Elizabeth A Cecil | Florida State University (original) (raw)
Books by Elizabeth A Cecil
Gonda Indological Studies vol 21 (Open Access), Leiden: Brill, 2020
In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval No... more In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.
PDF available here: https://brill.com/view/title/56950?language=en
Beyond Boundaries 8, De Gruyter, 2021
Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of... more Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of the primary sources for the study of premodern Asia. How might scholars chart new directions in Asian studies following these historical traces of past societies and polities? To address this question, this book unites perspectives from leading scholars and emerging voices in the fields of archaeology, art history, philology, and cultural history to revisit the primary historical sources that ground their respective studies, and to reflect upon the questions that can be asked of these sources, the light they may shed on Asian pasts, and the limits of these inquiries.
Beyond Boundaries Series (Open Access), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020
This book addresses a series of ‘confrontations’: occasions of dynamic exchange and interaction b... more This book addresses a series of ‘confrontations’: occasions of dynamic exchange and interaction between historical agents and the social and material contexts that defined the lived and intellectual spaces in which they operated. Examining diverse bodies of evidence and modes of cultural production in early South Asia, the individual contributions explore how the lived spaces of writers and artists influenced their ideas and practices, and how texts, objects, and images shaped the identities of their makers and the boundaries of communities. While the legacy of cultural production in the Gupta Period is often categorized as canonical and thus suggests fixity of form and idea, this volume draws attention to the processes and contexts in which the ‘classical’ took shape and the subsequent reception and revision of its cultural forms.
The first half of the volume addresses the intersections of textual, material, and visual forms of cultural production by focusing on three primary modes of confrontation: the relation of inscribed texts to material media, the visual articulation of literary images, and, finally, the literary interpretation and reception of religious media. The second part of the volume focuses on confrontations both within and between intellectual communities. The articles address the dynamics between peripheral and dominant movements in the history of Indian philosophy.
Articles by Elizabeth A Cecil
Textual Cultures, 2024
In early West Java (ca. fifth–sixth century CE), the ruler Pūrṇavarman sponsored the creation of ... more In early West Java (ca. fifth–sixth century CE), the ruler Pūrṇavarman sponsored the creation of a group of inscriptions to praise his virtues and achievements. Engraved on prominent natural rock surfaces at river confluences and high places throughout the polity called Tārumānagara, these innovative works juxtapose poetic texts in Sanskrit with calligraphic designs and carved images of human and animal footprints. The rock inscriptions served a specific set of functions related to Pūrṇavarman’s kingship and his identity as an īśvara — a divine lord able to control and shape the natural environment through acts of thaumaturgy. Pūrṇavarman’s records also bear witness to formative political and religious events in the premodern archipelago. As the earliest surviving examples of writing in the region, they are critical evidence of the harnessing of a new power technology in the service of political spectacle. Previous studies have presented the poetic elements not only in isolation from the accompanying images and signatures, but also from their environmental settings. Through a new contextual analysis, this article examines the design and siting of these multimedia works within the Indigenous environments that made them efficacious.
Ars Orientalis, 2024
The worship of Śiva in early South and Southeast Asia offered devotees a fully realized "religiou... more The worship of Śiva in early South and Southeast Asia offered devotees a fully realized "religious ecology," i.e., a system of mutually beneficial relationships between human communities, natural systems, and the nonhuman or more-than-human worlds in which they operated. Within this religious worldview, the Śaiva guru functioned as a critical terrestrial intermediary. In canonical early Śaiva texts, the guru was celebrated as an ecological agent capable of alleviating suffering and nurturing community. In material culture, the guru's iconographic attributes (e.g., waterpot, trident, and lotus) signaled his ability to offer devotees emotional, social, and environmental benefits. Using the figure of the Brahmanical sage and Śaiva guru Agastya as an entrée, this study initiates a comparative analysis of the cultural connections between gurus, Śiva worship, and the power of the natural world as expressed through iconographic programs and architectural spaces from northern India, Vietnam, and Java. Since Agastya is both a personification of Brahmanical cultural authority and a transregional emblem of the Śaiva tradition, he provides a fertile ground from which to explore the role of the guru in early South and Southeast Asia. Agastya's mythic biography also features two significant environmental interventions: subduing the Vindhya Mountain when it threatened to block out the sun, and drinking the ocean's waters to reveal hidden demons threatening a divine order. His ecological agency, expressed in narratives as the power to neutralize potential threats in the natural world and manifest beneficence, is materialized in images that express the socially supportive values of prosperity and fertility.
