see that the materials in use, though full of the same general details, have nothing to do with the “special ritual” adaptation only to be used when installing Viṣṇu. In fact, they seem to have been extracted from an explicitly Śākta ritual milieu that made use of non-standard Sanskrit, and within which rites for appeasing yoginīs formed an integral component of pratiṣṭhā. Just as importantly, quite unlike Hemādri’s own ritual program, this unknown source does not specify the nature and scope of authority of each of the kinds of ritual actors nor is it invested in imposing a hierarchy of significance among the different ritual segments, a central concern for the Mīmāṃsā exegete. In this alternatively theorized realm, ritual is just one damn thing after another, all of which are equally important.

The Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati is very long and much of it is concerned with ritual procedures whose Śākta analogues we have already discussed at some length in chapter 6, or which would be familiar to anyone who has spent time with pratiṣṭhā literature in general. So, much like good Mīmāṃsakas, we are going to jump ahead to the mukhyadravya—or main ritual details— that matter to us. We have skipped ahead through all the ritual preliminaries and are now at the point where in any pratiṣṭhā rite, the ritual patron takes his seat, offers homage to the presiding religious authority, pronounces his ritual intention, and begins to act under the direction of the pratiṣṭhāpanācārya.

H: Then, upon the bhadrapīṭhā to the east of the ritual space (āgāra) upon the darbha grass, the yajamāna along with his wife, having entered facing east and having done three rounds of prāṇāyāma accompanied by the wife, the one who has begun the sequence should make an intention:

“Today, proceeded by the destruction of sin of myself, of my father, of my mother, and of twenty-one other people, including myself, and of the ten generations before and of those after, I will do the installation of Viṣṇu, in so far as it is possible, according to place, time and so forth.”

H: It [the ritual procedure and announcement] is then done the same way regarding another god, and [also] with regards to dredging of the wells, in deploying the various [[P1513]] words and so forth, it is to be known [as being the correct procedure in all such cases].²¹⁰

If we go by our documentary records, the medieval Deccan had a mostly generic notion of what constitutes a patron. In practice, this social space tended to be occupied perhaps most often not by kings or Brāhmaṇa ritualists but by merchants, military commanders, and big men from a range of caste backgrounds. In Hemādri’s paddhati, in contrast, the patron is not only identified rhetorically with the Vedic role of the yajamāna, but he is required to assume an affect and ritual role explicitly derived from that of the twice-born sponsor of a Vedic sacrifice, right down to being accompanied in all his efforts by his wife. The mere inclusion of a wife as a necessary contributor to the ritual in and of itself deliberately narrows the scope of who can be a patron, as it effectively eliminates ascetics of any sort and young warriors on the make— to say nothing of women themselves acting as agents—three demographics that surface with considerable frequency in earlier sources. Furthermore, once we learn that the paradigm under discussion applies to all acts of institutionalization, even digging wells or setting up aqueducts, the representation of the yajamāna as “twice-born” effectively shuts down one of the primary means that śilpins/ojjas had of leaving their individual mark upon the social landscape through sponsoring small scale public works projects. As Hemādri is about to show us, these consequences are by no means unintended, but are part and parcel of efforts to inscribe a new form of credentialization process that is designed to exclude the previous officials who would have played these roles, from the very heart of the ritual. It is for this reason that the forming [[P1514]] of the ritual intention is now to be followed by “the choosing” of the ācāryas, a process that within our text involves laying out the standards for their selection, and in ritual itself demands the public pronouncement of their credentials.

H: He should choose the ācāryas and so forth according to the forms as will be described. [As per the citation:]

“An intelligent one with a good form, who is skilled, who is pure, who has good characteristics who knows the Vedas, the hotṛ should begin the hotra enjoined by the Vedas. The Brāhmaṇa who possesses Śruti—and even one who is solely intent on adjudicating the Vedas—one who is established in ritual, established in tapas, and likewise established in gnosis; one who is not attached, one who has offspring, one without wounds or disease; he is not violent, he is not ego driven, he is intent on the practice of rituals always. He has arisen “from” Āryavārta, and likewise from the land of the black deer.

The ṛtvijs are endowed with all these characteristics. They are skilled in the rituals for pratiṣṭhā and subordinate to the ācāryas. The ṛgvedic priest, the adhvaryu, the singer of the Sāma Veda, and the even the Atharvan are [examples of] the ṛtvijs, knowers of the Tantras and skilled in the pratiṣṭhā rituals.”

H: These two [the ṛtvij and ācārya] are endowed with the characteristics: they are in the Brāhmaṇa assembly [i.e., the council], and they are skilled in all rituals.²¹¹

[[P1515]]

In place of having a pratiṣṭhāpanācārya who directs the śilpins and serves as their guru, Hemādri envisions the installation rituals as being governed by a two-tier managerial system. The majority of the ritual action, we are told, is the responsibility of figures called ṛtvijs, who are legally subordinated (adhīna) to a governing ācārya, in the same manner a master has sovereignty over a servant. Typically speaking, the word ṛtvij is a term of art first found in the early Veda that refers to a ritualist who has mastered the Ṛg Veda. For Hemādri, however, the term is expanded to include those trained as Sāma, Yajur, and even Atharva Vedic ritualists, as well as those who merely “adjudicate the Veda,” in other words, Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsakas, even if they do not themselves practice the rituals. Instead of themselves being born in Āryavārta, as Hemādri clarifies elsewhere, the ritualists need merely to be able to claim that they arise from people who had their origins there. At the same time, just as we saw with the yajamāna, the imposition of the requirement that ritualists be married householders with children works to exclude other classes of professional religious authorities, including the yogins who earlier sources had been viewed as playing an integral role in many sorts of installations. And since pratiṣṭhā refers not merely to installing deities or even building temples but to virtually all forms of institution building—right down to making gardens and planting trees—the impact of these changes, just in and of themselves, is to substitute a world full of things made by diverse social communities for a world where most things are made by or under the direction of Brāhmaṇas. But in fact Hemādri takes things a step further, for in a manner that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Dharmaśāstra literature, even just Manu, after outlining a whole bunch of best case scenarios for what one should hope for in a pratiṣṭhā ritualist, in prose crafted by our author himself seemingly supported by no particular proof texts, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati then offers a bare bones standard for what qualifies one to be a ṛtvij or ācārya. The credentials that really matter are rather telling, for they are simply that the person is skilled in all the rituals, which earlier we learned entailed them “knowing the Tantras” while also being members in good standing “within the Brāhmaṇa assembly” (brahmasadas). In other words, in cases where other types of Brāhmaṇas are not available, institution building is to be overseen as well executed by the same social elite that make up the council of juridical authorities. The same dynamic is even more in evidence when [[P1516]] it comes to the replacement for the pratiṣṭhāpanācārya, now called the sadasya, whose mode of self-presentation instantly conveys his extreme degree of privilege.

Then, he should choose the sadasya and so forth with finger rings, hand ornaments and necklaces, gold earrings. . . . Then facing north, seated on his own āsana, the one who knows Vedānta, arising from Āryavārta, with a shaved head, devoted to the Purāṇas, he is extremely skilled in the main rituals; he is smiling, and he has deep knowledge.

Having adorned the sadasya, who has conquered the senses, who knows the mantras, and has white clothing, with pearl ornaments, having worshipped, with effort, the sadasya who knows the śāstras with clothes with ornaments and with smearing with good smelling things and garlands.²¹²

[[P1517]]

Thoroughly decked out in the gold Hemādri celebrates doling out en masse to his supporters, here the sadasya seems very much the representative of the nouveau riche elite that he most certainly would have been. The term sadasya itself had previously referred to the Vedic ritualist presiding over a sattra sacrifice. Here, in contrast, the sadasya is celebrated not, as we would anticipate, as an embodiment of the Vedic aṅgas or of śāstra, but simply for his mastery of Vedānta and devotion to the Purāṇas. As we will explore in the next chapter at some length, even as late as the twelfth century—even within Lakṣmīdhara’s Kṛtyakalpataru— these are perhaps the two least prestigious bodies of knowledge in South Asia so far as the traditions of classical śāstra and classical Tantra were concerned. There is thus every indication that people credentialing themselves by claiming mastery over two corpuses of knowledge that most traditional pandits and ritualists viewed as somewhere between irrelevant and stupid need to be understood as emerging from a different Brāhmaṇical demographic than that of the esteemed old families. In fact, despite the almost over the top peppering of lofty sounding Vedic terms of art found throughout the prose of our paddhati, the actual contents of the ritual procedures prescribes reveals such rhetoric to be a form of neo classicism, spoken by people who were no more living inside of a Vaidika mindset than Renaissance era princes who obsessively studied the rhetoric of Cicero from childhood onward can be characterized as authentically embodying the ethos of Republican and Imperial Rome. When this veneer is peeled back and you look at the actual content of the rites themselves, they are thoroughly saturated with what are unmistakably Śākta and Śaiva conceptual models. [[P1518]]

Having bowed to [the sadasya], according to injunction, one must perform the offering of the self to him.

“You are our guru, you are mother and father, you are the Lord, you are the recitation! By your grace, O ṛṣi among Brāhmaṇas, who are unwavering, may everything be achieved by the mind [lit., gone to my mind]. For the sake of release from calamity, do the ritual action called the karuyajña with the ṛtvijs who are pure, disciplined, and well equipped!” With regard to the ritual called the viṣṇupratiṣṭhā, to have accomplished the ritual installation of you people, I choose you of x-gotra of insert x-śarman, with these clothes, ornaments, betel, and so forth [to be] sadasya!

The reply is: “I am chosen!” Furthermore:

In this ritual, in order to do the pratiṣṭhā ritual (karma) I choose you as ācārya with the clothes, ornaments, betel and so forth. You, sir, are the embodiment of the form of the mantra here on earth, which is the destroyer of the flood of saṃsāra and so forth.²¹³

[[P1519]]

In this passage, we catch a glimpse of the incongruous appropriation of the dominant mode of sociality within the medieval śivapura by a newly arisen Smārta Brāhmaṇa professional class. In order to make sense of what sort of rhetorical work this appropriation accomplishes, it is worthwhile to first briefly reflect on the paradigm that it is supplanting. Within the realm of the śivapura, we need to remember, professionals such as artisans and performers, whose livelihoods were effectively inextricable from their inculcation within Tantric knowledge systems, as well as Tantric adepts, had typically undergone ritual initiations that rendered them subject (adhīna) to the initiating guru. This teacher was from thenceforth to be viewed as Śiva himself in human form and became the final juridical and spiritual authority in their lives. On both theological and pragmatic grounds, in emic terms, this role was seen as carrying with it substantial responsibilities, for the teacher was frequently seen as taking on both the literal and karmic debts of his disciples. In short, every element in this formulation emphasizes that what was being established is a lasting bond that fundamentally changed the initiate’s status. Depending on which tradition within the Mantramārga we are discussing, at the time of initiation, the guru either was to extract the soul of the initiate and infuse them with the mantra of lineage or, in the case of some Kaula traditions, he was enter into the body of disciple and transform him or her from within by leaving a seed representation of himself inside the channels and subtle body. Within the Śākta transmissions especially, of the sort that were codependent on the artisan and performance traditions so relevant to the present context, disciples were to venerate and visualize their initiatory teachers and their lineages on a daily basis as part of acts of routine worship. As the Kumārikā Khaṇḍa of the Manthāna Bhairava makes plain, this insertion of the veneration of the teacher as a structuring element even extended to the celebration of the birthdays of the lineage heads as a major calendrical festival. In other words, in very concrete ways, “the surrender” of the soul to a teacher was rooted in a lasting relationship, whether real or imagined, instantiated through sustained and repeated practice. [[P1520]]

Despite the fact that our text is mining what conceptually speaking are Mantramārga resources, as imagined by the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati the social role of the sadasya diverges radically from these older expectations. As Hemādri envisions him, instead of having a preexisting personal or ritual relationship with the patron sponsoring an act of institution building or with the various professionals who will execute the task, the sadasya is simply an elite member of the Brāhmaṇical jurist class whose services have been procured temporarily for the occasion. For that matter, despite the fact that during the ritual they are deemed subordinated (adhīna) to the sadasya, the ṛtvij ācāryas are also merely hired help with no preexisting connection to either their temporary master, the artisans, or the community. In other words, what our text is encouraging is essentially a ritualized surrender of personal and political authority to a stranger, quite likely serving in the local sabhā, without any pretense even of an imagined reciprocity. Indeed, in the formalized script provided by Hemādri, the patron is to begin the act of surrendering to this figure—who serves as a stand in for the Vedic ṛṣis— even before he has given his assent and chosen the sadasya as the designated authority. As we can see, this choice itself is executed in an idiom akin to a contractual establishment of a patron client relationship drawn from the world of ephemeral quotidian Sanskrit textuality. As the formalized passage makes plain, the sadasya’s authority is purely a function of his office, not the product of personal charisma, ascetic accomplishments, or even active sustained participation within the knowledge systems of the Mantramārga. In other words, not only do the sadasya and his ācāryas potentially lack any meaningful relationships with the other social agents involved in the pratiṣṭhā ritual, but they also even lack a meaningful relationship with the Tantras themselves. In other words, they are precisely the sort of sthāpaka the Devī Purāṇa had anticipated with such agitation, as bringing terror and ruin, one who is “without the [[P1521]] āgama,” and who seeks to organize rites using “a common procedure,” instead of entering into each individual ritual occasion aligned with what is prescribed by “the different doctrines.” Nonetheless, in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, these agents, who by traditional standards would be utterly lacking in adhikāra, for they have not immersed themselves in the modes of praxis that produce such a habitus, have acquired for themselves the quintessentially Mantramārga derived status of being like “god himself,” or “the embodiments of the form of mantra here on earth.” Without engaging in any efforts to actually bestow their grace or concrete favor upon the assembled public—for rewards in this system are reserved almost exclusively for Brāhmaṇas— the Smārta jurist has usurped the position of the Kālamukha sthāpanācārya carrying out the “karuyajña” with all its rhetorical trappings. Deploying what is fundamentally originally a Tantric or even Atimārgic repertoire to rather new even antithetical ends, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati transmutes each act of institution building from an instantiation of sovereignty within a pluralistic world order to an affirmation of the subordination all religious activities to the state and its representatives.

