Conclusion: Śaivakālasaṃhārasamkṣiptasāra
Chapter 1, “Defamiliarizing the Brāhmaṇical World,” questioned the long-standing tendency to treat conceptual frameworks like “Brāhmaṇism,” “Brāhmaṇical identity,” and “Brāhmaṇical ideology” as trans-historical categories with a fixed and immutable content—as opposed to ones that are historically and geographically contingent, internally contested, and constantly and often self-consciously evolving. On the basis of engagement with a wide range of primary [[P1958]] sources from the classical period, we began to disaggregate “classical Brāhmaṇism,” revealing a range of competing tendencies and social and epistemological visions—different ways of “Being Brāhmaṇa”—already present within Sanskrit discourse. In particular, much as Dvivedi had suggested, an empiricist “Indian way of knowing,” encapsulated in the dictum that one should proceed according to context or circumstances—yathāsthāna—proved to be as integral to elite Sanskrit knowledge traditions as the more familiar programmatic vision of human action being guided by injunction (yathāvidhi), where theory as envisioned by elite Brāhmaṇa pandits supposedly always proceeded practice. Moreover, unlike their prescriptivist counterparts, these equally elite conceptualizations of rules and meaning as context-, discipline-, and community-specific proved to be deeply dialogical with the working presuppositions that also animated non-elite social realities and the quotidian experience of everyday life on the subcontinent.
Through close and careful reading and source criticism, we called into question many of the major evidentiary pillars that have been presumed to support an emplotment of Indic history that identifies the Gupta era as defined by the full-blown emergence of an irreducibly theistic mode of Brāhmaṇical religion, articulated in the idiom of śāstra, monopolizing resources, wedded to state power, and that ascribes a pastoral and disciplinary role to Brāhmaṇas while granting them a monopoly in the domain of religion. We also examined how the projection of an invariant “Brāhmaṇical ideology,” where Indic social theory and the operation of disciplinary power is wholly conflated with the ideological apparatus of varṇāśramadharma, to the detriment of responsible social history, serves to occlude a range of other emic discourses reflecting on the nature of social reality along with the other highly pertinent modes of disciplinary power evident in particularized historical archives. Towards this end, we attended to a widely shared, and unduly neglected, emic conceptualization found throughout a range of classical śāstra about the transactional nature of an extra-śāstric social [[P1959]] world and the problematic mutability of socially constructed identities that are product of particular regimes of pedagogy and conditioning. Our inquiry then took as its guide shared reflections and anxieties found throughout classical śāstra about institutions and paradigms of Indian sociality that are extra-śāstric, where legitimate authority is determined by documentary records, not scholastic norms, a realm where it is not the pandit or the poet but the scribe and the corporation who are the holders of institutional memory and the adjudicators of norms. As we saw, especially in combination with the embrace of the guiding principle that values and standards are site- and community-specific, these epistemic frameworks and social practices held significant implications for determining what makes someone a Brāhmaṇa, or more generally, a source of authority.
Ironically, one of the consequences of recognizing the pervasiveness of site- and community-specific norms—that this pluralist episteme is deeply imbricated in the intellectual and religious life of the first millennium of the Common Era—is that the conceptual object we call “Brāhmaṇism,” whose content we treat as a set of perennial persistent norms operating outside of history, itself cannot help but become pluralized. And when pre-colonial social history is no longer read as the story of moments of passing resistance against the fixed, uniform, and unchanging canon of oppressive Brāhmaṇical normativity, what begins to emerge is a representation of Indian premodernity that is neither hagiography or polemic, but that represents religious and social change on the subcontinent in a manner attuned to the messy particularity that define fleeting human lives lived out in specific historical circumstances. In fact, it is only after we engage in this process of pluralizing Brāhmaṇism and the legal and social world in which it was entangled that we are really in a position to capture the contours of those historical moments in which something like what we have imagined as a hegemonic [[P1960]] Brāhmaṇical Hinduism comes to dominate a particular regional and historical episteme, as we will see in the final chapters.
