Review of R. Champakalakshmi, Religion, Tradition, and Ideology: Pre-colonial South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011 (original) (raw)
Related papers
South Asian Studies 30.2, 2014
This study explores how the sacred landscape was variously defined, demarcated, and appropriated in ancient and early medieval South India. Focusing in particular on the site of Banavasi in the modern state of Karnataka, I examine archaeological and epigraphic evidence to parse out some of the spatial and temporal patterns in the interaction between a surprising diversity of religious traditions and practices. While the close connection between local elite authority and traditional religious institutions such as Buddhism and Hinduism is apparent in Banavasi, the spatial and temporal organization of the landscape reflects several larger processes of interaction. These include the legitimization of local and regional elites, as well as more complex processes of interaction, competition, and replacement between religions. In addition, while stupas and temples are clearly recognizable elements of the archaeological record in South Asia, there is also considerable evidence for local cults and religious traditions, such as naga (snake) stones and various forms of commemoration. At times, these were appropriated within the larger religious traditions, and at other times remained separate and distinct entities in their own right. The persistence and longevity of these local traditions ensured that they occupied an important space in the sacred landscape of Banavasi. This article presents a case study that illustrates the complex and overlapping patterns of replacement, competition, appropriation, and abandonment that constitute historical sacred landscapes in ancient and medieval South India.
From Kailasa to Kataragama: Sacred Geography in the cult of Skanda- Murukan
In most world religions, pilgrimage is given relatively low status in the hierarchy of religious practices. But in one ancient yet still vibrant Sri Lankan tradition, the practice of pāda yātrā or foot pilgrimage demonstrably embodies profound metaphysical truths while serving as a working framework or matrix for the exploration of progressively subtler levels of religious practice that have long escaped the attention of non-participant observers. Far from being a merely outward practice suitable only for laity or the exceptionally naïve religious specialist, pilgrimage in the Kataragama Pāda Yātrā tradition is a comprehensive exercise of body, mind and spirit having ramifications far exceeding the suppositions of present day indological scholarship. Despite its great antiquity, stature and symbolic importance in Sri Lanka's multi-ethnic society, the tradition of annual Kataragama Pāda Yātrā has never been the object of modern scholarly study. This is partly because it takes place in remote districts in the North and East -- precisely the districts most affected by the ongoing conflict between insurgents and Government security forces -- and partly because pāda yātrā survives as a rural village 'little tradition', beneath the purview of older scholarship. Studies of Kataragama to date have tended to underplay the religious dimension of Kataragama as the tradition's custodians themselves understand it, focusing instead upon emerging social trends and regarding the Kataragama festival less as a religious tradition than as a release valve for social tensions in post-Independence Sri Lanka. This study, however, surveys Sri Lanka's longest and oldest pilgrimage tradition from the religious perspective as articulated by the tradition's practitioners themselves and assumes that a religious tradition is best understood within its own frame of reference. Among the ancient living traditions that survive in island Sri Lanka's rich cultural environment, few are as well-known or as poorly-understood as that of the Kataragama Pāda Yātrā. Starting from the island's far north and ending up to two months and several hundred kilometers later at the Kataragama shrine in the island's remote southeastern jungle, the Kataragama Pāda Yātrā tradition has played a major role in propagating and perpetuating traditions of Kataragama throughout Sri Lanka and South India. Predating the arrival of all four of Sri Lanka's major religions, it is essentially a tradition inherited from the island's indigenous forest-dwellers, the Wanniya-læto or Veddas, as the Kataragama shrine's Sinhalese kapurāla priest-custodians themselves readily concede.
