Purāṇa is a general term used to refer to a large number of religious texts, most of them composed in Sanskrit, which defy ready description, classification, authorship, or dating. Despite this obvious difficulty, efforts to assign authorship, classify, date, and describe them have been made both within the Hindu tradition and outside the tradition by modern scholars. This essay is an effort to present the indigenous concepts of the Purāṇa and to provide a brief overview of modern scholarship on the Purāṇas.
Indigenous Concepts of the Purāṇa
Traditionally, Vyāsa is believed to be the author of all Purāṇas. The son of Parāśara, Vyāsa, also known as Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana, was born an adult and had direct access to perfect knowledge of everything past, present, and future. Vyāsa was also the editor of the Veda, which he had divided into four parts: Ṛg, Yajur, Sāma, and Atharva. Authorship by such a superhuman person elevates the Purāṇas to an infallible status and endows them with a coherent meaning. The disparate texts themselves include a variety of contents, which in fact are not organized coherently. However, the idea that such a powerful personality as Vyāsa is the single author of these many texts encourages the readers and listeners trained in the culture to see a coherent meaning throughout despite apparent inconsistencies. Tradition also speaks of the Purāṇa as a broad genre, including the epic texts. While it is generally stated that there are eighteen Purāṇas and eighteen more Upapurāṇas or minor Purāṇas, the fact is that there are a lot more than thirty-six texts. It is difficult to list all the names under which the various texts are known in different parts of India or to arrive at a firm textual boundary to each text. Such textual flexibility of the Purāṇas was accepted in the tradition with no anxiety. No one seriously concerned themselves with minor variations between one version of a text and the other or for that matter even when the variations were huge, as is well known in the case of Skanda Purāṇa.
In contrast, the Vedas, included in the class of śruti (revealed texts), are considered fixed, unalterable, and beyond translation. They were rarely put into writing but were memorized with meticulous care to their word order, accent, and stress. The Hindu tradition speaks of the Purāṇas as texts that expand on the Vedas and considers them complements of each other. The Purāṇas renew themselves and adapt to the changing times by including new material and new meanings, while the Vedas keep the religion unified and authorized under their inflexible verbal power. This allowed Hinduism a flexibility unavailable for the religions of the book, such as Christianity or Islam, which depend upon one single source, the Bible or the Qur’ān, for both divine word and meaning.
The interdependence of the Purāṇas and the Veda is best stated in the following frequently quoted verses, which occur in many Purāṇas (for instance, in Vāyu 1.200) and the Mahābhārata as well: “The Brahmin who learns his four Vedas along with their Upaniṣads and ancillary texts does not become a learned man until he learns the Purāṇas. The Veda has to be expanded with the aid of the epics and the Purāṇas. The Veda itself fears a man of little learning lest he should hurt it.”1
The complementarity of the Vedas and the Purāṇas is crucial for an understanding of the text culture of Brahminic Hinduism. It is as if the two inseparable components of language—the sound of an utterance and its meaning, the signifier and the signified—have been split apart and located in two separate groups of texts perceived as one unit. The Veda is considered to be śabdapradhāna, that which is important for its sound, and therefore untranslatable and unchangeable. The Purāṇa is arthapradhāna, that which is important for its meaning. This classification allows the Purāṇas to be told in many different ways as long their meaning is kept unaltered. Their meaning is authorized by Vyāsa, but the actual text in which Purāṇas are written may vary depending on the choice of the paurāṇika. Such freedom in reworking the texts gave modern scholars the impression that the Purāṇas are loose and disorganized, where any paṇḍita with a modicum of Sanskrit changed and added sections as he pleased. Despite these allegations, the Purāṇas are a genre with well-recognized stylistic features, understood and respected by the paurāṇikas and the listening public. The popularity of these texts, as evidenced by a huge number of manuscript copies disseminated all over India and the adaptations and translations into many regional languages, attests to the widespread community approval of these texts. The Purāṇas were also rewritten in many languages with alterations and embellishments appropriate to the language into which they were rewritten. The fifteenth-century rewriting of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa by the Telugu poet Bammera Potana illustrates the transformations a Sanskrit Purāṇa could undergo when retold in a regional language.2
What the Purāṇas Say about Themselves
As highly intertextual and self-conscious texts, the Purāṇas themselves are a useful source to learn about the Purāṇas. The Viṣṇu (3.6.15f.), Agni (271.11ff), Vāyu (61.55ff), and Brahmāṇḍa (2.35.63ff) Purāṇas say that Vyāsa composed a Purāṇa Saṃhitā.3 He gave it to his disciple Romaharṣaṇa, who in turn gave it to his six disciples, Sumati Ātreya, Akṛtavraṇa Kāśyapa, Agnivarcas Bhāradvāja, Mitrāyu Vāsiṣṭha, Sāvarṇi Saumadatti, and Suśarman Śāmśapāyana. The Matsya Purāṇa (53.4) says that in the beginning there was only one Purāṇa of one hundred crore (ten million) verses, and it still exists in the world of gods. For the benefit of the humans, Viṣṇu assumes the form of Vyāsa in every Dvāpara Yuga and proclaims it in a shorter version of four hundred thousand verses in eighteen texts.4
In a culture where the Purāṇas and the Veda are always linked together and the Veda is considered the highest authority, it is interesting to see how the Purāṇas relate themselves to the Veda. In several Purāṇas there is a statement which says that the Purāṇas were created earlier than the Veda (for instance, Brahmāṇḍa 1.40-41, Matsya 3.3-4, Vāyu 1.54). R.C. Hazra suggests that this blatantly anachronistic statement makes perfect sense if we take the word “Purāṇa” not to mean the Purāṇa texts as we know them but in its etymological meaning, that is, ancient stories and legends, for such stories were told during Vedic sacrifices. He brings in evidence for his suggestion from the Atharva Veda, the earliest text to mention the word “Purāṇa,” which says that chants, songs, meters, and Purāṇa are leftovers (ucchiṣṭa) from the sacrifice along with the sacrificial formulas.5 However, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (3.12) says that Brahmā uttered the four Vedas first, one after the other, with each of his four mouths and afterwards spoke the Purāṇas with all four of his mouths in unison.6
The Purāṇa as a Distinct Genre: Five Distinguishing Marks of a Purāṇa
