Description
- Abstract:
- The recent recovery of manuscripts of a Sanskrit text calling itself the Skandapurāṇa has provided a critical impetus for this project of rethinking early Śaiva history. This new source affords an unprecedented glimpse into the growth of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the ‘Pāśupatas,’ While the authors of this text celebrate the ascetic practices commonly associated with Śaiva practitioners, they also acknowledge the values of the laukikas—the ‘people in and of the world’ (loka)—and praise the salvific potential of pilgrimage to Śiva’s many shrines and worship of his phallic emblem (liṅga) definitive features of the devotional repertoire of medieval Śiva worshippers. In mapping the Śaiva terra sancta, writ large, the authors designate a small region of northwest India as the “primordial Pāśupata landscape,” the place where the Pāśupata movement originated and the region in which Lakulīśa, the tradition’s deified founder, disseminated his teachings. Located at the heart of the subcontinent, this landscape was a center of political dynamism and religious efflorescence in the early medieval period (6th and the 10th centuries CE). To illuminate the ways in which the Pāśupata community participated in, and was shaped by, the distinctive socio-political conditions of this period, my dissertation brings the Skandapurāṇa’s Pāśupata landscape into conversation with contemporaneous inscriptions and material evidence from three critical groups of temple sites in the region. This new synthesis and interpretation of the historical sources privileges the voices of non-elite actors, who have too often been silenced in the existing scholarship and, through them, (re)considers how people imagined themselves as ‘Śaiva’ in early medieval India. These ‘voices’ are not exclusively human. I also consider physical landscapes, built environments, and icons as historical agents in order to explore the ways in which Pāśupata communities were emplaced in the regional landscape and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. Finally, by exploring the ties between the self-fashioning of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, I reflect critically upon the ways in which community building is coincident with place-making.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Cecil, Elizabeth Ann,
"‘Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: The Skandapurāṇa, Lakulīśa, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India (6th-10th century CE)"
(2016).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0WD3Z00
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Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Religious Studies department....