The deeper sense of geographic concerns employ to investigate the inherent power of sacred places by searching cosmic geometries embedded in ritual landscapes and the spatial orientations towards astronomical phenomena. Such sacred cities can be considered to be a mesocosm, geometrically linking the celestial realm of the macrocosm with the microcosmic realm of human consciousness and cultural traditions of text, tradition, and rituals. The Hindu literature, both the classical and modern, is full of reverence for ‘Mother India’ (Bhārat Mātā) and ‘Mother Earth’ (Bhū Devī). The ‘land (and the earth)’ is personified goddess. This image, as described in literary tradition, is conceptualised by relating all geographical features as lived and imagined landscapes, viz. mountains, hills, rivers, caves, unique sites, etc. to the mother earth and in that sense those sites and places automatically becomes part of the sacred geography of ancient India (cf. Eck 2012: 11). Every region or place has its own sacred geography where humans meet with the divinities and ultimate emerged the microcosmic web which are always regulated and expanded by the continuity of rituals, festivities and celebrations. Better known expression of the Nature-Man interfaces through spirituality is presented in the form of sacred geometry and maṇḍalas (i.e. geometric arrangements of esoteric symbols or symbolic representations of the abodes of various deities). The sacred landscape combines the absoluteness of space, relativeness of places and comprehensiveness of landscape; thus altogether result to a ‘wholeness’ carrying the inherent and imposed spirit of ‘holiness’, which is to be called ‘sacredscapes’. In Hindu tradition this is called ‘divya kṣetra’ (a pious/ divine territory).
Timothy Edensor, Uma Kothari and Ares Kalandides (eds.) 2020, The Routledge Handbook of Place. London: Routledge, 2020
The sacred landscape combines the absoluteness of space, the relativeness of places and the comprehensiveness of landscape. Altogether, this constitutes a 'wholeness' that conveys the inherent and imposed spirit of 'holiness', which here we call 'sacredscapes'; these are regulated and reproduced by those of faith and in their sacred rituals. Accordingly, as adherents of faith within sacred space, we form a sense of ourselves and the sense of our-place at varying scales of space-time. We begin from the local scale, and here we may first experience the sacred message through the spirit of place, its genus loci, and the power of place: place speaks, place communicates. In Hindu cosmology, the Matsya Purāṇa (ca. CE 400) enumerates a large number of sacred places with descriptions of associated schedules, gestures, dreams, and auspicious signs and symbols. The seven sacred cities within this schema (Sapta-purīs) are Mathura, Dvaraka, Ayodhya, Haridvar, Varanasi, Ujjain and Kanchipuram. Rather differently, the twelve most important Shiva abodes are scattered all over India and are known as Jyotir lingas tīrthas, with the four abodes of Vishnu in the four corners of India serving as another group of popular pan-Indian pilgrimage places. This chapter will focus on particularly vivid examples, illustrating Hindu reciprocal relationships between sacred places and the faith system. These are illustrated within the taxonomic frame of sacred places, ritualscapes, festivities, sacred water and aspects of spatial transposition that link locality and universality.
Sacred, mundane and religious geography of the Mahābhārata
Conference article – AAR Annual Meeting 2021; Mahabharata and Classical Hinduism Seminar; Thema: Multifarious Mahābhārata Methods (21-11-2021), 2021
The three geographies related to the MBh interact with each other. In the paper I define mundane geography as a map of India as it was imagined by the bards. Its starting point is the kingdom of Kuru seen as the epicenter of the world. Here I have reconstructed it on the basis of the number of mentions of the kingdoms and the importance of the heroes belonging to them. The analysis of mutual relations of the kingdoms formed six areas of the subcontinent within which the kingdoms were placed. Finally, using the archaeological evidence and the assumptions of historians, I mapped the capitals of kingdoms and marked areas of their possible extent. The reconstruction gives an overall orientation in the geography imagined by the bards. It is worth emphasizing that the purpose of the reconstruction is not to reflect any historical age. The text of the MBh was written over centuries during which the knowledge of the bards about geography was changing. The demarcation line between mundane and sacred geography is the distance from the Kuru kingdom to the farthest places that could be reached by travelers. Beyond the reach of travelers is the world of gods and divine beings. These are wondrous worlds accessible only to