Amarasimha, the fifth-century lexicographer defined the Purāṇa as one that has five marks (purāṇam pañcalakṣaṇam), and his commentators add an explanation as to what constitutes the five marks, lakṣaṇas. These are: sarga, the story of the creation of the universe; pratisarga, the secondary creation or recreation of the universe after its dissolution; vaṃśa, genealogies of the gods, the sun, the moon, and other beings; manvantara, the period oftime when a particular Manu from among the fourteen Manus in every kalpa (see below) is in charge; and vaṃśānucarita, the history of the kings in the ruling dynasty during the particular manvantara in question. The significance of the pañcalakṣaṇa is generally misunderstood among modern scholars who thought they were the five main topics that a Purāṇa should cover and were puzzled why such important subjects do not occupy much space in some of the Purāṇas and were nowhere to be found in others. Vans Kennedy was the first to observe that these five lakṣaṇas are by no means the principal subject of the Purāṇas.7 P.V. Kane agrees that these five topics occupy less than 3 percent of the extant Mahāpurāṇas, but their significance according to him consists in marking the Purāṇas as distinct from the epics. Apparently the line of demarcation between these two genres was rather thin before the fifth century.8 An entirely different interpretation is suggested by Stephan Levitt,9 who says that the standard understanding of the phrase “pañcalakṣaṇa” in Amarasiṃha’s dictionary was due to a misunderstanding and that it meant “having five different descriptions,” itihasā, ānvīkṣikī, daṇḍantti, ākhyāyikā, and purāṇa itself. I suggest that the five lakṣaṇas serve to indicate the time and place within which the events recorded in the Purāṇa texts occur, and so there is no reason why they should occupy a major portion of the Purāṇa text. The significance of the pañcalakṣaṇa is that they ideologically transform whatever content is incorporated into the Purāṇas into a Brahminic scheme of time and place.10
Purāṇic Time and Space
Events included in a Purāṇa are assumed to have happened at a particular point in a downward spiraling, circular, repetitive time frame. Purāṇic time is divided into four yugas, Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara, and Kali. Each of these ages is smaller than the preceding until finally the shortest age, Kali, ends in a dissolution (pralaya) of the universe, leaving room for a new cycle to begin. Purāṇic time is measured in divine years, where each divine year is equal to 360 human years and each divine day is equal to a human year of 360 days. The four yugas, Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara, and Kali each last for 4000, 3000, 2000, and 1000 divine years, respectively, and each of these ages have a transition time before the next one begins, lasting respectively for 800, 600, 400, and 200 divine years. Together the cycle of four yugas—a mahāyuga—lasts for a period of 12,000 divine years. A thousand such mahāyugas is a kalpa, which is a fabulous total of 4320 million human years. The decreasing number of years of each yuga in a four-yuga cycle also symbolizes a decrease in the virtues and excellence of human beings. A story from the Varāha Purāṇa (32.2-5) popularly retold is that Dharma, in the form of a bull, walks on all four legs in the Kṛta Yuga, on three legs in the Tretā, on two legs in the Dvāpara, and on one leg in the present age of Kali. Kṛta is the best of the ages, when human beings live long lives of honesty and happiness in harmony with divine law, the all-pervasive dharma. During the Tretā Yuga human beings need laws prescribing social behavior and a king to maintain the laws. Dvāpara is characterized by a confusion of social and religious conventions. Vyāsa is born to arrange the Vedic hymns into four Vedas and compose the Purāṇas. The Kali Yuga represents the lowest level to which humans deteriorate, where men and women lose their moral standards, Brahmins fall from their level of purity and acquire Shudra habits. Shudras, in turn, attain kingship and pretend to be Kshatriyas. Atheists, such as Buddhists and Jainas, emerge and misdirect people onto wrong paths. The yuga ends with Viṣṇu incarnating himself to dissolve all creation, after which a new cycle begins all over. This concept of circular, spiraling, and deteriorating time created by the Purāṇas is their single most important contribution to Hindu civilization. Hindus still calculate their ritual calendar based on Purāṇic time.
The concept of space in the Purāṇas is equally complex. Space is conceived as the egg of Brahmā (brahmāṇḍa), made up of seven concentric spheres. Seven successively higher heavens where the gods and immortal beings live are situated above the earth, and seven lower worlds where demons live are below. The earth, on which human beings live, is located in the middle. On earth the central location is Jambūdvīpa, surrounded concentrically by six other circular lands separated by seven seas: one each of salt water, milk, ghi, curds, liquor, sugarcane juice, and fresh water. Holy Mount Meru rises in the center of Jambūdvīpa. Four lesser mountains support Meru from the four directions: Mandara from the east, Gandhamādana from the south, Vipula from the west, and Supārśva from the north. A godly city sits on top of Meru where Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva dwell, worshiped by mortals and lesser gods. On the sides of the great mountain in the four major and the four intermediate directions lie the cities of the lesser gods. The chiefs of those directions are: Indra in the east, Agni in the southeast, Yama in the south, Nirṛti in the southwest, Varuṇa in the west, Vāyu in the northwest, Soma in the north, and Īśāna in the northeast. The river Gaṅgā falls from the heavens and passes through the lands of Jambūdvīpa. One of these lands is Bhāratavarṣa, the ancient name for the land of India, home of the Bharatas, named for the legendary progenitor of the Indian people. Bhāratavarṣa is where proper rituals are performed, and therefore it is called karmabhūmi, the land of ritual. Apparently this is where Purāṇic time of the four yugas, dissolution and recreation, operates. “The Purāṇic picture of space is complex, highly organized and symmetrical. Envisioned is a three-dimensional maṇḍala with the land of Bharata near the center … The whole is an imaginative vision of the shape of the cosmos which clearly locates the land of India in the center of the universe.”11
Hindu ritual performance is oriented to time and space based on the Purāṇic concepts. For instance, a Brahmin householder performing a ritual in India is likely to say that he is performing the ritual in the first quarter of the yuga of Kali, during the reign of Manu Vaivasvata. He will mention the particular name of the year in the sixty-year cycle and the fortnight, light (when the moon is waxing) or dark (when the moon is waning) as the case may be, and mention the name of the day according to the Purāṇic calendar. He will then continue by mentioning his location in terms of Purāṇic space in the land of Jambūdvīpa, in the area called Bhāratavarṣa, and in the country called Bharatakhaṇḍa (if he is in the south, he will orient himself as being south of Mount Meru), and finally he will conclude the chant by saying that he is performing the ritual in his own house with his wife and children.
The Number of Purāṇas and Their Classification
As mentioned earlier, tradition accepts that there are eighteen Purāṇas. The fact, however, is that there are many more, so many that the number one comes up with depends on how one counts. A verse in the oral tradition about the Purāṇas serves as a mnemonic device to list the eighteen Purāṇas.
bha-dvayam ma-dvayam caiva
bra-trayam va-catuṣṭayam
a-nā-pa-liṅ-ga-kū-skāni
Purāṇāni pracaksyate
Two begin with a “bha,” and two more with a “ma.”
Three begin with a “bra,” four with a “va,”
and one each with “a” “na,” “pa’, “lin,” “ga,” “ku,” and “ska.”
That’s how the names of the Purāṇas go, they say.
The Purāṇas listed in this verse with their first syllable are: Bhāgavata, Bhaviṣya, Matsya, Mārkaṇḍeya, Brahmā, Brahmavaivarta, Brāhmaṇḍa, Viṣṇu, Varāha, Vāmana, Vāyu, Agni, Nārada, Padma, Liṅga, Garuḍa, Kūrma, and Skanda.
These eighteen are considered mahā- or great Purāṇas, and a further list of eighteen are called upa- or minor Purāṇas. The convention of listing eighteen Purāṇas in each group is well established, even though there are discrepancies as to which Purāṇas are included. Some Purāṇas themselves include such a list, and Ludo Rocher observes that Vāyu Purāṇa begins a list of eighteen but enumerates only sixteen; it introduces Ādi Purāṇa to the list but omits Liṅga Purāṇa and, according to one reading, also Agni. The Bṛhaddharma Purāṇa announces eighteen but only lists seventeen and, furthermore, considers Nārada and Vāmana Purāṇas, which are normally onsidered Mahāpurāṇas, as Upapurāṇas.12 As may be expected, we find no uniformly accepted list of eighteen Upapurāṇas either.
