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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 (p.ii) A British Academy Monograph Bihani Sarkar British Academy Monographs showcase work arising from: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships British Academy Newton International Fellowships Access brought to you by: Dedication Page 1 of 1 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 Dedication Bihani Sarkar (p.v) For Mayu (p.vi) Access brought to you by: Figures, Maps and Tables Page 1 of 1 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 (p.viii) Figures, Maps and Tables Bihani Sarkar Figures 1. Image of Śākti Devi 122 2. Image of Lakṣaṇā/Bhadrakāli 123 3. The Sword of Taleju in Durbar Square, Kathmandu 196 Maps 1. Goddess-sites receiving patronage, 2nd–4th centuries 44 2. Goddess-sites receiving patronage, 5th–13th centuries 117 3. The major clan-goddesses and their affiliated clans 147 Tables 1. Evidence of sponsorship issued to heroic Śāktism (4th–13th centuries) 22 2. Common plot elements between the early myths of Skanda and Durgā 107 3. Aikṣvāku/Solar line (based on the Sahyādrikhaṇda ) 161 4. Aila/Lunar line (based on the Sahyādrikhaṇda ) 162 Access brought to you by: Acknowledgements Page 1 of 2 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 (p.ix) Acknowledgements Bihani Sarkar This book represents not the culmination but rather the beginning of a long road, that I have merely been preparing for since 2005, when I first grew acquainted with Sanskrit. This preparation would not have been possible without the help of others. My gratitude firstly goes to my Sanskrit teachers, Professor Alexis Sanderson, Dr James Benson and Professor Christopher Minkowski, who introduced to a naive ingénue the wonders of a rich, and often exasperating, language and literature, and an ancient world full of promise and excitement. I am profoundly grateful to my M.Phil. and D.Phil. supervisor Professor Sanderson, who generously shared aspects of his own research, time and vast knowledge of Sanskrit at all stages of this study. No part of this book would have been possible without his inspiration and guidance during my studentship. As well as suggesting the topic of kingship and goddesses as something promising to work on, he also pointed out to me the practice of local goddess worship by kings, sharing his copious notes on individual kuladevi s. In addition to teaching Śākta ritual literature such as the Kālikāpurāṇa and the Durgāpūjātattva during my postgraduate studies, he opened my horizon to the intricacy, beauty and passion of Śākta poetry by reading with me the stotra to Durgā in the Haravijaya , and lengthy portions of the Caṇḍiśataka and the Durgāvilāsa . And lastly, through his emphasis on paying close attention to detail and being meticulous in one’s approach, he taught me the concept of scholarship as a fine craft that ought to be perfected. I am particularly grateful to Professor Rosalind O’Hanlon and the anonymous reviewer who, after a careful reading of drafts, had noted that the implicit story of the Indian kingdom and early civilization could be brought out to the forefront of the argument. I am thankful to Professor Christopher Minkowski for commenting on chapters, Dr Benjamin Spagnolo and Dr Belinda Jack for their guidance and feedback, and to Dr Somdev Vasudeva, Dr Peter Bisschop, Dr Nirajan Kafle, Professor Harunaga Isaacson and Dr Martin Delhey for kindly allowing use of their research, much of which is unpublished. This book was written during a postdoctoral fellowship granted to me by the British Academy, who supported and encouraged me throughout my fellowship. Professor Diwakar Acharya’s detailed and patient assessment as academic editor of the book, and suggestions of textual resources I was not aware of, have enriched the arguments beyond measure. Christ Church College and my friends and (p.x) colleagues there have provided me with a haven of kindness and intellectual stimulation. At a stage when I had not even considered making a book out of this research, Professor Ralph Nicholas provided Acknowledgements Page 2 of 2 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 unstinting encouragement. For his optimism and kind words, I will be ever indebted to him. To my family and friends, particularly Dr Péter Dániel Szántó—words will never be a sufficient sragdharā for their support during my ten years of working with this subject. Author’s Note Unless otherwise stated, all dates are CE. For the sake of guiding readers unfamiliar with the distinction in Sanskrit between a palatal and a dental s, Śāktism, otherwise spelt with a palatal ś throughout the book, is written as