North India

We return to the northern part of the subcontinent to sketch some of the important developments after the decline of the Gupta dynasty. The reign of Harsa in the Gangetic basin during the seventh century - a reign noted for its stability and patronage of various religious institutions - was perhaps the last relatively stable period in the north for some centuries.

One of the “new” players on the scene of Northwest India were the Rajputs. The Rajputs were apparently of foreign origin - some scholars have even suggested they were descendants of the “Huns”²³ - but in their concern for acceptance and hegemony, they created “pockets” of “Hindu” culture, in some cases outdoing their rivals in orthopraxy. Brahmans were invited to become ministers in their courts to serve as rhetoricians and public relations agents. The brahmans were given land and the right to become kingmakers and to rhetorically claim ksatriya status for Rajput rulers.

The Hindu chieftains and would-be kings of the north practiced a strategy for retaining hegemony not unlike that of the Colas in the south. Most particularly, there were three principal activities: 1) Brahmans were given land grants and invited to be the court advisers and public relations agents. This would assure that vaidika culture was preserved and provide a “religious umbrella” for all the peoples in the domain. 2) In some instances, large temples were built to institutionalize the royal cult and serve as a centralizing monument for the monarch. 3) Local deities, and especially goddesses, were incorporated into the royal cult. In Orissa, for example, even as early as the sixth century royal donations were made at the shrines of Maninagesvarl (“Goddess of thejewel serpent”) and of Stambhesvarl (“Goddess of the pillar”).²⁵ These acts of patronage served to give royal sanction to important pilgrimage sites and incorporate into the kingdom those folk and village communities for whom these goddesses were important. We will explore these developments further.

Temple construction

There were at least five areas in which temple construction and/or art proliferated in North India, especially between the ninth and twelfth centuries.

Traditional patterns informed the architecture and ritual life of these temples. Aesthetically, the temple embodied rasa - the “flavor” of brahman - and was intended to invite the devotee to experience the flavor of the divine. Many temples, especially those at Khajuraho and Bhubaneswara, presented a multiplicity of symmetry and sacral spaces. The temple was a microcosm both horizontally and vertically: the tower in the north was called a sikhara and was often curvilinear, though like those of the south, was congruent to the human torso, and its parts were even assigned names usually associated with the body. The temples also reflected the socio­political reciprocities of the domains of the patron-king. There were reciprocities and exchange of gifts and honors between royalty, sectarian leaders, and landowners and various concessions or additions made to alternate groups or patrons.

The architecture of such temples as that of Konarak and Khajuraho is replete with erotic sculpting on the outer face. These external sculptures were intended to demonstrate the wide variety of practices being incor­porated into the ambiance of the temple. On some temple exteriors (for example, the Ramappa Temple in northern Andhra Pradesh), one finds ascetics, probably Jain, side by side with copulating couples. The erotic imagery was probably the result of incorporating tantric motifs into the architecture of the temple. Tantrism was being “domesticated” and made part of the classical tradition throughout India but especially by the ninth to tenth centuries in the north. Tantrism was a significant variation of religious expression and is worth some consideration.

Tantrism

The origins of tantrism are probably beyond reconstruction. Suffice it to say that it appeared to combine “folk” and vaidika features and that it was undoubtedly practiced for centuries by groups who were outside the orthoprax mainstream. Its “folk” roots may be linked in an agricultural respect for soil and furrow but manifest themselves in veneration of the female genitalia. The famed “squatting goddess,” Lajja Gauri, for example, apparently represented this early relation between furrow and vagina. She was the goddess seated on her haunches, naked, her genitalia clearly visible - the earliest forms of this figure found to date in the upper Deccan plateau are first century ce.²⁷ Also part of this “folk” background was the belief that one could be “possessed” by the deity, or, more accurately perhaps, become one with the goddess.