Classifying texts into mahā and upa appears to be a convenient device to organize the texts in a schematic order. The prefix mahā—does not necessarily give the text a greater authority, nor the prefix upa- relegate the text to a lower order. Since the name Purāṇa itself elevates the text to a level of infallibility, the question whether a particular text is called a Mahāpurāṇa or an Upapurāṇa does not appear to be relevant to determine its status. The relative status of these texts, actually, seems to be highly contextual, depending on the area and community in which the text is presented. For instance, James Nye notes vastly divergent opinions in the Purāṇa texts: we find statements saying that the Upapurāṇas are only appendixes (khila) or a subvariety (upabheda) of the Mahāpurāṇas, while the Parāśara Purāṇa goes to the other extreme to state that the Upapurāṇas are greater than the Mahāpurāṇas.13 Furthermore, there are many highly respected texts called Māhātmyas such as Gayā Māhātmya which describe the religious power of a location, temple, or a river. Some of these texts are found as independent Purāṇa texts, and some as parts of a Purāṇa such as Skanda Purāṇa. Finally, one finds some Upapurāṇas claiming the status of Mahāpurāṇas. Narasimha Purāṇa appears in the list of Mahāpurāṇas in Padma and Bhaviṣya Purāṇas, while Devibhāgavata Purāṇa asserts that it is the real Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the other Bhāgavata Purāṇa is merely an Upapurāṇa. V.R. Ramachandra Dikshitar considers that the classification of mahā and upa a later development,14 and Rocher suggests that “the distinction between mahāpurāṇas and upapurāṇas is not as historically important as it is generally made to be.”15
Dialogical Structure of the Purāṇas: The Purāṇa Ethos
The Purāṇas are framed in a dialogical structure. They are invariably set as a conversation between an interlocutor and a respondent. For instance, in the Nārada Purāṇa, Romaharṣaṇa tells Śaunaka and other ṛṣis the story that was originally told to Nārada by Sanaka. In the Brahmā Purāṇa, many ṛṣis attend a twelve-year sattra yāga, where sūta Romaharṣaṇa arrives. The ṛṣis ask him: “How did this world come to happen, the moving and the stable beings, the gods, the antigods, the gandharvas, the yaksas, the snakes, and the demons?” (Brahmā Purāṇa 1.18). In answer to that question, the sūta narrates the Brahmā Purāṇa. Similarly, in the Varāha Purāṇa, sūta is the narrator of an original story narrated by Viṣṇu to Pṛthvī, the goddess of the earth, when she asks Visnu to tell her how he, in the form of a boar, Varāha, saved her from the demon. Again in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, sūta narrates what Parāśara (Vyāsa) said when Maitreya asks him: “I am interested in knowing from you how the world has come into existence and how it will be in the future” (104). The atmosphere of a Purāṇa narrative is set in such questions, which are answered by an all-knowing sage. The readers/listeners perceive the answers as being given for the benefit of the world. In this framework, which creates an elevated tone and authenticity, the topics discussed acquire an aura of infallibility.
The topics covered in the Purāṇas, as described by Hazra, include:
glorifications of one or more of the sectarian deities like Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva … numerous chapters on new myths, and legends, and multifarious topics concerning religion and society, for instance, duties of the different castes and orders of life, sacraments, customs in general, eatables and non-eatables, duties of women, funeral rites and ceremonies, impurity on birth and death, sins, penances and expiations, purification of things, names and descriptions of hells, results of good and bad deeds … pacification of unfavourable planets, donations of various types, dedication of wells, tanks, and gardens, worship, devotional vows … places of pilgrimage, consecration of temples and images of gods, initiation, and various mystic rites and practices.16
Sūta: The Teller of Stories
Sūta is ubiquitous as the teller of the Purāṇa stories. He is called Romaharṣaṇa because he made his listeners’ hair (roman/loman) stand on end with his engaging narrative skill. Skanda Purāṇa says that Romaharṣaṇa’s own hair stood on its end when he heard the stories from Vyāsa.17 It is well known that sūta Ugraśravas, the son of Romaharṣaṇa (or Lomaharṣaṇa), narrated the story of the Mahābhārata to Śaunaka and other sages in the forest. Other references to sūta seem to relate to a caste of people who have a high position as senior confidants of the king and are very learned even though they do not have the right to study the Veda. Manu (Manusmṛti 10.11.17) clearly states that sūta is of a mixed-caste origin from a Kshatriya father and Brahmin mother. Amarasimha’s dictionary lists the word “sūta” twice. It is defined, first, as a charioteer (Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana 517), and the second time as a son born of a Brahmin woman by a Kshatriya father (662). The appearance of sūta in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas has given rise to a speculation among modern scholars whether the Purāṇas were originally non-Brahmin oral texts later appropriated by Brahmins. But Kane quotes Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra (3.7.29) to distinguish sūta of the Purāṇas from the mixed-caste sūta.18 R.N. Dandekar states that the narrator Sūta of the Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata is the name of a person and should not be confused with the word that indicates a caste of charioteers.19 Rocher quotes two parallel passages from the Vāyu and the Padma Purāṇas which state that sūta’s special duty is to preserve the genealogies of gods, sages, and glorious kings displayed in the epics and the Purāṇas and, after some discussion, concludes that the status of sūta cannot be ascertained definitively. “Either one tries the synchronic approach: the mixed caste element explains how the sūta could simultaneously fulfill a kṣatriya function, that of a charioteer and equerry, and a purely Brahminic role, that of bard and singer. Or one looks for a diachronic explanation: the sūta as the son of a kṣatriya father and a Brahmin mother is a later application of the term only, and it was not that of the Vāyu and Padma texts …”20
Purāṇas in the Popular Understanding of the Hindus
It is generally stated that the Purāṇas are meant for the benefit of women and Shudras who are not eligible to receive instruction from the Vedas. However, the popularity of the Purāṇas suggests that these texts were read/listened to by all Hindus, including the highest caste, Brahmins. Scholars prided themselves on having mastered all the Purāṇas, and poets listed the Purāṇas as an important item in their education. The Purāṇas were read/performed in temples and other religious locations. A class of paurāṇika performers made it their profession to perform these texts, and they were patronized by kings, local chiefs, elders of society, and temple authorities. For the average listener, the Purāṇas tell the stories of gods, goddesses, demons, and devotees and the stories of why sacred places became sacred. They also contain instructions for various rituals and pilgrimages to holy places. As a repertoire of stories, the Purāṇas are unrivalled. The worldviews most characteristic of Hindus are almost completely derived from the teachings of the Purāṇas. Their views of the creation, protection, and dissolution of the universe, the gods who are responsible for these activities, their views of time and space, cosmological perceptions, ideas of good and evil, karma and rebirth, the sacred and profane, are all derived from the Purāṇas. The most popular stories known to every Hindu about gods and demons are from the Purāṇas, even though no one, other than Purāṇa scholars, cares to remember which Purāṇas tell what story. All the Purāṇas merge in the memory of the average Hindu into one single group of texts. It is from the Purāṇas that Hindus know that Lord Nārāyaṇa sleeps on the milky ocean, on the thousand-hooded snake, Ādiśeṣa, and that his consort Laksmī, the goddess of prosperity, sits by his side serving him. From Viṣṇu’s navel rises a lotus out of which emanates the four-faced god, Brahmā, who creates the world. The Vedas come out of his four mouths, and his consort, Sarasvatī, is the goddess of speech. Nārāyaṇa as Viṣṇu takes avatāras, which include the fish, tortoise, boar, man-lion, dwarf, Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, and Buddha, with a final avatāra of Kalkin yet to come. Again, it is from the Purāṇas that the Hindus know all the stories about Śiva, who lives in the cremation ground or alternatively on the peaks of the Himālayas, wears snakes as ornaments, and is naked except for the skin of an elephant around his loins. His vehicle is a bull and his consort is Pārvatī, the daughter of the Himālayas. The Purāṇas also tell the stories of the great goddess Devi, mother of the universe, fierce to her enemies and compassionate to her devotees. Essentially, all Hindu religious, political, social, cultural, and even literary education is derived from the Purāṇas.
