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This chapter demonstrates how contemporary female Sanskritists in Maharashtra reconfigure Sanskrit, the “father language” of Brahminical Hinduism, as a “grandmother language” and how women engage in new ways to imbue the practices and activities of everyday life with religious meaning. Female Sanskritists unite their stridharma, or ritual duties as women, with the use of Sanskrit in everyday life, importing Sanskrit into everyday events and practices like childbirth, food preparation, and the feeding of family. In so doing, these women reconstitute Sanskrit as a domestic language of interpersonal care and personal transformation; they also reconfigure the “profane” moments of everyday life, imbuing them with religious meaning by sacralizing them with powerful religious mantras.

The Bṭhannīla Tantra, which forms the primary text used in this study, has not yet been translated from Sanskrit into English or any European language, though it has been published, in its various versions as many as five times in India since the 1880s. This appendix is presented to give some sense of the contents of this text. This synopsis covers the major themes and topics addressed in the Bṭhannīla Tantra. The Bṭhannīla Tantra is a comparatively large text, 256 pages of Sanskrit. This synopsis will focus less on the minutiae of precise ritual details, the most substantial element within the Bṭhannīla Tantra, and more upon that element of the Bṭhannīla Tantra that presents the greatest amount of authorial reflection—the “voice” of these authors through its stories and occasional philosophical explanations, for culling out the view of women that the Bṭhannīla Tantra presents.

This chapter analyses the problems associated with Buddhist Sanskrit vocabulary. The obvious reason for these problems is the well-known linguistic diversity that prevailed in the vast area of India in ancient times as it does today. The first to experience them were most likely the early Buddhist monks, when they propagated their faith and tried to make themselves understood beyond Magadha, the original home of Buddhism, and then in the course of time even beyond India. These problems were gradually exported from India, as Buddhists in Central Asia and finally in China started to struggle with strange Sanskrit — or even worse Gāndhārī — words in their attempt to translate new and alien concepts into Chinese and other languages.

Ancient Sanskrit had two tenses of particular interest: periphrastic perfect and periphrastic future. At first glance, they are rather similar: both realize a particular value of tense through a combination of a lexical verb (devoid of personal agreement) and an agreeing auxiliary. There are, however, important differences which are revealed in this chapter: the periphrastic future is available for every verb, and can be distinguished from the synthetic future on semantic grounds, while the periphrastic perfect is available only for certain verbs, and these do not make up a semantically homogeneous group. A formal analysis is proposed, within Paradigm Function Morphology, for the two periphrastic tenses. It is demonstrated that a morphological rather than a purely syntactic account is preferable here. The verbs with a periphrastic perfect make up a conjugation class; on the other hand, the periphrastic future is formalized as a morphosyntactic property whose default realization is periphrastic.

A full translation of Venkatesha's Sanskrit stotra, the Devanayakapanchashat, with detailed thematic afterword and notes. Chapter situates Venkatesha's stotra in the history of Sanskrit stotra literature, focusing on themes of recitation, a poetry of power, and the “fruits” of stotra composition and recitation in goals of prosperity, happiness, auspiciousness (kushalam), as expressed particularly in the concluding verses (phalashrutis) that describe manifold benefits (phalah) of reading, reciting, or studying the poem. The afterword also focuses detailed attention on a major literary motif of this poem and of the remaining poems in the volume, the ecstatic beholding of the beautiful body of Vishnu through the deployment of the anubhava, the step‐wise sequential description, using extravagant similes and metaphors, from foot‐to‐head or head‐to‐foot, of the body of god. Such devotional visions, comparable to the wasfs in the Hebrew Song of Songs, form the emotional center of gravity of the shrine poems to Devanayaka. Afterword ends with a return to the theme of radical surrender (prapatti) to the god and the vulnerability of love, helplessness, and the asymmetry of lover/beloved in Venkatesha's devotional poetics.