Shāktism in the title. Access brought to you by: Prologue Page 1 of 3 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 (p.xi) Prologue Bihani Sarkar arṇorājanarādhirājahṛdaye kṣiptvaikabāṇavrajaṃ cyotallohitatarpaṇād amadayac caṇḍiṃ bhujasthāyinīm | dvārālambitamālaveśvaraśiraḥpadmena yaś cāharal lilāpaṇkajasaṃgrahavyasaninīṃ caulukyarājānvayaḥ || 1 In 1151 this curious inscription in Sanskrit was commissioned by the Western Caulukya sovereign Kumārapāla. In it he boastfully commemorates subjugating Arṇorāja, a rival lord of Mālava, with a savage and bloody act. Cutting off the head of the warlord, ‘having shot his heart with a single flight of arrows’ (- hṛdaye kṣiptvaikabāṇavrajaṃ ), Kumārapāla hung it from his palace gate ( dvārālambitamālaveśvaraśiraḥ -) as a trophy to please the war-goddess, the fiery ‘Caṇḍī present in his arm’ ( caṇḍīṃ bhujasthāyinīm ). It was she who he believed had furthered his success. As a sign of his gratitude, the king ‘intoxicated her with propitiatory offerings of [his rival’s] gushing blood’ ( cyotallohitatarpaṇād amadayat ) and ‘captivated her’ ( aharat ) with Arṇorāja’s ‘lotus-like head’ ( śiraḥpadma ), given (the versifier notes with unintended humour) ‘her penchant for collecting toy-lotuses’ ( līlāpaṅkajasaṃgrahavyasaninīm ). Vividly evoked in this stanza is a particular aspect of medieval courtly life and religion, one of utmost importance to Indian kingship—the cult of the heroic goddess. This was a deity of kaleidoscopic identity. Her immediately visible form was the amazonian Durgā, represented in medieval iconography as a tempestuous buffalo-demon-slaying sovereign. She also incarnated divinities from wholly separate religious traditions. She was celebrated in Prologue Page 2 of 3 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 each of these charismatic embodiments with the greatest pomp, involving the entire populace of a kingdom and in absolute secrecy, with worship known only to a few. It was (p.xii) considered necessary to appease the deity—widely regarded to be fickle and capricious—at the onset of the military calendar in autumn, through splendid court ceremonies. Here large numbers of buffaloes, goats and sheep (and in a few cases even a human 2 ) were sacrificed for her sake, weapons and armies were blessed and infused with her energy, and kings demonstrated their fealty to her. For the medieval Indians, this ritual appeasement was believed to encapsulate the very essence of the heroic ethos. Even when certain features such as offering blood and appeasing wilder, unbridled forms of this devī were condemned by the medieval moral codes, their worship remained central to political practice rather than being relinquished. Why were Indic kingdoms loath to let go of these divinities? One reason was that the custom in medieval India required a kingdom and its ruler to be sanctified and affirmed by a powerful god and an associated cult. 3 The acceptance of the ruling clan by the local population depended greatly on the belief that an important deity, in a large number of cases a tutelary goddess who commanded a much broader following among groups other than the ruler’s, had exclusively sanctified the family in power. It was politically necessary that the continued rule of the dynasty was owing to her grace. However, the literature of the times suggests that the reason for royal goddess worship, besides the social need for inheritance and popular acceptance, was also more emotional and psychological. On the one hand, a king had the consolation of his patron- devī ’s prodigious protective powers safeguarding him through critical times, such as the loss of the throne, or on arduous journeys, a gift ancient Indic sacred and secular literature associated most particularly with a female potency. However, her protection was not permanent but remained entirely contingent on regular placation. If this pact was to be broken, legends warned she could cast one of her awful curses in displeasure, or let loose a horde of ghosts, and the consequences for king and kingdom could be dire indeed. On the other hand, a king would also turn to a devī for a profoundly intimate and revelatory experience of the basis of his authority—celestial power. The most heightened embodiment of this power was thought to be his tutelary goddess, whom he called his Śakti (‘capability/potency/ power’ in Sanskrit). Given her immanence in the world, a well-attested and widely held view, it was possible, suggested the literature, to grow close to śakti , to be able to experience her without distance. This meant that a king could transform himself into a conduit channelling the energy of the deity. (p.xiii) This belief found