Elaine Fisher’s The Meeting of Rivers sets out to pluralise the origins of the Vīraśaiva religious community, unravelling thereby the monocentric myth of origin popularised by A. K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Śiva, according to which the anti-caste vernacular uprising against Brahmanical ritualism sprang from a single founder, Basava, and a unified scriptural canon, the vacanas, composed in a single vernacular, Kannada, in a single political context, the court of Bijjala in twelfth-century Kalyana. In its vertiginous travels across the varied linguascapes and landscapes of the Deccan, Fisher’s study makes three signal contributions. It gives proof of a method; the study demonstrates the integrity and the limits of a critical philology, constrained by its archive, in making and making sense of the past. In its substance, the study dismantles the narrative of rupture that has long characterised the emergence of Vīraśaivism, drawing out the continuities—linguistic, doctrinal, ritual, sociological—that demonstrate the indebtedness and connection of this community of purportedly reformist Śaivas to antecedent Śaiva communities and corpora. Finally, the work expands the aperture of translation as a theoretical lens to comprehend the formation and transformation of the plural religious visions of a nascent community.
In her Introduction, Fisher expands the theoretical terrain covered by translation, ‘to include acts of multilingualism that are radically creative in nature, implying no notion of fidelity, literalism, or authenticity’ (p. 29). The study tracks how such acts of transcreation, including citation and commentary, but also the modification and repurposing of ritual syntax and practice, are used by religious communities, actors, and institutions to navigate a strategic field of power that Fisher refers to as South India’s linguascape. This conceptual space, at once geographic, institutional, and discursive in practice, makes legible how ‘socially embedded identity formation—including religious identity—is communicated, reproduced, and transformed across space and time in alignment with the flows that traverse the geographic and cultural spaces they inhabit’ (p. 36). The linguascape, which is constituted and transformed by acts of translation, is thus a structuring and structured field of action, imposing conventions and codes of conduct upon the actors that navigate it while it is itself shaped by the strategic choices made by these actors. Each of the chapters that follows introduces new dynamics and dimensions to this linguascape as Fisher charts the early history of Vīraśaivism.
In chapter one, drawing upon the texts produced in a Vīramāheśvara milieu in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in Srisailam, Fisher pulls back the blinders Ramanujan’s definition of Vīraśaivism has placed on the study of the community’s emergence along three axes: ‘(1) language, cosmopolitan and vernacular, (2) caste and devotion, and (3) ritual and temple worship’ (p. 52). An analysis of the works of Pālkurike Somanātha, composed in Telugu and in Sanskrit, besides displaying bilingualism in each language, provides a compelling counterargument to one of the three pillars of Ramanujan’s Vīraśaiva exceptionalism which tells us that the early Vīraśaiva canon demonstrates a novel rejection of the language, idioms, and conventions of Sanskrit. In Fisher’s analysis, the texts evince a seamless integration of ‘Sanskritic “doctrine” and vernacular “devotion”’, which points to deeper continuities with ‘the extant resources of Śaivism’s textual past’ (p. 68). In the second section, Fisher takes on the second of the three legs of Vīraśaiva exceptionalism, that the nascent community stressed ‘direct, individual experience’ through devotion (bhakti) over the caste-bound clerical mediation of its Śaiva antecedents, particularly the Kālamukha communities of the Deccan. Noting that the circa sixth-century Śivadharma was the single most frequently cited text among the Vīramāheśvaras of Srisailam, who invoked the text ‘as the iconic source for the fusion of anti-caste and devotional values so often taken to be the essence of Basava’s social revolution’, Fisher shows that Vīramāheśvara texts in Telugu incorporate Sanskrit passages drawn from the Śivadharma that announce the community’s caste inclusivity and devotionalism (p. 75). Indeed, the Vīramāheśvaras, following the Śivadharma, considered the ultimate goal of a devotee to become one of Śiva’s attendants, or ganas, on earth, a view that we find reproduced—and mistakenly considered an innovation—among early Vīraśaivas in their devotion of Basava as the earthly incarnation of Vṛṣabha. The final section unravels yet another shibboleth of early Vīraśaivism, namely, the importance of a personal liṅga, the use of which among the Vīramāheśvaras Fisher traces to the Vātula Tantra, perhaps the most influential scriptural work for that community. She concludes that ‘the personal liṅga or iṣṭa liṅga now viewed as definitive of the emergence of Vīraśaivism was no revolutionary invention but was directly inherited by the Vīramāheśvaras from transregional Śaiva communities and their scriptural corpus’ (p. 96).
