Ch 5 to 8 - NCERT

1 We saw in Chapter 4 that by the mid-firstmillennium CE the landscape of the subcontinentwas dotted with a variety of religious structures stupas, monasteries, temples. If these typifiedcertain religious beliefs and practices, others havebeen reconstructed from textual traditions,including the Puranas, many of which receivedtheir present shape around the same time, and yetothers remain only faintly visible in textual andvisual textual sources available from this periodinclude compositions attributed to poet-saints,most of whom expressed themselves orally inregional languages used by ordinary people.

2 Thesecompositions, which were often set to music, werecompiled by disciples or devotees, generally afterthe death of the poet-saint. What is more, thesetraditions were fluid generations of devotees tendedto elaborate on the original message, and occasionallymodified or even abandoned some of the ideas thatappeared problematic or irrelevant in differentpolitical, social or cultural contexts. Using thesesources thus poses a challenge to also draw on hagiographies orbiographies of saints written by their followers (ormembers of their religious sect). These may not beliterally accurate, but allow a glimpse into the waysin which devotees perceived the lives of these path-breaking women and we will see, these sources provide us withinsights into a scenario characterised by dynamismand diversity.

3 Let us look at some elements of thesemore closely. Fig. twelfth-century bronze sculpture ofManikkavachakar, a devotee of Shivawho composed beautiful devotional songs in Tamil 2022-23 Perhaps the most striking feature of this phase isthe increasing visibility of a wide range of gods andgoddesses in sculpture as well as in texts. At onelevel, this indicates the continued and even extendedworship of the major deities Vishnu, Shiva andthe goddess each of whom was visualised in avariety of The integration of cultsHistorians who have tried to understand thesedevelopments suggest that there were at least twoprocesses at work.

4 One was a process of disseminatingBrahmanical ideas. This is exemplified by thecomposition, compilation and preservation of Puranictexts in simple Sanskrit verse, explicitly meant tobe accessible to women and Shudras, who weregenerally excluded from Vedic learning. At the sametime, there was a second process at work that ofthe Brahmanas accepting and reworking the beliefsand practices of these and other social categories. Infact, many beliefs and practices were shaped througha continuous dialogue between what sociologists havedescribed as great Sanskritic Puranic traditionsand little traditions throughout the of the most striking examples of this processis evident at Puri, Orissa, where the principal deitywas identified, by the twelfth century, as Jagannatha(literally, the lord of the world), a form of (extreme right) with hissister Subhadra (centre) and hisbrother Balarama (left) 2022-23 If you compare Fig.

5 With Fig. (Chapter 4)you will notice that the deity is represented in avery different way. In this instance, a local deity,whose image was and continues to be made of woodby local tribal specialists, was recognised as a formof Vishnu. At the same time, Vishnu was visualisedin a way that was very different from that in otherparts of the instances of integration are evidentamongst goddess cults as well. Worship of thegoddess, often simply in the form of a stone smearedwith ochre, was evidently widespread. These localdeities were often incorporated within the Puranicframework by providing them with an identity as awife of the principal male deities sometimes theywere equated with Lakshmi, the wife of Vishnu, inother instances, with Parvati, the wife of Difference and conflictOften associated with the goddess were formsof worship that were classified as Tantric.

6 Tantricpractices were widespread in several parts of thesubcontinent they were open to women andmen, and practitioners often ignored differencesof caste and class within the ritual context. Manyof these ideas influenced Shaivism as well asBuddhism, especially in the eastern, northern andsouthern parts of the of these somewhat divergent and even disparatebeliefs and practices would come to be classified asHindu over the course of the next millennium. Thedivergence is perhaps most stark if we compare Vedicand Puranic traditions. The principal deities of theVedic pantheon, Agni, Indra and Soma, becomemarginal figures, rarely visible in textual or visualrepresentations.

7 And while we can catch a glimpseof Vishnu, Shiva and the goddess in Vedic mantras,these have little in common with the elaboratePuranic mythologies. However, in spite of theseobvious discrepancies, the Vedas continued to berevered as surprisingly, there were sometimes conflicts aswell those who valued the Vedic tradition oftencondemned practices that went beyond the closelyregulated contact with the divine through theperformance of sacrifices or precisely chanted the other hand those engaged in Tantric practicesFig. of a Buddhist goddess,Marichi ( century, Bihar),an example of the process ofintegration of different religiousbeliefs and practices2022-23 frequently ignored the authority of the Vedas.

8 Also,devotees often tended to project their chosen deity,either Vishnu or Shiva, as supreme. Relations withother traditions, such as Buddhism or Jainism, werealso often fraught with tension if not open traditions of devotion or bhakti need to belocated within this context. Devotional worship hada long history of almost a thousand years beforethe period we are considering. During this time,expressions of devotion ranged from the routineworship of deities within temples to ecstaticadoration where devotees attained a trance-likestate. The singing and chanting of devotionalcompositions was often a part of such modes ofworship.

9 This was particularly true of the Vaishnavaand Shaiva sects. In the course of the evolution of these forms ofworship, in many instances, poet-saints emergedas leaders around whom there developed acommunity of devotees. Further, while Brahmanasremained important intermediaries between gods anddevotees in several forms of bhakti, these traditionsalso accommodated and acknowledged women andthe lower castes , categories considered ineligiblefor liberation within the orthodox Brahmanicalframework. What also characterised traditions ofbhakti was a remarkable a different level, historians of religion oftenclassify bhakti traditions into two broad categories:saguna (with attributes) and nirguna (withoutattributes).

10 The former included traditions thatfocused on the worship of specific deities suchas Shiva, Vishnu and his avatars (incarnations) andforms of the goddess or Devi, all often conceptualisedin anthropomorphic forms. Nirguna bhakti on theother hand was worship of an abstract form of The Alvars and Nayanars of Tamil NaduSome of the earliest bhakti movements (c. sixthcentury) were led by the Alvars (literally, those whoare immersed in devotion to Vishnu) and Nayanars(literally, leaders who were devotees of Shiva). Theytravelled from place to place singing hymns in Tamilin praise of their gods.