Religions of South Asia, 2024
This study contributes to the spatial and material contextualization of early Nārāyaṇa religio... more This study contributes to the spatial and material contextualization of early Nārāyaṇa religion by revisiting important archaeological sites and epigraphic sources from the first and second centuries BCE. It explores some of the ways in which the literary formulations of Vaiṣṇava divinities and theologies were materialized and venerated by those individuals who identified themselves as devotees of Bhagavat (Bhāgavatas)—a title used in epigraphic sources of this period to refer to deities such as Vāsudeva, Nārāyaṇa and Saṃkarṣaṇa. While anthropomorphic icons are commonly associated with devotional practices relating to these deities, material representations of divinity could also take other forms—notably monolithic columns styled as emblematic banners (dhvaja or ketu). By analysing epigraphic and material evidence from Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh and Nagari in Rajasthan, two critical sites for the history of early Nārāyaṇa religion, I hypothesize that monumental dhvajas were integral to devotional life at these temple complexes
The JUGAAD Project: Material Religion in Context, 2023
How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining,... more How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects–intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation? In what ways are religious values expressed through the continued use and reuse of historical sites? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the preservation of ancient temples and religious sites in Southeast Asia?
To explore these questions, this essay brings images collected during field research in 2023 at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects. In the course of my fieldwork I observed the ways that ancient Khmer sites continued to ‘work’– that is, to be sites of pious labor–e.g. investments of time, energy, and resources, the practices of ritual performance, the exertion of devotion and efforts that attend the maintenance of powerful places and potent objects. I learned that the continued efficacy of sites was not contingent upon their historical preservation; rather, practices were informed by Indigenous understandings of the vitality of lithic media. Mountains, caves, quarries, rock-shelters, and crafted stone objects are loci where deities continue to be present, to manifest themselves and be receptive to the efforts of devotees to contact, please, and petition them, much as they were in the premodern world. Working from this understanding, the efforts of practitioners and the efforts of the deities are reciprocal: each works for the benefit of the other.
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/stoneworks
Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism Vol VII, 2023
From royal eulogies carved in stone and artfully engraved verses adorning monuments, to the names... more From royal eulogies carved in stone and artfully engraved verses adorning monuments, to the names of pilgrims etched on temple walls, and economic transactions pressed into copper plates, the corpus of epigraphic writings from South and Southeast Asia is one of the richest in the world. Inscriptions are vital primary sources for the study of these regions, from the time of Aśoka to the court of Akbar, and beyond. The significance of epigraphic sources spans geographic boundaries as well. From Gandhara in far northwest South Asia, and the Tamil speaking regions of south India, to the lands of the Khmer rulers in Cambodia, inscriptions survive in myriad regional scripts and in classical and vernacular languages. The study of these sources is also relevant for multiple fields and research areas within the study of South and Southeast Asia: economic history, religion, jurisprudence, gender studies, art history, and linguistics, among many others. While inscriptions are often approached primarily as textual sources, as the opening lines above make clear, they are also material objects. This materiality is not a secondary feature. As part of discrete, portable objects, or as features of larger and more complex assemblages that include images and monuments as well as built and natural landscapes, inscriptions are material texts embedded in particular spatial and material contexts are considered. These contexts are integral to the meanings that epigraphic writings conveyed (van der Vliet, 2017, 195). This is particularly the case with elaborate Sanskrit inscriptions, which would have been intelligible as literary productions to only a select few. The majority of readers would have relied in various ways on contextual literacy to gauge the nature and status of epigraphic texts (Bierman, 1998, 2-9). For example, political inscriptions displayed prominently in public settings or on monuments could be read as signs of power by viewers without access to the verses in praise of rulers. In addition to individual objects and monuments, sites, too, can become "epigraphic environments" (Yasin, 2009, 101). The placement of texts in temple complexes, monastic dwellings, or along pilgrimage routes serves to orient the viewer and choreograph
Archives of Asian Art, 2022
Ancient Daśapura was the site of an internally complex Śaiva religious community. The Aulikara ru... more Ancient Daśapura was the site of an internally complex Śaiva religious community. The Aulikara rulers used Śaivism as a political idiom to celebrate military might and royal power. Their ministers, the Naigamas, promoted an irenic vision that praised Śiva as a source of protection and prosperity. Attention to these expressions of Śaivism enables us to contextualize one of Daśapura’s most famous, yet enigmatic, works of art: an ithyphallic male figure depicted with a double phallus (c. 6th century CE). To date, the sculpture has remained impossible to place within the greater artistic landscape of the region. This study proposes a resolution by showing that the icon was conceived as part of a triad of sculptures that included Śiva’s wife Pārvatī and their son Skanda. The images of Śiva and Skanda are displayed at the Bhopal Museum, and while their similarities have been noted in previous studies, they have not been viewed as part of a set. The reason for this is their separation from an unpublished Pārvatī, which is currently displayed in the Mandasor Archaeological Museum and identified as a yakṣī. When viewed as part of a triad, the double-phallus figure is transformed from an iconographic puzzle into an innovative visual strategy to reconcile what might seem opposing facets of a divine persona—i.e. the ascetic and the family man. By presenting these icons as a ‘family portrait’, this study recontextualizes important works of art from early India and initiates broader considerations of the political and religious ideologies that inspired their production.
