Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene

Introduction

The Puranas (Primordial Texts) constitute the most voluminous and enduring genre of Sanskrit literature. These anonymous texts narrate the mythic cycles associated with the major deities of Hinduism (Visnu, Siva, Brahma, the Goddess, etc.).

Role in Place-Making

The Puranas have also been integral to processes of place-making by creating maps of geography and celebrating the salvific potential of sacred sites in myths that imbue the landscape with divine agency.

Historical Context

While many important Puranas were first recorded and circulated in the first millennium CE—a time of significant social change marked by the flourishing of regional devotional movements and innovations of temple and image-centered religious practices—the genre has remained a living tradition through the colonial period until the present day.

Cultural Significance

Despite the tradition's centrality for cultural production in South Asia, we know very little about their historical embeddedness. The Puranic composers and transmitters—in accordance with the anonymity characteristic of the genre—disguised their own historicity behind claims of primordiality and divinely inspired teachings.

Dynamic Mythical Discourse

More than just a body of literature, the Puranas are a dynamic mythical discourse.

Project Overview

PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Puranas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts, including:

1. Hindu scribes
2. Persian poets
3. Portuguese Jesuits
4. Khmer rulers

Longue Durée Perspective

Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Puranas' mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. This establishes what we call a Puranic Ecumene: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.