Mixed with these “folk” elements are aspects which have their roots in vaidika practice. This included the ritual use of sounds. Sound had cosmo­gonic power; hence, chants or mantras were thought to link one to the cosmos at large. Vidya (“magical speech”) was used in tantric ritual. This included meditation on a cryptic sentence and directing chants to the deity, almost always a goddess. Further, the body could be used symbolically in ways that resonate with the yogic tradition - winds were thought able to move from various cakras (centers on the body) through mythical veins. Gestures (mudrds) were used ritually as were postures (asanas) of various kinds. Pranayama (breath control) was similarly borrowed from hatha yoga. The body, in short, was congruent to the universe and to the alphabet of sounds and to the deities.

In tantra, a man usually worked with a guru, often female, who was believed to be able to lead the devotee to liberation and the use of occult powers. The culmination of the tantric experience was the reattainment of primordial androgyny, the collapsing of distinctions between separate selves, between males and females, and between deity and devotee. This was ritually expressed by sexual union in which no bodily fluids were ejected. Rather the couple became one.

Hindu tantrics understood their discipline to have seven steps. The first three were common to most Hindu devotees and included basic devotion to Visnu and meditation on Siva. The fourth stage, sometimes referred to as right handed worship (diiksoidcdia) entailed worship of the supreme goddess in ways consistent with orthoprax patterns. It is in the next stage, “left handed” worship ^macaw) when ritual use of the five “m’s” assumed a significant role: mamsa (meat); matsya (fish); mudra (fried rice); mada (intoxicants); maithuna (intercourse).

Tantrism became a part ofJain and Buddhist practice as well. In Buddhism, in fact, a new school emerged around the sixth century ce known as Vajrayana. It is the school that made its way into Tibet where it was grafted onto the indigenous religion known as Bon. Like “Hindu” forms of tantrism, Buddhist tantra used body imagery and sounds and understood all of matter, including alleged defilements, to be sacred. The rationale in Buddhism, however, differed. It was rooted in the doctrine of sunyata wherein matter (samsara) and nirvana were rendered homologous since neither had its own existence (svabhavd). Further, the female principle was not perceived to be a goddess (except later in Tibetan forms of Vajrayana). Rather, feminine forms were used to personify certain Buddhist perfections, such as wisdom or compassion. One did not worship these feminine forms so much as seek to emulate them or subsume their attributes. Further, the feminine forms were sometimes juxtaposed with masculine ones as in prana/ purusa (wisdom/spirit). Hence, in ritual coitus, the distinctions between male and female and of all opposites were collapsed. One became the other; one assumed the attributes of those perfections rendered in male or female form.

It seems likely that tantrism flourished especially in border regions - such as Assam, Northern Bengal, and Northwest India - which were not systematically Hinduized prior to the tenth century. By the ninth and tenth centuries, as such areas were brahmanized, there was assimilation of foreign and/or “offbeat” expressions; families and clans who were previously obscure and outside the circles of power were now being given land grants or in other ways being incorporated into the body politic.²⁹ Now increasingly, tantric imageries made their way into temple sculptures and architectural symbolism; for example, the icon, at least in Saiva temples, was the linga or male principle; the pedestal in which it was set was the yoni or female principle. Tantrism had to some extent been “domesticated” and made part of the brahmanic synthesis.