Internal contradictions among the Purāṇas, however, do not seem to be an issue in the popular mind. During their performances, paurāṇikas interpret the apparent contradictions to the satisfaction of their listeners. To quote Janamanci Seshadrisarma, a famous paurāṇika of the early twentieth century: “The intentions of the Purāṇas are deep and not easily available on the surface. Every action is properly directed in them with appropriate results. The deities described in them are made to suit the specific eligibility of each person, but not every Purāṇa is meant for everybody. The path for liberation for each person is different, and therefore the teaching of the Purāṇas appears self contradictory.”21
Three Kinds of Purāṇas
According to the Hindu worldview, all things in creation are made up of three qualities or guṇas: sattva, a light, gentle, and enlightening quality; rajas, a fierce, dynamic and aggressive quality; and tamas, a dark, dull, and vegetative quality. Even the Purāṇa texts have not escaped this classification. According to the Padma Purāṇa, the classification is as follows: The sāttvika Purāṇas are Viṣṇu, Nārada, Bhāgavata, Garuḍa, Padma, and Varāha. The rājasika Purāṇas are Matsya, Kūrma, Liṅga, Brahmāṇḍa, Brahmavaivarta, Bhaviṣya, Mārkaṇḍeya, Vāmana, and Brahma. The tāmasika Purāṇas are Matsya, Kūrma, Liṅga, Śiva, Skanda, and Agni. The sāttvika Purāṇas are supposed to lead to liberation, the rajasika ones to heaven, and the tāmasika ones to hell. It is interesting indeed to note that texts supposed to be authored by such a great sage as Vyāsa could lead one to hell. The division of the Purāṇas into these three classes is apparently based on the gods favored in each Purāṇa and motivated by sectarian passions of the Vaiṣṇavas. It is well known that Hinduism passed through some rather rough periods of sectarian conflict, and obviously the Purāṇas reflect that situation. It would, however, be risky to interpret the sectarian statements of the Purāṇas as their essential meaning because such statements represent highly contextualized connotations. Rocher has aptly stated that the sectarianism of the Purāṇas should not be interpreted “as exclusivism in favor of one god to the detriment of Others.”22 The same Purāṇa may make a passionately sectarian statement in favor of one god on one page and a few pages later may make an equally passionate statement in favor of another god.23 Such apparent contradictions, however, become irrelevant when one realizes that no Purāṇa text is ever read from cover to cover and that a Purāṇa performer chooses sections and interprets them appropriately to the occasion and the audience. This also underscores the fact that part of the problem modern readers face in interpreting the Purāṇas is that protocols of reading have changed, and we read every page and every line subjecting them to a uniform valence based on one-dimensional textual linearity. More on this later.
The Purāṇas and the Bhakti Tradition
Bhakti marked a significant shift in the religious traditions of lndia, and the Purāṇas reflect this change. As a term, “bhakti” is more a cover word for a variety of personal relationships to a deity rather than a single definitive theological concept. Broadly speaking, the Bhagavad Gītā’s concept of bhakti, which is also stated in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, presents god as accessible to living beings through a discipline of personal worship and surrender. In contrast to this, the seventh-century Āḷvārs of Tamilnadu sang and preached a different mode of bhakti where human emotions of passionate erotic love and affection are accepted as modes of worship. Experiencing god through such a passionate personal relationship is superior to the knowledge one can gain through the study of philosophical texts, the performance of ritual practices, and the chanting of the Veda. Furthermore, people of all classes and stations in life, from kings to commoners, from learned Brahmins to illiterate outcastes, men and women, all have equal access to god through this bhakti. In fact, the lower the station of a person in life, the easier it is for him or her to reach god. This is clearly a subversive concept in a society based on Brahminic ritual superiority and social hierarchies. The bhakti of the Āḷvārs gradually undergoes a Brahminic reformation when it is incorporated into the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and becomes a part of the Purāṇic religious complex.
The Bhāgavata Purāṇa
The bulk of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa represents what was first told by Vyāsa’s son, Śuka, to King Parīkṣit, son of Abhimanyu of the Pāṇḍava line. The context of narration is especially poignant. King Parikṣit was cursed by Sage Śṛṅgi to die within seven days from the bite of the deadly snake, Taksaka. The reason for the curse was that the king playfully hung a dead snake around the neck of Śṛṅgi’s father, when the latter was deeply lost in meditation and did not respond to the king’s inquiries. King Parikṣit, realizing that the end is near, asks Sage Śuka what a man nearing his death should do. Basically, Śuka’s answer to this question is the core of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Stories from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa have become independently popular and have been retold in many languages and genres.
To get acquainted with the message ofthe Bhāgavata Purāṇa, let us visit a few of these stories beginning with the story of Prahlāda Prahlāda, anti-god Hiraṇyakaśipu’s son, rejects his father’s beliefs and sings of God Viṣṇu, until his father angrily demands that he show him where Viṣṇu lives. Prahlāda replies that Viṣṇu is everywhere, he is omnipresent. Hiraṇyakaśipu points to a pillar in the assembly hall and sarcastically asks if Viṣṇu is also present in the pillar and then furiously kicks it. Viṣṇu emerges from the pillar as a half-man, half-lion and claws Hiraṇyakaśipu to death. Another story relates how the elephant-king Gajendra, who is caught by a mighty crocodile, cries to Viṣṇu for help. Viṣṇu appears and kills the crocodile with his discus. The story of Rukmi tells of how she fell in love with Kṛṣṇa, whom her elder brother Rukmīṇi hated. When Rukmi arranges a marriage for Rukmīṇi with another man, the distressed Rukmīṇi sends word to Kṛṣṇa to come and take her away. Kṛṣṇa appears on the wedding day and takes Rukmīṇi away on his chariot, defeating her brother’s army, which chases after him. All these stories celebrate the superiority of personal devotion to god even at the expense of social status and normal family relations between father and son, brother and sister, husband and wife.