This chapter examines Hardwar’s sacred history as presented in various Sanskrit texts. Two Hindu myths are closely identified with Hardwar—the Descent of the Ganges and Shiva’s Destruction of Daksha’s Sacrifice—and both stories are in many of the puranas (ancient compendia of sacred lore), as well as the Epic Ramayana. These sources give only sketchy references to Hardwar itself and focus more on ritual actions (bathing and almsgiving) and asceticism. More detailed descriptions are found in the mahatmyas (“Greatness”), a textual genre written to praise the holiness of some place or thing. A few puranas contain brief Hardwar mahatmyas, but the greatest detail is found in handwritten manuscript mayatmya traditions—the Mayapurimahatmya (early 1800s) and the Haridwaramahatmya (early 1600s). These previously untranslated texts describe Hardwar’s mythology and religious importance and provide an intriguing glimpse of the city at that time.

The evidence for ancient Greek accentuation is tantalizingly achronological, and there is no direct evidence until the Hellenistic period. This chapter surveys the indirect evidence pointing to elements of continuity between different periods in the history (or prehistory) of the Greek accent system up to the Hellenistic period, and to elements of change. Evidence for continuity is drawn from comparisons with accentuation in other Indo-European languages, especially Vedic Sanskrit; from comparison between the accent systems attested for different Greek dialects; and from the relative chronology of the law of limitation and quantitative metathesis. Significant prehistoric Greek innovations are the law of limitation; the recessive accentuation of the finite verb; and the accent shifts described by Wheeler’s law, Vendryes’ law, and Bartoli’s law. Wheeler’s law is treated in particular detail.

This chapter describes the basic features of the caste structure. The population of Sripuram is divided into a large number of castes or jatis. Differences between castes are carried in the matter of women’s dress. The differential importance of Sanskrit and Tamil, with regard to the styles of living of the Brahmins and Non-Brahmins, can be seen in the choice of personal names. Brahmins do not accept cooked food from Non-Brahmins or Adi-Dravidas, although both of the latter accept food from the Brahmins. It is shown that Brahmins who are a segment of the rural society of Sripuram themselves constitute a segmentary system. The bulk of the Non-Brahmin population of Sripuram belongs to what may be very broadly described as cultivating castes. Brahmin, Non-Brahmin, and Adi-Dravida are linked with different degrees of social honour or esteem.

This chapter examines innovations in both plot construction and gender representation with regard to the kūtiyāţtam theater of Kerala, in which three classical Sanskrit plays feature prominently. All of them depart from Valmiki's text and are tailored to the unique features of the kūtiyāţtam style of acting, which affect the representation of the story. In this style of performance, which can be traced back to the 10th century, characters mimic the mental states and actions of other characters across lines of gender and species (such as Ravana enacting Sītā's moods, or Hanumān enacting Rāma's), whereby gender identities in particular are loosened. It is shown how the kūtiyāţtam performance tradition transforms the plot of the epic and challenges the audience with complex, multiple-identity characters.

The various attempts made to date Sanskrit texts (the Veda) are examined in the context that if the Ŗgveda (the earliest of the texts) is at least a millennium older than its commonly accepted date, then the possibility of Dravidian and/or Munda and/or unknown linguistic influences on Vedic Sanskrit being the result of the speakers of these languages intruding on an Indo-Aryan-speaking area after the other languages had already left, as opposed to vice versa, becomes a much more serious consideration. Moreover, the relationship between Vedic and Proto-Indo-European would need to be reconsidered, and any proposal associating the overland trajectory of the Indo-Aryans with the Andronovo culture, a southern Iranian route, or any Post-Harappan culture in the subcontinent, loses value. For these and other reasons, a much older date for the Veda is foundational to the Indigenous Aryanist position; if by contrast, the oldest strata of the Ŗgveda cannot be far removed from the conventionally accepted date of 1200 or 1500 B.C.E., then the Indigenous Aryanist case loses cogency. The chapter examines the dating of Proto-Indo-European first, before going on to look at the dating of the Veda itself, paying special attention to astronomy and its bearing on Vedic chronology. The author concludes that none of the evidence presented so far in the book convincingly settles the debate, and that the only evidence that could do this with any degree of certainty would be the decipherment of the script from the Indus Valley civilization.

