UC Santa Barbara

Ending the Śaiva Age: The Rise of the Brāhmaṇa Legalist and the Universalization of Hindu Dharma reconstructs the largely unfamiliar site- and community-specific life-worlds that defined the religious mainstream in the early medieval western Deccan in all of their nuanced particularity, resituating them in a robust intellectual, social, and material context. It then recovers the concrete history, mediated by text, document, and stone, of how and why in the middle of the thirteenth century, as part of a conceptual revolution emerging from within the tradition of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra and situated in the court of the Seuṇa Yādava kings of Maharashtra, these lived realities were deliberately rendered mostly provincial and subaltern, making possible the centering of the more familiar Brāhmaṇical imaginaries of early modernity and the colonial era.

Ending the Śaiva Age demonstrates that a tradition of epistemic pluralism—which on methodological grounds asserts that the rules and norms that animate both knowledge systems and embodied lived realities necessarily vary from context to context, necessitating a proliferation of discrete modes of authority and authoritative agents whose autonomous sphere of operations must be protected—forms an integral facet of classical Sanskrit thought from its inception. Transposed into the realm of the juridical, such a framework manifests as a capacious legal pluralism that defers to the sovereign right of communities to manage their own affairs in accordance with their own values. Drawing on a vast array of mostly unpublished and unstudied source materials, including documentary records, in Sanskrit, Aiśa, old Kannada, and old Marathi, complemented by ethnographic work and surveys of material culture at over two hundred locations, I argue that it is this juridico-religious imaginary that forms the conditions of possibility for the lived realities that stand behind what Alexis Sanderson has characterized as the Śaiva Age—a period essentially coterminous with the early medieval in South Asia—during which Tantric inflected modes of knowledge shaped the religious mainstream. What we discover when we move from prescriptive revelation to its quotidian instantiation in particularized time and space is that the story of classical Tantra as lived religion embedded in well-respected and well-funded transregional institutions is very much a tale of the pervasive influence within such spaces of non-Brāhmaṇa—even Dalit—agents acting as juridical and religious authorities, playing central roles in both the production and dissemination of religious and cultural meaning as well as enacting the enforcement of disciplinary norms. Indeed, as the present work demonstrates, the documentary sources, built spaces, and material culture that form our primary sites for encountering the early medieval are largely the product of Śūdra and Dalit social agents thoroughly embedded within Śākta Tantric imaginaries. The stories that emerge seriously call into question core presumptions of our standard historiography and pedagogy, which almost exclusively center Brāhmaṇas as hegemonic social and religious authorities at best periodically challenged by subaltern dissenting voices. As I demonstrate in some detail based on my fieldwork, they are also essentially consonant, both theologically and sociologically, with contemporary localized traditions of non-elite Deccani religion in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Against such a backdrop, it is not an alleged “fragmentation” of a previously unified “Brāhmaṇical normativity” but the curious and sudden muscular assertion, on the cusp of early modernity, of an almost iconoclastic drive for unification and standardization—the universalization of Hindu dharma—that needs to be accounted for in highly particularized historical terms. Ultimately, what will emerge out of our sources, especially the vast dharmanibandha, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, which is here examined in detail for the first time, is the counterintuitive story of an internal revolution in Brāhmaṇical jurisprudence, ritual theory, and statecraft that abruptly called into question and overturned the longstanding radically pluralistic episteme. The result is the sudden unmaking of the institutions and life-worlds that the older consensus had made possible, the Śaiva Age so prominently featured in our title. In other words, to think historically in a particularized fashion about the conditions of possibility for the Indian encounter with early modernity is essentially to tell the story of what was the Śaiva Age and how did it end.