The narratives of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa create an opportunity to celebrate god. The style in which the stories are told is aimed not so much at informing the readers, as is the case with the other Purāṇas, but of reminding them of what they already know, thus creating an atmosphere in which they can remember god’s name. At the beginning of each of these stories King Parīkṣit asks Sage Śuka to tell him of a particular event in Kṛṣṇa’s life, such as his birth or wedding, and then immediately says how wonderful it would be to hear these stories one more time. Listeners/readers of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa feel exactly like the king. They already know these stories but want to adore god one more time.
Acceptance of the bhakti stories, so different from what the earlier texts preach, left their mark on the Purāṇa itself. The emotional/devotional nature of the stories gives the Purāṇa a lyrical quality. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa is written in a language both more beautiful and at the same more archaic than the other Purāṇas. The archaism of this Purāṇa, as J.A.B. van Buitenen notes,24 serves to legitimize the late text and gain for it a degree of ancientness. In fact, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa itself makes us aware that it is a different kind of Purāṇa in that it lists ten lakṣaṇas instead of the usual five that are supposed to mark a Purāṇa.25
The most popular part of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa is the tenth chapter, which narrates the love-games Kṛṣṇa plays in Vṛndāvana with his cowherd girls. Kṛṣṇa’s love-games inspired a number of poems in many regions of India, among which the Gītā Govinda is the best known. Scholars have noted that Rādhā, the most important of Kṛṣṇa’s cowherd girls, does not have a place in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa stories. Scholars attribute this absence to the South Indian origin of the text, whereas Rādhā stories originate from North India. In addition to being South Indian in origin, it is also claimed that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa was a late composition attributed to a certain Vopadeva.
The Skanda Purāṇa
The Skanda Purāṇa is in sharp contrast with the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. If the Bhāgavata expounds the value of bhakti as an experience of total devotion to the deity and rejects the value of ritual practice, Skanda emphasizes rituals and the power of sacred places. This Purāṇa is largely a collection of stories describing the power of holy places and temples (Sthalapurāṇas). As such, this Purāṇa apparently continued to grow as new temples and holy sites came under the influence of Brahminic Hinduism. This also explains the popularity of the Skanda Purāṇa as well as its segmentary nature because each holy place promoted its own story under the rubric of this Purāṇa. Additions to the Skanda Purāṇa are so numerous, with some as recent as the sixteenth century, that even the native tradition regards this Purāṇa as a “scrap-bag.”26 The expansive Skanda Purāṇa is available in two versions, one made up of khaṇḍas and the other made up of saṃhitās—each of which contains a number of sub-khaṇḍas. The stories in the Skanda Purāṇa cover the major Brahminic holy places in virtually the entire subcontinent. For instance, Kedārakhaṇḍa and Badri Māhātmya cover the Himālayan region, Kāśikhaṇḍa and Ayodhyā Māhātmya describe the holy places in Uttar Pradesh, Āvantyakhaṇḍa tells of the holy places in Malva, Rajasthan, and parts of Gujarat, Revakhaṇḍa relates to the holy places in the Narmadā Valley, Nāgarakhaṇḍa and Prabhasakhaṇḍa cover the sacred places in Gujarat and other parts of western India, Puruṣottamakṣetra Māhātmya tells the story of Puri in Orissa, Veṅkaṭācala Māhātmya and Setu Māhātmya describe Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh and Ramesvaram in Tamilnadu.
One of the notable sections of the Skanda Purāṇa is the Kāśīkhaṇḍa, which tells the story of Kāśī (Banaras). Once, the Vindhya Mountain grew higher and higher in competition with the Himālayas, and it obstructed the sun and the moon from traveling across the sky. Time stopped since the sun and the moon stood still. Śiva intervened and asked Agastya to take care of the problem. The sage and his wife, Lopāmudrā, travelled south towards the mountain. Seeing the great sage and his wife, the mighty Vindhya bowed to them in respect. Agastya walked across and asked the mountain to stay bent until his return, which he never did. This was how the power of the mighty Vindhya Mountain was subdued. However, Agastya, a long-time resident of Kāśī, missed his city and remembered it by describing its beauty in detail to his wife. It is in this context that the Kāśīkhaṇḍa lists all the sacred places along the Gaṅgā and serves like a guide to the city, including stories and descriptions for each of its shrines.
The Other Purāṇas: Agni and Bhaviṣya
Each Purāṇa is interesting in its own way,27 but I will briefly focus on two because they are very different from the rest. The Agni Purāṇa is extraordinary in that it includes discourses on the science of politics and statecraft, administrative branches of the state, qualifications of the king, his duties, the role of his ministers and other officers, the army, and so on. It includes information on trees and water resources, medicine, and anatomy. Furthermore, it has elaborate chapters on metrics, poetics, and lexicography. In a way this is an encyclopedic Purāṇa.
The name Bhaviṣya Purāṇa is a contradiction in terms, since Purāṇa means “old” and bhaviṣya “future.” Cast in a frame of telling events that will take place, this Purāṇa, to summarize Hazra, tells the stories of Adam, Noah, Nādir Shāh, and Jalaluddin Akbar.28 It tells the story of Pṛthvīrāja and Jayacandra and goes on to include information about Varahamihira, Śaṃkarācārya, Rāmānuja, Nimbārka, Madhva, and Jayadeva. It includes the grammarian Bhaṭṭojidīkṣita, Kabīr, and Nānak. It even describes British rule in India and mentions Calcutta and the parliament. Evidently, the text was composed after all the events that it purports to predict took place, which makes it a new and innovative mode of writing history.
Prominent opposition to the Purāṇic worldview came from the Jainas. The Jainas were great storytellers and competed with the Brahmins in precisely the same narratives, which the Brahminic religion used for spreading its message. In contrast to the Brahminic Purāṇas, which are composed by anonymous authors under the cover name of Vyāsa and run into many redactions, the Jaina Purāṇas are all written by historically identifiable authors, and their texts are relatively more fixed and datable. The Jainas used Maharashtri, Prakrit, Apabhramsa, and Kannada, in addition to Sanskrit, and apparently succeeded in bringing their versions to the people more successfully than the Brahmins. It is possible that the medieval retellings of the Brahminic Purāṇas by Brahminic poets in regional languages was motivated by the desire of the Brahmins to counter the popular reach of the Jaina versions. To the Jainas goes the credit of questioning the truth-value of the Brahminic Purāṇa stories, continuously offering critical and rational alternatives to them.
