Branding the Order of Texts and Bodies in Medieval South India

Abstract

Abstract Branding is a popular mode of bodily marking among several Vaiṣṇava traditions in southern India. This article examines how a practice with no discernible basis in the Vedas was transformed into a marker of Vaidika piety and Brahman identity. I examine the first known Sanskrit treatise about devotional branding, a short essay titled Protective Amulet of Righteous Conduct (Saccaritrarakṣā) written by the influential Śrīvaiṣṇava scholar Vedānta Deśīka (c. 14th/15th CE). Like most of Vedānta Deśika’s writings, The Protective Amulet is an exemplar of high scholarship. But unlike many works of Sanskrit scholarship, the Protective Amulet seems to have bubbled up from a world of popular practice. This article is about the Vedicization of bodily branding and the process in which forms of reading and interpretation were used to transform new practices into allegedly timeless markers of identity and devotion. The close connection between branding as both a bodily and scholarly practice means that this article is also about the connection between words and flesh. Branding is, of course, material. It entails fire, metal, ash, sweat, skin, and scars. But branding is also semiotic and discursive, both in the many meanings grafted onto a single branded symbol as well as in the enormous volume of writing and debate that bodily branding provoked. A study of branding pushes us to think about texts and bodies as connected in ways that intellectual history and material studies have yet to fully acknowledge.