The considerable irony is that at the very same time that Tantric ritual and conceptual materials are operating as the engine that powers all of its rituals, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati seeks to subordinate these elements both logically and rhetorically under a mountain of signifiers that while functionally still deriving from the Tantras are marked as performatively Smārta. As an illustration of how this works, let us skip past the rest of the ritual preliminaries and turn to the moment, immediately preceding the installation rituals themselves, when the sadasya and his ācāryas invoke the maṇḍala and prepare themselves to enter into the ritual space. When it comes to the maṇḍala itself, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati offers us two options, both of which are treated as functional equivalents. If the deity and its pantheon is aligned with Vaiṣṇava [[P1522]] elements (vaiṣṇave), one is to construct a vāruṇamaṇḍala, while in cases where Śaiva imagery prevails (śaive) one is to construct a sarvatobhadramaṇḍala.²¹⁴ After the text explains how each of these two basic formats can be executed at three different scales and degrees of elaboration, much like we saw in the Piṅgalāmata, there is a brief worship of the stylus (khaṭikā) and measuring thread (sūtra).²¹⁵ With the tools of his craft prepared, the ritualists then turn to making their own bodies suitable to the task at hand. As Hemādri explains:

H: Thus, having constructed the auspicious maṇḍala according to the emanation (sṛṣṭi) and/or dissolution (saṃhāra) sequences, having constructed the divinity of one’s own body (tanudaivī) by means of the matṛka nyāsa and so forth, one should begin the pūjā, nyāsa, and so forth:

“One should sustain (dhārayet) the concentration exercise (dhāraṇā) directly, which destroys the sins of the self. The yau bīja is situated in the cakra of the navel. It consists of smoke and heat and wind [or smoke and fierce wind]. Through meditation, one should separate all sin from the body. Established in the midst of the lotus of the heart, one should recollect the one who has a form made of splendor (tejorūpam). Above and below and horizontal from the navel, one should incinerate impurity by means of the rays.

One should meditate on the form of the moon— an ocean of nectar established in the sky—which is the syllable vau. The intelligent one should cause the entire body to delight with the winds(?) (conj. from vyādhibhir, “diseases”)²¹⁶ of the heart lotus, which are creeping about all the nāḍīs by the path within the interior of the suṣumnā. Thus, having purified his own body, the one who knows the supreme reality, by means of the supreme bīja, [understands/meditates upon] himself as having the nature of the universe, born from the sequence of the sprouts and so forth. Having meditated upon himself as having this nature, then he should commence the nyāsa.”²¹⁷

[[P1523]]

Hemādri here has prescribed that the sadasya and his ācāryas, who we must remember are not initiates in a Tantric knowledge system, are to perform what is instantly recognizable as a form of bhūtaśūddhi ritual that has as its express purpose the quintessentially Tantric divinization of the body.²¹⁸ The practice is supposed to commence with a series of focused visualizations practices (dhāraṇā) directed at different points in the body, beginning with the smoke within navel and culminating within the “sky” or the center of the head. Derived from the traditions of Śaiva yoga, these linked visualizations serve two purposes. On the one hand, as Hemādri tells us, they separate the body from “sin.” Just like we find in the Śaiva Tantras, as opposed to being framed in terms of accumulated karma, Hemādri here treats sin (pāpa) as if it is a substance, akin to the notion of an ontic stain (mala) that has to be forcibly burned out of the body. While this purification process, engendered by one type of dhāraṇā, is unfolding, our text simultaneously prescribes a second order of visualization practice. Commencing with an initial ritual identification of the practitioner with the divine splendor (tejorūpī) that resides within the center of the heart (this does not seem to be connected to a specific bīja), the practitioner is then to meditate on the moon within his forehead which has taken on the form of the Tantric seed syllable vau. While the text is not clear about what happens next (though based on parallels in other discourses, we would anticipate the body is flooded with nectar), apparently through the manipulation of an unspecified “supreme bīja,” the sadasasya and his ācāryas identify themselves with the universe in its entirety. This stage of the practice then concludes, as the practitioner makes the essentially Kaula-informed conceptual move of reversing the polarity between subject and object by taking this identification with the universe in its entirety as the object of his meditative focus. [[P1524]]

Before we can turn to examining how Hemādri appropriates and subverts the traditional methods of the Mantramārga that accomplish the divinization of the body, it is useful to orient the reader to just what such methods entailed and how they would have deployed in a more typical setting. Now that he has replaced his ordinary human body with a loosely characterized divinized body, this is the point in the practice that we would anticipate that—at least within a Tantric sādhanā—that the practitioner will begin to reinscribe his form and subjectivity with content specific to his initiatory tradition. Just as will happen in the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, this task is accomplished through the practice of ritual imposition (nyāsa), which typically involves the projection of visualized images or seed syllables onto the different parts of the human hand or body. While in some cases, as in the construction of the “hand of Śiva,” where bījas are installed on the five fingers, these nyāsa practices can be localized and brief, especially in the later classical Śākta Tantras aligned with Kubjikā, and the emergent tradition of Śrīvidyā, there is a tendency to “stack” independent nyāsa sequences, often derived originally from different traditions, one on top of one another.

The nyāsa procedures Hemādri teaches in the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati are considerably more elaborate than similar practices one finds in contemporary Tantric sources. Thus, while the Kumārika Khaṇḍa of Kubjikā traditions, for instance, limits itself to a six-phase nyāsa, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi in fact prescribes a sixteen-fold nyāsa.²¹⁹ Introduced just before the Sadasya, the ācāryas and the crew make their initial contact with the image that is to be installed, the practice contains the following components: 1) praṇava-nyāsa, 2) vyāhṛti-nyāsa, 3) mātṛkā-nyāsa, 4) kāla-nyāsa, 5) varṇa-nyāsa, 6) toya-nyāsa, 7) veda-nyāsa, 8) vairāj- nyāsa, 9) devayonī-nyāsa, 10) dvādaśadevatā-nyāsa, 11) kratu-nyāsa, 12) guṇa-nyāsa, 13) [[P1525]] āyudhā-nyāsa, 14) śakti-nyāsa, 15) mantra[mārga]nyāsa, 16) jīva-nyāsa. We will explore some of these in more detail in a minute. As you may already be noticing just based on the names, large portions of this practice incorporate what were originally entire Atimārga and Mantramārga ritual systems. But, these older practices are embedded alongside and often beneath “a new revelation,” to which our author gives conceptual priority. And as we are about to see, that tradition, much of which seems to have invented just for this occasion, celebrates the twofold division of the sanātanadharmas that proclaims its allegiance to a fusion of Śrauta and especially Smārta tradition.

Now, given their understanding of how mantras work, this Smārta appropriation of the practice of nyāsa would seem to pose a serious conceptual problem. Nyāsa, on the simplest level, involves the manipulation of bījas as well as mantra sequences as means of imbuing the practitioner’s body and subjectivity with the powers inherent in those syllables. The practice makes sense precisely because it is predicated on believing that the mantras are themselves the deities. But this complete identification of deities and principles with non-semantic Sanskrit bījas is essentially a Tantric idea for which the newly codified Smārta system, which as we have seen throughout this chapter, grounds its theory of mantra in resources it borrows at least in part from the Mīmāṃsakas, has no equivalent. In Mīmāṃsā, in contrast, the meaning of mantras is mostly irrelevant, for while the individual words within a mantra are supposed to all have meaning, even if some of them have been lost over time, taken as a unit they serve an indicative function, pointing the ritualist towards identifying the deity governing the ritual. As we are going to see, Hemādri’s Smārta nyāsas simply repeatedly center litanies of proper names and nouns—only some of which refer to deities—but all of which are indicative of the same interpretive context, namely, the world of the sanātanadharmas. Succinctly, Hemādri’s [[P1526]] sixteen-fold nyāsa envisions that the practitioner is to travel about in a vehicle that, while powered by the technology of the Mantramārga, has its every surface thoroughly encompassed by Smārta advertising.

In our exploration of Hemādri’s sixteen-fold nyāsa, we will primarily attend to seams in the text indicative of its heterogenous nature and diverse points of origin. Thus, for example, the second nyāsa, or vyāhṛti-nyāsa, prescribes the imposition of the different subcomponents of the quintessentially Brāhmaṇical Savitra Gāyatrī mantra, on the feet, heart, and in the cavity of the skull. Despite the plausibly Śākta connotations of the name māṭrkā-nyāsa, the third stage in the practice simply involves the installation of the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet onto the body, beginning with the vowels and culminating with consonant clusters arranged in terms of varga. It is here that things become increasingly strange. In the kāla-nyāsa, first the planets, constellations, other important astrological elements, and the months of the year are mapped onto the human body, and then the process is repeated using the different yugas and other time frames. Apart from the absence of any bījas, this could almost be a cousin of the much- understudied kālacakra practices taught in many of the Śākta Tantras. The same, however, cannot be said for the varṇa-nyāsa that follows immediately afterwards, for here the meaning of varṇa is quite simply the identities of Brāhmaṇa, Kṣatriya, and so forth, all of which are to be mapped onto the body. Not only do we see here a literal grafting of a part of the social order onto the divinized body that is supposed to be identical with the universe, a practice of course as old as the Puruṣasūkta, but the text even introduces post-Vedic conceptual components integral to policing caste relations as key elements of the practice. Thus, caste mixing in general (saṅkara) as well as anuloma marriages—where the male is higher caste than his partner—are ritually projected onto soles of the practitioner’s right and left feet, assigned inauspicious [[P1527]] places right alongside the animals of the village (grāmapaśu) and those of the wilderness (araṇyapaśu) in what is essence a representation of the great chain of being. Following a brief projection of forms of water (toya-nyāsa), that descends from the clouds (megha) down to the ocean (samudrā), the text next introduces a “veda-nyāsa.” As we might by now expect, here Hemādri teaches that the eighth imposition involves superimposing the four Vedas, the vidyāsthānas, and the disciplines of śāstra, beginning from the Ṛg Veda and concluding with Nīti and Vaśyaśāstra (perhaps referring to indrajāla?) onto the divinized body, again suggesting an implicit argument that an emerging vision of Brāhmaṇical normativity is integral to all viable forms of ritual power.²²⁰

The eleventh stage in the practice, the so-called kratu-nyāsa, makes such a very un- Vedic use of ostensibly Vaidika materials that it reads like a modern exercise in cultural appropriation, every bit as incongruous—even outrageous—to a “real Śrauta ritualist” as when yoga studios put an mūrti of Gaṇeśa right above the toilet or an attendee at Bhakti Fest gets the Gāyatrī tattooed above her belly button. [[P1528]]

On the forehead, [place] the horse sacrifice. On the upper palate, place the human sacrifice. On the face, the royal sacrifice; on the throat, the cow sacrifice. . . . In the navel, the ahīnas (sattra); on the knees the sarvajits; on the penis, the agniṣṭoma; on the other side of the penis, the atirātra; the aptoryāma on the two thighs; the ṣoḍaśins go on the flanks; the utkthya on the left shank; the vājapeya on the right shank; the atyagniṣṭoma on the right arm; the caturmāsyas on the left; the sautrāmaṇi on the hands; the parśva-iṣṭis on the fingers; the darśapūrṇamāsas on the eyes; the sarva-iṣṭis in the pores; the syllables svāhā, and vaṣat on the two arms; the pañcamahāyajñas beneath the soles of the feet; and, the āhavanīya fire on the head; and the dakṣiṇāgni in the heart; and the gārhapati fire on the arms; and the vedī in the heart; the pravargya on the ornaments. . . . darbha grass upon the hair. . . .²²¹

[[P1529]]

Hemādri here appears to have taken several previously discrete canons of Vedic sacrifices, inclusive of many exceptionally arcane and rarely practiced forms of Soma sacrifices, and strung them all together, filling in the gaps with stray elements used in sacrifice, such as the darbha grass, much in the same manner as one would decorate a Christmas tree. And just as holiday ornaments may have spent many years in the attic gathering dust, only to be taken out for special occasions, much the same is the case with Hemādri’s Śrautism, which amounts to a miscellany of very different things haphazardly assembled together on account of the fact that they all look decoratively Vedic. Though on the surface, the correlation of sacrifices to specific parts of the body appears evocative of the bandhu logic of the Brāhmaṇas, when one looks at the actual contents of these supposed parallels individually, they seem neither to be the product of careful reflection on points of commonality nor a continuation of older formations from the Brāhmaṇa literature. Indeed, the randomness and carelessness of many of these selections—why select the generic ahīna without representing the generic sattra [[P1530]] sacrifice?—why invoke the virtually nonexistent term sarvajit as opposed to the standard viśvajit?—all suggest a certain superficiality in Hemādri’s command of Śrauta knowledge.