This introductory chapter discusses Hindu caste and ritual. It examines the religious texts in Sanskrit, which serve as relevant sources of information on Indian society. It takes a look at anthropological research and the formation of a positivist approach, as well as the consequences of defining social reality based on concreteness. It introduces Louis Dumont's writings, where he rejects the dichotomy between behaviour and thought, and insists that an explanatory model cannot be limited to copying observed reality. It then pinpoints the two Sanskrit texts that will be analyzed in detail, namely the Dharmaranya Purana and the Grihya Sutra of Gobhila. The chapter also studies the caste Puranas, who are defined as a class of Sanskrit language that is concerned with the five main themes of creation.

Chapter 1 (and Chs. 2‐3) addresses the earlier of the two extant Tamil (South Indian) Buddhist texts, the Maṇimēkalai, by building on the work of Richman, and reading the text as a consummately literary whole that resonates not only with the earlier themes of the classical Caṅkam corpus, but also with Sanskrit‐influenced poetic theory, and a variety of themes found in other Buddhist literature. Pinpointing as a central motif in the main narrative, the arising of those conditions conducive to Maṇimēkalai's enlightenment (signaled by the technical term ētunikalcci), the narrative and doctrinal portions of the text are shown to be intimately connected through concern with the interdependently arising nature of the world and human relationships. Focusing on the overall structure of the narrative, as well as its thematic content, it is suggested that the labyrinthine character of the text, filled with subplots and stories within stories, is meant to evoke subtly the particularly Buddhist theory of causation, which is given formal structure only at the very end of the text. Careful attention is also paid to the Maṇimēkalai's obvious concern with the moral human life, focusing on the Sanskrit and Tamil literary theories of emotional evocation. The emotional experience that the text seeks to elicit from its audience is that of pity or compassion, a central organizing principle in the Maṇimēkalai's moral vision of concern and compassion for the suffering of all living beings.

The nature of the Maṇimēkalai's textual or reading community is considered through an examination of the narrative as a literary work produced in the context of a diverse and multilingual South Indian literary culture. Through careful reading of the intertextual allusions in the Maṇimēkalai, particularly in relation to the principal themes of an earlier Tamil narrative from which the Buddhist text borrows its central characters and settings, a picture begins to emerge of a textual community of literary connoisseurs who are multilingual, well versed in world views and the literature of various religious communities, and thoroughly engaged in the project of articulating religious identity in a literary and religious landscape of extreme diversity through the medium of ornately sophisticated poetry. The Maṇimēkalai's free appropriation and translation into Tamil of Buddhist narratives and philosophical concepts found in earlier Pāli and Sanskrit transregional sources provides a glimpse of the processes of transmission of a tradition for which no other record exists. In a literary‐cultural context that includes the vehemently anti‐Buddhist invective of the earliest Hindu poet‐saints, such easy switching from transliterated Sanskrit to translated Pāli in the Maṇimēkalai bespeaks a moment in Tamil literary history when language choice did not entail the same cultural, political, or religious allegiance that it would assume by the time of the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam.

This chapters and the next turn to the eleventh‐century Vīracōliyam and its commentary, both of which construct a technology or theoretical vision of a multilingual literary culture that is claimed for Buddhism. It is argued in this chapter that the Vīracōliyam self‐consciously combines Tamil and Sanskrit grammar and poetic theory in unprecedented ways, for the first time formalizing a relationship between two literary languages that had existed side by side for many centuries. In raising Tamil to the level of a translocal prestige language of learning, the Vīracōliyam traces the origin of this Tamil‐Sanskrit literary language to the teachings of a great Buddha‐to‐be, Avalokiteśvara, thereby carving out a place for Buddhism in the Tamil religious and literary landscape of competing sectarian communities. Named for its heroic royal Cōla (also Chola) dynasty patron, the Vīracōliyam, like the Maṇimēkalai before it, also participates in wider currents within the Buddhist literary world, as South Indian Theravāda monks writing in Pāli in the tenth to the twelfth centuries increasingly identify themselves and the monasteries in which they write as tied to a ‘Coḷiya’ order.