expression in an impressive range of rituals whereby the Śakti’s potency could be internalized by a ruler who was a committed practitioner of her creed. By performing these rituals a king believed he was transformed into a mahābala , a man of superhuman might, unvanquished in the onslaught of battle, or indeed under any duress. These interactional, sometimes ecstatic, substantiations of mystical power in the person of the king took place in special ceremonies propitiating the royal devī , taught in traditions refined in courts. Ritual strategies whereby power was invested in the king ranged from reciting secret mantras propitiating the deity, performing rites of self-identification whereby the body of the worshipper was transformed into the body of the goddess, to summoning the goddess and Prologue Page 3 of 3 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 appeasing her with blood in return for great gifts. The ecstatic experience of a Śakti’s power was often to be had by possession or through esoteric (Tantric) meditative-worship believed to grant mystical encounters with flying yoginī s. 4 In narrative too this intimate relationship between goddess and king is revealed. Some myths show the goddess appearing to a great warrior and granting boons. Some show kings losing their sense of self and speaking in the voice of the goddess. Certain legends even suggested that a king could be inhabited by śakti in dreams or trance. 5 Others cast the devī in forms palpable to men—a royal sword or amulet kept close to the monarch’s body, a Kumārī who counsels the king and plays dice with him. 6 Such was the passionate devotion aroused by the deity that a good king was even prepared to lacerate his body and offer his blood or decapitate his head to appease her, should she grow more demanding. These myths convey an important cultural belief about royal authority: in medieval India the relationship between sacred and mundane power— Devī and Rājā—was not abstract, but one of real, close and visceral engagement. It was even believed that both were mutually permeable, even different sides of one personality and occasionally fused identity. Notes: (1) Epigraphia Indica ( EI ) 1.34, v. 15. I am grateful to Alexis Sanderson for indicating this verse to me. (2) See Chapter 7, and for the Maithila Navaratra, in which a human head was offered, see the discussion of the Maithila rite in that chapter (pp. 234–58). (3) Sanderson (2005: 232 ff.; 2009: 252–73 ). (4) For the second among these, i.e. the transformation of the king into the goddess, an event that would take place during the Navarātra, see the Sāmrājylakṣmipiṭhikā discussed in Chapter 7 , pp. 262–70. For 19th-century eyewitness accounts of the Navarātra rites in Śivagaṅgai and Ramnad where the king is made interchangeable with Durgā on Navamī, see Price (1996). For tantric worship of this kind see the example of the Paramāra Naravarman discussed in the Introduction, p. 34. (5) See Chapter 5 , pp. 168–72, the first Cooch-Behar king’s experience of dream-visions of Kāmateśvarī. Consciousness occasionally permeated by śakti was presented in this and similar stories (such as those of Śivāji’s possession by Bhavānī) as a highly prestigious feature of divine kingship. When entered by the ideal projection of heroic power, the king was made cognate with her. (6) The legend of the dice-playing match between a tutelary goddess in the form of a little girl and a king is best represented by the tales of the goddess Taleju of Nepal and her relationship with the Malla kings. See Allen (1975: 18–19) for an overview of these legends in the Nepalese genealogies. (p.xiv) Access brought to you by: Introduction Page 1 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 Heroic Shāktism: The Cult of Durgā in Ancient Indian Kingship Bihani Sarkar Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780197266106 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: May 2018 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.001.0001 Introduction Bihani Sarkar DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197266106.003.0001 Abstract and Keywords This Introduction outlines the backdrop for the emergence of the cult of Durgā, characterized by a transformation of political structure from empire under the Kuṣāṇas and the Guptas to autonomous kingdoms following imperial decentralization, as villages grew into kingdoms and aspirational lineages, successors to the Guptas, seized control of territories. While describing cultic antecedents in the Kuṣāṇa empire, marking out the decline of the Guptas as the key political moment galvanizing the wider popularity of Durgā's worship, and in describing transforming