Vīraśaivism, caste, and language: Rethinking narratives

In seeking out traces of such other pasts, Ujjaini’s Tailābhiṣeka itself is an ideal place to begin. When I asked the head of Ujjaini’s lineage, Jagadguru Siddalinga Rajadeshikendra Swami, about the significance of the Tailābhiṣeka, or what sort of story stood behind its observance, he told me quite candidly that nobody had the slightest idea. ‘We do the Tailābhiṣeka because it is what we have always done. It is what defines us as a community.’Footnote ⁷ And yet, as I discovered sometime later, the archive has a markedly different, and more viscerally human, story to tell. In a sixteenth-century Kannada epic, the Maruḷasiddhakāvya of Devakavi, we learn that oil is poured on the temple as an act of care. Ujjaini is the home of a Śaiva teacher, Maruḷasiddha, who sits in suspended animation at the heart of the temple. In the midst of the blazing heat immediately preceding the rainy season, his devotees decided that anointing his residence with cooling oil would keep him comfortable down through the centuries. In other words, within a pre-colonial imaginary, now as obscured as the peak of Ujjaini’s temple, the Tailābhiṣeka formed a key part of how multi-caste devotional communities constructed their identity around a common focus—collectively caring for the body of a saint:

Such reliquary centres were ubiquitous among the multi-religious imaginaries of the premodern Deccan. What makes Ujjaini exceptionally relevant is that the body being tended by this premodern community of care was referred to in this early modern work, affectionately by his community and disparagingly by rivals, as ‘bhaṅgisiddha’, divine perfection in an ‘Untouchable’ body.

Our text, the Maruḷasiddhakāvya, is quite blunt—Maruḷa was born into a Hŏlĕya family, at the very bottom of the Deccani caste hierarchy. Many episodes in his life story thus reflect the reality that such a person would be excluded from caste society and its attendant privileges. It was his habit, we are told, to teach Śaiva doctrine while flagrantly disregarding purity codes and restrictions on touch. Maruḷasiddha demanded that everyone consumed their food communally, with no regard for caste. The text also portrays its protagonist overcoming acts of caste-based oppression. In one extended narrative, Maruḷa walks right onto the Vedic sacrificial grounds and demands that the brāhmaṇa ritualists give him the offerings due to him as a holy man. In a fit of rage, one brāhmaṇa leaps up and begins to beat him into a bloody pulp—only to find, after turning his back, that Maruḷasiddha stood before him with a beatific smile. Astonished, the brāhmaṇas make several more attempts to do away with this alleged defiler of their sacrifice and ritual purity. They seal him in a sack full of quicklime and dump him in a well. They pour boiling oil on top of his head. Each time, as happens in stories, he emerges unscathed.Footnote ⁹

On the surface, at least, nothing in these narratives fails to accord with our expectations from other works of hagiography: Maruḷasiddha, it seems, is the very image of a caste-oppressed saint speaking truth in the face of brahmanical hegemony.Footnote ¹⁰ And yet, unlike contemporary Dalit social imaginaries, oppression itself is not framed as constitutive of his subjectivity.Footnote ¹¹ The Maruḷasiddhakāvya devotes substantially more time to Maruḷa’s transregional journeys as he founded and managed a network of monasteries, or his occupation of the pontifical seat at Ujjaini itself. We find a detailed account of the initiation he received from his also non-brāhmaṇa guru Revaṇasiddha, who imparted through bodily touch a mastery of the Sanskrit Śaiva Āgamas and Upaniṣads.Footnote ¹² Without denying his ‘Untouchable’ status, the Maruḷasiddhakāvya insists its protagonist is also a siddha, a ideal being, perfectly embodying Śaiva ascetic practice and soteriological teachings. And simultaneously, Maruḷasiddha is portrayed as a great teacher and master of traditions of debate, transmitting a body of Sanskritic doctrine to his disciples. In later generations of hagiography, he even comes to be credited with composing a Sanskrit commentarial treatise, the Dārukabhāṣya.

With 400 years intervening between the hagiography and the lifetime of its subject, it is uncertain how well the text captures the religious dynamics of the twelfth century. What we can say quite confidently, however, is that a sixteenth-century author of high literary Kannada found it not only unproblematic, but downright quotidian, that an ‘Untouchable’ saint should be deeply imbricated in Sanskritic traditions of learning. In a poem that attributes numerous miracles to its narrative subject, Maruḷasiddha’s personal engagement with the contents of Sanskrit texts was not one of them. Nor does a single figure in the tale bat an eye at the thought that a Hŏlĕya had been ordained as a pontiff of a Vīraśaiva lineage qualified to give initiation to his own disciples across the boundaries of caste. And despite the physical brutality Maruḷa endures at the hands of dominant caste social agents—such as brāhmaṇas—the author expresses no disdain towards the Sanskrit language or its textual contents. Instead, much as I found in my own fieldwork at Ujjaini, we find an easeful assurance that Śaiva scriptures in Sanskrit and their ritual content are the honest birthright of all initiated Vīraśaivas, regardless of their caste origin. Even the smallest details of the text reflect this sense of community ownership of the Sanskrit language. Thus, for example, when Maruḷa’s disciples pour oil over Ujjaini’s temple tower, they boldly chant OṂ namo namo, employing a sacred syllable strictly denied to women and śūdras.Footnote ¹³

Is this assertion of non-brāhmaṇa ownership over the Sanskrit language some anomaly unique to Maruḷasiddha and his lineage? On the contrary, as our multilingual archive overwhelmingly suggests, non-brāhmaṇa communities were consuming, transmitting, and even producing knowledge in Sanskrit without interruption down through the centuries. Even more provocatively, however, the alliance between Sanskrit and caste inclusivity we find in the Maruḷasiddhakāvya is no sixteenth-century innovation, but has formed a cornerstone of the traditions we call Vīraśaivism since their inception in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In fact, I would argue that the Sanskrit inheritance of the Vīraśaiva tradition is one of the major keys to understanding the tradition’s enduring ethic of intercaste commensality. In existing models of the South Asian historical language order, Sanskrit, as the primary language of elite cosmopolitan learning, bequeathed its privileged access to the aesthetics of political discourses to South Asian’s many regional vernaculars at the dawn of the Vernacular Millennium.Footnote ¹⁴ Sanskrit was never eclipsed entirely, but was relegated to increasingly insular domains—courtly literary circles confined to their own regional terrain, and abstruse currents of philosophical debate. Simultaneously, however, throughout the Vernacular Millennium, Vīraśaiva monasteries were the primary institutional heir to another side of medieval South Asia, one in which another Sanskrit—a classical Sanskrit tradition as old as Kālidāsa—was vested largely in the hands of non-brāhmaṇa social agents. In other words, Vīraśaivism has been the most prolific and influential tradition of South Asian early modernity to inherit the legacy of Śaivism’s non-brāhmaṇa Sanskrit imaginary.