The rise of the goddesses to “high deity” status

One of the significant developments in the religious life of the subcontinent during the period under discussion was the emergence of goddesses to the status of “high deity.” Up until about the sixth century ce, goddesses had appeared in classical contexts but in relatively subsidiary roles - for example, as consorts, wives, adoptive mothers, and attendants in urban complexes of the Gangetic basin. There was, of course, evidence of goddess worship in agricultural settings from early times - from the Atharvavedic hymn of praise to Prthvl, and terra-cotta representations of fertility goddesses in the first two millennia bce to the iconography of the naked “squatting goddess” in the Deccan by the first century ce. Now these disparate streams were merging to propel the goddess into a place of supremacy she had not there­tofore achieved. There appear to be several reasons for this development: 1) The increased visibility of “folk” and tribal communities in areas that had thereto not been fully integrated. Many of these communities were worshiping goddesses of particular places, of natural powers (e.g., diseases) or of particular families. 2) The propensity of kings and other would-be patrons to incorporate such people into their domain by “co-opting” their deities into the official cultus. Such was the case, for example, in Orissa and in the Cola courts of South India, where the royal cult of Siva was given a bride derived from the rural landscape. 3) The employment of brahmans in the courts and in public contexts who were prepared to make “connec­tions” (bandhu) - that is, to link the “new” deities to the legitimating older ones. 4) The likelihood that goddesses became one strategy by which Hinduism came to replace Buddhism in several settings. There is evidence, for example, that shrines to the goddess were established occasionally on the site of Buddhist pallis (sacred places) - Bhagavatl shrines in Kerala are a case in point. These “replacements” were not necessarily arbitrary. Goddesses could personify those attributes (prosperity, creativity, etc.) deemed auspicious to vaidika adherents just as female icons had come to embody perfections and attributes within Buddhism. Further, the Buddhist understanding of the world with its ambiguities and dis-ease could be personified in the person of a goddess who represented the forces of nature and the ambiguous, even hostile, powers of the world. Such may have been the case with Durga, emerging by the tenth century in Bengal, possibly representing a Hindu personification of duhkha, the Buddhist term for the unsatisfactoriness of the world.³⁰ 5) The increased visibility of tantrism, especially in such places as Bengal, with its worship of the female form, almost certainly lent impetus to the classicalization of a powerful goddess figure. 6) Finally, one can identify a dialect of “self’ and “other,” when communities or kingdoms sought to differentiate or identify themselves over against other communities or kingdoms. In such dialectics, a myth­ology of militancy was often evoked - the “asuras” were the representations of the “other guys”; in the mythological rhetoric of warfare, “our deity” was more powerful than theirs. The great goddess was presented myth­ologically as more powerful than those deities who preceded her. Among the “others” being addressed may have been Buddhist, and eventually, Islamic communities.

Whatever the factors, there appeared during this period a Sanskrit text known as the Devimahatmya. The “text” was a series of myths, first recited, no doubt, in oral form, but reduced to writing somewhat later. The first two cycles of myths, at least - the “birth” of the goddess from the navel of the sleeping Visnu and her battles with troublesome asuras such as the buffalo Mahisa - were probably datable between the sixth and tenth centuries and represented many of the factors mentioned above: 1) The patronage of a royal house - perhaps the Calukyas of the Southwestern Deccan where one finds the oldest extant Durga temple in Aihole and images of Durga slaying the buffalo and of the squatting goddess (Lajja Gauri) by the seventh century (though Bengal is another possible venue for such patronage). 2) Mythmakers who used the repertoire of legitimating strategies to announce the exploits of a powerful deity (that is, she was “born” of an authenticating deity, given the weapons of older deities, etc.). 3) Evidence of folk elements being incorporated into the myth. For example, the slaying of the buffalo demon Mahisa had a long history in folk culture and was also seen earlier as the protagonist in battles with Skanda. 4) There are even hints of a Buddhist presence in the way the goddess personified such attributes as wealth and prosperity (laksmi) etc. In any case the Devimahatmya announced the arrival of the goddess as the most powerful deity on the landscape, and once in place, her persona could be applied to any and all goddesses. Part three of the Devimahatmya, in fact, does precisely that, indicating how the goddess was indeed an expression of Durga and Kali, goddesses which were perceived to have destroyed “demons” associated with Northern India, more than likely Bengal where the third myth of the Devimahatmya may have been composed.³¹