Chapter 2, “A Beginningless Transactionality: Recovering the Quotidian Institutional Realities of the Early Medieval,” acclimated us to the diffuse application of disciplinary power within everyday life on the subcontinent by introducing us to the wonderful world of premodern paperwork and the variety of institutional spaces within which it circulated. From slave contracts, to bills of sale, to instructions given to paid labor, from property deeds, to love letters produced on spec and thank you notes for visiting dignitaries, we quickly recognized the rhetorical and conceptual continuities of this transactional realm full of non-elite social agents with the idioms of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, generally viewed as circulating within much narrower networks largely restricted to twice-borns. A similar consonance in textual format and content again speaking to a rather greater degree of diffusion of these norms was also recognized in regard to the evidentiary dimensions of an Indian courtroom, where the testimony of witnesses is recorded verbatim and then transmuted to fit the demands of elite discourse. The chapter also introduced us to what would become one of the methodological mainstays of our investigation, namely, that by thinking about the workmanly dimensions of textual production in highly formalized genres where composition involves the use of templates, and surveying a range of analogous texts or material objects that are the product of the same kind of production process, we can begin to identify the deliberate choices and insertions being made by specific social agents as they adapt inherited forms in the service of very specific localized aims. The chapter concluded by suggesting how such a method can be applied to thinking with documentary records composed in old Kannada, which offer us an even richer presentation of early medieval quotidian social and institutional realities. [[P1961]]
Chapter 3, “The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge,” shows us how mechanisms for juridical pluralism native to the Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstras themselves recognized the legitimacy, within certain spatial constraints, especially the sovereign land grant, of specific communities having their rights adjudicated and their transgressions punished by representatives who are members of an administrative incorporated body drawn from within the community itself. Not only are such representative agents granted the authority to make these decisions, but, drawing upon their own canon of entextualized codes of conduct, they are to do so in alignment with community-specific norms. Such a framework provides the conditions of possibility for the capacious religious and epistemic pluralism that comes to define the early medieval Deccan. Even more specifically, it is this tacit acceptance of “difference,” vigorously defended by political authorities, that allows for the widespread institutionalization of explicitly Tantric social imaginaries. These traditions in turn produced entextualized accounts of their community-specific norms, crafted in a manner that renders them legible within the broader realm of juridical adjudication, which are then incorporated into Tantric revelation. Drawing first the time upon the unpublished eighth- to ninth-century Śākta-Śaiva Piṅgalāmata, a Pratiṣṭhā Tantra edited from manuscript, we looked at some concrete examples of these codes of conduct and in-community disciplinary procedures, which despite their often quite transgressive content formally replicate the evidentiary best-practices better known to us from their application within a Brāhmaṇical sabhā. Through offering close readings of what seems to be the only surviving work of scholastic commentary on a work of non-Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstra, the second half of the chapter introduced us to an emic juridical framework that explicitly presents itself as a comprehensive alternative to varṇāśramadharma, complete with its own mode of sociality, [[P1962]] form of political economy, and political theology. A model was proposed for situating the emergence of the root text, the mid-sixth century Śivadharmaśāstra, within the wider political and social history of the subcontinent, which marks the transition into the world of the early- medieval. The chapter further began to make the case for the utter centrality of the Śivadharmaśāstra, whose palpable influence will be in evidence in every subsequent chapter, and its manifold reception, for arriving at a working understanding of the early medieval Deccan. Extending our engagement with the multiplicity of modes of power that defines the early medieval Deccan, chapter 4, “Living in the Śaiva Age: Three Embodied Encounters with Authority and Responsibility,” offers us extended prosopographical accounts of the professional and personal lives of three non-Brāhmaṇa authority figures. In each instance, we are offered vivid and surprising portraits of how epistemic and juridical pluralism, inflected by teachings drawn from Tantric and pre-Tantric Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva value systems, shaped lived realities. We witness the religious awakening of a Śūdra big man participant in the military labor market, whose ancestors parlayed their involvement in extreme forms of Tantric ritual into a ticket out of untouchability, enabling their descendants to marry their way into hereditary non-Brāhmaṇa regional elite families. It is then this confluence of modes of influence that enables our protagonist to leverage his social connections in the service of expanding the Śākta-Śaiva power center overseen by his new Kālamukha guru. In the next case study, we examined the professionalization process of a Kālamukha pontiff as he seeks to balance his administrative commitments with his private life as a highly accomplished Śākta polymath and yogin. In the process, we were compelled to thoroughly reassess the Kālamukha religious imaginary and its immense institutional and economic footprint. What began to [[P1963]] emerge are clear indications that in the early medieval Deccan, at least by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Kālamukha communities, enacting forms of Trika, Krama, and Kubjikā worship, are integral sites for the transmission and performance of the Tantric Śākta canon, but that in practice these commitments seem to have been thoroughly entangled with site- specific modes of religious practice that reflect regional non-elite religious cultures. In our last case study, we turn to the biographical and autobiographical reflections of the Kalyāṇī Cāḷukya emperor Someśvara III. As rebuttal to Bilhaṇa’s much more famous kāvya, which filtered the values and life-worlds of the early medieval Deccan through the normalizing lens of conventional literary tropology and Brāhmaṇical normativity, Someśvara’s prose presents his family history so that it reflects the eclectic pluralized cultural and religious idiom of the Deccan, emplotting a story of how his grandfather wrestled with the conflicting demands of the prescriptions of the orthoprax Dharmaśāstrins and his own Śivadharmaśāstra-inflected Śaiva commitments, at first choosing the former with disastrous consequences before finally finding sanctuary and new hope through devotional surrender to Śiva. The chapter then concludes by presenting evidence that Someśvara III’s father, the illustrious Vikramāditya VI, whose fifty-year reign represents the defining moment in the history of the early medieval western Deccan, was an avid and unapologetic participant in the cult of the yoginīs.
With chapter 5, “A Substantive Intervention: Reading the Material Culture of the Western Deccan across Region and Dynasty,” we extended our purview to the study of material culture and landscape, all the while continuing to attend to similar methods and conceptual focuses, such as a deep concern with epistemic pluralism as manifested in everyday life, the place of Tantra within diversified Deccani life-worlds, and a methodological commitment to reading out intentionality from corpuses of formally analogous cultural artifacts by attending [[P1964]] to the places where they diverge from their template. Initially, we demonstrated how the temple culture that emerges during the reign of Vikramāditya VI enacts in stone the experience of inhabiting a pluralized episteme shaped by Tantric commitments, wherein each focal point constitutes a self-contained world and the esoteric and exoteric are situated right next to each other in a dynamic, unresolveable tension. In the second section, through surveying the changing placement and conceptualization of the deity Bhairava and his relationship with royal power, we took in the wider landscape of the western Deccan and the development of its highly specific mode of material culture. This in turn prepared us for a series of encounters with the material components and iconographic features of the institutionalized religious cultures of the Kālamukhas, which were shown to be pervasive features of the lived landscape present even in the very heart of elite Kannadiga literary culture. This visual and conceptualization vocabulary then enabled us to make sense of what remains of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya capital in and around what is now Basavakalyana.
In chapter 6, “Art and Terror in the City of Śiva: Śākta Artisan Imaginaries and the Making of a Material World,” through reconstructing artisan imaginaries, we shifted our focus from understanding the built landscape of the Deccan to recovering the life-worlds of the types of social agents responsible for its construction. First, we recovered accounts of artisans, called śilpins or kārukas, acting as yogins and making use of Tantric ritual technology within a formalized system of guild apprenticeship where they were under the guiding authority of their Tantric ācārya. Then, by reading a wide array of Tantric discourses, especially doxographies, against the grain, we recovered a prehistory, extending back into pre-Tantric sources, of artisans as adepts within Śaiva-aligned systems of praxis with their own textual canons, pantheons, and conceptual concerns. These systems in turn form an important