In chapter two, Fisher offers a synchronic analysis of Vīramāheśvara materials and practices that discloses a logic of translation as ‘mediating between apparently irreconcilable binaries’ and of remaking boundaries and constituting communities in shifting contexts (p. 109). Fisher’s argument is built upon three instances of translation. The assimilation of Vedic texts and practices within a Śaiva framework, exemplified in the exegetical approach to the issue of prasāda, not only demonstrates the resolution of the seemingly irreconcilable Vaidika and the Vīramāheśvara positions but further demonstrates the subordination of the former to the latter, so that the Śaiva corpus and the ritual practices of its adherents are regarded as embodying the essence of the Veda. Second, Fisher complicates the view, current among present-day Vīraśaiva communities, that the radical Vīraśaiva saints broke with a clerical past by proscribing the temple worship of external icons, valorising instead Śiva’s presence in the devotee’s heart. Her work shows that the equivalence, through translation, of the external liṅga and the personal liṅga worn by initiates was pioneered by Vīramāheśvaras, thereby inspiring what has now come to be considered a crucial aspect of the purportedly radical break that Vīraśaiva saints made with their Śaiva past. In the final section, Fisher shows that issues of caste and gender inclusion were promulgated in dharma digests produced in Vīramāheśvara milieux, in Sanskrit and Telugu, an analysis that dismantles the binary opposition, conjured by figures such as M. M. Kalburgi, between the Sanskritic and Brahmanical Vīramāheśvaras in Andhra and the radical reformist Liṅgāyats in Karnataka.
Fisher pursues this line of argument in the following chapter, methodically dismantling the academic orthodoxy that the reforms of the Liṅgāyat religion inaugurated by the Śaiva saints of Karnataka were tarnished by the Brahmanical and caste-based doctrines and practices, expressed in the reactionary idiom of scholastic Sanskrit, brought by the Ārādhya Jangamas from their Andhra homelands. Turning to the famed scriptural statements, the vacanas, which, despite being attributed to the twelfth-century Vīraśaiva śaraṇas (saints), first appear in anthologies that were composed in fifteenth-century Vijayanagara, Fisher shows that these purportedly Kannada texts are neither monolingual nor do they adhere to the doctrinal and ritual views typically ascribed to the śaraṇas. The multilingualism of the text, which evinces the seamless use of Sanskrit and Kannada conventions, idioms, and styles, and its invocation of a Śaiva nonduality that bears traces of a Kashmirian variety lead Fisher to conclude that ‘what we are faced with is a distinct stream of Sanskritic textuality that—while regionally distinct from Vīramāheśvara discourse out of Srisailam—appears to have exerted a pivotal influence of the Kannadiga Vīraśaiva scripture and identity by the fifteenth century’ (p. 198).
Fisher brings these many theoretical strands together into a fine theoretical discussion on the question of translation in the fourth chapter of the work. Foregrounding the translation of early Vīraśaiva vernacular classics into Sanskrit, the chapter shows how ‘translation flows fail to conform to the teleology of vernacularization at all’ (p. 309). As for the Kannada texts that proliferated in sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, noting that these were commentaries on, rather than translations of, Sanskrit scriptural texts, Fisher argues that this corpus bears evidence of the pedagogical purposes to which it was put. Rather than replace the Sanskrit of the scriptural sources, these texts enriched them by embedding them within new matrices of meaning (p. 278). Pushing into Marathi and Tamil sources, where novel assemblages appear from the confluence of such forces as Advaita Vedānta and the burgeoning fields of natural and practical sciences, Fisher shows that ‘to “translate” Vīraśaiva knowledge by fusing it with pre-existing cultural streams is to imagine into being unprecedented modes of belonging that are equally regional and equally “Vīraśaiva”’ (p. 282).
Given the erudition and the subtlety of synthesis that the work presents us with, it is surprising to note Fisher’s demurral in drawing definitive conclusions. ‘Empirically,’ she notes, ‘the monograph that stands before you constitutes a preliminary—if deliberately revisionary—sketch of the tradition’s largely uncharted textual history’ (p. 313). In fact, this equivocation comports with Fisher’s methodological commitment to transparency in forming an archive in the process of making sense of it. Fisher’s impressive facility with sources across languages and scripts, some of which are extant in fragmentary or manuscript form, and her exhaustive reading of the secondary scholarship is perhaps the most powerful case for a future philology that allows us ‘to read not for stasis but for agency, embodied in micro- and macrolevel scribal and authorial choices, variation, drift, misunderstanding, appropriation, and so on, across the boundaries of language’ (p. 319).