social landscapes, it explains the central proposition of the book: throughout the course of these developments Heroic Śāktism was a tradition structured around controlling communal dangers and civic threat, which resonated with rising monarchies confronting continual warfare and the threats of the civilizational process. By assessing examples of lineages and the formation of their religious policies, it shows that in absorbing local divinities, many outside the Brahmanical world, Durgā and her worship became a point of interfusion between the classical ‘Sanskritic’ and the non-classical ‘āṭavika’ (forest) domains, as new kingdoms arose from a tribal base after the Gupta decline. This led to the central place of paradox in the symbolic systems of the cult and the goddess's representation of wide-ranging identities, affiliations and loyalties, which in turn became a powerful symbol of the cohesive Indian state in the medieval period. The introduction also summarizes previous research on the Goddess in kingship and sectarian absorptions described in further detail in the subsequent chapters. Keywords: State-formation, crisis, Gupta, Kuṣāṇa , civilization Introduction Page 2 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 cakre cakrasya n̄a ś rȳa na ca khalu paraśor na kṣuraprasya n̄aser yad vakram. kaitavāviṣkṛtamahiṣatanau vidviṣaty ājibhāji | protāt prāsena mūrdhnaḥ saghṛṇam abhimukhāyātayā kālarātryāḥ kalyāṇāny ānanābjaṃ sṛjatu tad asṛjo dhāraȳa vakritaṃ vaḥ || Caṇḍiśataka , ‘Hundred Verses to Caṇḍi’, 53. Not for the edge of the discus Nor for the edge of axe nor dart Nor for rapier did her face flinch While the Foe 1 in guile had conjured Up a buffalo’s form as he made war; But at the ‘stream/edge’ ( dhārā ) of gushing blood Spurting from his lance-riven head Before her eyes did it become Contorted in aversion— May that lotus-face of Kālarātri [Durgā] Shower on you felicities. 2 Aims This book tells the history of the relationship between sacred and mundane power between the 3rd and 12th centuries as it unfolded in Indian courts. It is about the story of Durgā, the buffalo- demon-slaying deity dear to rulers, which illuminates an entire belief system concerning political power: warrior-centric goddess worship, henceforth called heroic Śāktism. (p.2) Fundamentally, the slow development of this deity cannot be disentangled from the narrative of the state in pre-modern India. Heroic Śāktism unfolded within a social landscape of conquest and competition, dependent on a monsoon economy in which harvests were unreliable and the appeasement of gods in control of environmental crises, foremost among whom was the goddess, was paramount. Its emergence is imbricated with the imperatives of state: military expansion, the rise of local lineages, the assertion of regional cultic identities, the authorization of territorial ownership and the development of the regular ritual life of kingdoms. All these political processes involved Durgā at their very core. She was the prime symbol that communities used to articulate the shifts they underwent during the fluctuations of expansion and consolidation. Within the story of ancient Indian kingship, two critical transitions overlapped with the rise of heroic Śāktism: the decline of the war-god Skanda as a military symbol and the concomitant rise of the early Indian kingdom. The first shift coincided with a transference of the rhetoric of kingship once strongly linked with the older war-god to the cultural narratives of the goddess. This process consolidated her political imagery and broadened its cultural resonance like no other. The second led to the association of indigenous deities in possession of territories with Durgā and thereby the unification of small states into a broader conception of civilization. Both transitions are interconnected. Skanda was the symbol of empire in its heyday, which had lasted up to the time of the Kuṣāṇas. But from Gupta times, the hegemony of empire was confronted by the need for a more expansive political canvas encompassing upcoming aboriginal states and their symbols of faith. From Samudragupta’s time comes an official declaration of the inclusion of, among a series of rulers in the north, south, east and frontiers of India, the āṭavikarāja s, or ‘forest kings’, within the empire, the restitution of disempowered royal lines, Introduction Page 3 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 and also assertions of the donative rights of local chieftains. 