After the tenth century, temples to goddesses proliferated as did their worship in classical contexts. Local goddesses were linked to those already known in the Sanskritic traditions (seven sisters, Parvati, etc.) and assumed a role not theirs hitherto. Such goddesses as Durga and Kali had by now entered the “national stage,” while another figure - that of Radha - had become part of classical culture by the twelfth century. In fact, the story of Radha can illustrate something of the way goddesses became increasingly important. For the first six centuries CE she was mentioned only in certain Prakrit sources (that is, in any of several indigenous dialects) and in Jain writings, so she may have been a part of lower class Saivism and folk culture.³² She “entered” textualized classical religion in Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (twelfth century CE) where she is transfigured from a human cowgirl into a deity. As such, she may represent the opportunity/model for women (such as earlier poets like Antal had done) to transcend normal social conventions. In any case, Radha came to embody prakrti (matter, earth), the co-eternal essence of the universe; she was also maya (the tangible world and its force), and sakti - the power of the divine. Not least important, she was lover of Krsna, whose dalliances with the divine flautist were enacted in music and dance throughout India. As Krsna’s consort, she mediated his grace to all and became the embodiment of compassion and the paradigm of the ideal devotee. There are intimations in her story of both tantric and Buddhist themes and, it is generally agreed, that it was in Bengal where her worship, like that of Kali, was most popular at least until the eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that in Bengal both Buddhism and tantrism had been strong.³³

Radha’s assumption of supreme status was not unique to her. Each emergent goddess had her own origins, but once adapted into the classical tradition, she came to embody the power (sakti) of the divine, as well as the character of the world’s force. Both Kali and Durga tend to embody this power in ways that are often seen as potentially malevolent. Kali, for example, was portrayed as black, tongue extended as in combat, a necklace of skulls. She was the fierce destroyer of her enemies and powerful protector of those who worshiped her. At the same time, for those on good terms with her (as with the world itself), she was mother and sustainer of life.³⁴

Buddhism and Jainism

By the fourteenth century, Buddhism had virtually disappeared from the Indian landscape, save for occasional pockets of Buddhist culture. This decline of Buddhism on the subcontinent may be attributed to four factors.

First, there was a migration of monks out of the subcontinent. Many Theravada monks had begun to migrate as early as the first centuries bce to Sri Lanka, which had become a stronghold of Theravada culture and from there that school of Buddhism had spread throughout much of Southeast Asia and especially to Burma, Thailand, and cambodia. In the meanwhile, Mahayana monks, especially of the Madhyamika and Yogacara schools, had made their way, starting as early as the first centuries ce, by way of Central Asia to China. By the ninth century, Vajrayana Buddhism had spread into Tibet. Second, from the time of Sankara, Buddhist intellectual life declined on the subcontinent. “Philosophy” based on the Upanisads attracted more inquirers; in the meanwhile, Buddhist speculations in China and Southeast Asia were on the rise.

Third, the devotional movement with its appeal to accessible deities concretely available in local places made Hinduism increasingly attractive at the popular level. In fact, in many respects, Buddhism was “absorbed”

into popular forms of Hinduism. There is evidence of Hindu temples being built upon the site of Buddhist pallis, of Hindu iconography and/or deities appropriating Buddhist motifs; and of Hindu popular literature assimi­lating Buddhist elements. In some cases, the conversions of Buddhist centers were gradual though probably quite self-conscious. Such was appa­rently the case with shrines at Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Nagakoil, Kancipuram, and Nagarjunakonda. A shrine outside of Mangalore in Karnataka, for example, once devoted to the bodhisattva Avolokitesvara became a shrine to “Manjunatha,” a manifestation of the Siva linga.35 Similarly, in a cave outside Nagarjunakonda, once the home of Buddhist monks, one finds an icon to Visnu as Adisesa (the sleeping Visnu), perhaps depicted as a Hindu alter­native to the quiescence sought by monks; Visnu, however, unlike the Buddha, would awaken from his quiescence and was accessible to devotees. Similarly, deities such as Sasta (the teacher), appeared to have been a Hindu alternative to the Buddha and was depicted iconographically in ways that emulated the pose of earlier Buddhist icons. Indeed Buddha came to be seen as an avatar of Visnu. That Buddhist monks may have acquiesced in this process is suggested by Professor Padmanabha Jaini, who reports that only one text was written by Buddhist monks (and that only as late as the eleventh century) offering advice on conduct appropriate for the lay- person.³⁶ Local kings and rulers, for their part, were increasingly inclined to patronize Hinduism at least partially because it had been able to assimilate or accommodate forms of folk and popular religion.