This shallowness in our author’s command over traditional “Brāhmaṇical” materials is starkly in contrast to the intimate understanding and precision that orders the sequences in the nyāsa that immediately follow it, wherein the materials being used are derived from the worlds of the Atimārga and Mantramārga, both of whose canons Hemādri has surreptitiously mined and cited without attribution throughout the paddhati. During the next five nyāsas, each of which are given in both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava variants, the practitioner invokes the parivāra, weapons, and attributes of the supreme deity (either Sadāśiva or Vāsudeva) and constructs the throne upon which the deity sits, which is perched on top of the hierarchy of worlds. Here, for example, is a small selection from the nyāsa of the guṇas, the preliminary act in the sequence, offered with occasional Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava variants:

oṃ hāṃ prakṛtitattvāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ prakṛtitattvādhipataye pitāmahāya namaḥ / oṃ hā[ṃ] puruṣatattvāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ puruṣatattvādhipataye viṣṇave namaḥ /

oṃ hāṃ sadāśivatattvāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ sadāśivatattvādhipataye ajeśāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ kālatattvāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ kālatattvādhipataye ṛtudhvajāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ vidyātattvāya namaḥ / oṃ hāṃ vidyātattvādhipataye viṣṇave namaḥ /

oṃ hāṃ cakrādyāyudhacihnebhyo namaḥ /

oṃ saṃ sattvāya namaḥ / oṃ raṃ rajase namaḥ / oṃ taṃ tamase namaḥ / oṃ raṃ vahnimaṇḍalāya namaḥ / oṃ aṃ arkamaṇḍalāya namaḥ / oṃ vaṃ somamaṇḍalāya namaḥ /

śaive aṣṭatriṃśat[t]attvebhyo namaḥ / aṣṭatri[ṃ]śat[t]attvādhipebhyo namaḥ /²²²

[[P1531]]

After having installed the elements and the tanmātras, which, apart from occasional divergences on who is the presiding deity, are treated as identical in the two systems, as we ascend up to the veneration of more subtle ontic levels, the text begins to offer us two sets of options, both of them within a Tantric framework. Rather atypically, once we get past puruṣa and prakṛti, the text places sadāśivattatva as subordinated to kāla and vidyā, each of which in turn is subordinated to Viṣṇu and his weapons. In this shared fused cosmology, however, the two founts of theistic religion themselves take second place to the elements, and the three domains of the fire, the sun, and the moon, so central to post-classical Śākta traditions. The section concludes by indicating that Śaivas can emend this visualization (śaive— aṣṭatriṃśatattvebhyo namaḥ) to incorporate some more elements of their traditions. In doing so, however it invokes, not the expected thirty-six but thirty-eight tattvas, which are to be superimposed “on top” of the already invoked sāmānya Saṃkhyā-derived map of the cosmos. At our current state of knowledge, identifying Hemādri’s exact sources is not yet possible, but it is telling that Abhinavagupta, who also knows of this variation in the enumeration of ontic levels, identifies tattvas 37 and 38, respectively with Bhairavatattva and Kālasaṃkarṣiṇītattva, strongly suggesting this system’s point of origin in the scriptures of the pre-philosophical Kālī Krama, perhaps among materials that make their way into the later divisions of the Jayadrathayāmala.

Very much taking the opposite stance of tradition specific sectarianism, when Hemādri turns to the question of envisioning the presiding deities, he reframes them in a manner that emphasizes points of commonality. For example, he suggests that the core theological principles that support each version of the throne—dharma, jñāna, vairāgya, and aiśvarya— are identical for Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas. He even suggests that, despite divergences in the names and imagery the weapons and the entourages associated with the two pantheons, as they are made up of an equal number of components, we should understand them as operating as tradition specific optionalities that are functionally equivalent.²²³ In both cases, again, our author has rearranged these elements to maximize the appearance of apparent commonalities. Within such a framework, the text is implicitly arguing being Vaiṣṇava or being Śaiva is primarily evocative not of distinctive worldviews, but different approaches to ritual style. [[P1533]]

Just as this delimitation of pantheons—just the two options with minimal internal variation— offers us functionally analogous parallel sets of preferences with minor variations, so too are the mantra systems deployed by the practitioner during the sixteen-fold nyāsa upon his own body largely mirrored in the ritual mechanics that the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati prescribes for preparation of bases and the installation of images. As the final stage of the sixteen-part nyāsa, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi teaches what it calls the jīva-nyāsa—the ritual installation of the soul. The same procedure in an expanded form also is deployed during the act most commonly called prāṇapratiṣṭhā, when the deity is made to take residence in the image, what our text calls pratimājīvanyāsa. In a substantial terminological departure from what we typically find in the classical Tantras, repudiating one of the core theological claims of a Śākta worldview of reality pervaded by powers (śakti) in Hemādri’s Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, the sadasya, ācārya, [[P1534]] yajamāna, and śilpins are never depicted manipulating or embodying “powers.” Instead, as they work their craft, they fuse their subjectivities with atom-like “souls” (jīvas). As the text tells us, these souls come to us accompanied by adjuncts or impositions; the word often used is upādhi, a term of art borrowed from Vedānta that, while not integral to the nature of souls themselves, result in the manifestation of specific qualities and ontic modalities (bhāvas). The manner in which one works with these principles is the same regardless of whether the site into which they will be made to enter is the human body or an object, and is also independent of the apparent nature of the deity being installed. Through a preliminary practice of prāṇāyāma, the ritualists cause different breaths into enter into distinctive channels.²²⁴ Using the praṇava mantras, the practitioner brings the unmarked puruṣa who is a pervader (vyāpin) to rest in the cavity within the eight-petalled lotus in the heart. Through the use of a whole array of mantras, the puruṣa is then “made” into a jīva through the superimposition of series of qualities, including the tanmātras and the elements, the jīvātman, and paramātman. The ritualist joins (saṃyojya) his own self to the image, and the puṇḍarīkātman is then invoked from his heart into the heart of the image. The ritualist now makes himself identical in his bhāva with the witness of all things (sarvasākṣiṇaṃ bhāvayitvā).²²⁵ This enables the installation of something called the sarvātman, followed by the puruṣātman, an act that is accompanied by the recitation of the passage in the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad that speaks of the supreme reality as having faces everywhere (sarvatomukha). Finally, the grace bestowing nature (anugrahātman), the nature of making up everything (sarvabhūtāman), and the three functions of creation, maintenance, and dissolution are infused into the deity, at which point either the practitioner or the image awakens to its true nature. This nature—the real identity of both person and deity—is expressed [[P1535]] in a language that is deliberately crafted so as to be devoid of either explicitly Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava technical terms of art. The implicit message is that while at lower levels of articulation, different circumstances may call for the use of different mantra systems, ultimately the “one who sees everything” transcends all dualities. At least within the Caturvargacintāmaṇi itself, for Hemādri’s later writings will express a different point of view, this supreme deity is neither Śiva nor Viṣṇu but something that incorporates or transcends both of them. Elsewhere in the Pariśeṣakhaṇḍa, where the matter comes up in passing, Hemādri directs his readers to the explanations he had offered in the Mokṣakhaṇḍa as well as in the second division on pratiṣṭhā, both parts of our text that have yet to surface in manuscript. Though we will not pursue the matter further, there is good reason to believe that Hemādri himself identified this supreme reality with the Harihara principle, which in the present age has assumed the form of the patron deity of the later Seuṇa kings, Viṭṭhal at Pandharpur.

With this new presumption of an exoteric undifferentiated universal nature as the undifferentiated principle that animates reality comes a new commitment to transparency in ritual. If all images are functionally the same thing and the ritual installer is always the same “establishment” person who in his daily life is at once responsible for the management of a varṇāśramadharma oriented social order and answers to an increasingly centralized surveillance state, it logically follows that there is no need for any secrets at all, let alone a hidden esoteric regiment of practices offering an alternative theory of sovereignty that falls outside the state. From the perspective of the emerging new social order, both those responsible for the preservation and transmission of those secrets and those secrets themselves are utterly superfluous, and that is before one begins to take into consideration that this obsolete demographic is sitting on top of much of the wealth and property of the Deccan. Thus, for both [[P1536]] political as well as theological reasons, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati reimagines almost every stage of ritual to minimize potential opportunities for the old guard to keep peddling their outmoded wares. This reinvention begins with a complete spatial reorientation of the workings of ritual. Succinctly, the vast majority of activities that were previously conducted either off site or inside of a private space within the temple such as the garbhagṛha are now performed in public, either outside or alongside the temple or in maṇḍapas and other pavilions, and before a public. Even at places in the ritual where it is essentially unavoidable that certain activities have to be performed inside of a closed structure, the sadasya and the artisans are never left alone to themselves, but are always accompanied by Vedic ritualists who are not part of their team but paid on spec. It is probably not an accident that it is precisely at the junctures in the ritual where the older order, represented for example by the Piṅgalāmata, would have imbued public acts with secret private meanings or clandestinely conducted parallel events for initiates, that the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati deploys the ṛtvijs to go about reciting Vedic ṛcs, fumigating the space with the air of the new orthopraxy.

Here, for example, is how the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati treats the period while the image of the deity is incubating. This activity now happens underneath an open-air pavilion—a pavilion that is in fact built using ritual procedures that Hemādri himself identifies in the Vratakhaṇḍa as being derived from the Piṅgalāmata itself! In the Piṅgalāmata, this event marks the occasion for staging public utsavas for the public during the day and gatherings where vīradravya is consumed by initiates at night.²²⁶ Needless to say, Hemādri proposes a rather different approach: [[P1537]]

This is the procedure for the incubation of the god and temple and so forth.

Then, having passed the night in the awakening (jāgaraṇe), [the celebration is to be done] with the recitations of Purāṇa, instrumental music, and Veda. In the morning, outside, the teacher, having bathed, having done the occasional rituals, is accompanied by the mūrtipas. Having gone to the yāgamaṇḍapa, having enjoined the worship for the eastern door and so forth, having done the pūjā of the banners, pots, vastumaṇḍala, and ritual site, in each respective pit, with the mūlamantra, having oblated a hundred and eight times with the śānti substances to each deity with the mantras of the image, the mūrtipati, and the lords of the world, having offered the pūrṇāhuti, having given to the mūrtidhara the brahma stone in the form of a turtle and the piṇḍikā that are to be incubated along with it, and having utilized the protector with the Indra mantra, accompanied by the sounds of pacification, it is led counterclockwise to the prāsāda.