The Jaina Purāṇas essentially narrate the lives of the sixty-three great men (triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣa) of the Jaina tradition through which the Jainas will learn the work of karma according to the Jaina worldview. While this is the larger goal, there is also an unmistakable interest on the part of the Jainas to create a counter-Purāṇa to the major Brahminic epic narratives. The Jaina Rāmāyaṇa and the Jaina Harivaṃśa are important among such attempts. The Jaina narrative of the Rāmāyaṇa is told in Vimalasūri’s Paumacariya. These texts were not always called Purāṇas. They were also called Caritras, life stories. According to John Cort, the Digambara Jainas called their texts Purāṇas, while the Svetambara Jainas called their texts Caritras, although in some cases both terms were applied to the same work.29
Purāṇas from Below
Following the established convention of calling narratives that are not fixed in writing or not written in a standard language folk narratives, A.K. Ramanujan identified several folk mythologies and folk Purāṇas.30 However, there is also a genre of Purāṇa texts relating the origin myths of non-Brahmin castes, which are often, if not always, written in Sanskrit. We can call these Purāṇas of the lower castes who have moved up in society or had attempted to do so. It is well known in Indian social history that one of the strategies of upward mobility for a low caste is to create a Sanskrit text and invent a mythology associating itself with Vyāsa. Rocher reports a number of caste Purāṇas from Gujarat. In addition, there is a text called the Bhāvanarṣi Purāṇa which relates the origin of weavers, and another called the Viśvakarma Purāṇa which tells the story of the goldsmiths.31 The Kanyakā Purāṇa tells the origin myth of the unity of trading castes, and the Jāmba Purāṇa conveys the caste story of leatherworkers. All these Purāṇas are known in the Telugu-speaking area of Andhra Pradesh, and, except for the Jāmba Purāṇa, all these texts are written in Sanskrit. The Jāmba Purāṇa, sung among the Madiga caste of leatherworkers, is interesting because it borrows the name Purāṇa but is actually a Telugu oral narrative, a genre often studied by anthropologists and folklorists rather than by Purāṇa scholars. The regional nature of these Purāṇas is both an asset and a problem in coming to a comprehensive understanding of the nature of these texts. An asset because the texts of these Purāṇas are relatively few and do not create major problems in determining their path of transmission, and a hardship because of the vast areas one has to cover to collect these regional texts.
Unlike the Brahminic Purāṇas, which are written with a view to establishing a Brahminic ideology, these Purāṇas question Brahminic superiority and attempt to upset it. The lower-caste Purāṇas, if written in Sanskrit, closely follow the general style of the Brahminic Purāṇas. The differences are ideological and political rather than textual. Among these Purāṇas, the Purāṇa of the goldsmiths, the Viśvakarma Purāṇa, attacks the Brahmins for usurping a ritual superiority assigned by god to the Viśvabrāhmaṇs, the goldsmiths. The Kanyakā Purāṇa, the Purāṇa of the Komatis (merchant caste), does not oppose the Brahmins but shows that the Komati caste is as pure as the Brahmins. The well-known Basava Purāṇa may be studied in this context, even though it is not strictly a caste Purāṇa but a Purāṇa of Vīraśaivites who were virulently anti-Brahminic. The Basava Purāṇa, written in Telugu and Kannada, tells the stories of the militant followers of Basaveśvara, the twelfth-century leader of the Śaivite movement in Karnataka. It also narrates a number of stories of Śaiva devotees from the earlier Pĕriya Purāṇa, written by Cĕkkiḷār in Tamil.32
Colonial Scholarship of the Purāṇas
Early Western scholars of the colonial period, eager to gather religious and cultural information and knowledge about the Hindus, encountered the Purāṇa texts and were bewildered by their variety, complexity, and multiplicity. As early as 1784, Warren Hastings commissioned Radhakanta Sarma to prepare a summary of the Purāṇas.33 Vans Kennedy, an Englishman in the military service, and Horace Hayman Wilson spent most of their lives studying this vast body of texts. Wilson employed a small army of native Sanskrit paṇḍitas to produce detailed indices of the contents of all the Purāṇas. He trained native young men to translate these indices into English and then examined the original and the translation “and corrected them wherever necessary.”34 In 1840, Wilson published a translation of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa with a scholarly introduction. However, Purāṇa studies did not hold a sustained interest for him because they were not, in their present form, ancient texts such as the Vedas. “They preserve, no doubt, many ancient notions and traditions; but they have been so mixed-up with foreign matter, intended to favour the popularity of particular forms of worship or articles of faith, that they cannot be unreservedly recognised as genuine representations of what we have reason to believe the Purāṇas originally were.”35 Attention to the Purāṇas was revived when Vincent A. Smith demonstrated that the Vaṃśānucarita of the Matsya Purāṇa was basically an accurate record of the ancient Andhra dynasty. Frederick Eden Pargiter energetically established the historical validity of the Purāṇas, followed by R. Morton Smith.36 Only then did the Purāṇas become valuable because they were believed to be useful in reconstructing the ancient history of India.
However, the general attitude of suspecting the Purāṇa texts as reliable records continued. More bewildering than anything to the colonial scholar was the very nature of their existence as texts. As serious classical students trained in Latin and Greek, colonial scholars expected the Purāṇas to be concrete written texts with the usual corruptions that result from centuries of use. Little were they prepared to encounter a tradition whose concept of text is very different from their own, where texts interact with their oral discourses and where paurāṇikas move through these texts with unfathomable conventions, and whose practices appeared to Western eyes to be verging on forgery, interpolation, and textual manipulation. Lack of communication between the two groups of scholars—the Western Indologists and the native paṇḍitas—developed into irresolvable suspicion of each others’ methods. As for the colonial scholar, ancient India was great; it was only contemporary India that was rotten. This belief led to their perception that the texts deteriorated in the hands of ignorant transmitters. The ancient texts were magnificent, but the Purāṇas we have at hand are corrupted.
The Austrian scholar Maurice Winternitz carries this line of thinking and reports the general view of colonial scholarship. According to his survey, the language of the Purāṇas was sloppy and grammatically flawed, and their content was wildly confusing and full of meaningless exaggerations. For him the extant texts represent an inferior class of literature, belonging to the “lower, uneducated priesthood,” who transmitted the Purāṇas.
Still many old sagas of kings and many very late genealogical verses (anuvaṃśaślokas) and song stanzas (gāthās) of the original bard-poetry have been preserved to us in the later texts which we have received. And fortunately the compilers of the Purāṇas who worked haphazardly did not disdain what was good and have included in their texts some dialogues reminiscent of the Upaniṣads in form and content as well as individual legends and texts of profound thought-content taken from the ancient ascetic poetry … Even in the desert of the Purāṇa-literature there is no lack of oases.37
However, prejudices of this nature did not last for long as a more sophisticated and nuanced modern scholarship developed.
Modern Scholarship on the Purāṇas
After two hundred years of active and persistent application of Western methods and progressive training of Indian scholars in Western text-criticism, a highly sophisticated field of Purāṇa study has emerged which should be called modern rather than Western or Indian, since it includes Indian as well as European scholars. An international group of philological scholars has rigorously applied principles of text-criticism to a number of manuscripts and made strenuous and laudable efforts to refine the methods of producing critical editions of the Purāṇas, including the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. Scholars from different countries—Australia, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, and the Netherlands, to name some—participate in active debate and discussion in this enterprise.
The idea of producing critical editions has exercised the minds of Indologists for a long time. Winternitz first expressed the need for a critical edition of the Mahābhārata at the 11th International Congress of Orientalists in Paris in 1897. In 1908, Heinrich Lüders submitted an eighteen-page prospectus of the Mahābhārata, drawing upon twenty-nine manuscripts. However, nothing came of this until 1920, when Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar began to work on a critical edition of the Mahābhārata in Pune. At the completion of this renowned critical edition, Haraprasad Shastri expressed a fervent hope that similar editions should be produced for all the Purāṇas. Serious work on the Purāṇas began when the All-India Kashiraj Trust was formed under the patronage and guidance of Vibhuti Narayan Singh, the Mahārājā of Kāśī, which, in addition to producing critical editions of the Purāṇas, also published the journal Purāṇam.