And yet, in academic literature to date, ‘Sanskrit’ and ‘Vīraśaivism’ are scarcely ever mentioned in the same breath.Footnote ¹⁵ According to our received wisdom, the very idea of Vīraśaivism being part of a classical ‘non-brāhmaṇa Sanskrit imaginary’ may seem like so much gibberish. As the story goes, the Vīraśaiva movement was the revolutionary vision of a single historical actor, the twelfth-century socio-religious reformer Basava, who preached the annihilation of caste 800 years too soon. In the aphoristic words of A. K. Ramanujan, for instance: ‘Basavaṇṇa was the leader of the medieval religious movement, Vīraśaivism, of which the Kannada vacanas are the most important texts.’Footnote ¹⁶ Consequently, then, the medium for Basava’s message is to be found exclusively, we are told, in a vernacular corpus of poetry—namely, the vacanas, the Kannada sayings of Basava and his radical circle of contemporaries. The choice of the vernacular itself, then, is read as part and parcel of Vīraśaivism’s revolutionary agenda—it is simply assumed that to speak in Kannada in the twelfth century was by definition to reject Sanskrit.

But here again, the voice of the archive offers us something completely different. As a corpus, the vacanas, far from representing the doctrinal core of a nascent community, emerge into view only in the fifteenth century when we suddenly encounter attempts at anthologization.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the earliest examples, for instance, is Kallumaṭhada Prabhudeva’s Liṅgalīlāvilāsacāritra. But as its entirely Sanskrit title suggests, the language politics at play are, in fact, the antithesis of what we might expect from an exercise in codifying the vacanas as a textual canon. Upon closer examination, in fact, the Liṅgalīlāvilāsacāritra is not a monolingual Kannada text.Footnote ¹⁸ As Prabhudeva tells us, the work is subdivided into 16 sections, each of which comprises evidentiary citations that exemplify one of 16 ‘stations’ (sthala) of Vīraśaiva doctrine.Footnote ¹⁹ Each subsection in turn comprises two bodies of citations, the first consisting of Kannada vacanas, and the second, sometimes as extensive as the first, of verbatim Sanskrit citations drawn from Śaiva or specifically Vīraśaiva theological and scriptural texts. These Sanskrit passages are demarcated, as is common practice in early modern Vīraśaiva works, by the terms ‘witness’ (sākṣi), ‘text’ (grantha), or ‘verse’ (śloka). That is to say, one of the earliest and most influential anthologies of Kannada vacanas was equally committed to the project of compiling Sanskrit scripture. Moreover, given the author’s frequent ṭīkā-style grammatical glosses for even elementary morphological forms (for example, syāt ahudu), Prabhudeva clearly intended his readers to wrestle with the Sanskrit original, regardless of their degree of fluency.

If the multilingual content of the Liṅgalīlāvilāsacāritra comes as a surprise, a glance at the content of the anthologized vacanas themselves should give us further pause. In other words, the multilingualism of Prabhudeva’s work is not limited to the bipartite structure of its subdivisions, but rather extends to a multilingual texture internal to the Kannada vacanas themselves, as many of the Kannada vacanas he cites contain further Sanskrit citations as integral to their canonical form. As an example of the sort of linguistic fusion at play, take, for instance, the following vacana endorsing the consumption of food that has been ritually offered to Śiva (prasāda):

This case is no isolated occurrence: in total, Prabhudeva’s Liṅgalīlāvilāsacāritra embeds more than 160 distinct Sanskrit citations, more than two dozen of which circulate within the vacanas he anthologizes. A similar anthology, Mahāliṅgadeva’s Ekottaraśatasthala, likewise, preserves more than 120 Sanskrit citations within his corpus of vacanas. If the earliest known anthologizers of the vacanas never rejected the Sanskrit language, just where did we inherit this notion that for Vīraśaivism the politics of caste and language were intrinsically inseparable? Although standing in stark contradiction to available textual evidence, this conceptual frame, commonly embraced by scholars and practitioners alike, is wholly the product of the colonial encounter. Since the nineteenth century, classical Indology has explicitly framed Vīraśaivism as an Indian analogue of Protestant Christianity.Footnote ²¹ We know only too well how that story goes: when Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to the church door, he set off a tidal wave of religious reform, a protest against the Catholic Church and its elitist emphasis on priestcraft, ritual, and a scriptural canon restricted to classical Latin.Footnote ²² And so, in contemporary South Asian studies, we have come to tell the story of Vīraśaivism in very much the same way: Vīraśaivism was a social movement, breaking radically from the clerical imagination of a repressive past enacted in a dead language. As Orientalist scholar Arthur Miles wrote in 1933, for instance:

What we have, in essence, is a Western metanarrative, extracted from the annals of European temporalities, superimposed wholesale on the social history of South Asia. And this metanarrative is alive and well today, shaping religion, politics, and public discourse. But although Basava’s singular role as the founder of Vīraśaivism has rightly been critiqued in recent scholarship, more is implicit in the Protestant metanarrative than Basava himself as the Reformer, and much of it remains uncritically accepted in scholarship on South Asian religions today. If the story of Vīraśaivism’s origin need not start with Basava as social revolutionary and egalitarian reformer, why, then, must it start with the Kannada language, or why even with the vernacular at all? Why are the only precursors of early Vīraśaiva literature to be found in the Tamil Śaiva devotional poetry of the Nāyaṉārs, a contiguous ‘vernacular bhakti’ tradition? On what grounds do we presume that Vīraśaivism represents a radical break from a monolithic brahmanical past that suddenly erupted ex nihilo in the twelfth century? These questions take us back to the very idea of the Bhakti Movement, and the ‘storm of songs’ that swept across the subcontinent from south to north, a notion that the remarkable detective work of John Stratton Hawley has historicized as a largely colonial period invention.Footnote ²⁴

In short, with our history of South Asia fundamentally imprinted by the teleologies of the West, we continue to presume a map for which there is no territory.Footnote ²⁵ It rests on our shoulders, then, to consider how we might decolonize our portraits of the South Asian past, including the stories we tell about caste, language, and social agency. Indeed, when we take our cues from the archive, approaching it with fresh eyes, radically different perspectives come into view. Virtually untouched, Vīraśaivism’s multilingual archive comprises hundreds of texts, composed from the twelfth century onwards not only in Kannada but also in other south Indian vernaculars, Telugu, Tamil, and Marathi, and yes, also in classical Sanskrit. This is an archive that demands several lifetimes’ worth of study, for which we scarcely possess a roadmap. But when it comes to questions of language choice, thankfully, the message conveyed is clear and unambiguous: Sanskrit currents are omnipresent. I am aware of no instance in which premodern Vīraśaivas rejected Sanskrit scripture in favour of exclusively valorizing the vernacular. Instead, they embraced a capacious vision of multilingualism, within which Sanskrit had a very specific and strategic role to play.

