Conclusion: Śaivakālasaṃhārasamkṣiptasāra
We began our journey with some provocative questions posed in the early twentieth century by Hazari Prasad Dvivedi that attempted to make sense of Hindu law’s uneasy encounters with colonial modernity. Essentially, Dvivedi discerned that the discourse of Dharmaśāstra contains within itself two mutually exclusive models of legal reasoning. The first of these, which he prizes as an integral dimension of Indic thought, champions the universal application of a fixed set of principles and standards in a logically consistent manner throughout the human realm. In contrast, the second more pluralistic model of site- and community-specific norms— radically internally diversified in terms of its precepts, methods, and core commitments—from his perspective spinelessly abrogated “the rules” of well-ordered human existence to accommodate law and religion to circumstance and changes in context.
Dvivedi accounted for this discrepancy with dharma discourse in historical terms, suggesting that the abandoning of the “original” ideologically and methodologically consistent theory of jurisprudence accompanied by a more general Indic flight from reason was the product of cultural trauma engendered by Islamic incursions. From this perspective, Dvivedi understands what he calls the “sthānīya ācāra”—or the practices of place—as the [[P1956]] maladaptive response of Dharmaśāstrins as they are displaced from the center of Indian social life and come to dwell in the shadow of the more productive response to changing circumstances on the subcontinent epitomized by the rise of devotional religion. Writing at a moment of the burgeoning awakening of a nationalist consciousness, Dvivedi anachronistically viewed the valorization of localized norms with the domains of law and religion as both reflecting and engendering the type of political and social fragmentation that had rendered India ripe for foreign subjugation. Yet even amidst this tale of the loss of classical wisdom replaced by misrule, ruin and woe, Dvivedi identifies an admirable Indian protagonist whose vision prefigures the type of unifying, focused, comprehensive, and actionable worldview that is representative of Hinduism’s better angels, a guiding light whose example offers lessons for the new Indian century. This far-seeing innovator is none other than the thirteenth-century Maharashtrian Dharmaśāstrin polymath Hemādri Sūri, best known as the author of the immense dharmanibandha, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi.
While attending to many of Dvivedi’s core problematics, we have charted a very different course. What we have discovered is that far from representing an expression of early modern trauma stemming from a hostile encounter with someone else’s cultural imaginary, the capacious context-specific legal pluralism that so troubles Dvivedi forms a part of the discourse on Dharmaśāstra from that discipline’s inception. Instead of being alien to Indic thought, the juridical pluralism of site- and community-specific normativities we have set out to recover is itself a reflection of a broader pluralized epistemic paradigm with its own longue durée history. In actuality, it is the drive to articulate a synthetic scholastic paradigm for “unifying” Indic law and religion that represents a second order phenomena with recoverable emergence within historical time on the eve of the Islamic encounter. What results is a radical reformulation of the relationship between what we label “law” and what we label “religion,” of the scope of Brāhmaṇical governmentality, and of the very nature of Brāhmaṇical identity. If in a personalist vein we must speak of “cultural trauma” or acts of historical forgetting, the epistemological rupture comes not from without but from within, and the episteme that becomes largely occluded was the pluralized site- and community-specific life-worlds of the early medieval. As Dvivedi rightly discerned, but did not understand, the primary author of this sea-change in values—of reformation almost two-hundred years before the Reformation— [[P1957]] is none other than the singular, and almost completely unstudied polymath Hemādri, who from a position of power within the court of the Seuṇa kings of Maharashtra theorizes and then puts into practice the universalization of dharma. The story of his harnessing of śāstra in the service of deliberate interventions into the quotidian here-and-now is impossible without first coming to terms with the deeper history of the site- and community-specific nature of the medieval Deccani worlds into which he was born.
For this reason, Ending the Śaiva Age: The Rise of the Brāhmaṇa Legalist and the Universalization of Hindu Dharma presented to the reader two intimately interrelated conceptual projects. We reconstructed the largely unfamiliar and often quite surprising site- and community-specific life-worlds that defined the early medieval western Deccan in all of their nuanced particularity, resituating them in a robust intellectual, social and material context. Then, we presented a concrete story, mediated by text, document, and stone, of how and why these lived realities were rendered mostly provincial and subaltern, making possible the centering of the more familiar Brāhmaṇical imaginaries of early modernity and the colonial era.