Finally, there were concerted efforts at times to destroy Buddhist institutions. It occurred in South India by the fourth century when Nagarjunakonda was destroyed by Saivite warriors. In Kashmir, such kings as Nara and Mihirakula destroyed Buddhist establishments. Such destruction of Buddhist institutions was virtually completed by the armies of MahmUd of Ghazni in the eleventh century and Timur of Samarkand in the fourteenth. Even though some of the havoc may have been wrought for political rather than religious reasons, the outcome was the same: Buddhism was virtually gone from the subcontinent by the fourteenth century.

In the meanwhile, Jainism was also threatened by the wave of devotion- alism with its accessible deities and colorful ritual life. Jainism, nonetheless, survived for a variety of reasons.Jain monks offered self-conscious alter­natives to Hindu popular religion and literature. Unlike the Buddhists, they produced some fifty texts on conduct proper to a Jain layperson.³⁷ They produced alternative versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, wherein Rama and Krsna were portrayed as Jaina heroes subject to the principles ofJaina ethics and Ravana was killed, not by Rama, but by Laksmana, so that Rama could be reborn in heaven for his observance of ahimsa.³⁸ Similarly, Hindu deities were to be found in some Jaina temples as “attendants” and/or tirthankaras-in-process. Not least important, in some schools of Jainism, rituals were sanctioned which emulated Hindu puja in many ways albeit given aJain legitimation. Jinasena’s Adipurana (ninth century) seems to have been the earliest text mentioning such rituals for the Jain laity.³⁹ In this ritual tradition, the tirthankaras were depicted in anthropomorphic form and puja (worship) could be directed to them, not to obtain intercession from them on one’s own behalf, but to honor the t.nlhi.iri'ikarii, attain merit in doing so, and to find in him a model for one’s own life.Jainism in this form has survived into the present and has remained particularly strong in portions of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Recommended reading

History, culture, literature of the post-classical period

South India

Balasundaram, T. S. The Golden Anthology of Ancient Tamil Literature. Three volumes. Madras: South India Saiva Siddhantha Bombay Publishing Society, 1959-60.

Hart, George L. III. The Poems of Ancient Tamil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Pillar, K. K. A Social History of the Tamils. Second edition. Madras: University of Madras, 1973.

Ramanujan, A. K. tr. The Interior Landscape. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969.

Sastri, K. A. N. History of South India. Madras: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Shulman, D. D. Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Stein, Burton. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Zvelebil, K. The Smile of Murugan. London: Brill, 1973.

North India

Kulke, Herman. Kings and Cults: State Formations and Legitimation in India and Southeast Asia. New Delhi: Manohar, 1993.

Thapar, Romila. Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978.

Philosophical developments

Banerjee, N. V. The Spirit of Indian Philosophy. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1958.

Carman, J. B. The Theology of Ramanuja, An Essay in Inter-religious Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.

Cenkner, W. A. A Tradition of Teachers: Sankara and the Jagadgurus Today. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983.

Das Gupta, S. N. History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols. Third edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961-62.

Devasenapati, V. A. Saiva Siddhanta as Expounded in the Sivajnana Siddhiyar and its Six Commentaries. Madras: University of Madras, 1960.

Devasenapati, V. A. Of Human Bondage and Divine Grace. Annamalai: Annamalai University Press, 1963.

Feurstein, G. The Philosophy of Classical Yoga. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1982.

Halbfass, W. Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Hiriyanna, M. Outlines of Indian Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958.

Mahadevan, T. M. P. Hymns of Sankara. Madras: University of Madras Press, 1970.

Neeval, W. G. Jr. Yamuna’s Vedanta and Pancaratra: Integrating the Classical and the Popular. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1977.

Potter, K. Bibliography of India’s Philosophies. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970.

Potter, Karl. The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies. Banares: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970.

Radhakrishnan, S. and Moore, C. A. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Srinivasacari, P. The Philosophy of Visistadvaita. Adyar: Theosophical Society, 1946.