antecedent to [[P1965]] elements now identified with specific Tantric transmissions, such as the Trika and Śaiva Siddhānta. It is these adepts, acting under the guiding directions of the Lākula and eventually Kālamukha lineages that become their initiatory and guild gurus, to whom we owe much of what remains of the documentary and material cultural record of the early medieval Deccan. By returning to the Piṅgalāmata, the culminating textual production of these earlier imaginaries, we are able to engage with both the pedagogy and theology that animated these communities, where acts of craft prove to be inseparable from acts of esoteric worship carried out in an epistemically pluralized world where meaning and rules are site-specific. With that understanding in hand, we tackled the Piṅgalamāta’s extraordinary account of the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of the institutionalization of a sovereign land grant and the building of a temple comes to us replete with a vivid and detailed account of Śākta-Śaiva practices of philanthropy and its maximally distributionist model of political economy. One dimension of this discourse of much broader interest in understanding the nature of community in the premodern Deccan is that the text is emphatic that these inaugural acts of institution building as well as their annual memorialization were incorporative of both initiates and the general, even non-Śaiva, public to whom concrete material benefits would be provided. Beyond the intrinsic interest of capturing something of the verisimilitude of a lived reality that was integral to Deccani imaginaries but has never been represented in Western scholarship, this case study also served as an important rhetorical foil for the markedly different prescriptive, Brāhmaṇical vision for the founding of a temple and the institutionalization of social space we will encounter in the ninth chapter, which the mid-thirteenth-century dharmanibandha, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, proffers as the replacement for long-established Śāiva and Śākta normativities. [[P1966]]
While our study had until this point been concerned with the more generalized religious and social imaginaries of the early medieval western Deccan that were the product of the wider networks of circulation associated with the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas, their vassals, rivals, and the religious and cultural institutions whose independence they defended, from chapter 7 onward, we narrow our focus more specifically to early medieval Maharashtra, seeking to isolate the sensibilities and values that were particular to this region so we can track their reformation in the wake of the reimagining of Brāhmaṇical normativity and the state-directed suppression of Tantric socialities and institutional cultural that is the defining feature of the second half of the thirteenth century. Belying general assumptions, especially within Marathi secondary literature, that the religious and social life-worlds of early medieval Maharashtra prior to the thirteenth century are basically unrecoverable, drawing on a combination of material cultural and folklore in which there is persistent and specific memory of the early medieval, chapter 7, “Remembering Medieval Maharashtra: The Early Seuṇa Yādavas in the World,” traces the emergence of a Maharashtra-specific mode of religiosity whose distinctive nature was recognized across the regions. This modality in turn provides us with a framework for making sense of the dynasty of the Seuṇa Yādava kings of Maharashtra, whose early history proves inseparable from their strong Śākta-Śaiva commitments and affiliation with Kālamukha and Kālamukha adjacent institutional networks. Through site studies, prosopography, documentary records, and a close reading of an unstudied but seminal work of old Marathi religious literature, chapter 8, “Śākta Cosmopolitanism: The Seuṇa Yādava Imaginary before Hemādri,” examined the values among the circles of affiliation that surrounded the last Seuṇa king, Siṅghaṇa II (r. ca. 1210–1246 CE), whose court was committed to Śākta cosmopolitanism. By re-embedding key documentary records in their institutional context, our analysis seriously [[P1967]] complicated Christian Novetzeke’s model of a Maharashtra in the era before Cakradhar and Hemādri as defined by a Sanskrit-promoting “Brahminic ecumene.” Instead, the imaginary that emerged from our investigation was already multilingual and committed at almost every level to a variety of Śākta-Śaiva traditions that held a complicated if not downright oppositional relationship to caste-centric Brāhmaṇical normativity. The result was a detailed portrait of the institutional and religious realities of the Seuṇa court in the generation immediately before Hemādri institutes a sea-change in values deliberately engineered to sweep away these pluralized Tantric pasts. They are to be replaced by a universalizing vision of dharma in which the Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrin is centered as singular locus of authority and disciplinary power within the realm of religion and culture.