Such is the case, for instance, within the textual corpus of the Vīramāheśvaras, a thirteenth-century Vīraśaiva tradition based at Srisailam in contemporary Andhra Pradesh, whose largely unstudied discursive community I have reconstructed in previous publications.Footnote ²⁶ Within their bilingual Sanskrit and Telugu corpus, Sanskrit was not only an expedient medium of communication but a link to a much deeper cultural inheritance. And yet, the best-known representative of this community, Pālkuriki Somanātha, features in scholarship to date strictly as a devotional poet of the vernacular Telugu, presumed to be writing in opposition to a hegemonic Sanskrit past. As Velcheru Narayana Rao and Gene Roghair opine: ‘Somanātha’s rejection of Sanskritic, brahminic, literary conventions was complete. He based his book on the stories of the great bhaktas that were popular in oral traditions among the Vīraśaivas. He sought instruction regarding such stories from the local assembly of bhaktas rather than from a Sanskrit poet-sage.’Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, this image of Somanātha fails to accord with the evidence at hand. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Somanātha was also a skilled Sanskrit commentator and dialectician. Indeed, he appears to have composed a major work of Sanskrit śāstra or systematic prose, entitled Extracting the Essence of Vīramāheśvara Conduct (Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhāra), popularly known as the Somanāthabhāṣya, or ‘Somanātha’s commentary’, whose archive and arguments literally set the stage for Vīraśaiva Sanskrit textuality in later centuries.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, his acquaintance with Sanskrit was by no means casual, as he demonstrates iconically in his benedictory verse, composed in the ornate mālinī meter:

Although grammatically a monolingual Sanskrit verse, Somanātha’s poetry is indexically bilingual: note, for example, that all four feet of the verse rhyme, adhering to distinctively Telugu conventions of prosody—in fact, Somanātha often employs the very same rhyme scheme in his own Telugu works.Footnote ³⁰ And just as there are traces of Telugu in his Sanskrit, there are traces of Sanskrit in his Telugu. Such is the case, for instance, with Somanātha’s Paṇḍitārādhyacaritramu, the life story of the twelfth-century Vīraśaiva saint Paṇḍitārādhya, a near contemporary of Basava. Verse by verse, the Telugu medium is interspersed with garlands of Sanskrit quotations, reproducing lengthy passages almost verbatim.Footnote ³¹ Based on the sheer quantity of Sanskrit cited, we must surmise that such a passage would have been utterly incomprehensible to audiences unversed in the Sanskrit language. In fact, large swathes of the text have remained largely unintelligible to those who have sought to translate it.Footnote ³² The verses as cited are often grammatically incomplete, such that an ideal reader or listener would be called upon to supply the remainder of the citation from memory. In other words, Somanātha simply presumes that the non-brāhmaṇa Śaiva communities he is addressing could fluently access a certain register and canon of Sanskrit. And in fact, when we survey the bilingual corpus of Vīramāheśvara literature, we repeatedly find many of these same Sanskrit quotations in active circulation. Much like Maruḷasiddha, Vīramāheśvara authors and their audiences were all reading, hearing, memorizing, and reflecting upon an extensive library of Sanskrit literature—Śaiva Āgamas, Purāṇas, Vedas, and Upaniṣads, including a handful of principal scriptural works that appear to have been composed or redacted by the Vīramāheśvaras themselves.Footnote ³³

Might the inclusion of such citations simply have been an act of political expediency, an attempt to pass under the radar of brahmanical systems of power? Again, the evidence suggests otherwise. For when we look more closely at the content of the vernacular narratives of the Vīramāheśvaras and compare them to their chosen pool of Sanskrit citations, we find that Vīramāheśvara authors envisioned a hermeneutical unity between the stories they told and the teachings of the Sanskrit past they redeployed—even, or perhaps especially, when matters of caste are concerned.Footnote ³⁴ Take, for instance, the story of Mācayya the washerman, as told by Somanātha in his Telugu Basavapurāṇamu. Unwavering in his devotion to his lord Śiva and his community, Mācayya took quite seriously the responsibility vested in him as personal washerman of Basava’s entourage. Who else could be ensured to maintain the purity of the personal garments of the community but another devotee of Śiva? Mācayya was so staunchly committed to his task that he would strut boldly through the streets of the city of Kalyana, shouting at the top of his lungs that he would instantly slay anyone who so much as laid a finger on his laundry bundle.Footnote ³⁵ Eventually, one such unfortunate did chance to touch the garments by accident, and Mācayya did away with him in a flash. The crowd of horrified onlookers hauled Mācayya before the king, scandalized that a lowly washerman should see fit to kill to defend the purity of his community. Precisely on cue, Somanātha tells us, Basava appeared in court to diffuse the conflict. As he declared to the assembled crowd: ‘Is he really a washerman? Why, if your wits are about you, would you say he is anything but a direct manifestation of Śiva? He was born in a caste, and yet, he is not bound to a caste by birth.’Footnote ³⁶

Where, then, might Somanātha have learned this provocative sentiment? Across languages and genres, Vīramaheśvara authors placed their anti-caste ethos front and centre. And yet, according to their own testimony, such values were by no means new to the thirteenth century. Among the abundant citations compiled in Vīramāheśvara texts, Sanskrit or vernacular, all of our authors unfailingly gravitated towards centring one Śaiva classic—namely, the Śivadharmaśāstra.Footnote ³⁷ Most likely composed around the late sixth or early seventh century, the Śivadharma was a mainstay of Śaiva sociality throughout the medieval period, its authority emblazoned on Śaiva temple complexes.Footnote ³⁸ And as its title suggests, the Śivadharmaśāstra (The Treatise on Śaiva Law) was not merely scripture but served as a canonical legal and social charter available for interpretation and implementation in all autonomously governed Śaiva land-grant territories. The implications of such a text are more radical than may first meet the eye: to codify and circulate a legal theory specific to Śaiva domains is to assert, quite literally, that Śaivas fall outside the jurisdiction of brahmanical law. And thus, brahmanical strictures of identity, including the logic of caste, were thrown open for critique as communities began to formulate—in the Sanskrit language—entirely new logics of Śaiva personhood.Footnote ³⁹

Take, for instance, this iconic citation, one of the most memorable and widely cited verses in the Śivadharma. It is no coincidence that our earliest known voice from Vīramāheśvara discourse accords pride of place to this very verse in his work. An ideal example is this multilingual Telugu passage from the Śivatattvasāramu of Mallikārjuna Paṇḍitārādhya, a twelfth-century near contemporary of Basava:

Split across three Telugu verses, the Sanskrit reads: ‘A brāhmaṇa who knows the four Vedas is not dear to me; even a dog cooker (śvapacaḥ) who is my devotee may be given to and taken from. He is worthy of worship as I am myself’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is a remarkably blunt statement, unequivocally dismissing the relationship between touchability and birth for initiated Śaivas. In a single verse, it mirrors the very tensions we find at play in the story of Mācayya the washerman, a non-brāhmaṇa social agent who dared to flip the logic of touchability and violence on its head. For a Śaiva washerman to declare himself and his laundry so pure as to be ‘Untouchable’ to the public is to performatively announce a social order in which purity is divorced from the circumstances of birth. Lest one dismiss such a statement as purely rhetorical, consider another Vīramāheśvara Sanskrit citation, this time attributed to the Śivarahasya, produced by the Vīramāheśvara community, which unambiguously forbids the practice of caste distinction. Initiates are forbidden from so much as even mentioning the prior caste identity of a member of the community:

What this citation from the Śivarahasya clarifies about caste and identity, then, is twofold. First, early Vīraśaivas inherited and implemented ritual technology for removing or altering caste status, a practice not at all uncommonly attested in Śaiva literature during the preceding centuries.Footnote ⁴³ Second, and just as significantly, social belonging was reconfigured in this cultural imaginary as a matter not of birth—that is, of an indelible jāti or varṇa identity—but as a matter of religious affiliation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this shift engendered a number of consequences: around the thirteenth century in particular, for instance, social purity came to be reconfigured as a matter of religious status, prompting an upsurge in rhetoric endorsing violence against religious others, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even this horrific consequence, however, should underscore the central message that texts such as the Śivatattvasāramu and Śivarahasya aimed to convey: among Śaiva initiates, jāti and varṇa categories assigned to one at birth were simply not, prescriptively speaking, the core factors determining social inclusion and exclusion.