3 These declarations of local power- players tell us that the notion of empire was changing to mean something more expansive, accommodating the rights and authority of regional kingdoms. As Gupta empire declined and northern India became a crucible for rising polities forged by independent lineages, imperial symbolism began to transmute in a profoundly radical manner. Once the unchallenged metaphor for charismatic power, Skanda, a male war-god, became eclipsed by smaller goddesses with control over the āṭavika lands. They in turn were made into parts of a larger identity, Durgā, whose very nature was, like the transforming empire, patterned by difference and even contradiction. Durgā in one sense was the most potent (p.3) image of the new socio-cultural map at the dusk of ancient Indian empire, in which regional actors and polities were fashioning their identities in active conversation with a notion of wider civilization. Though she had come into being in the womb of the great empires run by the Kuṣāṇas and the Guptas, she grew into a more expressive symbol for the ‘new world’ and its spirit of entrepreneurship at their disintegration. The Scholarly Tradition The lengthened historical perspective in this book of the goddess’s slow transformation and its position within the broader history of Indian state-formation are indebted to observations made in scholarship on India since the 19th century. Even in colonial India, the early traditions of the goddess in empowering heroic practice had endured and were visibly evident to observers. British ethnographic accounts of the warrior Rajputs had noted in descriptions of religion that ‘the principal deity of the Rajputs is the goddess Devi or Durga in her more terrible form as the goddess of war. Their swords were sacred to her, and at the Dasahra festival they worshipped their swords and other weapons of war and their horses.’ 4 This role continued to excite scholars of religious traditions in South Asia for the next hundred years. 5 Their studies dealing with the life of small medieval kingdoms in Rajasthan, Nepal, Orissa, Bengal and Tamil Nadu had pointed out the charismatic goddess involved in all their processes, and that the ruler and the royal family shared a mysterious connection with this powerful if enigmatic deity shrouded behind private shrines and private practices. They had also pointed out that one of the key roles served by the goddess’s public rituals within the regular functioning of kingship was to consolidate social structure. Among these studies, Burton Stein in an influential article had explained the importance of the south Indian Navarātra, the principal ritual of the goddess, in consecrating the power of the Vijayanagara kings. 6 This function of blessing rulers continued until very recently. Even in the mid-20th century, Taleju, the presiding goddess of Nepal, in her incarnated form the Kumārī, a pre-pubescent girl from the Buddhist Newar gold-making clan, was believed to sanctify the Nepalese king and she was worshipped with (p.4) due importance. Since it was still a living tradition, its particular place within the constitution of Nepalese kingship could be studied in great depth by a number of scholars. Taleju, whose spirit was made to fill the Kumārī every Mahāṣṭami, was of paramount importance to Nepalese kingship. Her mantra was, in the words of Allen, a ‘mark of legitimate succession to the throne—rulers who failed to receive the mantra were regarded as liable to lose their kingdoms’. 7 The significance of Taleju is visually manifest in the architecture in Durbar Square in Kathmandu and Pāṭan, where her public form as Mahiṣāsuramardinī or Cāmuṇḍā leaps forth from nearly every tympanum in the courtyards, both of the Kumārī palace and in the main courtyard at Pāṭan. Here one is greeted, even today, by a garland of buffalo entrails offered to her festooning the entrance. Introduction Page 4 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 That goddess worship formed a common practice among Nepalese rulers as early as the 11th century is attested in records of Lakṣmīkāmadeva, a king of Kantipur, 8 and in the narratives of the Malla kings. Oral traditions claim that Taleju was a Maithila import. These traditions, seeking to establish dynastic connections between the Nepalese Malla and the Kārṇāṭa lineages of Mithilā, relate Taleju’s rise in Mithilā among the Kārṇāṭas. 