Having sprinkled the garbhagṛha in a couterclockwise fashion with pacification water and [water purified by] the astra mantra to ward off obstacles, with a stream of flowers and water. . . . using the [Vedic] mantra that begins “mahāṃ indro vajra bahur,” having inscribed [the space] with that mantra, again having sprinkled all around with water purified by the astra mantra, [they enter] into the middle of the womb of the door [to the garbhagṛha].²²⁷

[[P1538]]

Prior to recovering the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, on the basis of what could be inferred from other sections of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi,²²⁸ I had assumed that the domesticated model of temple construction Hemādri teaches was largely indebted to the late classical tradition of the Śaiva Siddhānta, which from the eleventh century onward increasingly acclimated itself to emerging neo-Brāhmaṇical norms. Through its continued incorporation at key points in the ritual of elements and theological claims utterly alien to Śaiva Siddhānta discourse, such as the thirty-eight-level tattva system, however, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati itself unexpectedly and repeatedly disproves this hypothesis. In light of our close reading in chapter 6 of the centrality of the worship of Caṇḍeśvara both to a posited archaic artisan religiosity among the kārukas and to the Śākta traditions maintained by the Kālamukhas into which this tradition was absorbed, it is fitting that we close our exploration of the ritual systems propounded in the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati by looking at how what is essentially a Smārta ritual manual appropriated and preserved key components of kāruka viśvakarman religion. In fact, throughout the text as a whole, especially in passages that Hemādri attributes to “the Viśvakarmamata,” we intermittently keep encountering Caṇḍeśvara, often paired with Sarasvatī as his Śakti, woven into mantra sequences and visualizations in rhetorically significant places. While as one would anticipate, given our author’s theological commitments, during the installation process itself there is no trace of the “secret” as a material object nor is there a complementary clandestine ritual system being enacted alongside the installation of the public deity, as we reach the final day of the ritual process, uncanny commonalities begin to reassert themselves.

[[P1539]]

Through by making the sadasya simply an elite member of the community hired just for the occasion, Hemādri has effectively elided the role of the sthāpanācārya as at once a ritual professional and the actual initiatory guru from the ritual process. Just as we saw in the Piṅgalāmata, as the ritual comes to an end, this conceptual choice poses a methodological problem, for one of the roles assigned to the sthāpanācārya is to use his powers and his command to “make the ritual complete.”²²⁹

[[P1540]]

Hemādri’s unexpected solution is to assign this role not to a person but to a deity. As it so happens, that deity is Caṇḍeśvara:

Having meditated thus, with the stated mantras, having performed the upacārapūjā, one should petition: “Whether from knowledge or ignorance, whatever is deficient or extraneous, let all that be complete, O Caṇḍanātha, by your command! So long as the liṅga stands, the god of gods, Maheśvara, within it, for that much time, O Caṇḍa, may you remain in the presence of Śiva.²³⁰

[[P1541]]

The Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati next turns to describing Caṇḍeśvara’s ritual function. At first glance, it would seem that Caṇḍeśvara is simply a servant of the Supreme deity set up as the designated consumer of ritual refuse (nirmālya), just as in parallel Śaiva Siddhānta sources. And then, out of the blue, having first indicated the general rule, the text itself introduces a stipulation that for its intended audience would have effectively ruled out such a possibility.

“Fruits, roots, food, and drink and so forth, tambūla, garlands and ointment—the consuming of nirmālya is given to you, indeed, by the command of Śiva.”

Having bowed, he should give the first bali offering.

“Caṇḍa is not authorized [however], with regard to a bāṇaliṅga, an iron liṅga, a siddhiliṅga, or a self-arisen one, and in regard to all images.”²³¹

[[P1542]]

As an attentive reader may have noticed, back in chapter 6, we have already encountered substantial scholastic reflection by Tantric authors working within the tradition of the Śaiva Siddhānta on this very same issue. In his own writings on Caṇḍeśvara, for example, Dominic Goodall directs our attention to a passage in the thirteenth-century Saiddhāntika Jñānaśiva’s thirteenth century Jñānaratnāvalī. And as we can see below, Jñānaśiva, almost a direct contemporary of Hemādri, is unambiguous in his assertion that any text that excludes caṇḍeśvarapūjā from forming an essential component of the rituals associated with bāṇaliṅgas, siddhiliṅgas, svayambhūva liṅgas, or mūrtis by definition cannot belong to the tradition of the Śaiva Siddhānta:

Surely [PP]

In the case of a bāṇaliṅga, a portable one, ones that have risen [from rivers], one established by a Siddha, a spontaneously arisen one and in the case of all [representational] images, Caṇḍa has no authority. [So too] in the case of one in which there is visualization of a non-dual [deity such as Bhairava or Tumburu]. And also in the case of rites for the Lord [installed] on the ground.

Others, however, [opine:]

No worship of Caṇḍa [is to be performed] when the [image of] the Lord has been crafted either.

How can [such a view as] that [be maintained]? True. [But] this is [in fact] a prohibition of the installation of Caṇḍa and not a prohibition of his worship. This is advanced as somebody else’s doctrine. In the Śaiva Siddhānta, however, the rule is that he should always and in every case be worshipped. And this is expressed in the Kālottara:

Whether the liṅga is stable or portable, or made of precious stone, clay, wood, rock, iron, or is represented in a picture, or is a bāṇaliṅga, [the worship of] Caṇḍa remains determined by rule (niyāmakaḥ) in the Siddhānta, but not in other tantric traditions: neither in the Vāmasrotas nor in the Dakṣiṇasrotas.²³²

[[P1543]]

Following the Kālottara, Jñānaśiva assigns the methodological stance that certain focuses of worship do not fall under the jurisdiction of Caṇḍeśvara, and thus by implication that the things offered to them do not become nirmālya, to either the Vāma or Dakṣiṇa transmissions. This is to say, he associates it with the domains that, as we have seen, the Devī Purāṇa associates with “the best among the sthāpakas,” which by our period have come to be occupied by the Kālamukhas and their śilpin or kāruka disciples. Just as we saw in the Piṅgalāmata, a work that the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā had assigned to the Vāmasrotas alongside the Mataṅgapārameśvara, which also preserves these features, the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati has also retained strong indications that it has inherited an older system of values in which Caṇḍeśvara stands in for Śiva as the Lord of the universe.

On the fourth day after the installation of the liṅga or the day after that, outside of the base of the temple (jagatī) in the īśāna direction, according to half the measure of the garbhagṛha of the temple, in house of moon, having practiced the pīṭhanyāsa and so forth, [one is to do the following mantras:]

oṃ caṇḍanāya namaḥ / oṃ caṇḍeśvarāya hūṃ phaṭ svāhā / Thus, having summoned [him, one recites:] oṃ caṇḍāya hṛdāya hūṃ phaṭ namaḥ oṃ caṇḍakavacāya hu[ṃ] phaṭ namaḥ / oṃ caṇḍāstrāya hu[ṃ] phaṭ namaḥ /

oṃ caṇḍasadyojātāya hum phaṭ namaḥ / oṃ riṃ [caṇḍa]²³³vāmadevāya huṃ phaṭ namaḥ / oṃ raḥ [caṇḍā]ghorāya huṃ phat namaḥ / oṃ [caṇḍa]tatpuruṣāya [huṃ phaṭ namaḥ] / oṃ cāṃ [caṇḍa][ī]śānāya [huṃ phaṭ namaḥ] /²³⁴

May there be homage to you Caṇḍanāyaka the fierce lord, who is the origin of the fire of Rudra, and terrifying. He bears a śūla and a daṇḍa and has four faces and four arms. He has twelve red eyes and a great fire that spews forth from his mouth. He is adorned with a moon, a crown, and dread locks, and a small bracelet/earring. He has a serpent for his sacred thread, and ascetic’s pot along with a mālā. He is seated on a white āsana. He destroys afflictions through devotion and humility. . . . He is the inconceivable one, the lord of Viśvarūpa. Homage to you, with genuflection out of devotion.²³⁵

[[P1544]]

In the prose ritual instructions that precede the mantra system and the visualization, which have been composed by Hemādri himself, though even here we see some continuities, Caṇḍeśvara’s role is much diminished. Though the old association with “the place of the moon” has been retained, instead of residing in a closed structure of equal dimensions to the garbhagṛha of the main focus of worship in the temple, Caṇḍeśvara is now installed in a permanent open pavilion outside of the temple in a space that has half the dimension of the main focus of worship. Like so many other features of the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, every element of this realignment serves to undercut the older ritual system in which the “real” esoteric god, who instantiated a radical rejection of the very idea of ritual purity through distributing his offerings as blessings to everyone, resided in the place the moon.²³⁶

[[P1545]]

When we turn from Hemādri’s own prose to the unattributed “traditional sources” that he has retained for liturgical purposes, however, a very different dynamic is in evidence, beginning with the mantras themselves. As Goodall has observed in other contexts, while one would anticipate that a mere servant of the deity would be assigned a single seed syllable for his mantra, here Caṇḍeśvara is given the five-part mantra nyāsa of a sort that is otherwise reserved for Śiva and the goddess. Even more tellingly, beginning with the mantra “oṃ caṇḍasadyojātāya hum phaṭ namaḥ,” this five-part nyāsa then appears to be followed by the unprecedented invocation of the five faces of Śiva as extensions of Caṇḍeśvara himself. The dhyāna that immediately follows maintains this identification throughout, invoking Caṇḍeśvara as the terrifying lord of the world in the form of a four faced Atimārgic deity. The iconography in evidence, even many of the terms of art, largely overlaps with the visualizations given in the Piṅgalāmata.²³⁷ Instead of being identified with “the wrath of god,” here Caṇḍeśvara is understood as the “origin of the fire of Rudra,” in other words, the source of the cosmic fire that destroys the universe at the end of the kalpa. And while these cosmic affiliations abound, conspicuously absent from these passages are any allusions to Caṇḍeśvara as a disciplinary force, responsible for example for inflicting punishment on those who break samaya codes, of the sort one would expect to find in Siddhānta aligned practice systems.

Hemādri’s deliberate retention of these formal elements in the liturgy coincide with considerable efforts to undercut the Śākta theological vision of the tradition of Caṇḍeśvara, especially its radical inclusivism and outright rejection of notions of purity and impurity. For before, during, and after the god is installed, the *Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati performatively seeks to overwrite the Śākta approaches to the redistribution of food, goods, and value as well as its more transgressive and sanguinary dimensions. In this new ritual system, once the deity is installed inside of the temple—the only major activity conducted inside of the temple out of the view of the public—the ācārya and his ṛtvijs, but noticeably not the artisans, offer a series of śānti rites in which a vegetarian and non-transgressive form of caru—quite unlike the concoction contained inside “the secret”—is fed into the fires to the accompaniment of Vadika mantras. Once this act is completed, the ritual refuse produced during the installation of the deity is gathered up and brought before Caṇḍeśvara, while at the same time, the ācārya—who does not share with anyone—is fed the wholesome caru.²³⁸ [[P1546]]

Hemādri, Caturvargacintāmaṇi, Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, “One should give [to the guru] yogurt, akṣata grain, the tips of kuśa grass and milk or honey, barley, along with fruits and flowers for the attainment of desires. . . . The installation of “all the gods” applies to a garden of trees, a pond, or in regard to images, with regard to rituals of improvement and renovation, or with regard to replacement that has to be done, and with regard to temples, pots, and so forth. All of this is the common system, which is stated in the Śruti, Smṛti, and Āgamas. Fol. 102 verso: sarvadevapratiṣṭhā suvṛkṣodyāne jalāśaye / mahopadyāte vārcāsu jīrṇasaṃskārakarmaṇ[i] // jīrṇoddhāre ca kartavye prāsādakalaśādiṣu / eta[t] sādhāraṇaṃ ta[n]traṃ śrutismṛtyāgamoditam // Fol. 98 recto - verso: dadhyakṣatakuśāgrakṣīra[ṃ] vā madhuyava[ṃ] s[id]dh[ya]rthaka[ṃ] puṣpaphalānvitam a[rgh]apātram āsādya /

Once the sadasya has been fed, accompanied by the yajamāna, bearing the ritual refuse, he goes before Caṇḍeśvara so that the rite can be completed. In place of the sharing of the joy (anumodana), which in the Piṅgalāmata the guru distributed to everyone assembled at the end of rite, here the sthāpaka simply pleads to the deity on behalf of the community. Once it is clear the deity has accepted this offering, Caṇḍeśvara receives a series of baths designed to ensure that he is clean.

