Project
The Śivadharma project aims at examining the impact of the spread of the Śaiva religion on the formation of regional religious identities in South Asia from the Middle Ages to early modern times. The Principal Investigator and her team will examine the historical evidence connected with a still little studied but highly influential tradition of Sanskrit texts collectively referred to as Śivadharma, which have been transmitted in some of the most representative regions of South Asia to exhibit the continuing influence of Śavisim. The impact of this literature can be traced in multiple literary, epigraphical and iconographic sources, making it particularly suitable for a multidisciplinary study in which the analysis and edition of texts goes hand in hand with that of the inscriptions and archaeological context. The regions that will be considered for this project are: Nepal, the Deccan area (with connections to the Andhra coast), the north-eastern area of the Bay of Bengal (present-day West Bengal and Odisha), Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
The Śivadharma texts, composed around the 6th to 7th century, are mostly related to the institutional and cultural facets of lay religion, thus offering access to information on the material and practical aspects of Śaivism at a time corresponding to its rise to monarchical patronage in South and Southeast Asia. The main focus of the team’s research will be on the process of how these texts were adapted to the different regional contexts in which they are transmitted, as well as the assessment of the impact that their knowledge had on the formation of local Śaivism. We will thus study the manuscript transmission of the texts, along with the texts themselves in their regional variants; translations and commentaries on the texts in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages; and the inscriptions and icons of religious centres that are linked to the texts and the religious current sponsoring them.
The Śivadharma team thus has in its hands an impressive quantity of materials whose study promises to reveal unknown aspects of the history of the Śaiva religion, one of the most powerful vehicles of culture in premodern and modern South Asia. Since the project’s aim is to focus on the influence that the Śivadharma, as a translocal tradition, had on the formation of local religious communities, our study will follow a regional approach, with each sub-project covering a specific region; team members will dig up all the regional attestations of the Śivadharma, and connect them with the broader historical context of those areas, while also linking them with the religious landscape of each specific region, with an emphasis on local forms of Śaivism.
For further details on the output of the project see the OUTPUT archive.
Research will be mainly conducted on the following regional areas, although it will not be solely restricted to them
Nepal
Here the Śivadharmottara spread quite early thanks to favourable historical conditions, and demonstrably impacted local Śaivism by giving rise to the composition of a whole collection encompassing 7 more works for the laity that were attached to the two earliest ones. Scholars have referred to this fixed set of works transmitted in Nepal as the “Śivadharma corpus”. Proof of its popularity in this region is the abundance, quality and antiquity of Śivadharma manuscripts that were produced here over a time-span ranging from the 9th to the 20th century. Probably the last representative of this tradition was yogi Naraharinath, an ascetic, polygraph and political figure active at Pashupatinath in the second half of the 20th century. He published a partly handwritten edition of the works of the corpus (1998) —which in fact is just a transcription from an unidentified manuscript, with several silent corrections and adaptations— to which he has added a commentary in Nepali, thus valuing the texts of the Śivadharma corpus in the light of contemporary Śaiva practice. Two distinguishing tendencies have so far emerged from the assessment of works of the Nepalese corpus: the strong interaction existing between the local Śaiva and the Vaiṣṇava communities, and the frequent use of sections from the Mahābhārataas source of textual materials and contents.
The sub-project «Nepal: The Śivadharma in the Kathmandu Valley: Religious Hybrids and the Invention of a Corpus» will illuminate this context by examining the “Umāmaheśvara dialogues” of the Śivadharma corpus, and preparing critical editions of selected chapters from these works, to be studied against contemporary historical and textual sources and matched with the testimony of the early Nepalese recension of the Mahābhārata.