9 They say that she was a Tantric goddess who had revealed herself to the founding ancestor of the Maithila Kārṇāṭas, Nānyadeva, in a yantra contained in a casket in the Sarayū river and had caused the building of the Kārṇāṭa capital Simraun Gadh in one night. Under Harisiṃhadeva, Simraun Gadh fell when attacked by the Turkish Ghiyās-ud-din-Tughlaq in 1324. The ruling dynasty is said to have been forced to flee Mithilā and take shelter with Rudra Malla of Bhaktapur in Nepal, the country of their initial forays, 10 eventually permanently settling there. Harisiṃhadeva brought with them their tutelary deity Taleju. When in Nepal, the legends report, the first place Harisiṃhadeva established her was Bhaktapur, and her principal officiants in Nepal became the Rājopādhyāya brāhmaṇa s of that city. 11 Taleju was appropriated by the Malla dynasty, the traditional rulers of Nepal, and her worship at the Nepalese Navarātra came to be associated with Newar Vajrayāna practice and esoterized. On the other hand, even before the purported arrival of this goddess on Nepalese soil, devīpūjā appears to have formed an integral part of Nepalese royal practice—Kumārī worship was possibly a long-standing Vajrayāna, specifically Newari, custom that was incorporated by the Mallas when they sought credence among the Newars. 12 (p.5) Heroic Śāktism endowed even a village with the myth of imperial structure. As late as the 1970s, social hierarchies were legitimized during the Navarātra within the micro-unit of the Bengali village. Ralph Nicholas in his careful study of religious life in the village of Kelomal notes how the social fabric of the village, what he calls the ‘sacrificial polity’, comprising ‘the social assembly of sacrificers and caste-specialized workers’, was ‘ritually enacted and the authority of the magnate ... legitimized’ during the annual village Durgā Pūjā. 13 The ruling zamindār family and other members of the social strata had their role and place in village society affirmed under the eyes of the goddess, even though, Nicholas writes, ‘Bengal villages, particularly after independence, have become politically dynamic, with factions playing out their rivalries in the guise of competing political parties ... In the face of such radical changes, the village under study here in the late 1960s, still sustained the framework of the older social order.’ The close association between the goddess’s festival and the sanctification of zamindārī power in Bengal traces its roots to the 16th century, 14 but the ultimate belief system out of which this association stemmed went far further back in culture, to the mystical and energizing connection between the goddess and heroic power that permeated ancient Indic cultural consciousness. That the roots of this connection lay far earlier in Indian history, in the Sanskrit and Prakrit literature emerging from the classical period, had not escaped Sanskritists. It was pointed out in instances of Sanskrit poetic literature by Baldissera in the Kathāsaritsāgara , and by Sanderson both in the Tantric textual corpus of Orissa 15 and in the developmental trajectory of medieval Śaivism. 16 Indeed, Sanderson’s works on early medieval Tantric traditions and their rise have been invaluable in revealing the elaborate intellectual discourse about the ‘hidden’ nature of the goddess. His work has shown the critical place of antinomianism within Śākta cults and its effect on the figuration of the goddess herself and the concomitant worship of the practitioner. In particular, his writings have shown how the presence of such antinomianism led to tensions between the goddess-tradition and the dharmically ordered social matrix in which it was embedded. Introduction Page 5 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 The landmark study of the early warrior goddess cult is by Yokochi (2004). Working through a range of materials with emphasis placed on an early recension of the Skandapurāṇa , Yokochi provided evidence that the legend of the goddess Kauśiki Vindhyavāsinī contained in the oldest version of that work represented the stage of Durgā’s history, around the 7th century, when (p. 6) she had been elevated from a formerly minor martial goddess of the Vindhya mountains into a supreme ruler of the gods. On the basis of the portrayal of the goddess in this text, she concluded that the origins of the deity lay in ‘the social segment centred on kings and the warrior class’ (154). To Yokochi I am indebted not only for the historical emphasis on the Vindhyavāsinī legend in the old Skandapurāṇa , but also for my methodology. In this book I have chosen to investigate a broad and eclectic range of sources, as reliance on a single text, or a single genre such as epigraphy or mythology, would provide a very limited picture of the cult of the goddess in kingship. Since we are concerned with a belief regarding royal power, its expressions were culturally manifold, reflected in art, literature and rituals of the age, and tied into the political practices of the time. The early literature in Sanskrit and Prakrit is particularly emphasized and investigated in depth, for, despite its wealth of detail, it is often neglected