Routledge Handbook Of Hindu Temples: Materiality, Social History, Practice, 2022
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2021
In the fifth–sixth century CE the rulers of the Kadamba dynasty claimed the town of Halsi (ancien... more In the fifth–sixth century CE the rulers of the Kadamba dynasty claimed the town of Halsi (ancient Palāśikā) in modern Karnataka as the northern capital of their expanding polity. Their investments in this locale are recorded in a corpus of copper-plate inscriptions spanning four generation of kings. The plates record the growth of a thriving Jain community at Palāśikā and are revelatory of their relationships with the Kadamba rulers and their agents. This study of the donative and political processes converging in Palāśikā shows that the use of Sanskrit inscriptions
as media for royal representation and public self-fashioning was highly
developed in the Kadamba polity, where idioms and trends developed independent of the Gupta royal model. Moreover, the evidence from Halsi is indicative of the centrality of Jain religious communities, ideologies, and institutions in the administration of the Kadamba polity and the expression of a lineage identity.
[Includes one correction of a missing heading.]
Indo-Iranian Journal, 2021
In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in ... more In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465-500 ce) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a 'text-monument' that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom.
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021
To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the 'Gupta Ecumene'... more To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the 'Gupta Ecumene', writ large, this article presents a detailed analysis of two sites that served as centres for political performance, devotional practice, and artistic production between the fourth and the sixth century CE: Eran and Sondhni in the Indian heartland of Madhya Pradesh. Eran is commonly held to be a key site for the study of Gupta art and architecture and holds several important inscriptions from the beginning to the end of the Gupta period, including one issued by Samudragupta. Sondhni is marked by two inscribed columns of Yaśodharman, a former Gupta subordinate who challenged the imperial rulers using metaphors borrowed from Samudragupta's Allahabad Pillar Inscription. Examining these two sites in dialogue presents an opportunity to identify a shared cultural realm in which local polities participated and developed a transre-gional 'Gupta' political discourse. This study normalises a Gupta-centred imperial history and, in doing so, participates in a wider departure from dynastic history by emphasising the ways in which localised polities and rulers negotiated the political idioms of their day, challenged them, and created spaces for innovation.
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Bridging Heaven and Earth: Art and Architecture in South Asia, 3rd century BCE - 21st century CE, 2020
Perspectives on Lived Religion: Practices, Transmission, Landscape, 2019
Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photographs cover: Relief-decorated blocks from the north ... more Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photographs cover: Relief-decorated blocks from the north wall of the antechapel of the tomb of Ry, Berlin inv. no. ÄM 7278. Copyright SMB Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, photo: Jürgen Liepe. Volume editors: Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies, Lara Weiss. ISBN 978-90-8890-792-0 (softcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-793-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-794-4 (PDF e-book)
History of Religions, 2019
Journal of Hindu Studies, 2018
The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrativ... more The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrative episodes that eulogise the Śaiva terra sancta writ large, the text’s authors designate a small region of northwest India as the ‘Pāśupata landscape’, a salvific region celebrated as the birthplace of the Pāśupata movement. It was here that Śiva assumed a human form and disseminated the Pāśupata doctrine via four students, each of whom presided over a prestigious locale—the storied cities of Ujjain, Mathura, Jambumarga, and Kanauj. The text’s claim to colonise a region that occupied the sociopolitical heart of northwest India presents an imagined geography—not a fanciful representation; rather, a spatial rhetoric intended to localise, order, and authenticate a particular vision of community. This process of localisation served three discrete, yet intertwined aims: (i) it presents a cosmological vision of a sanctified world or Śaiva hierotopy, (ii) provides a normative model for community, and (iii) stakes a geopolitical claim.
Archive Journal , 2018
https://www.archivejournal.net/essays/the-medieval-temple-as-material-archive/
Gonda Indological Studies vol 21 (Open Access), Leiden: Brill, 2020
In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval No... more In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.
PDF available here: https://brill.com/view/title/56950?language=en
Beyond Boundaries 8, De Gruyter, 2021
Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of... more Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of the primary sources for the study of premodern Asia. How might scholars chart new directions in Asian studies following these historical traces of past societies and polities? To address this question, this book unites perspectives from leading scholars and emerging voices in the fields of archaeology, art history, philology, and cultural history to revisit the primary historical sources that ground their respective studies, and to reflect upon the questions that can be asked of these sources, the light they may shed on Asian pasts, and the limits of these inquiries.
Beyond Boundaries Series (Open Access), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020
This book addresses a series of ‘confrontations’: occasions of dynamic exchange and interaction b... more This book addresses a series of ‘confrontations’: occasions of dynamic exchange and interaction between historical agents and the social and material contexts that defined the lived and intellectual spaces in which they operated. Examining diverse bodies of evidence and modes of cultural production in early South Asia, the individual contributions explore how the lived spaces of writers and artists influenced their ideas and practices, and how texts, objects, and images shaped the identities of their makers and the boundaries of communities. While the legacy of cultural production in the Gupta Period is often categorized as canonical and thus suggests fixity of form and idea, this volume draws attention to the processes and contexts in which the ‘classical’ took shape and the subsequent reception and revision of its cultural forms.
