The present book draws attention to the institutional basis of medieval sectarianism and shows that the temples and monasteries became, in the hands of a powerful priesthood, effective means of religious control and publicity. It highlights the increasing patronage extended by heterogeneous social ranks including the landed gentry, moneyed bureaucrats and traders to these institutions. This changed them into big employers and encouraged the growth of feudal ties and manorial interests which the priest of a temple or the superior of a monastery tried to preserve and perpetuate on a hereditary basis.

The extraordinary multiplicity of religions and religious cultures in India, chronicled over two thousand years From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In this ambitious and wide-ranging chronicle, Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. India, Davis writes, was not only the birthplace of the religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions that can be classified as “folk” or “popular” religions. Tracing these intertwined practices, Davis shows that the ardent and heterogeneous religious cultures of early India came to define and redefine themselves in relation to one another. Davis recounts this history through voices—voices recorded in hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, and theological discourses, as well as voices that speak through material remains, whether monumental sculptures or tiny terracotta figurines of nameless goddesses. He focuses on the long millennium often designated as “classical India,” which stretches from the time of the founding figures of Buddhism and Jainism during the sixth century BCE through the seventh-century-CE dynasties of the Chalukyas and the Pallavas in southern India. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity.

Through the use of epigraphical evidence, Leslie C. Orr brings into focus the activities and identities of the temple women (devadasis) of medieval South India, and suggests new ways of understanding the character of the temple woman -- and of the role of women in Indian religion and society.

This book is a pioneering attempt to understand the prehistory of Hinduism in South Asia. Exploring religious processes in the Deccan region between the eleventh and the nineteenth century with class relations as its point of focus, it throws new light on the making of religious communities, monastic institutions, legends, lineages, and the ethics that governed them. In the light of this prehistory, a compelling framework is suggested for a revision of existing perspectives on the making of Hinduism in the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

This book provides an account of the organisation, practices and history of the Daśanāmī-Saṃnyāsīs, one of the largest sects of sādhu-s (‘holy men’) in South Asia, founded, according to tradtion, by the legendary philosopher Śaṅkarācārya.