It is worth pausing at this juncture, then, to reiterate just how significantly this evidence departs from the established wisdom of the field. That early Vīraśaivism foregrounded saints of diverse caste background and mandated intercaste commensality, we presume, is an artefact of its devotional vernacularity—its status as a revolutionary Kannadiga religion of the people. Rather, perhaps the single most formative influence on Vīraśaiva notions of personhood was a sixth- or early seventh-century ce Sanskrit scriptural and legal work, the Śivadharmaśāstra. Verses from this work provided the key proof text not only for the rejection of caste among initiates but also for the alternate modes of personhood they adopted in its place: Vīraśaiva as jaṅgamas or moving śivaliṅgas, for instance, or as earthly incarnations of Śiva’s gaṇas, or even the very idea of bhakti or devotion.Footnote ⁴⁵ And however influential, this text, too, is just the tip of the textual iceberg: the early Vīramāheśvaras of Srisailam drew from a substantial corpus of Śaiva textuality that, once again, we find directly interwoven into Pālkuriki Somanātha’s Telugu verse.Footnote ⁴⁶ In essence, the very language that our earliest Vīraśaiva texts, in both Sanskrit and the vernacular, use to inculcate anti-caste values was neither vernacular nor revolutionary, but was directly inherited from the previous several centuries of Śaiva textuality in the Sanskrit language.

What we have learned so far from the Vīramāheśvaras and their Sanskrit Śaiva past, then, holds major implications for our understanding of the historical entanglement of caste and language. The critiques we have seen marshalled against caste distinctions are attributed by our authors, systematically and in their own words, to a substantial textual inheritance from a classical Sanskritic world. Granted, this was not the classical Sanskrit of the royal court with its ornate literary genres of kāvya, epic poetry with a bent for royal panegyric, or the brāhmaṇa agrahāra, home to formal philosophical treatises on Vedic hermeneutics, which have dominated the study of Sanskrit since the inception of classical Indology as a colonial discipline. Indeed, to conflate the Sanskrit language wholesale with Sanskrit courtly literary cultures or Mīmāṃsā and Dharmaśāstra commentarial traditions is precisely the source of confusion we should aim to avoid. On the contrary, the Śivadharmaśāstra reflects a millennium’s worth of Śaiva textual production in Sanskrit, much of which was vested in non-brāhmaṇa hands.Footnote ⁴⁷ Based on the excavation of a previously unstudied textual archive, specialists in early Śaiva texts have reinscribed the medieval in South Asia, between approximately 600 and 1300 ce, as the period in which Śaiva institutions and their textual cultures constituted nothing less than a civilizational mainstream—in other words, as ‘The Śaiva Age’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Although still poorly integrated into South Asian historiography at large, the idea of the Śaiva Age invites a genuine paradigm shift in our understanding of the premodern history of the subcontinent. Until now, outside of a narrow pool of textual specialists, scholarship has yet to wrestle with how findings on the Śaiva Age shed new light on our understanding of South Asian early modernity. Just as we cannot make sense of the rupture of colonial modernity without understanding just what colonialism disrupted, our understanding of early modernity depends fundamentally on what we believe came before.Footnote ⁴⁹ In much the same way, then, when we reframe Vīraśaiva sociality not as an unprecedented revolution but as an inheritance of earlier Śaiva values, we can begin to make sense of how and why the social fabric of early modernity, and the epistemic shifts it engendered, continued to make space for non-brāhmaṇa Sanskrit imaginaries. In the remainder of this article, then, I examine the contours of one such non-brāhmaṇa discursive sphere, in which Sanskrit remained a vital medium of religious self-fashioning across caste lines during South Asia’s Vernacular Millennium.

Sanskrit, monasteries, and devotional pedagogy in early modernity

The colonial period was undoubtedly a moment of epistemic rupture, constitutive of much of South Asian modernity. And yet, it is remarkably easy to overestimate discontinuity simply by failing to consult the evidence of what came before. Within Vīraśaiva studies, there is no shortage of literature situating the advent of Sanskrit within Vīraśaiva social circles as a novel act of brahmanization, allegedly unprecedented in prior centuries. Granted, over the centuries, we should inevitably expect signs of innovation in social structure and discourse: for instance, by the late nineteenth century, the Pañcapīṭha or Pañcācārya lineages found new avenues for rapidly propagating Sanskrit knowledge through their Solapur-based publishing enterprise, and Vīraśaiva or Liṅgāyat maṭhas came to adopt a pāṭhaśāla pedagogical structure mirroring their brahmanical contemporaries under the colonial regime.Footnote ⁵⁰ But what these developments, in and of themselves, can tell us about the place of Sanskrit in early modernity requires careful consideration. Consider, as a parallel example, the case of the nineteenth-century Tamil religious visionary Irāmaliṅka Cuvāmikaḷ: although usually touted as an example of a purely ‘modern’ reformer, Irāmaliṅka, as Srilata Raman has meticulously demonstrated, drew abundantly on premodern streams of Tamil religious thought, such as Tamil Cittar and Vīraśaiva works, rarely consulted by scholars of the colonial period.

After the decline of the Śaiva Age, Vīraśaivas were the primary heirs to the Śaiva monastic infrastructure across the Deccan previously held by Kālamukha Śaiva lineages.Footnote ⁵¹ In subsequent centuries, Vīraśaivas expanded on this foundation to propagate new transregional networks that remained largely outside of state jurisdiction. By no means cloistered communities of higher learning sequestered from the world, early modern monasteries were institutional powerhouses, often serving as region-wide landlords and centres of economic circulation.Footnote ⁵² As a result, what Vīraśaiva monastic lineages chose to do with language, and for whom, had a far-reaching impact on transregional modes of caste and religious identity. Nevertheless, when we tell stories about the learned religious traditions of the early modern Deccan, these voices are conspicuous in their absence. Our focus has been restricted instead to brāhmaṇa monastic lineages—the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, Mādhvas, the Śaṅkarācārya lineages of the Smārtas—while the proliferation of non-brāhmaṇa Vīraśaiva monasteries across the breadth of the Deccan has been largely left out of the picture.Footnote ⁵³

For the remainder of this article, I would like to take a closer look at the contours of Sanskrit discourse among early modern Vīraśaiva communities, with an eye to thinking through how these archives can contribute to the project of provinicializing brahmanism—that is, towards acknowledging the spaces in which the Sanskrit language was vested unproblematically in non-brāhmaṇa hands.Footnote ⁵⁴ But just as saliently, non-brāhmaṇa Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium was often directly infused into vernacular textual cultures—and here I echo the sentiment of Gajendran Ayyathurai, scholar of critical caste studies, that engagement with the multilingual vernacular is crucial to giving voice to non-brāhmaṇa communities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Take, for instance, the Vīraśaiva practice of composing complete Kannada commentaries on earlier works in Sanskrit. A prolific corpus of such commentaries was composed over the course of perhaps three or four centuries under the auspices of non-brāhmaṇa Vīraśaiva monasteries, and even today they are often housed in monastic repositories, off the beaten track of government archives established under colonial rule. Within this varied and almost entirely unstudied corpus, we find abundant commentaries on Vīraśaiva-specific Āgamic scriptures and Sanskrit hymns employed in liturgical recitation.Footnote ⁵⁶ Other genres, in contrast, defy our expectations as to what sort of Sanskrit should have been circulated among non-brāhmaṇa communities.