The first half of the volume addresses the intersections of textual, material, and visual forms of cultural production by focusing on three primary modes of confrontation: the relation of inscribed texts to material media, the visual articulation of literary images, and, finally, the literary interpretation and reception of religious media. The second part of the volume focuses on confrontations both within and between intellectual communities. The articles address the dynamics between peripheral and dominant movements in the history of Indian philosophy.
Textual Cultures, 2024
In early West Java (ca. fifth–sixth century CE), the ruler Pūrṇavarman sponsored the creation of ... more In early West Java (ca. fifth–sixth century CE), the ruler Pūrṇavarman sponsored the creation of a group of inscriptions to praise his virtues and achievements. Engraved on prominent natural rock surfaces at river confluences and high places throughout the polity called Tārumānagara, these innovative works juxtapose poetic texts in Sanskrit with calligraphic designs and carved images of human and animal footprints. The rock inscriptions served a specific set of functions related to Pūrṇavarman’s kingship and his identity as an īśvara — a divine lord able to control and shape the natural environment through acts of thaumaturgy. Pūrṇavarman’s records also bear witness to formative political and religious events in the premodern archipelago. As the earliest surviving examples of writing in the region, they are critical evidence of the harnessing of a new power technology in the service of political spectacle. Previous studies have presented the poetic elements not only in isolation from the accompanying images and signatures, but also from their environmental settings. Through a new contextual analysis, this article examines the design and siting of these multimedia works within the Indigenous environments that made them efficacious.
Ars Orientalis, 2024
The worship of Śiva in early South and Southeast Asia offered devotees a fully realized "religiou... more The worship of Śiva in early South and Southeast Asia offered devotees a fully realized "religious ecology," i.e., a system of mutually beneficial relationships between human communities, natural systems, and the nonhuman or more-than-human worlds in which they operated. Within this religious worldview, the Śaiva guru functioned as a critical terrestrial intermediary. In canonical early Śaiva texts, the guru was celebrated as an ecological agent capable of alleviating suffering and nurturing community. In material culture, the guru's iconographic attributes (e.g., waterpot, trident, and lotus) signaled his ability to offer devotees emotional, social, and environmental benefits. Using the figure of the Brahmanical sage and Śaiva guru Agastya as an entrée, this study initiates a comparative analysis of the cultural connections between gurus, Śiva worship, and the power of the natural world as expressed through iconographic programs and architectural spaces from northern India, Vietnam, and Java. Since Agastya is both a personification of Brahmanical cultural authority and a transregional emblem of the Śaiva tradition, he provides a fertile ground from which to explore the role of the guru in early South and Southeast Asia. Agastya's mythic biography also features two significant environmental interventions: subduing the Vindhya Mountain when it threatened to block out the sun, and drinking the ocean's waters to reveal hidden demons threatening a divine order. His ecological agency, expressed in narratives as the power to neutralize potential threats in the natural world and manifest beneficence, is materialized in images that express the socially supportive values of prosperity and fertility.
Religions of South Asia, 2024
This study contributes to the spatial and material contextualization of early Nārāyaṇa religio... more This study contributes to the spatial and material contextualization of early Nārāyaṇa religion by revisiting important archaeological sites and epigraphic sources from the first and second centuries BCE. It explores some of the ways in which the literary formulations of Vaiṣṇava divinities and theologies were materialized and venerated by those individuals who identified themselves as devotees of Bhagavat (Bhāgavatas)—a title used in epigraphic sources of this period to refer to deities such as Vāsudeva, Nārāyaṇa and Saṃkarṣaṇa. While anthropomorphic icons are commonly associated with devotional practices relating to these deities, material representations of divinity could also take other forms—notably monolithic columns styled as emblematic banners (dhvaja or ketu). By analysing epigraphic and material evidence from Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh and Nagari in Rajasthan, two critical sites for the history of early Nārāyaṇa religion, I hypothesize that monumental dhvajas were integral to devotional life at these temple complexes
The JUGAAD Project: Material Religion in Context, 2023
How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining,... more How do Indigenous repertoires of ‘care’–i.e. scripted and ad hoc practices of using, maintaining, repairing, and beautifying religious sites and objects–intersect with the ‘work’ of historical conservation? In what ways are religious values expressed through the continued use and reuse of historical sites? Finally, can these works of piety be integrated within current conversations around the preservation of ancient temples and religious sites in Southeast Asia?