a select few. They can be reached by taking long journeys (2.25) or in dreams (7.57). When describing sacred geography, I pay special attention to the three cosmological versions which can be found in the MBh. I suppose that the oldest is the version of continents reflected on the surface of the Moon. The islands scattered on the ocean could be a further development of it and the ultimate version is the ring-islands surrounded by the oceans. The foremost continent known to bards was the land of Sudarśana. Right behind it to the north was the land of Śāka, what may suggest that this version appeared during the Scythian influence on the Indian subcontinent. It’s worth to notice the possible inclusion of astronomical content taken from the Babylonian tradition into Indian cosmology – the Viṣṇu Cart in the north may be a reference to the Little Dipper from Babylon. Mundane and sacred geography from the MBh influence the religious geography – pilgrimage sites related to the epic. It is a constant process, some mechanisms of which I tried to trace in the third part of the article. For the sake of clarity, we divided the pilgrimage sites into four groups, trying to capture their specificity. I pointed out slight influence of archeological finds in forming the MBh pilgrimage sites, the problem of pilgrimage places outside India, and attempts to dominate over Buddhists sanctuaries. On a few occasions I exemplify the mechanism behind the emergence of pilgrimage sites. Saints and ascetics, who are credited with spiritual vision of the past, play an important role in this process. They mainly shape the Indian pilgrimage map; however, they do not act capriciously, but rely on folk tales, adding subsequent chapters to the already existing story.
Beyond Sacred Landscapes: Poetic Illuminations of Local Experience in Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita
Thesis (M.A. in South and South East Asian Studies)--University of California, Berkeley, 2016
In twelfth-century Kashmir, the Sanskrit poet Kalhaṇa composed a chronicle of kings. This text has recently become the site of renewed debates about the relationship between history and literature in pre-modern South Asia. From these discussions, new ideas have emerged about temporality, narrative style, and regional identity. Before there can be a regional identity, however, there must be a conception of “region.” For this, I turn to the work of Maṅkha, Kalhaṇa’s contemporary. In the third sarga of Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita, Maṅkha provides a geographical account of the maṇḍala of Kashmir and its capital city Pravarapura where his family had established itself several generations before. In the first section of this thesis, I explore tensions between the local and translocal in Maṅkha’s description of region. I consider the way in which Kashmiri winters intrude upon the translocal conventions of Sanskrit aesthetics. In section two, I turn to the question of a regional identity. I argue that the particularities in Maṅkha’s description of landscape and social practice point to the construction of Kashmir as more than an idealized cosmological space. The final section considers the relationship between mythology, the divine, and artistic practice, emphasizing the visual quality of Maṅkha’s regional sketch. By thinking about localization as an emergent undercurrent in Kashmiri Sanskrit literature of the second millennium, I depart from the dominant paradigm of sacrality as a model for thinking about landscapes. I turn instead to the materiality of landscapes and consider this as the force around which and through which multiple worldviews come to be expressed in Maṅkha’s regional sketch.
Faith and place: Hindu sacred landscapes of India (In: The Routledge Handbook of Place)
Routledge, 2020
The sacred landscape combines the absoluteness of space, relativeness of places and comprehensiveness of landscape; thus altogether results in a ‘wholeness’ carrying the inherent and imposed spirit of ‘holiness’, which is to be called ‘sacredscapes’, and are regulated and survived by the faith involved in and the sacred rituals. We begin the sense of our-place from the local scale and here we first experience the sacred message (spirit of place, genus loci) and power of place: place speaks, place communicates! The Matsya Purāna (c.ce 400) enumerates a large number of sacred places with descriptions of associated schedules, gestures, dreams and auspicious signs and symbols. The seven sacred cities (Sapta-purīs) include Mathura, Dvaraka, Ayodhya, Haridvar, Varanasi, Ujjain and Kanchipuram. Similarly, the twelve most important Shiva abodes are scattered all over India. The four abodes of Vishnu in the four corners of India are another group of popular pilgrimages. These are the examples of pan-Indian pilgrimage places. The chapter presents such vivid examples.