“O lord, for the sake of the pacification of the flood of sins, may the pūjā of this yajamāna, the bathing and giving of enjoyments be accepted—it [this result] is brought near²³⁹ by me”. . . . One should begin the bath at the place situated on the right side, preceded by the statements of hail along with sounds of trumpet, the conch, the recitation of auspicious things, the Devasūkta, and other such sounds.²⁴⁰ [[P1547]]

The ritual that follows, which incorporates the use of powdered marijuana and entails the worship of the previously Śākta aligned sandals of a Śākta siddha, a procedure that has been Vedicized and domesticated, is of considerable interest. Thus, despite numerous issues with the text, it has presented below in a preliminary fashion. “Having set down the pādukas on the footstool, having dressed it with bathing clothes, having worshipped along with lights, incense, flowers, and scents, having anointed it with oil and fragrance, having made a powder. . . there is the bathing in the purified unction water. . . with acacia flower (śirīṣa), indigo, and sunflower, along with water full of powder that contains kuśa grass and sida cordifolia (sahadevī), there is the “wiping” of the body. With the words “śa[ṃ] no devī”. . . with the mantra “agnim mūrdhānam [divo apratiṣkutam tamīmahe namasā vājinam bṛhat],” there is the offering of the murā plant (myrrh), the kuṣṭa (dolomiaea costus), a coconut, the fragrant root of the uśira plant (vetiver), fragrant flowers, vālaka plants (fragrant swamp mallow), the chaste tree, reṇukā (chaste tree), turmeric, and haridrādvaya (turmeric extract), for the sake of siddhi. And, the head [is bathed] with water suffused with powered marijuana (vijayā) and so forth.” pāduk[au] pādapīṭhaṃ tv agre nidhāya snānavastraṃ paridhāya gandhapūṣpadhūpadīpādyair abhyarcya gandhatailenābhyajya drupadādi vety udvartya śuddhodakasnānaṃ. . . . saptabhadrāśirīṣarajanīsūryāvartinīsah[a]devīkuśacūrṇodakair dehamārjanam / śano devīr iti haridrādvaya-murākuṣṭavacābhāsībālakakoṭaramurāśaileyacūrṇajalasnānam / mūrdhānaṃ diva iti surākuṣṭhanārikela-padmośirasugandhabālakareṇukāharidrādvayasiddh[ya]rthaṃ dravābalājayantivijayācūrṇajalaiḥ śiraḥsthānam /

Notice the use of the so-called Atharvavedic Sailila hymn 1.6. Interestingly, the Kauśuikasūtra, which offers ritual applications for Atharvan mantras, prescribes the hymn is to be recited for śāntyudaka as well as in several other contexts related to pacification rites.

Now housed in an outdoor pavilion, the antithesis of his traditional abode, the ancient one Caṇḍeśvara—the god who gave things to everyone and for whom everything was considered pure—is bathed again and again in the service of purification to the sounds of pacification mantras drawn from Ṛg and Atharva Vedas. In a similar spirit, the conclusion of the ritual incorporates two conceptual elements very much at odds with the milieu from which the practices had sprung. On the one hand, we have an act of sin-eating, which benefits only the patron. On the other, there is the offering of a coconut coated in turmeric and steeped in extracts from a cornucopia of flowers and intoxicants in lieu of “the best of sacrifices”—at a moment where either an animal or a human being was to be decapitated and placed upon the pādukas. Succinctly, while on the surface Hemādri has preserved many of the formal dimensions found in his sources, his knife-like mind has set itself to the task of trimming out the core theology that animates these texts with the critical intelligence and deftness of a surgeon. In a systematic manner, what takes the place of this old order of values is the promotion of a theological-political model promoting the universality of dharma that consistently selects against practices suggestive of the episteme it has just dethroned and those orders of society that are demographically likely to attempt to clandestinely perpetuate it.

This seems an opportune moment to introduce the reader to what from a modern perspective is one of the most unsavory dimensions of our Dharmaśāstra, namely, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s robust discourses on the moral necessity of excluding and expelling from the realm of ritual any “subversive” elements clinging to the now deposed paradigms of the early medieval Deccan. In attending to this task, we will begin with examining the [[P1548]] prescriptions offered by the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati at its conclusion, which warn of the moral danger of permitting the occurrence of deviant practice in the realm of institution building before concluding with a closely related discourse in the Śrāddhakalpa on policing the demographics among ritual attendees at all public acts of commemoration and institution building. Here, then, in Hemādri’s own words, is how the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati concludes:

The installation of all the gods (sarvadevānāṃ) is stated by the Śruti, the Smṛti, and the Āgamas. Have rummaged through the Purāṇas and other things, it is related by Hemādri Suri.

Whatever else is discerned in accordance with what is contained within another system, that also is to be employed here [but only] in so far as it is not contradictory [with the structures governing] place, time, and so forth [as taught within our system]. . . .

One is not authorized to perform the installation ritual merely having had recourse to the śāstra. One who knows the Vedas and who knows the principles of ritual practice is worthy to do it.

A person of little knowledge (alpajña), who, out of ignorance or greed, desires to do the ritual installation of the gods, should be forcibly restrained by the kings.

For, by the king, who acts according to dharma and desires the increase of dharma, all of the rituals in his kingdom must be done, directly, in accordance with the śāstra. . . .

For, there are many people who want to do it [pratiṣṭhā] who do not know the mantras (amantrajñāḥ). The suppression (nigraha) of [such people] is to be done by the kings out of fear for the destruction of the kingdom.

The lowest of men does not correctly know the procedures for nyāsa and homa. He is not to be considered an ācārya. He is to be seized like a thief. . . .

Thus, having seen that the triple worlds were impoverished in the recitation of dharma, due to the power of the kali [age] by him, acting out of concern for the assistance of the triple worlds, the lovely “Wish-Fulfilling Gem” was manifested. Śrī Hemādri, the lord of all the śrīkaraṇas who are connected to Mahādeva, king of kings, is skilled in all the vidyās. Contained within the Pariśeṣa Khaṇḍa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, in which he has composed the elaboration on the iṣṭāpūrtadharma, that paddhati concerning the installation of all the gods is completed—Offering to Viṭṭhal.²⁴¹

[[P1549]]

As this division of his work draws to a close, Hemādri takes great pains to drive home a quintessential dimension of his interpretive project that was perhaps in danger of getting lost amidst a sea of ritual details. Quite simply, the comprehensiveness of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi is implicitly an argument for its self-sufficiency. In other words, Hemādri is presenting his own work as constituting in and of itself an entire knowledge system, whose strictures anyone else’s interventions into these same domains will have to obey and whose standards they will have to match. As we will see in much more detail in the next chapter, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi offers itself to its intended readers as both a canon of content and a method. As Hemādri suggests here in the second verse, while the former is amiable to further expansion—such that, for example, one might add to a list of observances (vrata) by drawing on further Purāṇas or integrate a set of procedures for building a well or temple with different shapes or proportions—the latter is fixed and inflexible. The terms of these restrictions are at once demographic and ideological. While having access to “the śāstra” is absolutely necessary if one wishes to perform any act of institution building (pratiṣṭhā), however humble, in and of itself it is hardly sufficient, for one must also know the Veda. What might not be immediately apparent is that by “the śāstra,” Hemādri refers not to scholarly learning in general but, quite pointedly, to his own text. In other words, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi is telling us, over and over, that if you want to do anything “the right way,” you will have to rely on the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. [[P1550]]

By extension, everyone who does not take the Caturvargacintāmaṇi as their methodological and ideological lodestone is by definition a person of little knowledge (alpajña) and a person who does not know the mantras (amantrajña). And, since doing things “the right way” is more important in this paradigm than doing things “effectively,” such wrong modes of doing and being, which inculcate a divergent model of the social order grounded in divergent networks of sentiment and solidarity, can hardly be tolerated. They threaten the “harmony of the world,” at least if one believes that the world is harmonious in so much as it matches up to the idealized models laid out in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. Indeed, in a certain sense, Hemādri is entirely right. Whatever their background, anyone who has not been trained under his direction is virtually guaranteed not to know the “right procedures” and the “right mantras.” The very simple reason why this necessarily would have been the case is that, though individual elements in the rites he prescribed have their own earlier histories, as pre- systematized ritual units, the methods and mantra sequences taught in the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati had no prior discursive life outside this text itself.

In other words, in crafting his Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati, Hemādri has deliberately and summarily set out to dismiss and decredentialize an entire industry and everyone who works in it. Their expertise deemed obsolete, the very pool of pratiṣṭhāpanācāryas and their crews who made the institutional worlds of the Deccan and had for centuries been acclaimed as among the most learned people on the subcontinent are rebranded. Instead of being celebrated as tantraviśārada in every sense of these multifaceted terms, now they are “men of little knowledge” who act “out of greed or ignorance.” Because acts of ritual and institution building are above all else performances of values that make experientially real the norms that inform them for those who participate within their frames, the activities of these people are deemed a [[P1551]] threat to the health and power of the state. Just like what we saw happening at Kukkunur, where after its “liberation” the Kālamukhas were expunged from the historical record and the esoteric deities of the Mantramārga and Vidyāpīṭha whom they tended were summarily replaced by a pantheon comprised of “all the gods,” the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati demands that “the lowest of men who does not correctly know the procedures for nyāsa and homa”—and indeed how could they, for Hemādri has invented both of these ex nihilo—“is not considered an ācārya.” Instead of the kings of the Deccan stepping outside of their own domains and going before such figures as supplicants who are seeking wisdom, power, and council, Hemādri proposes a new royal program. From henceforth, it is incumbent upon any king to treat such people as thieves. If the kingdom is to survive, let alone flourish, they must be quickly identified and then forcibly suppressed.

The term here that Hemādri repeatedly deploys in describing this disciplinary regime, quite interestingly, is nigraha. Depending on context, this is a word that can mean suppression, restraint, imprisonment, or even destruction, and it likely that here most if not all of these applications are intended. As a term of art, however, nigraha has special additional rhetorical significance, for it is situated at the heart of the emic theory of just what it means to be a king. Vijñāneśvara, for example, tells us at the beginning of his commentary on Yājñavalkya’s division on vyavahāra, “the supreme dharma (paramo dharmaḥ) of the king is the protection of the people (prajāpālanam), and that is not possible apart from the suppression of bad [people] (duṣṭanigraha).”²⁴² As we have seen again and again throughout this work, in the [[P1552]] medieval Deccan, one of the key components of the responsibility of the king to protect his people had been understood as entailing the protection of dharma through the preservation in perpetuity of the individuated sovereignty of the undying land grants and their administrators. The king’s role as protector against “bad people,” in contrast, is treated as a conceptually subsidiary duty, largely homologized with the preservation of the rule of law, and given considerably less rhetorical emphasis. Far from being restricted to simply the king himself, this same dictum was viewed as being relevant for any local big-man who wields disciplinary power. This is why both aspects of its implementation, protecting the people through protecting the dharma embodied in the land along with protecting the people from enemy raiders and brigands with his mighty bow, could feature prominently in the professional self-representation of a Śākta Śūdra gangster such as Habbĕya Nāyaka operating in remote regions in the shadows of the mountains.

For a big man like Habbĕya just as much as for a king, however, the “duṣṭajana” under consideration were simply understood as people who preyed upon the population, such as thieves, murderers, and brigands. Vijñāneśvara²⁴³ himself also seems to adhere to a similar standard, for though he councils that in regard to a bad person, disciplinary power (daṇḍa) must be deployed directly and immediately (duṣṭe samyagdaṇḍaḥ prayoktavyaḥ) his catalog of what makes something bad, whether we are talking about thoughts and impulses that must [[P1553]] be suppressed (also called nigraha) through self-discipline, or thieves, liars, frauds, violent criminals, and murderers, is in no way framed in doctrinally specific terms. As we have seen in chapter 3, in this earlier discourse, “difference” (bheda) in ritual or conduct is not only never labelled duṣṭa by the authorities, but the king is explicitly instructed that within its respective domain it is to be protected using the full resources and authority at his disposal. Thus, in this context, the suppression of people is about punishing material crimes as defined under the law and not about summarily punishing “ideological deviancy,” wherever and whenever it might occur. Though not entirely lacking in historical precedent, especially earlier in history and elsewhere on the subcontinent, in terms of the norms that animate the prescriptive and documentary records in use throughout the medieval Deccan, what Hemādri is proposing amounts to a stark break from tradition. Even when compared with their peers, the Seuṇa Yādava rulers of earlier generations were unusually eloquent and vocal advocates for what can only be described as something more than mere religious tolerance.²⁴⁴ From henceforth, under the Seuṇa Yādavas, at least in theory, through the newly trained cadres of Brāhmaṇa authorities it has recruited for just such a purpose, the state is supposed to closely monitor every act of institution building. Where their services are not employed and Caturvargacintāmaṇi-derived “best practices” are not followed, the institution is to be disrupted and its managers expelled, imprisoned, or even killed.