To explore these questions, this essay brings images collected during field research in 2023 at premodern Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in Cambodia into conversation with historical sources that contextualize the reciprocal relationships that exist between religious practitioners, sites, and objects. In the course of my fieldwork I observed the ways that ancient Khmer sites continued to ‘work’– that is, to be sites of pious labor–e.g. investments of time, energy, and resources, the practices of ritual performance, the exertion of devotion and efforts that attend the maintenance of powerful places and potent objects. I learned that the continued efficacy of sites was not contingent upon their historical preservation; rather, practices were informed by Indigenous understandings of the vitality of lithic media. Mountains, caves, quarries, rock-shelters, and crafted stone objects are loci where deities continue to be present, to manifest themselves and be receptive to the efforts of devotees to contact, please, and petition them, much as they were in the premodern world. Working from this understanding, the efforts of practitioners and the efforts of the deities are reciprocal: each works for the benefit of the other.
https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/stoneworks
Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism Vol VII, 2023
From royal eulogies carved in stone and artfully engraved verses adorning monuments, to the names... more From royal eulogies carved in stone and artfully engraved verses adorning monuments, to the names of pilgrims etched on temple walls, and economic transactions pressed into copper plates, the corpus of epigraphic writings from South and Southeast Asia is one of the richest in the world. Inscriptions are vital primary sources for the study of these regions, from the time of Aśoka to the court of Akbar, and beyond. The significance of epigraphic sources spans geographic boundaries as well. From Gandhara in far northwest South Asia, and the Tamil speaking regions of south India, to the lands of the Khmer rulers in Cambodia, inscriptions survive in myriad regional scripts and in classical and vernacular languages. The study of these sources is also relevant for multiple fields and research areas within the study of South and Southeast Asia: economic history, religion, jurisprudence, gender studies, art history, and linguistics, among many others. While inscriptions are often approached primarily as textual sources, as the opening lines above make clear, they are also material objects. This materiality is not a secondary feature. As part of discrete, portable objects, or as features of larger and more complex assemblages that include images and monuments as well as built and natural landscapes, inscriptions are material texts embedded in particular spatial and material contexts are considered. These contexts are integral to the meanings that epigraphic writings conveyed (van der Vliet, 2017, 195). This is particularly the case with elaborate Sanskrit inscriptions, which would have been intelligible as literary productions to only a select few. The majority of readers would have relied in various ways on contextual literacy to gauge the nature and status of epigraphic texts (Bierman, 1998, 2-9). For example, political inscriptions displayed prominently in public settings or on monuments could be read as signs of power by viewers without access to the verses in praise of rulers. In addition to individual objects and monuments, sites, too, can become "epigraphic environments" (Yasin, 2009, 101). The placement of texts in temple complexes, monastic dwellings, or along pilgrimage routes serves to orient the viewer and choreograph
Archives of Asian Art, 2022
Ancient Daśapura was the site of an internally complex Śaiva religious community. The Aulikara ru... more Ancient Daśapura was the site of an internally complex Śaiva religious community. The Aulikara rulers used Śaivism as a political idiom to celebrate military might and royal power. Their ministers, the Naigamas, promoted an irenic vision that praised Śiva as a source of protection and prosperity. Attention to these expressions of Śaivism enables us to contextualize one of Daśapura’s most famous, yet enigmatic, works of art: an ithyphallic male figure depicted with a double phallus (c. 6th century CE). To date, the sculpture has remained impossible to place within the greater artistic landscape of the region. This study proposes a resolution by showing that the icon was conceived as part of a triad of sculptures that included Śiva’s wife Pārvatī and their son Skanda. The images of Śiva and Skanda are displayed at the Bhopal Museum, and while their similarities have been noted in previous studies, they have not been viewed as part of a set. The reason for this is their separation from an unpublished Pārvatī, which is currently displayed in the Mandasor Archaeological Museum and identified as a yakṣī. When viewed as part of a triad, the double-phallus figure is transformed from an iconographic puzzle into an innovative visual strategy to reconcile what might seem opposing facets of a divine persona—i.e. the ascetic and the family man. By presenting these icons as a ‘family portrait’, this study recontextualizes important works of art from early India and initiates broader considerations of the political and religious ideologies that inspired their production.
Routledge Handbook Of Hindu Temples: Materiality, Social History, Practice, 2022
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2021
In the fifth–sixth century CE the rulers of the Kadamba dynasty claimed the town of Halsi (ancien... more In the fifth–sixth century CE the rulers of the Kadamba dynasty claimed the town of Halsi (ancient Palāśikā) in modern Karnataka as the northern capital of their expanding polity. Their investments in this locale are recorded in a corpus of copper-plate inscriptions spanning four generation of kings. The plates record the growth of a thriving Jain community at Palāśikā and are revelatory of their relationships with the Kadamba rulers and their agents. This study of the donative and political processes converging in Palāśikā shows that the use of Sanskrit inscriptions
as media for royal representation and public self-fashioning was highly
developed in the Kadamba polity, where idioms and trends developed independent of the Gupta royal model. Moreover, the evidence from Halsi is indicative of the centrality of Jain religious communities, ideologies, and institutions in the administration of the Kadamba polity and the expression of a lineage identity.
