The Archaeology of Bhakti II: Royal Bhakti, Local Bhakti
Contents: Introduction: King and Place/Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid. I. Textual Foundations: 1. Tirthas, temples, asramas and royal courts: towards a Mahabharata ethnography of early Bhakti/Alf Hiltebeitel. 2. Blob Glaube? Understanding academic constructions of Bhakti in the past century/Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee. 3. Devotional elements in the sakkapanhasutta of the dighanikaya/Greg Bailey. II. Royal Figures: 4. Word-Image tango: telling stories with words and sculptures at the Kailasanatha Temple complex in Kancipuram/Padma Kaimal. 5. Creating Royalty: Identity-making and devotional images of the Wodeyars of Mysore/Caleb Simmons. 6. The servitude of the Travancore Royal family to Sripadmanabhasvamin/S.A.S. Sarma. III. Performing Bhakti: 7. Royal and local patronage of Bhakti cult: the case of temple and court dancers/Tiziana Leucci. 8. Hagiography versus history: The Tamil Panar in Bhakti-Oriented hagiographic texts and inscriptions/Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan. IV. At the Hinge: 9. Queen Cempiyan Mahadevi’s religious patronage in tenth-century South India: The Missing Link between local and Royal Bhakti?/Nicolas Cane. 10. Chiefly queens: local royal women as temple patrons in the late cola period/Leslie Orr. V. The Power of Place: 11. Local Bhakti or monastic advertising? The functions of medieval Jain rock-reliefs in Tamil Nadu/Lisa Owen. 12. Gods and devotees in medieval Tiruttani/Valerie Gillet. 13. Found in Paratexts: Murukan’s places in manuscripts of the Tirumurukarruppatai/Emmanuel Francis. 14. Where are the kings? sites of birth and death of Campantar/Uthaya Veluppillai. Afterword/Richard H. Davis. Index.
This volume is the fruit of the second workshop-cum-conference on the ‘Archaeology of Bhakti’, which took place from 31st July to 13th August 2013 in the Pondicherry Centre of the Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient. ‘Royal Bhakti, Local Bhakti’ was the topic of this scholarly encounter and is the central theme of the present volume, which attempts to clarify the roles of kings, local elites and devotional communities in the development of Bhakti.
When we look at the monuments that are the material traces of Bhakti, we expect kings and their immediate relatives to have played a key role in producing them. But temples commissioned by ruling kings are in fact relatively rare: most sacred sites resonate with the voices of many different patrons responsible for commissioning the buildings or supporting the worship conducted there. Queens, princes, palace women, courtiers, local elites, Brahmin assemblies, merchant communities, and local individuals all contributed to the dynamism of Bhakti.
Far from downplaying the importance of kings as patrons, this volume explores the interactions between these different agents. Do they represent independent and separate streams of Bhakti? Or is there a continuum from large-scale royal temples to locally designed ones? What is the royal share in the development of a Bhakti deeply rooted in a specific place? And what is the local one? How did each respond to the other? Was the patronage by members of royal courts, especially women, of the same nature as that of ruling kings?
After an introduction by the editors, fifteen scholars address such issues by examining the textual foundations of Bhakti, the use of Bhakti by royal figures, the roles of artists and performers, the mediation of queens between the royal and local spheres, and the power of sacred places. The volume concludes with an afterword by Richard H. Davis.
