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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.

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.

Chapter 2 explores the tarikhs written during the Mughal period to illustrate the ways in which they drew on earlier Sanskrit and Persian texts to assert the distinctiveness of Kashmir within the Mughal Empire. And later in the eighteenth century, as Kashmir transitioned from Mughal to Afghan rule, they gave voice to the category of people (qaum), not just the place, of Kashmir. While Mughal texts such as the Ain-i Akbari incorporated Kashmir into the Mughal landscape of power through a reading of its Sanskrit texts, Kashmir’s Persian narratives self-consciously engaged these texts on questions regarding the style and purpose of narrating the past as both tradition and history, even as they redefined the meanings of both terms. By invoking a specific literary genealogy, these tarikhs constituted Kashmir not simply as a natural and spiritual paradise, but quite as much a distinct literary paradise.

This chapter considers the textual material of Tantra, which consists mainly of texts called tantra in Sanskrit. Not all Tantric texts are called Tantra. They are also called āgama (“tradition”), saṃhitā (“collection”), or sūtra (“aphorism”). All these texts form the Tantric scriptures—the Tantric Revelation. There are also other revealed Tantric texts such as the Purāṇas (“antiquities”) and the Upaniṣads. This chapter discusses a number of Sanskrit texts on Tantra, including the Śaiva works which constitute the majority of Tantric literature; the canonical Tantric Vaiṣṇava literature; and saura-saṃhitās devoted to the Sun god, Sūrya.

The introduction provides a broad scholarly context for the arguments put forward in the book by focusing on three main themes. First, the interconnectedness of Kashmir’s multilingual historical tradition over the centuries, as the Persian narratives drew on the tropes and themes outlined in the earlier Sanskrit texts to define both Kashmir as well as history. Second, these definitions were located at the intersection of the particular and the universal, as Kashmiri oral traditions, Sanskrit mythologies, and Islamic universalism coalesced to imagine Kashmir as a sacred space and polity through a narration of its past. Third, both textual and oral traditions defined history in multiple ways, even as they ascribed multiple motivations to the task of historical narration. The introduction, and the book as a whole, illustrate that place-making—of Kashmir’s landscape and spaces within—emerged as a central aspect of historical practice in Kashmir.

This chapter examines the concept of the human body in Hinduism by analyzing three Sanskrit texts: medical texts, The Laws of Manu, and the Puranas. It first considers the doctrine of the three humors, tackled in Hindu medical texts such as the Charaka Samhita, and closely related to the Hindu belief that all matter, including the human body, is composed of the three elements of lucidity (sattva), energy (rajas), and torpor (tamas). It then looks at Manu’s attitudes toward the body, in particular offering a chilling image of it. The Puranas offer several explanations of conception and birth that are different from the ones discussed in Manu and the medical texts.

This chapter presents Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Cienaños de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967]), to discuss the revival of nineteenth-century fictions that promoted capitalism. The novel discusses capital as the foundational myth of export-driven modernity. The two key mythical elements from Cienaños de soledad are the story of Adam and Eve, and ancient Sanskrit texts. Critics have frequently discussed these elements as a key component of the novel’s poetics.