[Includes one correction of a missing heading.]
Indo-Iranian Journal, 2021
In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in ... more In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465-500 ce) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a 'text-monument' that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary, donative, religious, and agrarian practices supported state-making in an early South Indian kingdom.
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021
To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the 'Gupta Ecumene'... more To show how kingship was enacted and materialised in specific contexts within the 'Gupta Ecumene', writ large, this article presents a detailed analysis of two sites that served as centres for political performance, devotional practice, and artistic production between the fourth and the sixth century CE: Eran and Sondhni in the Indian heartland of Madhya Pradesh. Eran is commonly held to be a key site for the study of Gupta art and architecture and holds several important inscriptions from the beginning to the end of the Gupta period, including one issued by Samudragupta. Sondhni is marked by two inscribed columns of Yaśodharman, a former Gupta subordinate who challenged the imperial rulers using metaphors borrowed from Samudragupta's Allahabad Pillar Inscription. Examining these two sites in dialogue presents an opportunity to identify a shared cultural realm in which local polities participated and developed a transre-gional 'Gupta' political discourse. This study normalises a Gupta-centred imperial history and, in doing so, participates in a wider departure from dynastic history by emphasising the ways in which localised polities and rulers negotiated the political idioms of their day, challenged them, and created spaces for innovation.
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Bridging Heaven and Earth: Art and Architecture in South Asia, 3rd century BCE - 21st century CE, 2020
Perspectives on Lived Religion: Practices, Transmission, Landscape, 2019
Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photographs cover: Relief-decorated blocks from the north ... more Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Photographs cover: Relief-decorated blocks from the north wall of the antechapel of the tomb of Ry, Berlin inv. no. ÄM 7278. Copyright SMB Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, photo: Jürgen Liepe. Volume editors: Nico Staring, Huw Twiston Davies, Lara Weiss. ISBN 978-90-8890-792-0 (softcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-793-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-90-8890-794-4 (PDF e-book)
History of Religions, 2019
Journal of Hindu Studies, 2018
The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrativ... more The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrative episodes that eulogise the Śaiva terra sancta writ large, the text’s authors designate a small region of northwest India as the ‘Pāśupata landscape’, a salvific region celebrated as the birthplace of the Pāśupata movement. It was here that Śiva assumed a human form and disseminated the Pāśupata doctrine via four students, each of whom presided over a prestigious locale—the storied cities of Ujjain, Mathura, Jambumarga, and Kanauj. The text’s claim to colonise a region that occupied the sociopolitical heart of northwest India presents an imagined geography—not a fanciful representation; rather, a spatial rhetoric intended to localise, order, and authenticate a particular vision of community. This process of localisation served three discrete, yet intertwined aims: (i) it presents a cosmological vision of a sanctified world or Śaiva hierotopy, (ii) provides a normative model for community, and (iii) stakes a geopolitical claim.
Archive Journal , 2018
https://www.archivejournal.net/essays/the-medieval-temple-as-material-archive/
Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient Indian Through Texts and Traditions, 2017
South Asian Studies, 2014
As the emblem of Pāśupata identity, representations of the deified teacher called Lakulīśa (the ‘... more As the emblem of Pāśupata identity, representations of the deified teacher called Lakulīśa (the ‘Lord with a Club’) became a prominent feature of the expanding Śaiva religious landscape in early medieval northwest India. This study works to recover some of Lakulīśa’s historical contingency by reading his appearance in both text and image as a reflection of or response to particular concerns of the developing Śaiva religious community. The significance of Lakulīśa’s literary debut in the Nepalese recension of the early Skandapurāṇa is examined first. I then explore the visual representations of this figure by considering patterns in Lakulīśa’s iconography and the place of his images within sanctified spaces. Since temples were vital loci of interaction across a wide spectrum of social groups and religious communities, even ostensibly Śaiva centres would have accommodated a range of deities, religious practitioners, and devotional repertoires. Given the multivocality of these sanctified spaces, I propose that Lakulīśa images would have been subject to multiple ‘readings’ or interpretations. With his attributes signifying power, fertility, and protection, I suggest that Lakulīśa functioned not only as a potent sign of Pāśupata identity, but as a multivalent persona, facets of which would have resonated with a broader religious community.
Opening of the exhibition Sanskrit – Across Asia and Beyond on Thursday 18 May at 5.00 pm. The op... more Opening of the exhibition Sanskrit – Across Asia and Beyond on Thursday 18 May at 5.00 pm. The opening will take place in the Vossius Conference Room in the University Library, Witte Singel 27 in Leiden.