On temple and iconography

Banerjee, J. N. The Development of Hindu Iconography. Second edition. Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1956.

Chandra, Pramod. Studies in Indian Temple Architecture. Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1975.

Gopinath, Rao T. A. Elements of Hindu Iconography. Second edition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985.

Kramrisch, S. The Hindu Temple. Two volumes. Delhi: MLBD, 1946, reprint 1977. Kramrisch, S. The Presence of Siva. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Meister, M.W. ed. Discourses on Siva. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

Michell, G. The Hindu Temple. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Michell, G. The Penguin Guide to the Monuments of India. Volume one. London: Penguin, 1989.

Sivaramamurti, C. South Indian Bronzes. New Delhi: Lalitkala Akademi, 1963.

Younger, P. The Home ofDancing Siva. New York: Oxford, 1995.

On tantrism

Bharati, Agehananda. The Tantric Tradition. London: Rider & Co., 1965. Bhattacharya, N. N. History of the Tantric Religion. Delhi: Manohar, 1982.

Brooks, D. R. The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Sakta Hinduism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Chattophadyaya, S. Reflections on the Tantras. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978.

Kinsley, D. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Padoux, A. Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.

White, David G. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

White, D. G. ed. Tantra in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

On deities, ritual, and devotionalism

Beane, W. C. Myth, Cult, and Symbols in Sakta Hinduism: A Study of the Indian Mother Goddess. London: Brill, 1977.

Bhattacharji, S. The Indian Theogony: A Comparative Study of Indian Mythology from the Vedas to the Puranas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Brown, C. M. God as Mother: A Feminine Theology in India; an Historical and Theological Study of the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Hartford, CT: Claude Stark, 1974.

Brown, C. M. The Triumph of the Goddess: The Canonical Models and Theological Visions of the Devi Bhagavata Purana. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.

Carman, J. B. and Narayana, V. The Tamil Veda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Clothey, F. W. The Many Faces of Murukan. Leiden: Mouton & Co., 1978.

Coburn, T. B. Devämahätmya: the Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984.

Courtright, P. B. Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Cutler, Norman. Songs of Experiences: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Dehejia, V. Slaves of the Lord. Delhi: Munisharam Manoharlal, 1988.

Dehejia, V. Antäl and Her Path of Love. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.

Feldhaus, A. tr. The Deeds of God in Riddhipur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Gatwood, L. E. Devi and the Spouse Goddess: Women, Sexuality, and Marriage in India. Delhi: Manohar, 1985.

Hardy, F. Viraha Bhakti. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Hawley, J. and Wulff, D. eds. The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Hawley, J. and Wulff, D. eds. Devi: Goddesses of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Hiltebeitel, A. The Cult of Draupadi. Volume one: Mythologies from Ginsee to Kuruksetra. Volume two: On Hindu Ritual and the Goddess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 1991.

Kane, P. V. History of Dharmasastra. Five volumes. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930-62.

Kinsley, D. The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krsna, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Kinsley, D. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Lopez, Donald S. Jr. ed. Religions of India in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

McDaniel, J. The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Marglin, F. A. Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

O’Flaherty, W. D. Siva: The Erotic Ascetic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Orr, Leslie C. Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamil Nadu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Pandey, R. B. Hindu Samskaras: Socio-Religious Study of the Hindu Sacraments. Second edition. Banares: Motilal Banarsidass, 1969.

Peterson, I. Poems to Siva, the Hymns of the Tamil Sutras. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Pintchman, T. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Traditions. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Raghavan, V. The Great Integrators: The Saint Singers of India. Delhi: Ministry of Information, nd.

Ramanujan, A. K. Speaking of Siva. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973.

Ramanujan, A. K. Hymns for the Drowning. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Rocher, L. The Pura/nas, History of Indian Literature. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986.

Sontheimer, G. D. Pastoral Deities in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Yocum, G. Hymns to the Dancing Siva: a Study of Manikkavacakar’s Tiruvacakam. Columbia, MO: South Asian Books, 1982.