Remarkably, even texts of overtly Vedic origin became the subject of Kannada Vīraśaiva commentaries, including those on the Puruṣasūkta, envisioned by some scholarly voices as the urtext of brahmanical normativity.Footnote ⁵⁷ But perhaps the most noteworthy Vedic extract privileged for commentaries is a core Śaiva liturgical hymn, the Śatarudrīya or Śrīrudram. Sourced from the Taittirīya Saṃhitā of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, the Rudram has been viewed as particularly salient among Śaivas for embedding what is allegedly the first-known mention of the five-syllable mantra, oṃ namaḥ śivāya, a key touchstone for early modern exegetes who argued for an essentially Śaiva interpretation of the Vedic canon.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, the relative number of commentaries on this work leaves little doubt that Vīraśaiva monastic communities, whose constituents hailed from a range of non-brāhmaṇa castes, would have been reciting the Vedic Śatarudrīya on a regular basis.Footnote ⁵⁹ Consider the implications: the more conservative sources of brahmanical law viewed even auditory access to the Vedas as an abomination for non-brāhmaṇas. And yet, Vīraśaiva initiates are circulating, reworking, and even teaching Vedic Sanskrit to communities of mixed caste origin—the very same Vedic scriptures presumed today to be the essential repositories of caste exclusion and injustice.

As transgressive as these decisions may seem to our modern eyes, restored to their original context, such commentaries may simply have seemed utterly quotidian, just part of the fabric of an inherited textual culture, posing neither a conceptual nor ethical problem. We can locate other historical circumstances, in contrast, when the non-brāhmaṇa use of Sanskrit was a matter of active protest. For instance, in Tamil Nadu, early modern lineages of the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition do indeed become polarized around linguistic and caste identity. Thus, for example, in the early eighteenth century, a pontiff of the Tarumapuram Ātīṉam, a lineage comprising largely non-brāhmaṇa Veḷāḷa constituents, composed a polemical treatise in Sanskrit, the Varṇāśramacandrikā, as a political act, vigorously defending the right of non-brāhmaṇas to take renunciation and attain preceptorship of influential Śaiva monasteries.Footnote ⁶⁰ In contrast, I have yet to see any Vīraśaiva author, prior to colonial modernity, feel the need to defend the right to speak in Sanskrit. Think again of Maruḷasiddha, physically abused for touching what should not be touched, but never for knowing Sanskrit scripture. For a modern-day point of comparison, think of how Toni Morrison would brush away the ‘suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective’, she tells us, ‘there are only black people. When I say “people,” that’s what I mean.’Footnote ⁶¹

In much the same way, as unquestioned owners of powerful monastic networks spanning the breadth of peninsular India, Vīraśaivas generally felt no need to justify their everyday use of the Sanskrit language to hostile ‘others’. But how, then, did these communities circulate information, ideas, or literary works across these networks, or across the boundaries of multiple south Indian vernaculars that would have been mutually unintelligible to many of their consumers? In fact, the Sanskrit language played a vital role in moving Vīraśaiva texts across regions into spaces where they were otherwise inaccessible. We have presumed, generally, that prior to early modernity, cosmopolitan Sanskrit, by definition, had served as a vehicle for transregionalization because of its broad geographical accessibility among elite learned audiences, whereas subsequently, Sanskrit became local and provincialized, mirroring the stylistic and epistemic constraints of the vernacular.Footnote ⁶² In contrast, however, Vīraśaiva imaginaries remained distinctively transregional throughout early modernity. As a result, we find something of a counterpoint to our usual model of vernacularization, which we tend to view as a monodirectional, perhaps even teleological shift from Sanskrit into the vernacular, suggesting instead an enduring locus for Sanskrit’s power to transergionalize even at the height of the Vernacular Millennium.

To explore in greater detail how Sanskrit interpenetrated with the vernacular in early modern south India, I would like to focus on one concrete example of how Sanskrit textual authority was disseminated across caste lines by Vīraśaiva institutions—namely, the practice of composing complete Kannada commentaries on authoritative Sanskrit scriptures, presumed today to be the essential repositories of caste exclusion and injustice. Now why, one might pause to ask, would early modern Vīraśaiva intellectuals produce commentaries on Sanskrit texts rather than simply translating them into the Kannada vernacular? As it turns out, the evidence speaks for itself: Sanskrit works of scripture are by and large not translated into the vernacular—at least, in the typical lexical sense of the word ‘translation’—an act that could erase or supersede the original authoritative language of the scriptures themselves.Footnote ⁶³ Rather, these Kannada commentaries take pains to actively preserve, codify, and circulate the original form of the texts in the Sanskrit language. Moreover, the very fact that these texts required vernacular commentary in the first place suggests an imperative that non-brāhmaṇa practitioners only partially or minimally literate in Sanskrit should study and come to understand the Sanskritic scriptural heritage of their tradition in the original Sanskrit.Footnote ⁶⁴ Let us take a brief look, for instance, at the Kannada commentarial tradition on the Sanskrit Siddhāntaśikhāmaṇi, focusing here on the commentary of the seventeenth-century Sosale Revaṇārādhya, the Siddhāntabodhinī:Footnote ⁶⁵

For instance, Revaṇārādhya explicates vs. 1.3 of the Siddhāntaśikhāmaṇi as follows:

Stylistically, the Siddhāntabodhinī contains much of what one would expect from a bilingual gloss. Word for word, Revaṇārādhya provides Kannada equivalents for even the simplest of grammatical forms that would only prove troubling for novice readers, substituting the first-person Sanskrit pronoun aham for the Kannada nānu, and so forth. At times, Revaṇārādhya further expounds upon theological concepts that may be unclear in the original, not with passages of Kannada prose, but with lengthy Sanskrit compounds with Kannada terminations, creating what might seem something of a Maṇipravāḷa effect (for example, śivatattvādi-pṛthvyāṃtavāda), but in fact could be simply deemed typical of early modern vernacular scholastic prose. Evidently, in rendering the Siddhāntaśikhāmaṇi bilingually accessible through his commentary, the commentator was not intending a wholesale replacement of a prior textual tradition. Rather, he clearly aims not only to render the meaning transparent but to inculcate a certain degree of competence in the conceptual vocabulary of Sanskrit learning, explicating for instance the metaphors that underlie theological ideas, such as the ocean of consciousness, which is itself Śiva, and citing nyāyas or maxims from the Sanskrit intellectual tradition, such as the ghṛtakāṭhinyanāya (‘the maxim of the solidity of ghee’) we find attested here.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such textual strategies are highly suggestive of a well-developed sense of pedagogy. We can readily envision, moreover, a pedagogical context in which new monastic initiates, possibly minimally literate in Sanskrit, gained a foothold in the authoritative canons of their lineage through line-by-line study of classical texts.