Did you know that Sanskrit is one of the oldest surviving members of the Indo-European language family? And that Sanskrit left its traces all over Asia and beyond? Sanskrit is a vehicle through which ideas and tales have been conserved and passed on. Leiden University shows this summer the rich heritage of Sanskrit: Buddhist scriptures on twelfth-century palm leaves, luxuriously illuminated manuscripts of the Ramayana epic,
next to an instruction manual for yoga and some spectacular loans from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. The exhibition is the second of three in the Leiden Asia Year. Leiden University holds one of the oldest and richest Sanskrit collections.
The exhibition has been conceived and curated by Peter Bisschop, Elizabeth Cecil and Daniele Cuneo.
IIAS Newsletter, 2017
Sanskrit is a global phenomenon—a language that has captured the intellectual imagination of hist... more Sanskrit is a global phenomenon—a language that has captured the intellectual imagination of historians and linguists in nineteenth-century Europe, and contemporary students of yoga and āyurveda, alike. While Sanskrit is commonly studied as a literary form, its influence has extended to shape rituals, fables, images, performances, and architectural forms that together inspired a shared world of culture linking diverse regions of Asia across the centuries. The aim of the exhibition, Sanskrit—Across Asia and Beyond (Leiden, 18 May-5 Sept 2017), is to materialize some of the complexity and cultural dynamism of Sanskrit by featuring materials from the Special Collections of Leiden University Asia Library.
Florida State University, 2024
Do forests think? Are animals persons? Should museum objects be treated as subjects? Questions li... more Do forests think? Are animals persons? Should museum objects be treated as subjects? Questions like these are inspiring conversations around Indigeneity, ecology, and material culture in the humanities. Such inquiries seek to reframe life in the Anthropocene (i.e., the period in the planet’s history when human activity has become the dominant influence on the ecosystem) by recognizing the agency of nonhuman actors, environments, and objects, and by acknowledging the human responsibility to engage ethically with them. The interdisciplinary study of religion offers a rich ground to advance inquiries around more-than-human worlds.
More-than-human Religion is a collaborative project around these areas of inquiry organised by Elizabeth Cecil and Sonia Hazard at Florida State University.
Third Annual Workshop in Indian Epigraphy, 2021
This international workshop will introduce participants to the skills necessary for reading and... more This international workshop will introduce participants to the skills necessary for reading and interpreting inscriptions of the Maitraka, Kadamba, Calukya, Rastrakuta and Silahara dynasties. Daily sessions on the paleography, grammar, and interpretation of stone and copper plate inscriptions will be led by the project organizers. We will learn to use estampages and photographs, consult text editions and digital tools, and contextualize our readings in light of archaeological and historical evidence. Featured instructors will include Dr. Annette Schmiedchen (Humboldt University, Berlin), Dr. Elizabeth Cecil (Florida State University), Dr. Mekhola Gomes (Durham University), Dr. Jason Neelis (Wilfrid Laurier), Dr. Daud Ali (University of Pennsylvania), and Dr. Luther Obrock (University of Toronto, Mississauga).
University of Toronto - Mississauga, 2019
Leiden Canonical Cultures Research Network, 2019
Leiden Canonical Cultures Research Network, 2018
Leiden Canonical Cultures Research Network, 2017
Graduate International Colloquium, 2016
New Books Network - Hindu Studies, 2020
https://newbooksnetwork.com/elizabeth-a-cecil-mapping-the-pasupata-landscape-brill-2020/ Elizab... more https://newbooksnetwork.com/elizabeth-a-cecil-mapping-the-pasupata-landscape-brill-2020/
Elizabeth A. Cecil‘s Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (Brill, 2020) weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapurāṇa, physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons to provide groundbreaking insight into the earliest known community of Śiva devotees: the Pāśupatas. Through examining how the Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional Indian landscapes, this book explores issues of belonging, identity, community building and place-making in Early Medieval India.
Indo-Iranian Journal
In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in ... more In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary...