Karnataka and Andhra
The predominant and most distinctive religious force in northern Karnataka between the 11th and 13th century was the Kālāmukha (lit. “black-faced”) sect, which, thanks to a highly institutionalized form of religion, had formed an important network of temples and monasteries in the northern Deccan, with which its documentary history, almost exclusively consisting of inscriptions, is connected. Their religious observance can arguably be associated with that of the Lākulas, the worshippers of Lakulīśvara, a division of early Śaivism. The story of the “Black-faced Śaivas”, who played an enormous role in the foundation of local Śaiva traditions, is still largely unwritten, but their religious and cultural legacy leaps to the eye of all observers of present-day Karnataka. Progress in our knowledge of the Śaiva traditions has recently allowed us to prove, from references in their inscriptions, that the Kālāmukhas read and used the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara, the latter expressly supporting the cult of Lakulīśvara. Given that the scriptures of the Kālāmukhas have not yet been reconstructed, apart from their titles, the connection with the Śivadharma appears even more significant.
The sub-project «Translocal Dimensions in a Regional Context: A Study of the Śivadharmottara and Śaiva Inscriptions from Medieval Deccan», led by the Principal Investigator, will promote a systematic investigation into the epigraphical corpus of this Śaiva sect, spread from Karnataka to Andhra Pradesh, essential to reconstructing the history of a tradition that shaped the nature of Śaivism in the Deccan. The PI will work in parallel on the critical edition of the Śivadharmottara and a study of its impact to its massive secondary tradition in Sanskrit works.
Tamil Nadu
Starting from the 12th century, we observe a progressive assimilation of the Śivadharma into the Śaivasiddhānta tradition of Tamil Nadu. Most important in this history is the early modern period, when the Śivadharmottara became of utmost importance in the work of Nigamajñāna I and his pupil Nigamajñāna II, Śaivasiddhānta teachers located in the important Śaiva religious centre of Chidambaram in the 16th century. They authored a successful Tamil translation and commentary of the Śivadharmottara (Civatarumōttaram), and abundantly used the Sanskrit text of the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara in their own Sanskrit production, in which they quote these works side by side with scriptures from the canon of the Śaivasiddhānta established in Tamil Nadu. Knowledge of the Civatarumōttaram is amply attested in the works of local scholars of the 18th century, while the text was printed, along the commentary, in the 19th century (1867 and 1888), at a time when the introduction of print played a central role in that transformative period for Tamil culture and society that is regarded as a “Tamil Renaissance”.
The sub-project «The Reception of the Śivadharma in Tamil-Speaking Areas» will reflect on this process of translation and adaptation of an early Śaiva text to the local context and audience. Its outputs will be a complete study of the attestations and influence of the Śivadharma in early modern Śaiva literature in Tamil, as well as in the corpus of Tamil inscriptions.
Bengal and Odisha
Manuscripts of the Śivadharmottara and the Śivadharmaśāstra are attested in Bengal, although here the textual tradition seems to be chiefly dependent on the Nepalese one. However, in this area we also observe that the Śivadharmottara has been amply reused in the composition of a local Purāṇa, the Devīpurāṇa, which is a foundational work for the medieval cult of the Goddess in Bengal. Still unknown is the influence that the Śivadharma might very plausibly have had on other local Śākta-Śaiva sources. Besides looking into this topic, we will also extend our research to the strong presence of early forms of Śaivism, such as the Pāśupata and the Lākula movements, and examine their possible connection with the early Śivadharma literature. Iconographic and archaeological evidence from Odisha, a region that has had strong historical and cultural ties with Bengal, prove the success of the Pāśupata order in this area. This is attested in its Śaiva epigraphical corpora, as well as by the abundance of depictions of Lakulīśvara (lit. “Lord bearing a club”), one of Śiva’s emanations, often associated in iconography with his role as a Pāśupata teacher. This role was also expressly acknowledged by the Śivadharmottara, which prescribes the installation of icons of teaching Lakulīśvaras in Śaiva monasteries.
This sub-project will investigate the impact of the Śivadharma in the easternmost regions of India by studying the epigraphical corpora of this area that are connected to early Śaiva communities, as well as some of the local Sanskrit Purāṇas, such as the Bṛhaddharmapurāṇa, the Devīpurāṇa, the Kālikāpurāṇa and the Ekāmrapurāṇa. Special attention will also be paid to interactions with Buddhism.
