Caught in the Net of Sastra: Devotion and its Limits in an Evolving Saiva Corpus

Abstract

This article aims to persuade that much light is shed on the history of South Asian devotion when we retell its story in terms of the encounters of specific sectarian communities with the conventions of the Sanskrit knowledge systems and their sustained engagement with śāstric interpretive practices. Limiting our focus to a single recurrent discursive trend, I argue that as texts and traditions aspire to acclimate themselves into the idiom of the śāstric mainstream, a process which almost inevitably involves acculturation to the interpretive practices of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā school of ritual exegesis, their understanding of what constitutes religious action and the character and role of the religious actor is reimagined in response to an encounter with Mīmāṃsaka sensibilities. As an integral part of this process, the devotional elements of the tradition are minimized and the lexeme bhakti is denuded of rhetorical force and particularized semantic value. Through documenting how this process plays out within the realm of emergent Śaiva textual communities over the course of the first millennium, as they gradually abandon their resistance to taking representatives of the Sanskrit knowledge systems as their primary dialogical partners, I begin to reconstruct both the depth of the contribution of the Śaiva traditions to the developing discourse on bhakti as well as the conditions of possibility that led to them being elided from our own historiographical record.