“Outcasting “Difference”: The Making of the Tantric Subaltern

Though monitoring acts of institution building and renewal, and intervening when they conflict with the “best practices’” of the new professional class, represent a much higher priority for [[P1554]] the securing of a new Yādava ecumene grounded in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s vision, an analogous dynamic is also at work in the realm of occasional rituals, with considerable attention being devoted to policing who is to be included and excluded from meaningful social moments. Once we recognize that the very heart of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s reimagining of what it means to “be Brāhmaṇa” entails the recasting of the Dharmaśāstrin primarily as the administrator and overseer of the quotidian religious lives of the population, the rationale for this focus on governing and monitoring rituals of very different sorts becomes immediately clear. It is certainly no accident that, at least in the portion of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi that has been edited and published, the greatest care and attention that Hemādri directs to thinking through in painstaking details the ins and outs of any ritual system, including the for us exceptionally pertinent matter of who is to be expelled from the sacrifice, is directed towards the topic of śrāddha rites.

The choice is clearly highly strategic. As Matthew Sayers has demonstrated²⁴⁵ convincingly and at some length, such rituals form a logical conceptual bridge between classical Śrauta, pre-dharmanibandha Smārta, and dharmanibandha style religious praxis. In selecting śrāddha as the test case for thinking through the workings and boundaries of ritual, Hemādri is able to make a convincing case for the continuities between the piṇḍapitṛyajña of the Vedas proper, the four-fold śrāddha ritual of the Gṛhyasūtras, and the at least twelve types [[P1555]] of “Purāṇic” śrāddha recognized by the dharmanibandha Smārtas, and thus, by extension, for the canonicity of the new Smārta mode of religion. Just as importantly, however, though they had originated as a ritual honoring the ancestors on specific delimited occasions, governed by calendrical concerns, or marking the death of the sacrificer’s parents, over time, the scope of śrāddha ritual expanded so far beyond this ritual function that they had effectively become a standard approach to sanctifying pretty much any kind of special occasion, such as celebration of victory, a marriage, the birth of a son, starting out on pilgrimage, commencing or concluding medical treatment, or performing public forms of theistic worship.²⁴⁶ Nor was the influence of this ritual form restricted to domains where Vaidika Brāhmaṇas were the only religious authorities. By the eighth century, Tantric variations of śrāddha²⁴⁷ have been adapted into Śaiva and Śākta revelations and codifications [[P1556]] of the ritual are prescribed in the ninth- and eleventh-century paddhatis of Brahmaśambhu and Somaśambhu of the Śaivasiddhānta as well as in the twenty-fifth chapter of the tenth-century Tantrāloka of Abhinavagupta.[^1556_1389] Succinctly, even before we take into account the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s own efforts to add to the instances where śrāddha rites are performed, by the thirteenth century, this ritual form would have effectively punctuated most of the important moments in many people’s lives.

For the next chapter, we will examine in some detail how Hemādri’s treatment of the śrāddha ritual provides his readers with a hermeneutical skeleton key to understanding both the theology and method that underlies his vision of the universalization of Hindu dharma. For the moment, however, let us restrict our focus to the much narrower task of examining the disciplinary dimensions of the śrāddha ritual as a means of policing who is to be included and excluded from meaningful social moments. Like so many other modalities we have examined throughout our investigations, within the various sources that nibandhas draw upon, the rules for who is invited to sponsor, to attend, and to be fed at śrāddha rites not only vary in substantive and significant ways from text to text, but even within a single text are highly dependent upon the specific type of śrāddha rite under consideration. For example, if a specific type of śrāddha rite involves an offering of liquor and meat to the bhūtas and piśācas, with the remainder from that offering being fed to the attendees at the conclusion of the rite, ascetics who have taken vows that prohibit the consumption of such substances under any circumstances are prohibited from participating. In the nibandha literature, however—for this is a case where, though he provides an order of magnitude more detail, Hemādri is building upon some precedents set by Lakṣmīdhara—the bare effect of bringing together these disparate strictures and compiling them in a single framework where they are treated as complementary [[P1557]] elements of single system markedly changes the nature of the conversation. In the Śrāddhakalpa of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, the section on who is to be forbidden from being fed after the śrāddha rite and who is to be driven away from a site where śrāddha rituals are taking place runs more than a hundred pages. By the time all of the types of social agents who cannot participate have been delineated, which Hemādri does with great precision in his commentary on the sources, much of society has been excluded. For Hemādri, however (seemingly in distinction from his source), one of the key objectives in these sections is to lay a foundation for the unambiguous exclusion of the ruling authorities of the Śaiva Age from every significant aspect of social and religious life.

Let us take, for example, the manner in which the text frames the general rules for feeding ascetics at the śrāddha.

H: Śātātapaḥ says, “One should feed the ascetics (yati).” And with regard to that, a qualification is stated. As is stated in the Brahmavaivarta:

“One should drive away (varjjayet) bald-headed ones (muṇḍas), those with dread locks, and those with red robes. You should pay off (pradāpayet) the ones with scalp tufts, those reddened with dhātu marks, and those with triple notched staves. However, the ones who are always established in their vows, are knowledgeable, and are meditators, are devoted to the gods, and are great souls, they, being all those things, cause purification by mere sight alone.”

H: Muṇḍas means ones with bald heads along with a top knot. The jaṭilas means Śaivas, Pāśupatas, Kālamukhas, and so forth. The robed ones means those who have for their clothes red and brown robes, such as figgies?(āśvatthas).²⁴⁸

[[P1558]]

As you will by now anticipate, faced with the core conceptual problem that the Smṛti texts do not actually make the arguments that he wants them to make, Hemādri qualifies the teachings of Dharmaśāstra with statements from an unrelated source, the Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa, which in its current published iteration is virtually an addendum to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Though the Rādhā-centric iteration of this work now available to us is almost certainly quite different from the version available to Hemādri in the thirteenth century, given the rest of his use of this text, the recension from which this extract was drawn expressed roughly analogous and unambiguously Vaiṣṇava commitments that informed its exclusion of its Śaiva rivals. Even so, the text as written does not really speak very clearly to his exact concerns, and so he must flesh out his intended message through his commentary. In each case, he tweaks the construal of the term present in the root text considerably. The end result is to exclude from the śrāddha all of the major competing types of religious authorities.

In place of people with shaved heads, an accoutrement that could arise from a range of communities and circumstances, Hemādri excludes perhaps the most orthodox-presenting form of Brāhmaṇa, known especially from south India, whose head is adorned solely by a top knot. People with dreadlocks again represents an underspecified category that in fact does not exclude all the social agents that defined the Śaiva Age, since some of them did not wear dreadlocks. Just as problematically, the category could also incorporate slightly more acceptable varieties of philosopher ascetics, like Pātañjalian yogins, of whom Hemādri approves. As Hemādri’s predecessor in the field of Dharmaśāstra, Medhātithi would have it, jāṭila might even simply refer to Brāhmaṇa students who have not completed their studies and thus do not have the adult privilege of participating in śrāddhas. For this reason, our author spells out explicitly that what the text intends is that one is to drive away Śaivas, Pāśupatas, Kālamukhas, and so forth. In other words, the whole panoply of ritual agents who might have been attending and conducting śrāddha rites in lieu of Smārta Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrins are [[P1559]] now to be expelled. Finally, because the category of robed ones could potentially be interpreted as demanding that Hemādri’s precious Vedāntins, the future Daśanāmīs, might be excluded from the very roles for which they are being cultivated, the prohibition is adapted to specify only brown and red robes, perhaps intending the deselection of Buddhists. Saffron, in contrast, is deemed perfectly fine.

The passage we have just examined introduces a substantial section exploring the different rules and restrictions for including yatis in the śrāddha, such as what do you do with ascetics who have taken a vow to eat nothing or only one food. Most of these are largely irrelevant to our concerns. The interesting point is that Hemādri has chosen this particular focus as his framing mechanism in organizing his text. He will return to it several times within the discourse, including at the end. Rhetorically, Hemādri is explicit that the passage we have just examined is to be treated as the benchmark against which all other statements about yogins must be tested and interpreted. As he writes, “therefore, by this [above statement], it is known that the entirety of the statements about yogins [in our text] have precisely the subject of yatis who are endowed with these characteristics.”²⁴⁹ And thus, after treating such topics as the importance of seeking out and inviting to the feeding lines after the śrāddha Brāhmaṇas who are hungry and living in poverty, but are too proud and concerned about their reputation to seek out assistance, Hemādri concludes this topic, which is labelled under the heading “those outside the āśramas (āśramabāhyāḥ),” seemingly for both good and ill, by reasserting in no uncertain terms that certain categories of ascetics are to be summarily driven away from the śrāddha, as for example in this extract from the Brahmavaivarta which reads, “But the bald headed ones, those wearing dreadlocks, and clothed in red robes must be driven away from the śrāddha.” Once again, his preferred authorities are collections of Purāṇic proof texts mostly drawn from Vaiṣṇava leaning sources, since these are the texts most likely to match up to his intended message, but these have been interspersed with clipped extracts from other, more Śaiva leaning Purāṇic sources that are not as self-evidently treating the same topic but that have been edited such a way so that the reader assumes doctrinal harmonization.

[[P1560]]

The next thirty pages of the Śrāddhakalpa are devoted to two deeply interconnected topics, a detailed catalog of the professional and religious identities who are not permitted a banner, and those viewed as “despoilers” of the purity of the śrāddha offering, and who are thus are not fit for the receiving lines. In the present context, we can barely do justice to the sociological richness of the resulting text’s representation of life-worlds of non-elite people in the medieval Deccan. Eschewing the usual stereotyped imagery we expect from kāvya, or antiquated formulas one finds in the Dharmaśāstra, Hemādri approaches the topic with a devotion to verisimilitude—making sure we know exactly who these people are and what they do—that previously in this study we have only seen in Someśvara III’s gadyakāvya, the Vikramāṅkābhyudaya. The key difference, of course, is that whereas the Cāḷukya king shared with us the social diversity of his kingdom because he believed it to be part of what made Kalyāṇa great, Hemādri’s intention is to ensure that professional Brāhmaṇa ritualists throughout the Seuṇa kingdom have all the tools they need to weed out unwanted classes of people. The particularity and the sheer variety of the social world that Caturvargacintāmaṇi sets out to domesticate blows open our comfortable presumptions about what medieval India must have been like. Thus, in the lesser manner of those forbidden a banner (ketanānarhāḥ), to cite just a few example (pg. 477–79) the ranks include devalakas—as Hemādri explains, [[P1561]] these are those who worship deities for the sake of obtaining money²⁵⁰—as well hypocrites (dambhikās), which Hemādri tells us is a technical term for those who observe restrictive injunctions (niyama) that cannot possibly ever yield results.²⁵¹ Our text mentions transgender people and soma sellers—as Hemādri specifies, the latter are those who sell the soma vine.²⁵² It singles out various different subclasses of bards that attend a royal court, subdivided into such categories as the bodhakas, who are vaitālikas, and the caraṇas, who keep the company of female dancers called plavakas. Apparently there was a recognizable class of people who taught Śūdras Sanskrit śāstra, again with a special subcategory for those who specialized in teaching Śūdras Sanskrit grammar, and there were also those who taught śāstra to those who would end up teaching Śūdras.²⁵³ Hemādri mentions several sorts of those who, for all intents and purposes, ascend in caste by marrying up, again with a special category for those who marry the daughters of Brāhmaṇas.²⁵⁴ He speaks of those who cast out pretas for a fee, apparently called mṛtaniryyātakas, figures whose inclusion in the ranks of those who do not get a banner but are not despoilers of the line apparently differentiates them as somewhat less despised than several other categories of exorcists who appear in the other section.²⁵⁵ Our author lists several different subcategories of financial debtors and the indebted, including those who charge exorbitant interest²⁵⁶ as well as the so called “debt maker,” “one who obtains [[P1562]] a debt for the purpose of producing ‘unnecessary income.’”²⁵⁷ People who make arrows sit alongside Brāhmaṇas who never even observe their rituals, who in turn are lumped next to the foreigners (yavanas).²⁵⁸

One of Hemādri’s longer and rather revealing discussions, for it is very suggestive of a new kind of state coming to terms with documenting and cataloging the population, involves the different subcategories of “people who have not been previously recognized.”²⁵⁹ As our author explains, these are people who either themselves or even their ancestors are not mentioned in recorded sources, along with those whose foundational line are only listed in relation to a gaṇa or a saṅgha, archaic terms that may well still point to the survival of vestigial pre-monarchical modes of governance into the thirteenth century. As will be clarified in the next division, on those who “despoil the line,” one sub-type of people who descend from a gaṇa are in fact Śrauta ritualists who apparently remain within their own communities all their lives, having no further ties with the rest of society, a social arrangement that Hemādri treats as just as bad as being nāstika.