Given their often pedestrian or workmanly language, often overlapping substantially with rival glosses, these commentaries evidently do not aim to make a case for the author’s innovative brilliance or originality, but rather serve a necessary, if far less glamorous, function in that they come to mediate the circulation of knowledge within the ambits of monasteries and their immediate and wider publics.Footnote ⁶⁸ The fact that Vīraśaiva monasteries are growing further entrenched within Karnataka’s religious landscape is reflected in a codification of both the contents of authoritative theological discourse and its means of dissemination.Footnote ⁶⁹ One might say, in other words, that vernacular commentary occupied the place we typically associate with acts of translation, but again, with one key caveat—multilingual commentary as a medium aimed to explicitly preserve the authoritative language of the original rather than replacing it with a new medium. Instead of erasing the privilege of a brahmanical past, such Kannada commentaries, structured as bilingual glosses, were written precisely so as to render scriptural knowledge directly accessible to those who otherwise could not have accessed it.

Other texts from this period, indeed, further complement the evidence from multilingual commentarial practice for this Vīraśaiva pedagogical turn. To name one intriguing example, apart from his authorship of the Siddhāntabodhinī, Sosalĕ Revaṇārādhya also contributed to the pedagogical practices of his day by authoring a rather unique textbook on oral instruction within initiatory lineages. Entitled the Paramātmaprakāśikĕ (Illuminating the Supreme Self), this primarily Kannada-language work compiles sample dialogues between a guru and disciple on salient questions of doctrine. In the process, these dialogues illustrate precisely how an instructing pontiff might have deployed a strategic use of Sanskrit citations in personal instruction or public talks. For instance, we are told, a disciple might pose the following question to the teacher about the true meaning of ritual initiation (dīkṣā). The teacher replies not only in clear Kannada prose but by citing for the student an exemplary Sanskrit passage.

Thus, presented explicitly as a pedagogical dialogue, the structure of the Paramātmaprakāśikĕ leaves little doubt that it was intended to inspire oral instruction within lineage through direct exposition of Sanskrit source texts. Where, then, does this leave us? The case of vernacular commentaries on Sanskrit works of Vīraśaiva scripture provides us with especially compelling evidence that in the early modern centuries, Sanskrit was not sequestered off from public view, to be consumed and circulated only among the most rarified of Vīraśaiva intellectual circles. The implications, then, for the use of Sanskrit across caste boundaries is significant: we must keep in mind that Vīraśaivas do not mandate brahmanical upanayana initiation, do not require memorization of the Vedas from childhood, do not trace their genealogy to brahmanical gotras, and continue to circulate Sanskrit scriptures through early modernity that decry discrimination based on caste.Footnote ⁷¹ None of this is to say, obviously, that internal hierarchies and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion cannot exist within such a social context, but rather, that to study such gradations of power requires a very different toolbox than the one to which our field most naturally gravitates. Power and symbolic capital, that is, are simply not universally coterminous with the expected boundaries of caste, nor is access to the Sanskrit language. What we have at hand is a far cry from the motifs of brahmanical exclusivism we tend to circulate without awareness of historical context—that a śūdra should have his ears filled with molten metal for so much as hearing the Vedas, or that a brāhmaṇa pedagogue would fall from caste for so much as daring to teach a word of Sanskrit to a non-brāhmaṇa.Footnote ⁷²

If vernacular commentary, then, disseminated Sanskrit textuality across social boundaries within a given locale, early modern Vīraśaiva discourse was equally shaped by the transmission of knowledge across regional boundaries by means of the Sanskrit language—specifically, by translation of entire vernacular texts, usually narrative in nature, into Sanskrit. Let us examine the case, for instance, of Śaṅkarārādhya, fifteenth-century translator of the Basavapurāṇamu into Sanskrit. A courtly poet par excellence Śaṅkarārādhya displays a masterful command of Sanskrit language and versification. Unlike most of the other social agents mentioned above, Śaṅkarārādhya claims brahmanical gotra descent, and in fact composed his Sanskrit Basavapurāṇa at the prompting of a royal patron during a transregional literary convention. And yet, the fact that he was asked, at such an elite social engagement, to translate into Sanskrit a text dealing with non-brāhmaṇa saints and social imaginaries says quite a bit about the success of the Sanskrit language in bringing non-brāhmaṇa imaginaries into serious dialogue with their brahmanical counterparts. The scene in question opens in the midst of a cosmopolitan crowd of Sanskrit literati, who have gathered in the town of Skandapuram in Andhra Pradesh, in the pavilion of the Skandasomeśvara temple to celebrate the local spring festival. As the poets mingled, they shared vignettes—presumably in Sanskrit—celebrating the local legends of Śaiva saints, which they were unable to understand in the original, local vernaculars of their colleagues. As Śaṅkarārādhya writes:

Then, making a timely entrance into the din of scholarly conversation, Keśavāmātya, Śaṅkarārādhya’s patron, steps up to recommend Śaṅkarārādhya for the project of translating the exploits of the Vīraśaiva saints, as narrated in the Basavapurāṇamu, into Sanskrit. And in turn, the faculty of the literary society concur, appointing Śaṅkarārādhya to the task, speaking directly to the virtues of Sanskrit:

While these two passages may produce a mixing of metaphors in such close proximity, the underlying message is patently clear. Even at the height of the Vernacular Millennium, Śaṅkarārādhya understood the Sanskrit language as built by its very nature to endure the travails of time. Its verses are undecaying, like garlands of gems strung together on solid gold. Likewise, just as clothing encompasses the totality of the human body, Sanskrit is geographically unrestricted. The vernacular, by contrast, is transiently beautiful like a freshly blooming flower garland, but restricted to one region (deśa), just as jewellery accents only a single location (deśa) on the body.

Given the division of labour Śaṅkarārādhya perceives between the cosmopolitan and literary vernacular, perhaps it is not surprising that he reaches for a substantively different aesthetic from that of the Telugu Basavapurāṇamu, clothing the text not in local flavour but the globalizing idiom of high courtly kāvya. Nevertheless, the Sanskrit Basavapurāṇa does, most often, accurately convey the narrative content of each episode. Even those incidents that might offend the sensibilities of conservative brahmanical audiences are replicated in Śaṅkarārādhya’s translation without bowdlerization or apology. If anything, Śaṅkarārādhya tends at times to overdetermine the unitary message of his source text, stressing in no certain terms that the Basavapurāṇamu’s garland of vignettes are strung together, so to speak, on the unifying thread of anti-caste devotionalism. So intent is Śaṅkarārādhya to convey this central ethos to his audience of transregional brāhmaṇa literati that he sometimes elides key details that were central to Somanātha’s original message about how Śaivism and intercaste commensality were related, and why.

