Explain the social change in kashmir with special reference to institution of family and marriage
Answers
Explanation:
It is well known that religious agents in premodern South Asia appealed to the
purported timelessness and transcendence of their scriptural sources to secure
not only their legitimacy but also that of the ideas found in them. Equally well
known—in no small part due to the work of Alexis Sanderson on the social
history of Śaiva and other religious traditions in early-medieval Kashmir and
elsewhere—is the fact that premodern South Asian religions do not appear as
unchanging and immobile traditions in social stasis. Quite the opposite: the
various religious traditions of medieval South Asia were nothing if not inno-
vative in idea and practice, most notably in their literary productions. These
myriad religious traditions, moreover, had a measurable and not insignificant
influence on contemporaneous social life.
In beginning to address the question of religious change in premodern South
Asia I would like not merely to point out that the religious practitioners of the
day were surely able to distinguish new religious, and other, ideas and prac-
tices from received tradition—just as we are today—a fact that itself calls
into question the reification of the sort of social stasis and lack of historical
awareness posited in previous Indological scholarship.1 I also will argue thata self-conscious, emic theory or explanation of scriptural authority and social
change may be found in the history of religions in premodern Kashmir. I wish
to examine the significance of novelty, of innovation, as it was conceived by
the authors I propose to place under study, and to identify its role in establish-
ing, or challenging, religious authority in the period in question, all of which I
will do by exploring an exemplar that illustrates what I suggest should be taken
as a maxim in the study of South Asian religions (and religion more generally),
namely, thatchange is not inimical to religion, even if particular religious agents
are not infrequently inimical to change.2
In particular, I propose to examine selected writings of some among the
most prominent of the Śaiva tantric “post-scriptural” authors of the Kashmir
Valley, who thrived there in the period reserved by the title of the present
essay. They include Somānanda (circa 900–950), Utpaladeva (circa 925–975),
and Abhinavagupta (circa 975–1025), as well as Jayaratha (early 13th C.E.), the
author of the Tantrālokaviveka commentary on the Tantrāloka (hereafter TĀV
and TĀ, respectively). Their textual contributions are properly associated with
what continues, sometimes, to be labeled “Kashmiri Shaivism,”3 and they offer
an important opportunity to reevaluate the nature of various sources of reli-
any proper appreciation of history. MacDonell, in turn, both reiterates this position and adds
to it a second claim regarding what he calls the “total lack of the historical sense” in premod-
ern Indian literature: he claims that historical events in premodern South Asia were insuffi-
cient to trigger the cultivation of a properly historical consciousness. See MacDonell [1900]
1962, 8–9. This pair of views exemplifies the two types of arguments that earlier Indologists
have made regarding the supposed ahistoricality of premodern South Asian works: Schol-
ars often suggested either that the authors of premodern Sanskrit works held theoretical—
mainly religious—views that precluded them from taking interest in historical concerns; or,
they argued that historical events in premodern South Asia transpired inways that preempted
the possibility of a properly historical response to them.
2 Scholars in the academy have given new attention to the question of the place of change in
religion in recent years.Jonathan Edelmann, formerly of Mississippi State University and now
at the University of Florida, has suggested, in an unpublished précis of concerns addressed by
four panelists of a session of the 2011 American Academy of Religion National Meeting enti-
tled “Authorizing Theologies,” that the question to hand was a matter of “newness,” of novelty,
and of “authorizing” such novelty in the language of “theology,” with the shared hypothesis
of all the panelists being that the various theological formulations they placed under exami-
nation each sought to “recast and re-contextualize influential concepts and arguments from
earlier traditions” (to quote from the panelists’ description of the session). Some of the prod-
ucts of this panel may be found in a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies,
for which see Edelmann 2014. The present essay constitutes a response to and an engagement
with the broader theme first engaged by these scholars at the AAR Annual Meeting in ques-
tion.
3 It is well known by now that this term is something of a misnomer, because it is both overly
specific geographically and overly general doctrinally. See Dyczkowski 1987: 222–223.