When it comes to the ranks of those who “despoil the line,” Hemādri synthesizes together a range of different sources, each of which on its own privileges different criteria for determining exclusion from ritual settings.²⁶⁰ Encompassing at once concerns we would label as legal, purely “economic,” the regulation of professions, and the policing of social behavior, Hemādri’s approach to ritual governmentality amounts to a series of interrelated approaches for regulating different modes of transactionality and exchange. Part of the point here is that someone like a usurer, a counterfeit or a gambler, a defrauder of the village, someone who [[P1564]] manipulates the scales, which is to say someone who cheats the system “economically,” finds their immediate counterpart in the realm of religious life in the hypocrite “who practices dharma on a pretext for the sake of pleasing the world,” which is, of course a near paraphrase of the more conservative Mantramārga position about why one should continue to observe worldly dharma, and in the domestic world in a married man who is impotent. By defying the role assigned to them by the order of things, all of them are effectively committing fraud in precisely the same manner. Hemādri is equally keen on targeting professions and ways of life that step over and outside of his vision of a singular shared social normativity, in a large part because they represent autonomous sites of power and agency. Poison sellers and alchemists belong alongside exorcists for hire in that they offer or manipulate power substances on behalf of anyone of means as a paid service. People with “deviant ācāras” as well as preṣyas, the designated voices of the village council and the state, are problematic because they represent the older pluralistic paradigm Hemādri seeks to displace. Just like travelling troupes of performers, and nomads who wander in and out of urban and village areas selling the products from their cows, goats, and buffalo, contract labor exists outside of permanent social relations governed by logics of uninterrupted dependency. In other words, literally in the first case but figuratively in the second, these are people who do not “know their place” within the social order and who spend much of their time effectively not subject to a singular and consistent guiding authority. [[P1565]]

[In response to Manu,] A preṣya is one who is doing the command of a king or village council. . . . The cow protector is the one who protects cows for the sake of subsistence. . . . But a contract laborer (bhṛtaka) is someone who takes wages according to the speech, “I will do this for so much money”. . . . A grinder of oils and so forth is a tailaka. A kūṭakāraka is someone who speaks non-truth in the court while acting as witness. Otherwise, the term refers to the act of the falsification of impressed coins and so forth. As for the mad or ones whose minds are unsteady, [this can be] on account of flaws of the vāta and so forth, or because of being seized by piśācas and so forth. . . . A gṛhasaṃveśaka is one who subsists on the discipline of vāstu, such a sthapitas and sūtradhāras and so forth. . . . A klība is someone of whom the “excitement has been broken off” in regard to “duties that have to be done.” “One who is always asking” is someone who always irritates the world by asking all the time. Here, the ka suffix is used in the original sense to indicate blameworthiness and so forth. . . . Aurābhrikas are those of whom the vendible items are rams or sheep; thus is also the case with the [seller] of buffalos. . . . The pretaniryāpaka is one who, for a price, casts out or conveys away pretas. The one who has a reviled ācāra is one of whom the social practice is censured. The ajapāla, a goat herder, is someone who protects goats for the sake of subsistence. As for the grāmakūṭaka he is someone who cheats the village. The sense is he causes to be consumed the wealth of the village by many sorts of fraudulent businesses. But a tulākūṭa, scale fraud, is a deceiver [who operates] by means of having a business that uses fraudulent scales.

Caturvargacintāmaṇi, Śrāddhakalpa, pg. 479–480: *athāpāṅkteyā bhavanti. . . . satyaṃ yasmin jīvikopāye dhānyavṛddhijīvanaḥ vārddhuṣikaḥ / mūlyena devatāpūjako devadravyabhoktā vā devalakaḥ / krayavikrayavavahāropajīvī baṇik. . . . dhanārthaṃ rujāṃ pratikarttā cikitsakaḥ / dharmārthinas tu tasya praśastatvād. . . . gṛhaprāsādādinirmāṇavṛttiḥ śilpopajīvī /. . . . samprayoktā dyūtakārī / chadmaprayoktā kitavaḥ /. . . . lokaprītyarthaṃ chadmanā dharmānuṣṭhātā dāmbhikaḥ. . . . pg. 483: grāmasya rājño vā preṣyaḥ ājñākaraḥ. . . . ājīvanārthaṃ yaḥ paśūn rakṣati sa paśupālaḥ / pg. 484: vandī stutipāṭhakaḥ / tilādīnāṃ peṣṭā tailakaḥ / sākṣitve ’nṛtavādī kūṭakārakaḥ, kūṭānām nāṇakādīnāṃ karttā vā / pg. 485: iyatā dhanenedaṃ karomīti vacanavyavasthayā vetanagrāhī bhṛtakaḥ. . . . vātādidoṣeṇa piśācādigṛhītatvena vā anavasthitacittaḥ “unmattaḥ”. . . . gṛhasaṃveśakaḥ vāstuvidyopajīvī sthapatisūtradhārādiḥ / pg. 486: kartavyeṣu bhaṅgotsāhaḥ klībaḥ / sadaiva yācanayā lokānudvejayati saḥ nityayācanakaḥ / nindādibhyaḥ svārthe kap /. . . . urabhrāḥ meṣāḥ paṇyaṃ yasya ca aurābhrikaḥ / evaṃ māhiṣikaḥ. . . . yo mūlyena pretān niryāpayati vahati sa pretaniryāpakaḥ / vigarhitācārāḥ ninditācārāḥ / pg. 487: ājīvanārtham ajāḥ pālayati ajapālaḥ / Hemādri (pg. 490) is here commenting on terms of art found in a passage assigned to the Yamasmṛti: grāmaṃ kūṭayati chalayatīti grāmakūṭakaḥ / bahubhir alīkavyavahārair grāmadravyaṃ bhakṣayatīty arthaḥ / alīkatulāvyavahāreṇa vañcayitā tulākūṭaḥ /

Finally, there are ritually indispensable but low status communities like the oil pressers and the oil vendors, who, we should remember, figure frequently in the early medieval Kannada inscriptional record especially as both the patrons and recipients of usually small- scale grants affiliated with a temple complex. As we have seen repeatedly throughout this [[P1566]] study, many of these demographics who are to be shunned, “service classes,” musicians and performers, artisans, healers and exorcists, nomads, as well as oil makers, also tend to have cultural and initiatory ties with Mantramārga ritual practitioners and “specialized” institutions. That being said, it is difficult to say whether it is the internal logic that animates these life-worlds themselves or their doctrinal allegiances that would have proven the bigger point of contention, for both represent value systems that are effectively antithetical to Hemādri’s interpretive project and for precisely the same sort of reasons.

As you may have noticed, among the ranks of those who despoil the line, Hemādri has already incorporated śilpins as well as more general contractor builders (gṛhasaṃveśaka). This portion of our text is not organized thematically but is structured around Hemādri’s responses to a range of proof texts that themselves often simply enumerate different classes of rejected persons in accordance with the exigencies of meter as opposed to with the aim of cataloging examples according to coherent principles. Even so, more so than with any other demographic, Hemādri choses to return again and again to tackling comprehensively all the possible different terms of art that might be used to refer to the different groupings of artisans, focusing especially on goldmakers, with the express purpose of making sure that none of them slip through the cracks of his attempts at excluding them from commensality.

[In response to the Yamasmṛti], śreṇīs are original inhabitants (prakṛti) [of a village] such as goldmakers and so forth. The sacrificer on behalf them is called a śreṇī sacrificer. One who subsists by attaining an increase in his store of gold through [the practice of] art is kalopajīva. He is one who makes a livelihood by means of art such as fashioning gold and so forth. Or, he is someone who lives by the sixty-four arts. One who is a great offender is a person of whom punishment has been done by the king, through the marking of the feet and so forth; he is [also] said to be a “punishment banner.” A honey killer is one who kills honey bees for the purpose of taking their honey. . . . Samayas are differential [legal] arrangements made by a king and so forth. . . .²⁶¹ A sacrificer of the pūga: a pūga is a collectivity of people who have the same [[P1567]] occupation, who are also of the same caste. One who is a sacrificer of that pūga is a pūga sacrificer. . . .²⁶² A bhṛtya-teacher is one who has taught hired laborers or who is a teacher of hired laborers. Thus also [he] is a Śūdra-teacher. . . .²⁶³

One who subsists by the activity of writing books is a paustika. Or, a book writer may be one who sells books for money. A storyteller is one who is a teller of stories, such as the Bṛhadkathā, for the delight of the court parasite (vīṭa). A machine maker is someone who constructs machines for the sake of an assembly in forts and so forth, or for the sake of hunting. A kāṇḍapṛṣṭha is someone who subsists on weapon craft. . . . One who is vāditram plays a musical instrument that is struck. Nṛtya means one who dances. Gītā is song. Tāla rhythms are [dancing rhythms] such as cañcatpūta and so forth. The focus is one who subsists by his skill at these vidyās. A mūlyasāṃvatsarika is someone who points out the constellations and so forth out of his desire to obtain money.

As is stated by Manu: “One should not speak the tithi of another person, or one should not point out the nakṣatras.” A great traveler is someone who travels on the ocean or is always going on the road. The aśmakuṭṭaka is a fashioner of stone for the purpose of building temples and so forth. . . .²⁶⁴

[[P1568]]

In much the same way that the Pratiṣṭhāpaddhati sets out to dismantle piece by piece the ritual systems and ethos that animated the professional lives of the makers of the world, here in the Śrāddhakalpa, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi sets about to disassemble the variety of social and juridical forms that made possible their largely autonomous way of life. In doing so, our text provides welcome confirmation that the social realities on ground in the Maharashtra of his day that Hemādri sets about regulating out of existence bear a close affinity to those that we saw outlined in chapter three in Varadarāja’s Vyahāranirṇaya, right down to the use of parallel terms of art. The world of the arts and artisans, in other words, was comprehensively ordered around the differential arrangement of the law (vyavasthā) as established by kings and other ruling authorities, which gave sanction to samaya codes of differentiated law. This in turn enabled social forms like the pūga, self-governing collectivities in which people of single profession share a single caste background, but also created spaces for a myriad of types of non-Brāhmaṇa religious and technical authorities, such a mathematicians and astrologers, who were responsible for the ritual lives of these communities and who also provided various forms of mass education, both in technical disciplines and in the realm of cultural production.

[[P1569]]

Particularly in light of the almost normative historiographical assumptions that the Brāhmaṇa as landlord-farmer was one of the defining pillars of a perennial Brāhmaṇa led social order often characterized as “feudal,” the amount of attention that Hemādri invests in delegitimizing this practice is also worthy of mention. Since the age that they live in does not entail the adoption of the dharmas associated with a time of trials, any involvement in agriculture, we are told, renders a Brāhmaṇa ineligible as a ritual participant, with an important stipulation. Overriding the context-specific legal pluralism we have encountered so often, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi offers a universal injunction governing all agricultural production that removes the practical equivalent of ritual fault. Presumably taken out of a single year’s harvest, the producer is to give 1/6 of his yield to the king, 1/20 to the gods, and 1/18 to Brāhmaṇas, and so long as he does so, his transgressions will not be punished. This arrangement at once points to the preexistence of a substantial number of caste inappropriate tenant farmers who have to somehow be accommodated as well as alternative financial means whereby Brāhmaṇas [[P1570]] who are not themselves farmers can passively accrue income from the land merely by agreeing to overlook the transgressions of their neighbors. At the same time, much like we saw in the inscription from Unkeshwar,²⁶⁵ it points to a new consensus that all modes of production should both directly enrich the state and help to fund the state supported project of reimagining the religious landscape, regardless of whether the “donees” themselves have any devotional, social, or personal ties to the religious institutions in question.

With the multitudes of people who merely despoil the line dispensed with, the worst of the worst—those who must be violently driven away if they even approach the area where a śrāddha is taking place are reserved for last. In contrast to what we have seen up until now, this category is defined explicitly in doctrinal and theological terms.

As described by Hemādri, of good intellect, whose jocular conversation is an ocean of nectar, a veritable sun whose radiance is wisdom, who is a lovely treasury of discrimination of truth from falsity, who is the king of the waves of compassion, the highest gold mine of auspiciousness—hear now the ones who have come forth from bad living creatures, who are to be driven away from the ground in the vicinity of the śrāddha [sacrifice]. . . .²⁶⁶

As is stated in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa: Naked people and so forth should not ever see the śrāddha. . . .

H: Naked (nagna) means those who have abandoned the Vedas. By the word ādi (“and so forth”) are understood those who have renounced the practice of Vedic ritual of those sorts. And likewise, on that very subject it is stated:

“Since the three Vedas is the covering of all beings, those indeed who abandon it, out of delusion, are known indeed as the naked.”

H: The “three” means the Veda. Saṃvaraṇa means covering or garment. For just as a garment protects people from cold, wind and so forth, in the same way, the Vedas also [[P1571]] protects from suffering in that it establishes the practice of one’s own dharma. Thus, it is similar to a garment.