An ideal example is the story of Śivanāgumayya, and what elements of the text’s original social ethic are lost in translation. As Pālkuriki Somanātha tells the story in the Basavapurāṇamu, one day, the city of Kalyana was to be honoured by the presence of a Śaiva celebrity.Footnote ⁷⁵ So esteemed was Śivanāgumayya that he arrived at the palace borne on a palanquin and was to be honoured in a public ritual conducted by Basava himself. Śivanāgumayya, it seems, plays the role of a typical pontifical luminary among the Śaiva monastic lineages of his day. Nevertheless, certain orthodox brāhmaṇas in the king’s court were displeased by the pontiff’s bodily presence within the grounds of the royal palace. However high his office, they objected, Śivanāgumayya was an ‘Untouchable’, and consorting with figures of such low birth would surely bring about the downfall of the kingdom. Seeking to alleviate his advisers’ concerns, King Bijjala refused to open the door to the royal court, preparing instead to greet his honoured guest in a public space. Outraged by this insult to a great Śaiva personage, Basava responded by ceremonially laying his own upper garment on the ground to serve as a seat for the reverend preceptor. General chaos ensued. When Bijjala pointedly questioned his flagrant disregard for caste normativity, Basava offered a rather unusual rejoinder, directing some rather pointed humour at his brāhmaṇa accusers:

Basava continued with apparent glee, enumerating how the body of the golden cow was apportioned among the Caturvedīs, Prābhākara Mīmāṃsakas, grammarians (vyākaraṇamu vāru), and all stripes of brāhmaṇa affiliates. But what precisely did Basava mean by this oddly irreverent tale? On the surface, Basava clearly makes a mockery of brahmanical rules of purity—the sanctity of cows, anxiety about contaminated food. This much, to his credit, Śaṅkarārādhya understood. In his Sanskrit retelling, the story begins with the golden cow being fashioned and butchered, much as expected. But then, however sympathetic he might be to his sources, our brāhmaṇa author falters. And since he does not understand, he proposes a new context, derived from the Sanskrit knowledge systems. What we get in essence are a series of insider jokes as Basava banters back and forth with the brāhmaṇas in a highly learned idiom. Should one be indicted for cow-slaughter for dismembering an imaginary cow, given that reason dictates a cow made of gold must be inanimate? Or, is this crime absolved because in actuality Vedic scripture endorses acts of violence—even prescribing ritual murder using black magic? With this latter allegation, Śaṅkarārādhya refers to a debate within the scholastic Mīmāṃsā tradition of Vedic exegesis concerning the infamous śyena or hawk sacrifice, which had for centuries posed one of the most troubling, unresolvable questions raised against the philosophical system: if the Vedas are by definition timeless and true, and we are beholden to perform the rituals they describe, what do we do when the Vedas tell us to commit ritual murder?Footnote ⁷⁷

Clever as Śaṅkarārādhya’s objections to the brāhmaṇa’s behavior may be, none of them is to be found in the Telugu original. For Śaṅkarārādhya, the point of this story was quite simple: the ethical precepts of brāhmaṇas were riddled with internal contradictions that a pious Śaiva could see right through. And yet, two centuries earlier, Pālkuriki Somanātha had said something different. For Somanātha, this was indeed a story about caste, and purity, but more specifically, it was about the relationship between caste and Śaiva initiation. In the original Telugu text, right after the slaughter of the cow, the very next words out of Basava’s mouth, which figure nowhere in Śaṅkarārādhya’s translation, convey something else entirely:

What Somanātha actually meant by the story, then, is something far more radical than the straightforward anti-brāhmaṇa sentiment Śaṅkarārādhya has rendered in translation. Caste, Somanātha tells us, has nothing to do with the Vedas whatsoever—it is an artificial accretion to human sociality that brāhmaṇas had wilfully misattributed to the Vedas for their own personal gain. But perhaps more importantly, through the voice of Basava, Somanātha inculcates a key point of theology inherited from earlier Śaiva lineages in the Deccan—namely, that by receiving Śaiva initiation, Śaivas transcended the restrictions of human birth. In other words, only Śaiva initiation can annihilate caste. Indeed, upon closer examination, the story of the cow is actually built upon a parody of a Śaiva initiation ritual, wherein initiates visualized themselves as entering into the womb of the goddess of speech, Vāgeśvarī, becoming filled with the Sanskrit alphabet, and were reborn free from all ontological bondage, including caste.Footnote ⁸⁰ This, then, was the undertone of Basava’s off-colour story about the golden cow: brāhmaṇas could never successfully co-opt the salfivic power of Śaiva initiation and its unique ability to annihilate caste.

Caste and liberation philology

Looking back, let us compare, for a moment, the story of Maruḷasiddha, with which we began, and that of Śivanāgumayya, another ‘Untouchable’ saint, with a community that commemorated him through an act of bodily care. We have before us two works of narrative literature from the Vernacular Millennium, three centuries apart and in different vernacular languages. Both share a memory of two non-brāhmaṇa, even caste-oppressed, leaders of monastic communities, wielding significant power among their contemporaries, and defying brahmanical caste norms—not through rhetoric alone but through a narrative enactment of what Aniket Jaaware has called an ‘altruistic touch’.Footnote ⁸¹ The remapping of altruistic touch, Jaaware argues, outside of the boundaries of family or intimate relations, is the sensorial vector of the dissolution of caste boundaries, as the phenomenology of touch lies at the heart of our sense of social belonging. From Jaaware’s perspective, the public care of an ‘Untouchable’ body proclaims a phenomenological remapping of the social order. But alongside these acts of radical inclusion, in both the Telugu of Basavapurāṇamu and the Kannada of the Maruḷasiddhakāvya, we also find the deep-seated presence of Sanskrit, clinging stubbornly to the stories where we think it would not belong, like so much oil on the façade of a Cāḷukya-period temple. Sanskrit, like oil, evidently, clings to everything. It persisted throughout early modernity in peninsular India, within the multilingual textures of Vīraśaiva communities, conveying through the content it passed down the centuries the earlier anti-caste values foundational to non-brāhmaṇa institutions of the Śaiva Age.

But what, precisely, is the point of this intellectual exercise? Is it to cast aspersions on or detract from enterprises of caste critique in the contemporary world? Indeed, recent years have met with scholarship that has posited the recovery of Sanskrit pasts as an intrinsically reactionary enterprise. In this spirit, theorist of religion Kathryn Lofton has raised the question of whether ‘the future of the study of religion is in the acts of critique that are being propounded by people who are I think largely rightly motivated to reconcile religion as an object of political concern and those who see themselves as still importantly carriers of religion … they’re concerned about the loss of those archives even more than they are at times I think with occupying the right cultural politics of interpretation’.Footnote ⁸² If we understand Sanskrit as strictly the language of brahmanical hegemony, any enquiry using its sources is by definition itself a hegemonic enterprise, swerving far afield from the ‘right cultural politics of interpretation’. And this is, indeed, an allegation that has surfaced on multiple occasions among scholars committed, for many excellent reasons, to the ‘development of a postcolonial ground for the study of Asian religions that could serve as a productive site for racially engaged pedagogies in religious studies’.Footnote ⁸³ For instance, the 2022 and 2023 American Academy of Religion annual meetings have hosted panel-workshops on the ‘Sanskrit dilemma’—the premise that the study of Sanskrit in scholarship and in the classroom is necessarily rooted in the logics of caste oppression. It seems virtually inconceivable, in comparison, to posit an ‘Arabic dilemma’ or ‘Chinese dilemma’, problematizing the study of an entire civilizational complex on account of cultural elements we wish to critique. Evidently, many have taken the voice of brahmanical orthodoxy at face value: there was never a time, we might be tempted to believe, when the Sanskrit language circulated outside of elite, brahmanical hands.