The standards of philological method require that all the available manuscripts of a particular Purāṇa be gathered together and closely examined for variations. Following strictly established practices of text-criticism, the Ur-text of a Purāṇa is theoretically possible to reconstruct. This model assumes that there was a single author for each of the Purāṇas who produced a single text which was then transmitted throughout a wide area over a long period of time during which the text acquired scribal errors, textual attritions, not to mention deliberate interpolations by motivated anonymous authors.
Controversies regarding critical editions led to a range of opinions regarding the feasibility and usefulness of such editions. On one end were scholars who wanted to adopt Western methods to reconstruct as pristine a text as possible, if not exactly the Ur-text of the Purāṇa from which all the other texts of the Purāṇa in question took off. On the other end were scholars who argued that the very idea of a critical edition was wrong and that texts should be read as they are, in their localities and communities.
Madeleine Biardeau opposes the methods of producing critical editions of the Purāṇas and the methods adopted by V.S. Sukthankar in his critical edition of the Mahābhārata as well.38 Following her teacher Sylvain Lévi, Biardeau questions the validity of making critical editions of texts which are primarily oral and local. She draws a sharp distinction between the connotations of an oral tradition in the West and in India and observes that in the West the written word is valued more highly than the oral tradition, whereas in India it is the oral word (śruti) that is respected as the highest authority. Furthermore, she asserts that the Purāṇas derive their acceptance from the local Brahmin communities who use the texts. To erase the pivotal importance of the locally authorized text in favor of a constructed text because the latter is perceived to be closer to the oldest possible version is to distort the reality. She points to her experience with the Śrīvaiṣṇavite Brahmins of Simhachalam temple in Andhra Pradesh, who insisted that a certain version of the Narasimha and Prahlāda story they tell was, for them, authoritative. They claimed that their version was from the Skanda Purāṇa, while at the same time they had no difficulty admitting that it differed from what appears in the extant version of this Purāṇa. Biardeau maintains that “any locally accepted version is authoritative in its own right” and should prevail over the version of the so-called critical editions which are assumed to be older and therefore closer to Vyāsa’s text.39 Biardeau’s method raises a different problem in that it leads to a plethora of texts from different regions under one name with no unity. To resolve this problem, she suggests that their unity is to be found in the meaning of the stories and “not in their particular contents or historical bearing.”40 She also suggests “the manuscript evidence be checked and strengthened through consultations with the people who, even now, have a first hand knowledge of the … Purāṇas.”41
V.M. Bedekar of the All-India Kashiraj Trust responds to Biardeau’s critique by defending Sukthankar’s methods, strongly insisting that once a tradition is committed to writing it is open to textual criticism irrespective of whether it is originally oral or written. He does not deny that local Brahmins hold the power of authorizing their version, but that in itself does not cause a problem for the editors of critical editions, since the latter are not competing for authority; rather they are only producing an edition which presents the text—in Sukthankar’s words (1933: ca), which Bedekar quotes “in all its variety, all its fullness.”42
Anand Swarup Gupta, also of the All-India Kashiraj Trust, who undertook the preparation of critical editions of the Vāmana, Kūrma, and Varāha Purāṇas, steers clear of most of the debate but firmly rejects the Western methods, including those adopted by Sukthankar. Gupta questions the assertion that additions made to the Purāṇas over time should be considered “spurious.” Gupta prefers to view them as a natural growth of the texts and wanted to “keep them in line with the current religious and social ideas of their times in order to preserve the encyclopaedic nature of the Purāṇas and keep them up-to-date.”43 His project was to reconstruct a single text of a Purāṇa based on all the available manuscripts collected from different regions of the country. “Such a single critical text must be a conflated text by its very nature, but this defect is more than compensated by giving the readings and variants ofall the available versions in the critical apparatus (in the form of the critical footnotes of a critical edition).”44
Rocher, too, rejects critical editions, saying that in so far as the Purāṇa tradition is purely oral, of which only parts were accidentally committed to writing, producing critical editions based on the standard rules of textual criticism makes little sense.45 Elsewhere, he says: “I too have been trained in classical philology in Europe. I too have learned how to prepare critical editions, comparing manuscripts and reconstructing the original text—the archetype. But I am prepared to forget all that when it comes to the Purāṇas.”46
In contrast to Rocher, however, R. Adriaensen, H. Bakker, and H. Isaacson strongly believe in the written text of the Purāṇas.47 In their view there is “no reason to assume any but a written transmission of the Purāṇa, although it is certainly the case that at times a transmitter’s memory of other similar texts may have had some influence.”48
They categorically state that the oral character of the Purāṇas was exaggerated. They follow the strict philological approach of starting with the oldest available text of the Skanda Purāṇa from which they aim to produce an edition that accurately presents the readings of available manuscripts and a constituted text that is superior, as a whole, to that found in any of the individual manuscripts.49 They published their first volume of Skanda Purāṇa in 1998, and their work is still in progress. Earlier, in 1995, Greg Bailey had articulated a wholly different approach of working with Purāṇa texts in his Gaṇeśapurāṇa.50 Adopting a structuralist methodology, Bailey argued that every single Purāṇa text is a coherent whole and every redaction of it is equally systematic. In response, Adriaensen, Bakker, and Isaacson affirm that “It is through philological research based on manuscripts that this selection on the one hand and substitution on the other, as well as the intrinsic criteria by which they operated—i.e. the general generic principles of Purāṇa literature—can be brought to light. No structuralistic analysis, taking printed texts for granted, will ever delve so deep.”51 Apparently, the debate concerning the production of critical editions of the Purāṇas is not over yet.
Dating the Purāṇas
Modernity is inseparably connected with historicity, and as such, there is no wonder that a text without a date causes anxiety to a modern mind. Traditional ideas that connect the Purāṇa with the Veda and therefore consider them dating from the beginning of time while also presenting a gradual development of the texts in the hands of Vyāsa, his disciples, and other paurāṇikas sharply clash with the modern positivistic need for a date on a linear time line. Purāṇas as religious texts created by a superior authority in a cyclic time and Purāṇas as empirically verifiable, man-made texts in historical time belong to two different worldviews, and a reconciliation of the two is impossible. Still, scholars made valiant efforts to fix a date for each of the Purāṇas. The early colonial scholars tended to give the Purāṇas a relatively late date, while Indian scholars tried to push them as far back as possible. For Wilson, the Purāṇas belong to the late period when Hinduism was developing a sectarian character, worshiping Śiva or Viṣṇu, and therefore cannot be older than Samkara, Ramanuja, Madhva, and Vallabha. Gradually, a consensus seems to have emerged that there is a great deal of ancient material in the Purāṇas along with very modern material and that composite, everchanging texts such as these are impossible to date as whole texts.52 Cornelia Dimmitt and J.A.B. van Buitenen suggest an innovative idea of dating the Purāṇa material by correlating different sections of the Purāṇas with phases of Hindu tradition as known from other literature.53 They speculate that
the oldest material in the Purāṇas is contemporaneous with the Vedas, but was recited either in a different milieu than the brahminic ritual or by persons other than the brahmin priests. This alternate milieu would be the source of the smṛti tradition that gave rise eventually to both epic and Purāṇic collections. Thus the Purāṇas, which share many stories from the epics, the Mahābhārata in particular, do not derive from that epic, but from the same body of oral tradition, or smṛti, whose origins may be as old as the period of the Vedas.54
Dimmitt and van Buitenen go on to suggest that some of the Purāṇa material was collected about 1000 BCE, the period after the Mahābhārata war, and again during the Gupta period, that is, fourth to sixth century. More new material continued to be added to the Purāṇas well after the sixth century, and there is no final closing date for the Purāṇas.55 Rocher says that despite insurmountable difficulties in dating individual Purāṇas, scholars still assign specific dates to them. He reports dates set by others in his very erudite and informative book, The Purāṇas,56 stating at the same time that it is not possible to set a specific date for any Purāṇa as a whole.