“Those who follow the dharmas of the Buddhists, Śrāvakas, the Text-less, Śāktas, Jīvakas, Kāpilas are indeed folks that are naked.”

H: Buddhists means Buddhists (saugata), Śrāvakas means Śvetāmbara Jains. The Text- less are the Digambara Jains. Śāktas are Kaulas. Jīvakas are Bārhaspatyas—the sense is the Cārvākas. Kapila is one who resides in the Lokāyata country. Kāpilas are those who are led by him.²⁶⁷

[[P1572]]

In the root text on which Hemādri’s is relying, the people who are to be completely forbidden fall under the category of “the naked” (nagna). In the original source, this is likely a mundane pragmatic restriction. We are probably simply talking about people who do not wear any clothes, who must put clothes on before attending the ritual. And yet, through intertextual exegesis, Hemādri is able to shape this passage into something that provides a capstone to this part of his interpretive project. In this regard he clearly again is leaning on a specifically Vaiṣṇava precedent, for all of the sources that offer this somewhat fanciful allegorical reading of the term nagna seem to originate in such a domain.²⁶⁸ What our author [[P1573]] has done in a sense is that, without invoking Vaiṣṇava signifiers or making plain that this idea is product of interreligious polemic, he has taken entextualized Vaiṣṇava specific norms and theological frameworks and equated them with the shared worldview of a new kind of Smārtas. Indeed, as Hemādri explains in his commentary, the function of the Veda is not that it provides the core conceptual resources for this new tradition, but rather that it “protects from suffering” by “establishing the practice of one’s own dharma (svadharma).” In other words, its main virtue is that it provides checks that seek to override a pluralism of values and a pluralism in law. For Hemādri, the figures that most thoroughly embody such abhorrent normativities are not the agents of the Mantramārga as whole, but a curious rouges gallery of what we would call Śramaṇa religions—Buddhists, Śvetāmbara and Digambara Jains, the survivors of the old materialisms, along with what this study has taken to be our author’s main intended opponents, the Śāktas, whom Hemādri quite accurately identifies as Kaulas. Intriguingly, by and large, one of the defining features of the heterodoxy of all of these communities is that, in addition to being socially dependent for their survival on a site- and community-specific differentiation of norms, at least by this time period, they have adopted nominalist-like epistemologies that treat individual things and “experience” as sources of authority. In essence then, whether or not such agents themselves adhere to the expected norms of Varṇāśramadharma, they represent everything written on the slate that is our particularized world that the Caturvargacintāmaṇi seeks to wipe clean away. This section then concludes with a series of warnings, emphasizing once again that in a world where legal and moral judgements are both normative and universal, there exist no exceptions to universalized ritual and legal norms, even for the ruling powers. Perhaps most pertinently, Hemādri directs his readers to the following seemingly cursory statement: [[P1574]]

And this is the prohibition regarding the eating of rice of a king who has deviated from his own dharma. Thus is to be seen: “The food is never to be eaten of kings who are devoid of protecting the people, who are deviating from the law books. One who is eating it should go to hell.”²⁶⁹

[[P1575]]

Given what we have learned about the dominant normativities that animate the medieval Deccan, and which continued to hold sway in places where the Seuṇas did not rule and the Caturvargacintāmaṇi had not been embraced as the law of the land, if taken seriously, this small statement amounts to the shattering of any hopes of commensality between the Seuṇas and other royal courts. This is not the place to engage with the rather substantial multilingual corpus of texts and documentary records produced in the courts of the Seuṇa’s major regional rivals, the Hoysalas to the east in Karnataka and the Solaṅkī Caḷukyas of Gujarat, but suffice it to say that in both domains, but especially among the Hoysalas and their vassals, right alongside an increasingly influential and decidedly Vaiṣṇava normativity, Kalyāṇi Caḷukya social “best practices,” including the use of non-Brāhmaṇa ācāryas overseeing artisans in construction and the initiation of generals and sometimes the kings themselves into Śākta samaya codes continued into the fourteenth century. Were they actually to follow the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, even to parley or arrange and celebrate a marriage, the Seuṇas would have no longer been willing to share the food and trust of their relatives and rivals. Succinctly, the program of social reform that the Caturvargacintāmaṇi promotes in almost every aspect aims not at the restoration of long held social norms but at a revolution in [[P1576]] the practice and understanding of dharma that irrevocably breaks away from an almost thousand-year consensus.

In preparation for our upcoming encounter with Hemādri’s vision as a theologian, it is worth considering some the sources that have inspired this drastic break from the familiar. As we will see in our final chapter, though Hemādri’s universal dharma is profoundly influenced by a range of Vaiṣṇava scriptures, no single work has more an impact than the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and this true even in regard to the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, where it is quoted sparingly. It is thus fitting that we close out our own exploration of the disciplinary dimensions of Hemādri’s interpretive project, especially as they pertain to the “curation” of individual participation upon the sacrificial grounds, by turning to the Bhāgavata’s own reflections upon such matters, which until now have been entirely overlooked by modern Western scholarship.

The fourth division of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa²⁷⁰ begins with a retelling of the story of the destruction of Dakṣa’s sacrifice, a tale that for many contemporary Śaivas in the thirteenth century was emblematic of both the demographic inclusivism of their tradition as well as of the necessity of ferociously defending the honor of their god.²⁷¹ Needless to say, the Bhāgavata construes this story in a rather different manner. Succinctly, as we are about to see, it will reimagine this story as a charter myth justifying the exclusion of initiated Śaivas from social life and the sacrificial grounds. [[P1577]]

At first things proceed in the usual fashion, with Dakṣa denouncing his daughter Satī’s relationship with the ill-mannered skull wearing lord who dwells in the cremation grounds.²⁷² In a pointed language that resonates with the rhetoric of the text we have just read, Dakṣa laments that by Śiva and his followers the path (panthā) practiced by good people (sadbhir) had been defiled (dūṣita). Though Śiva took his daughter’s hand in marriage in front of sacred fire in the presence of Brāhmaṇas (viprāgnimukhataḥ) as if he was a good person (iva sādhuvat), from Dakṣa’s perspective, at least, the god failed to do his father-in-law proper homage after the marriage. For this reason, his new father-in-law has come to resent him immensely, lamenting that bestowing his daughter in marriage was “like [giving] beautiful speech to a śūdra (śūdrāyevośatīṃ giram).” Dakṣa then continues on in the usual fashion, denouncing the impurity and inauspiciousness of the so-called auspicious lord, as well as his motley filthy retinue of followers, until at last he declares that there is going to be implemented a new restrictive injunction (niṣidhyamānaḥ). Henceforth, in the Vedic sacrifice, the god Bhava will no longer receive any offering whatsoever. This far, the story is indistinguishable from any of its other tellings. Of course, by end of the tale, Śiva’s rightful share will be restored to him and we will be taught that Śiva and Viṣṇu are one and the same supreme principle and neither is to be disrespected. [[P1578]]

Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the Bhāgavata swerves off onto a very different course that aims at conveying a contrarian message. To accomplish this task, in a subplot leading up to the actual performance of Dakṣa’s sacrifice, it introduces into the story two new protagonists, who usually play no meaningful role in the myth. The first of these figures is none other than Nandikeśvara, the leader of Śiva’s gaṇas and the revealer of the Śivadharmaśāstra. The second is the Vedic sage Bhṛgu, forefather of the often-ferocious line of the warrior Brāhmaṇa Bhārgavas. What happens next, according to the Bhāgavata, is that Nandīkeśvara makes a mistake. Defiled by the garment that is anger (roṣakaṣāyadūṣitaḥ), he places a curse on the head of Dakṣa and his followers.²⁷³ Dakṣa, he declares, entrapped by the net of karma, will have his mind turned away from the Vedic dharma. Because he acted like a beast (paśu), that clever one will become goat -aced (bastamukhaḥ) and will become obsessed with desire for women. Dakṣa and his followers, the gaṇeśvara proclaims, will be reborn again and again in this world. Directing his attention to Dakṣa’s Brāhmaṇa followers, Nandikeśvara proclaims:

May those haters of Hara whose selves are agitated be deluded by the abundant kindling wood that is the sweet smell of the flowery scriptural language! For the sake of their livelihood [and not out of piety] may the twice-borns eat everything, bear vows, austerity, and wisdom here in this world! May they be beggars for whom the [only] wealth is the pleasure gardens of the bodily senses.²⁷⁴

[[P1579]]

As the Bhāgavata teaches, while Nandikeśvara was well within his rights in cursing the misguided Dakṣa, in directing his ire to his Brāhmaṇa followers the lord of the gaṇas made a pivotal mistake with long lasting repercussions. In defense of the Brāhmaṇas, Bhṛgu now steps forward and offers his own counter curse.

These ones who bear vows to Bhava, and those ones who are entirely attached to them—may they be heretics, obstructing the true śāstra! Their purity destroyed, their minds deluded, bearing bones, ash, and matted locks, may they enter into Śaiva initiation (śivadīkṣāyāṃ) in which liquor is divine. Since you all blaspheme against Brahmā and the Brāhmaṇas, who are the bridge that is the support of men, thus, you have taken recourse to heresy! For this alone is the auspicious (śiva) eternal path of all the worlds/people (lokānāṃ), which previously they followed, of which the veridical authority (pramāṇa) is Janārdana. Having reviled that brahman, the Supreme, Pure [one], eternal, the abode of the good, go to heresy (pāṣaṇḍa), where your divinity is king of bhūtas!²⁷⁵

[[P1580]]

In this manner, the Bhāgavata condemns to the darkness the knowledge system of the Mantramārga and all its followers, not because they “disrupted” the sacrifice, but because they had the audacity to criticize Brāhmaṇas. The message here quite simply is śivadīkṣā is the foremost sign of heresy and that it is inextricably linked with transgressive practices. As the story progresses, Śiva himself and his worship, provided it is part of a multifaceted system of practice addressing other non Śaiva gods, will be redeemed. And though he is humbled, his head replaced with that of a goat, Bhṛgu’s curse is never lifted nor does the text ever condemn it. Indeed, it subtly asserts that it has established a new status quo where those who exclusively worship Śiva and imitate his actions are rendered radically impure and forever more unfit to participate in society. The story resumes in the usual fashion, with Satī denouncing her father and committing ritual suicide and an enraged Vīrabhadra, acting on behalf of Śiva and accompanied by his gaṇas, descending upon Dakṣa’s sacrifice and destroying it. In order to appease the frenzied throng of Śaiva devotees, Brahmā and the other goods seek out lord Śiva and ask him to intervene, promising that his rightful share in the sacrifice will be restored to him. The decapitated Dakṣa is given the head of a goat, at which point he realizes the essential truth that Brahmā, Śiva, and Viṣṇu are the same supreme power—in other words, the core theology that animates the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. Dakṣa proclaims that this supreme god’s role is to serve as the protector and corrector of Brāhmaṇas, and Śiva is pleased. Everyone then assembles to attend the “vaiṣṇava yajna,” which is to commence with an offering made to Viṣṇu in three vessels. First, however, in order to ensure both the sanctity and continuity of the interrupted rite, the malign influence of Śiva’s “disruptors”—the pramathagaṇas—must be expunged. As the text pointedly states, the puroḍaśa is performed “to purify [the sacrifice] from the touch (saṃsarga) of the vīras (vīrasaṃsargaśuddhaye).”²⁷⁶ [[P1581]]

Once this has been accomplished and the taint of the followers of the Mantramārga has been expunged, all at once—to the astonishment of the crowd—Viṣṇu makes himself manifest before the sacrifice. One by one, the gods and the sages begin to praise him, and of course Śiva is no exception. Strangely enough, however, the words that Śiva speaks are only incidentally addressed to his other half, for in reality, they target his followers.

If some ignorant person promotes me [lit., repeats me] as having bad conduct (apaviddha)—I whose mind is fixed on your lotus feet, which, even though they [grant] all aims here in this world by means of [your] benediction, ought to be honored by dispassionate sages with respect—because of your supreme grace, I do not take that into account.²⁷⁷

[[P1582]]

Though these words are quite oblique, the core message is quite simple. Though some ignorant people may have disseminated (japati glossed by Śrīdhara as jalpati) the message that Śiva promotes a degraded mode of social praxis (ācārabhraṣṭam in Śrīdhara’s understanding of apaviddham), Śiva says, “I pay (gaṇaye) them no heed,” for in actuality Śiva himself clings to the grace of the supreme lord and repudiates such toxic nonsense. In other words, the price Śiva has paid for his own inclusion in respectable society is the exclusion of his most devout devotees. The gist of the matter is that Śiva is great, but Śaivism is not, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs to get with the program and start reading and following real śāstras. The Bhāgavata, for instance. Or, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi…. [[P1583]]