The present book is the outcome of an international conference held at the Museum Volkenkunde in ... more The present book is the outcome of an international conference held at the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden in August 2018, organized by the editors within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project Asia Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language, and the State. During the five days of presentations and conversations, the scholars in attendance from Europe, North America, and South Asia shared new research related to the cultural and political history of premodern Asia and explored historical intersections and parallels in modes of state formation, religion, economy, and cultural production in South and Southeast Asia in light of patterns from adjacent regionsthe ancient Mediterranean, ancient Near East, and East Asia. Visiting scholars also experienced some of the rich collections of primary historical sources held in Leiden's renowned museums, libraries, and archives. On the third day of the conference, participants were introduced to the South and Southeast Asian materials at the Museum Volkenkunde by Francine Brinkgreve, curator of Insular Southeast Asia. Professor Marijke Klokke (Leiden University) provided an introduction to the special exhibition on Indonesian bronzes and discussed the production and transmission of the remarkable portable images. In the afternoon, Doris Jedamski and Maartje van den Heuvel guided visitors through a display of some of the University Library's extensive special collections, with highlights including the massive copper plates of the South Indian Cola dynasty, manuscripts of Indonesia's expansive epic La Galigo, and the earliest images of the Borobudur in the form of rare daguerreotypes. The conference united a diverse group of scholars working in the fields of history, archaeology, religion, anthropology, art history, classics, and philology in an effort to explore new perspectives and methods in the study of primary sources from the premodern world. Our inquires converged around topics such as inscriptions and textual sources, material culture and environment, the role of narrative in crafting ideologies, and religious landscapes and monuments. Deepening the discussions that animated the conference event, the present book adopts a more focused geographical perspective, looking specifically at primary sources bearing on premodern South and Southeast Asia. Although they are not included in the present work, other papers that have enriched the thinking behind this book were presented by Dániel Balogh (British Museum), Lucas den Boer (Leiden University), Robert Bracey (British Museum),
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts
Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of... more Stone inscriptions, manuscripts, monuments, sculptures, ceramic fragments: these are just some of the primary sources for the study of premodern Asia. How might scholars chart new directions in Asian studies following these historical traces of past societies and polities? To address this question, this book unites perspectives from leading scholars and emerging voices in the fields of archaeology, art history, philology, and cultural history to revisit the primary historical sources that ground their respective studies, and to reflect upon the questions that can be asked of these sources, the light they may shed on Asian pasts, and the limits of these inquiries. This volume contributes to a more expansive research aim: the research initiative Asia Beyond Boundaries: Politics, Region, Language, and the State, a collaborative project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) from 2014 to 2020. One of the core aims of this ERC project has been to rethink and revisit established scholarly narratives of premodern social and political networks in early South Asia. In doing so, the scholars involved considered how complex trajectories of cultural and economic connectivity supported the development of recognizable transregional patterns across Asia, particularly those patterns that have been commonly regarded as "classical." Anchored in "Gupta Period" South Asiaa remarkably productive period of cultural and political change that extended from the fourth to the sixth century CE-Asia Beyond Boundaries situates the innovations of these centuries within the broader South and Southeast Asian ecumene through the integration of archaeological, epigraphic, art historical, and philological research. While the research initiative of the Asia Beyond Boundaries project occasioned both the conference and the volume inspired by it, the current publication also looks beyond it. Situating the "Gupta Period" and South Asia in a broader context, the present volume expands upon some of the core research questions that animate the larger project by considering what primary historical sources may tell us about the premodern world. To challenge traditional boundaries and create a more capacious view of Asian studies, varied sources, methods, and perspectives are joined in conversation. This introduction frames the volume's contributions in light of advances in adjacent fields, augmenting the core methodologies long established as the strengths of each regional discipline as traditionally conceivedphilology, archival research, archaeological excavation, field research, etc.
Indo-Iranian Journal
In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in ... more In March 1971, B.R. Gopal discovered a partially buried pillar with visible inscribed writing in the village of Guḍnāpur in Karnataka. The monument has since become known as the Guḍnāpur Pillar Inscription of Ravivarman (ca. 465–500 CE) after the ruler of the early Kadamba kingdom who commissioned it. The inscription preserves a compelling historical record that details the intersections of religious and political performance at the Kadamba court as centered around a temple to Kāma constructed within the confines of the royal residence at Vaijayantī (Banavasi), and the distribution of agrarian lands to support its maintenance. This study presents a new translation and analysis of the text and a discussion of the pillar as a ‘text-monument’ that was both embedded within and constitutive of landscapes: physical and built as well as rhetorical and imagined. By presenting the Guḍnāpur inscription as a text-monument situated within multiple landscapes, the article reveals how documentary...
Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2021
Despite its ubiquity in the classical tradition, the premodern South Asian Buddhist tale of the s... more Despite its ubiquity in the classical tradition, the premodern South Asian Buddhist tale of the suffering fetus in the filthy female womb is often read as medical, a pseudobiological interpolation in the “religious” canon of classical Buddhism. Leaving aside theoretical questions about how well categories like “science” and “religion” serve us in understanding premodern South Asian Buddhist cultural worlds, this essay argues that Buddhist narratives about the suffering fetus and the foul female womb have important and broad implications for the contestation of gender in South Asian Buddhist contexts. An oft-repeated trope, Buddhist descriptions of birth have been a powerful means – in language suggested by the editors of this volume – of “perennializing” a certain classical Buddhist ideology of the female reproductive body. They have also operated, as I argue here and elsewhere, as a “vector of social change” (again, using the language of the editors), albeit in ways both indirect and paradoxical.1 In the context of the profound suffering of birth (the central message of this ubiquitous trope), women’s fertility and sexual desirability or readiness are not to be coveted and devoutly wished for. For this reason, men and women contemplating, reproducing, and circulating the Buddhist discourse of birth may have found it easier to conceive of women living
another kind of life besides motherhood and wifehood.