Our last three chapters are each dedicated to a comprehensive engagement with a different facet of the Seuṇa sea-change in the second half of the thirteenth century as it is articulated in the oeuvre of Hemādri, particularly in the various sections of the vast, unstudied Caturgacintāmaṇi and the equally seminal and neglected Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā. Chapter 9 largely addresses how the Seuṇa reformalization of Dharmaśāstra deliberately articulates a new paradigm designed to undercut Tantric imaginaries and their lived realities. In contrast, chapter 10 takes up the vision of the universalization of dharma as theology and social philosophy, demonstrating at every step along the way its utter discontinuity with prior visions of “Brāhmaṇical normativity.” Finally, chapter 11 shows us how, in the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā, through a robust new theorization of bhaktirasa. Hemādri provides the conceptual mechanics for transmuting the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s philosophy of devotional Advaita Vedānta into a program of praxis rendered accessible and appropriate for all different types of people. [[P1968]]
Chapter 9, “Universalizing Hindu Dharma: Hemādri and His Legacy,” recovered from the documentary and material culture record the untold story of how after the death of Siṅghaṇa II in 1245 CE, the existing social contract that had animated Deccani institutional cultures for hundreds of years is suddenly called into question. Through a series of case studies of institutional disruption, including an account of the eviction of the Kālamukhas of Kukkunur we encountered in chapter two and four, we examined the evidence for the implementation of a new regime of delimited juridical and property rights that placed the management of previously autonomous spaces under the watchful eye of new class of “Brāhmaṇa” legalist regulators. Effectively, this eliminates much of the economic, social, and political power of non-Brāhmaṇa religious agents. This real-world socio-political program was shown to be thoroughly consonant with the prescriptive conceptual project in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi calling for the universalization of dharma. With great self-awareness, Hemādri innovatively set out to articulate a new episteme that reimagines the scope, theoretical foundation, and contents of Dharmaśāstra while offering a set of pedagogical tools designed to rapidly professionalize a vast new cadre of Brāhmaṇa authorities to fill the newly crafted roles whose proliferation is mandated by his manifesto. Thus, in chapter 9, a specific historical account of on-the-ground social change finds its complement in a series of close readings of key portions of the published Dāna and Śrāddha Khaṇḍas, along with selections read from manuscript from the unpublished “lost” Tīrthakhaṇḍa and Pratiṣṭhā subsections. In examining different aspects of the prescriptive vision of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, our particular emphasis in this chapter was on how each prescriptive vision related to the “real world” of the early medieval Deccan. In the service of this type of robust contextualization, in which making sense of text demands a recovery of context and not new-critical navel gazing, we returned time and again to a form [[P1969]] of source criticism that closely attended to Hemādri’s use of inherited textual and conceptual resources by juxtaposing his “readings” with those of his antecedents, in a manner that rendered palpably evident the true scope of Hemādri’s subversive innovations.
In contrast, with Chapter 10, “Why I am So Clever, Why I Write Such Excellent Books, and What I Did to the Gods: Hemādri Reimagines Brāhmaṇical Thought,” our attention shifted to making sense of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s reimagining of the world of Sanskrit śāstra in a manner that infuses Brāhmaṇical imaginaries with an effusive devotionalism and a strong commitment to Advaita Vedānta as a knowledge system. Our initial focus was on the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s iconoclastic theorization of a Dharmaśāstra discourse that abjures the centrality of the usual questions of the duties specific to particulars varṇas and āśramas, and in their place robustly theorizes a universal (sāmānya) dharma, whose general contours are applicable in all contexts and to which all human agents are subject. While in the previous chapter, we had focused on how this conceptual architecture is used to systematically delegitimize and dismantle the existing institutional and theological norms that organized the western Deccan while at the same time reshuffling the labor force in a manner that lead to an immediate redistribution of resources to the detriment of non-Brāhmaṇas, here we consider the theology of the universalization of a nascent Hindu dharma on its own terms. Envisioned as a form of ethicalized natural law in a manner that has precious few antecedents, the dharma theology of Hemādri places all human beings under the same shared norms, whose adjudication is conveniently confined to a new social agent, the Smārta Brāhmaṇa Dharmaśāstrin.