in contemporary studies of royal goddess cults. Though at first sight this corpus of genres, spanning a wide period and locale, appears rather dispersed and haphazard, on close reading it would be seen to articulate a consistent narrative regarding a commonly held cultural perception and practice. In epigraphy we find a reflection of an aspect of the association between kings and goddesses that was official, in Purāṇic legends the scriptural, in poetry the personal, and in ritual the practical. I am also deeply indebted to the work of Sanskritists for the interpretation of myth as sources of history. Among various sources, there is a large body of medieval legends on goddesses and kings in various Purāṇic sources popularized in several recensions in different parts of India and in the vernaculars. Many among such myths contain the memory of historical events that were transmitted and preserved through oral traditions before being committed to writing. They may be seen to reflect, or symbolically depict, processes of actual religious transformations. The myths of the Skandapurāṇa have been fruitfully studied in this way by Granoff, who finds Śaiva myths in this work to reflect the early absorption of local cults and deities by Śaivism in its nascent form, providing thereby a glimpse into the roots of Śaivism in heterodox cults. 17 Similarly, Bakker too sees the Vārāṇasīmāhātmya myth of the Skandapurāṇa , which eulogizes and narrates the history of the great sacred city of Vārāṇasī, as ‘reflecting the earliest stage of a process in which the Śaiva religion transformed what originally might have been mainly a commercial centre’. 18 In other words, myths can be seen, as described by Bakker, as ‘religion in actu’. 19 They were used to explain and justify changes in religions. When a new deity was (p.7) absorbed by another sect, a legend developed to narrativize this process. Similarly, when certain sites acquired importance as pilgrimage destinations, tales developed to explain why that happened, and to establish the primordial connection of a certain god—Śiva, Viṣṇu or Śakti—to that site. I have interpreted the numerous narratives of kingdom formation evoking a goddess as stories that encode such processes. They preserve the conceptual germs of older forms of worship connected to kingdoms before their adoption of a Brahmanical superstructure, and reflect the crucial role played by the older goddess cults in the ritual sanctification of sovereignty. The Goddess and the ‘New World’ For the imperial Kuṣāṇas and the Guptas, the goddess, like their border of forest kingdoms, was a peripheral deity, essentially monolithic in personality and, though linked to the metaphysics of Introduction Page 6 of 33 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use. Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 July 2020 death, only vicariously linked to the pragmatic necessity of war. For the kaleidoscopic ‘new world’ born from the Gupta demise, the goddess was a much more centrally positioned, indefinably protean and pragmatic symbol. Her place within the āṭavika lands that were now being empowered was much more integral than it had been under the successive Iranian and Vaiṣṇava ideologies of the previous two regimes. This was because the concept of sovereignty as a woman with martial and also fecund potency who was to be appeased for protection was a belief traditionally cherished by many of the non-Brahmanical groups in power in those lands. Among those tribes to have left us epigraphical records from the period are the Orissan Śulkīs, a formerly tribal monarchical lineage, who swore allegiance in their inscriptions to Stambheśvari, a regal deity thought to protect the tribe. An example of a tribal goddess whose uninterrupted worship was thought to confer continued success on the clan, Stambheśvari was the patron- deity initially of Tuṣṭikara 20 in the 6th century and then of the Śulkīs of the Dhenkanal-Talcher region of Orissa between the 6th and 9th centuries. The goddess was important to the predominantly tribal area around Sonpur. In fact, she is still worshipped by various communities such as the Dehuris of the Kondh tribe in the Dhenkanal-Talcher area in wooden posts or stones planted outside the doors of their homes, under the name Khambeśvari. 21 The dynasty faithful to her for the longest period of time, the Śulkīs, who (p.8) ruled Dhenkanal between the 6th and 7th centuries, originated either (as suggested by Kulke) from the Śaulika tribe, 22 or (as suggested by Sircar) from the similarly named Śuklīs of Midnapore district in West Bengal. 23 By 554 they had grown from obscure origins in the east to become a considerable power n