The Absent Paurāṇika
Prevailing ideas about critical editions fall on one or the other side of the oral/written divide. For Rocher, the Purāṇas were oral texts that were accidentally written down. For Adriaensen, Bakker, and Isaacson they were basically written texts. The fact, however, is that they were both. The orality of Indian languages, unlike that of Western languages, allows for what I call oral literacy. The paurāṇika performer prided himself in his scholarship and distinguished himself from the nonliterate performer who sang oral narratives which have no written authority. Every Purāṇa says in writing that it was orally told by sūta who himself heard it from an earlier telling by Vyāsa or some such authority. Nowhere in the long line of transmission of the Purāṇa recorded in writing in each Purāṇa text is the act of writing mentioned (except in the case of the Mahābhārata where Ganesa serves as the scribe for Vyāsa). Curiously, then, an authentic Purāṇa happens to be a written text, which claims in that very writing that it is not a written text. Scholars agree that no Purāṇa is ever performed in its entirety as it is written. A typical paurāṇika, a paṇḍita who is well versed in the Purāṇa tradition and would be known by different regional language names throughout India, chooses a section of a Purāṇa for a discourse, reads out a portion of the text in Sanskrit or the regional language, and comments on it, incorporating material from other similar texts and expanding on their relevance to that specific place and point in time. The erudition of the paurāṇika allows him to move across many Purāṇas with his memory as the only authority to determine which text he has borrowed from. When such a paurāṇika serves also as a producer of Purāṇa texts, he feels justified in incorporating material that he has quoted from other texts into the one he is producing. The style in which Purāṇas were composed, a simple Sanskrit meter called anuṣṭubh, easily allows for moving substantial portions of one Purāṇa text to another Purāṇa text. Vyāsa was the author of all the Purāṇas, but the actual producers of the texts were the paurāṇikas who made these texts and renewed them as context required. Literally thousands of such producers of texts over a period of hundreds of years worked quietly without seeking any individual recognition under the imagined direction of the legendary sage Vyāsa. The creativity that went into the making and remaking of the Purāṇas is quite remarkable.
Elsewhere I draw a distinction between the recorded text and the received text in India.57 What is recorded on palm leaf, and later on paper, is not the entire text, it is only a part of it. It acquires its fullness in performance, at which time it is appropriately recreated by the paurāṇika, who is trained in reading the Purāṇas and interpreting them. His knowledge, which was not written down, would be crucial in determining the received text. The recorded Purāṇa text tells only part of the story. When the paurāṇikas who knew the received text disappeared, scholars were left with only the recorded text, which has become our sole text. Simply reading the recorded text in a linear order, without the training in performing it, scholars found a number of irresolvable contradictions and discontinuities, not to mention a plethora of scribal errors. But if the early scholars had actually studied the Purāṇa in performance and learned how the trained performer constructed and presented a Purāṇa in each performance, we would have an entirely different kind of Purāṇa scholarship today. Instead of suspecting the paṇḍitas, the agents of transmission of this tradition from generation to generation, if the early scholars had striven to understand the nature of this text culture, a whole different way of asking questions would have emerged.
The paurāṇikas who knew this text culture had been initially marginalized and eventually disappeared from the scholarly scene. So much so that the entire scholarship of the Purāṇas has been conducted viewing these texts as artifacts with little direct interaction with the users of these texts and their textual practices. The textual activities of this culture—production, transmission, performance, and reproduction, which includes the training of the paurāṇikas, the principles and methods of text creation they employed, and the rules governing such activities—need to be properly understood. In the absence of such an understanding, texts collected from their original locations and stacked in the air-conditioned rooms of libraries and studied in isolation could only give a distorted picture. The Purāṇa culture where hundreds and even thousands paurāṇikas served as silent authors without claiming individual recognition—all speaking in the voice of the revered Vyāsa over such a long period of time in the history of India—waits to be properly understood.
Notes
1.Rocher 1986: 15, 15n10.
2.Shulman 1993.
3.Rocher 1986: 45–6.
4.Ibid.: 47.
5.Hazra 1962: 241.
6.Anantaramayya 1984: 17.
7.Kennedy 1831: 153n.
8.Kane 1930–62, 5.2: 840–1.
9.Levitt 1976.
10.Narayana Rao 1993: 87–9; see also Bailey 1995: 12–14.
11.Dimmitt and van Buitenen 1978: 28–9.
12.Rocher 1986: 32.
13.Nye 1985.
14.Dikshitar 1951: xiv.
15.Rocher 1986: 68.
16.Hazra 1962: 246–7.
17.Kane 1930–62, 5.2: 862.
18.Ibid. However, according to Kangle (1960–65, 2: 2, 5n), the text of the Arthaśāstra is difficult to construe.
19.Dandekar 1985.
20.Rocher 1986: 56.
21.Janamanci Seshadrisarma 1931: 15.
22.Rocher 1986: 23.
23.Ibid.: 21–2.
24.van Buitenen 1966: 38.
25.Rocher 1986: 27.
26.Doniger 1993: 59.
27.See Rocher 1986: 133–254 for a full survey of the Purāṇas.
28.Hazra 1975: 169.
29.Cort 1993: 187.
30.A.K. Ramanujan 1993b: 101–20.
31.Rocher 1986: 72.
32.Narayana Rao 1990.
33.Rocher 1986: 2.
34.Wilson 1839: 64.
35.Wilson 1961: lvi.
36.Rocher 1986: 115–25.
37.Winternitz 1963–83, I: 507.
38.Biardeau 1968.
39.Ibid.: 122–3.
40.Ibid.: 123.
41.Ibid.
42.Bedekar 1969: 225. For a survey of the debate, see Coburn 1980.
43.Gupta 1971: xxxi.
44.Ibid.: xxxa.
45.Rocher 1986: 99.
46.Rocher 1983: 72; emphasis in original.
47.Adriaensen, Bakker, and Isaacson 1998.
48.Ibid.: 38.
49.Ibid.: 40.
50.Bailey 1995: 3–73.
51.Adriaensen, Bakker, and Isaacson 1998: 17; see also the Preface by Heinrich von Stietencron of the Tubingen Purāṇa Project in Bailey 1995: ix–xi.
52.Rocher 1986: 100–3.
53.Dimmitt and van Buitenen 1978.
54.Ibid.: 5–6.
55.Ibid.
56.Rocher 1986.
57.Narayana Rao 1995.
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