But it is the very premise of this assumption, I would argue, that not only fails to find evidentiary support in a careful reading of the archive, but actively impairs our ability to achieve the critical reach such authors may envision for their scholarly projects. What is called for, I suggest, is something rather different, and I would like to invoke what Sheldon Pollock once referred to as ‘liberation philology’, a philology that, contrary to widespread perception, is by no means anathema to social critique. In Pollock’s words, the sort of philology he envisions is ‘a critical or reflexive or hermeneutic or, better, liberated philology, which also, when properly cultivated, promotes the cultivation of core political-ethical values and becomes a sort of liberation philology’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Pollock is well aware, naturally, of the depth of his provocation, acknowledging elsewhere the scandal some would be likely to read into any attempt to rehabilitate ‘Oriental philology, a phrase that in the wake of Edward Said’s critique now carries a hint of criminality’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Many still resist his suggestion that the act of close reading, in and of itself, need not be intrinsically correlated with the ‘noxious colonial epistemology’ that Said rightly identified with Orientalist knowledge systems. Pollock, undeterred, would seem to suggest precisely the opposite: that the critically reflexive impetus of philological reasoning can itself provincialize historically contingent modes of knowledge that power structures have sought to universalize, such as the conceptual toolkit of European modernity. Indeed, he reframes his own model of the Sanskrit cosmopolis in The Language of the Gods and the World of Men as serving just such an aim—of identifying a cosmopolitan literary formation that did not enforce cultural homogenization by the sword, and the fact that early Indian vernacularity was not bound to a proto-ethno-nationalism.

Liberation philology, then, is far more than simply the art of interpreting language and reconstructing texts, but rather makes critical use of a more fundamental instinct in humanistic thinking—what I would refer to as a mental habit of integrity towards our archive, whether textual or otherwise. I use the word ‘integrity’ here in full cognizance of our limitations in reconstructing the past, the situatedness of the scholar giving voice to history, and the abuses that philological methods, as with any other academic methodology, have perpetuated. At the same time, however, I would like to suggest that such integrity offers greater critical potential than its absence—that the tools of philology have much to offer in allowing us to reconstruct the socially and historically situated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, oppression and empowerment, that have surfaced throughout human history. We will make little headway in a romanticist project of recovering pasts that were ostensibly completely free from systemic forms of oppression.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the contrary, a liberation philology is completely at odds with what Fredric Jameson speaks of as postmodern nostalgia,Footnote ⁸⁸ an aestheticized simulacrum of times past that empties its signifiers of genuine referent. What I am suggesting is that to bring the present into dialogue with a past overly saturated with particular meaning can denaturalize our sense of what is inevitable.

It should be abundantly clear by now, then, that to practise liberation theology, in Pollock’s terms or mine, is by no means to recover a past devoid of social hierarchy, to be naively superimposed upon an imagined future. In no way do I intend a deferral of enquiry into caste-based or other systems of inequity. Like any social arena in human history, Vīraśaiva communities were governed by relations of power. And yet, by illuminating the historically contingent nature of the particular power dynamics we face today, knowing that the past has been otherwise, we are able to recover voices from the archive that speak to ‘otherwise possibilities’ for worlds to come. As a parallel, consider the work of Ashon Crawley, who draws on Black studies, queer theory, and other disciplines to coin the term ‘otherwise possibility’. In his book Blackpentecostal Breath, he explores how the aesthetic practices of Black Pentecostalism create a space for envisioning alternate social realities:

Of course, there is a distance between Crawley’s work and my own explorations today: the Black Pentecostal Church of the twentieth-century United States is not the same as premodern Śaivism in India, nor is aesthetic theory the same as philology. Nevertheless, Crawley’s work points us in a crucial direction for conceptualizing the scope and impact of scholarship on the past, even philological scholarship, for present-day injustices. In short, I would like to locate a genuine critical potential in the work we do as philologists to envision the concrete ways in which human sociality has been, and can be, imagined as otherwise.

Vīraśaivas and Liṅgāyats, by their own self-definition, disaggregate social identity from the conditions of their birth, as did many Śaivas for centuries before them. While speaking from various positions of enfranchisement, they are by all classical orthodox definitions not brāhmaṇas. And yet, the depth of their engagement with the Sanskrit language and its contents should by now speak for itself. One might be tempted, surely, to invoke at this juncture the legacy of social anthropologist M. N. Srinivas, justly renowned for his coinage of the term ‘Sanskritization’. In fact, Srinivas invokes the Liṅgāyat community as a quintessential instance of successful Sanskritization, in that the Liṅgāyat claim to equal status with brāhmaṇas, he contends, underlies their relative success in ascending the social hierarchy of the Karnataka region.Footnote ⁹⁰ To make such a case, however, would require overlooking the substantial evidence on offer that in a very real sense, early Vīraśaivas/Liṅgāyats were not upstart revolutionaries but were almost reactionary adherents to a prior Śaiva orthodoxy—one that, in its legal repertoire, provided the ammunition for instituting anti-caste modes of sociality. Sanskrit, for the authors we have surveyed, was not simply a matter of artificial expediency; rather, I would suggest, the Sanskrit inheritance of the Vīraśaiva tradition is itself pivotal to understanding the tradition’s enduring legacy of anti-caste sentiment.

To whom, then, did Sanskrit belong in the Vernacular Millennium? When we say that Sanskrit had ‘died’ by the twelfth century, becoming subordinated to the vernacular, we implicitly limit Sanskrit’s survival to a highly delimited sphere of literary and philosophical discourse.Footnote ⁹¹ And by focusing our research on early modern Sanskrit exclusively on these survivals—the Sanskrit knowledge systems of a rarified, brahmanical elite—we have been telling an artificially restricted story of the place of Sanskrit in the early modern world. Archives that reveal how things could be, and have been, otherwise serve as a pointed reminder that only something that exists in historical time—and that has a historically contingent origin—can be annihilated. If what we are interested in is social critique, I urge readers to remember that, as critical theorists of religion will readily point out, the very foundation of critique is historicism. As Bruce Lincon asserts, for instance, in his Theses on Method:

In a certain light, Lincoln’s theses no longer read as provocation but simply as common sense: scholars are by now well accustomed to identifying the historical contingency of theological claims and attestations of religious experience. But concomitantly, sociological and conceptual constructs such as ‘brahmanism’ are no less historically contingent phenomena, imbricated in historically situated dynamics of power that serve some more than others. When we uncritically essentialize something called ‘brahmanism’ or ‘brahmanical normativity’ as a transhistorical constant, unconditioned by historical discourse, we are contributing to the naturalization of a category that only stands to benefit the contemporary Hindu nationalist and casteist perspectives we wish to critique. Attention is due, no doubt, to any and all historical confluences in which an alliance between brāhmaṇa identity, religion, and power actively reshaped regional South Asian cultures. To let the other voices of our archive speak, however, is to provincialize brahmanism by telling the story of how those other Sanskrits endured. Just as in early modernity, what we do with the Sanskrit language, what we translate, is a conscious choice—and we can choose otherwise.