At the same time, this increased theological orientation of a universalizing dharma discourse has substantial consequences for questions of soteriology. For the first time in the [[P1970]] history of prescriptive Brāhmaṇical śāstra, Hemādri offers a vigorous and learned defense of the legitimacy of non-twice-born soteriological aspirations, promoting the centrality of a mode of liberative inquiry, albeit applied to a canon of internally diversified Purāṇic sources, that is structurally analogous and functionally equivalent to the processes in orthodox Vedānta. Thus, Hemādri emerges as the earliest recoverable articulator of some of the defining features of one of the more familiar “textbook” versions of “Hinduism,” namely, the apparent inclusion of all Indian subjects across caste lines and governed by the same religious authorities within an “enchanted” shared religious framework suffused with theistic devotional sentiment, which asserts that all varieties of Indian religious textuality express a single shared worldview and unitary intentionality deeply indebted to Advaita Vedānta. In substantiating this point, again using copious source criticism, we examined key portions of the Caturvargacintāmaṇi’s Vrata and Śrāddhakhaṇḍas, systematically demonstrating at each point along the way the marked discontinuity between Hemādri’s topical and conceptual concerns as well as his methodology and those of virtually all of his predecessors, a state of affairs rendered all the more clear when Hemādri’s positions are demonstrated to be either entirely absent from prior discourse or actively identified as pūrvapakṣas that fall outside of the realm of Brāhmaṇical knowledge and values. Our engagement with the Caturvargacintāmaṇi proper then concluded with Hemādri’s highly technical presentation of his theory of textuality, which situates the mode of knowledge production exemplified by the dharmanibandha at the center of Smārta tradition. The final portion of the chapter is dedicated to showing beyond a reasonable doubt that Hemādri’s robust commitments to viewing the discourse on bhakti and Vedānta as integral parts of what it means to be Smārta were not shared by his most immediate and recoverable predecessors, in this case, from twelfth-century Varanasi, which sees its own distinctive [[P1971]] Brāhmaṇical renaissance invested in the project of promoting the genre of the dharmanibandha.
Finally, chapter 11, “Staging Devotional Advaita in Thirteenth-Century Maharashtra: Possession, Poetics, and the Anxiety of Influence,” offered the first account of Hemādri’s Vedāntic theistic devotionalism as it is expressed in one of the earliest commentarial treatments of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The Muktāphala and its conjoined commentary, the Kaivalyadīpikā, is the foundational work of the discourse of bhaktiśāstra, and in it the theology of bhaktirasa to which so many early modern Vaiṣṇava traditions are deeply indebted finds its initial articulation. What this chapter aimed to make plain is that the main interpretive context for making sense of Hemādri’s theological commitments, as well as many of the key intellectual strategies and conceptual models integral to his articulation of bhaktiśāstra, arise from the very episteme of the Śaiva Age that he invested so much energy in discrediting and deinstitutionalizing. This chapter thus offered an introduction to the core arguments of Hemādri’s bhaktiśāstra, the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā, while also treating them as offering a sustained polemical and dialogical engagement with this preceding knowledge system. Departing from the working assumptions in the secondary literature that the Muktāphala and Kaivalyadīpikā are best understood as works of literary theory whose primary influences come from the realm of Sanskrit Alaṃkāraśāstra, we saw that Hemādri’s selective use of these materials is largely strategic. In actuality, for Hemādri, rasa theorization about devotional religion was not an end in itself but the means to a very specific end, namely, reframing affectively charged “direct religious experience,” which falls outside the scope of religion by injunction so that it ceases to be the provenance of an elite vested with special kinds of authority. This is to say, in the realm of this dharma discourse, bhakti becomes a [[P1972]] universalizing social force precisely when the status “being a bhakta” ceases to index juridical difference or to correspond to social and material power within the transactional world.
Our analysis continued with extended reflection on the substantive affinities between Hemādri’s epistemology, ontology, and devotional theology with contemporary and near contemporary discourses in old Marathi. What emerged from our explorations was an alternative localized history that speaks to the flourishing as the early medieval period drew to a close of a heavily devotionalized Deccani Vedānta growing out of older Śākta traditions. That this value system appears to have represented a widespread and popular theological tradition even in the absence of the hegemonical identification of Brāhmaṇical tradition with Vedānta as a knowledge system poses a serious challenge to our normative narratives about the Brāhmaṇization and Vedāntization of “popular” religion. Hemādri’s intellectual project as a Vedāntin in fact suggests that we begin to think seriously about the “popularization of Brāhmaṇical religion” as playing a pivotal role in the history of the elevation of Vedāntic traditions. The chapter concluded by looking at the sociological implications of Hemādri’s new bhaktiśāstra, in a manner that calls for a more general reappraisal of the concrete real-world implications of early modern Vaiṣṇava bhakti as a social form and its complex and occluded relationship to the life-worlds of the early medieval Śaiva Age. [[P1973]]