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Puranic Texts from Kashmir

Vitasta and River Ceremonials in the Nilamata Purana

Dr Mahesh Sharma is a Reader in History at Punjab University in Chandigarh, India. He was a Fulbright Senior Fellow at the Centre for India and South Asia, UCLA in 2007–08. Address: Department of History, Punjab University, Chandigarh 160014, India. [e-mail: replymahesh{at}gmail.com]

Focusing on the western Himalayan provinces of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, this article argues that the Indian hagiographic texts of the Puranas should be understood as a nuanced literature that sought to effect a paradigm shift in liturgy and praxis, fusing polity and religion, largely in contravention to the earlier Vedic–Upanishadic texts and their commentaries, but also building on them. Emphasis on local Sanskrit literature, specifically the Nilamata Purana, which uses popular iconographies of river goddesses, served many centuries ago to reconstruct the geography of the area within the wider context of the subcontinental sacred geography.

Keeping within the Puranic tradition, the article focuses on the rituals and ceremonials associated with rivers, while also charting the process by which regional pilgrim centres were formed on their banks, devising a sacred space parallel to the subcontinental cosmos. This reinforces the logic of the sacred river, the worshipped deity, as a process by which brahmanic dominance was asserted in the peripheral areas of early India, or ideologically and politically contested regions such as Kashmir. In the sacrality of the river Vitasta, Brahmanism as an ideology reasserts itself by restating the tradition in relation to its sacral past, creating a new sacred space and devising a sacred icon to reclaim this particular geography for the devout Brahmanas.

Key Words: geography • hegemony • iconography • Kashmir • Kumbha mela • pilgrimage • Prayaga • Puranas • ritual • river-goddesses • rivers • sacred spaces • Vitasta • water festivals

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