In: Abhyudaya: Recent Researches in Epigraphy and Numismatics: Commemoration Volume in Honour of Dr. K.V. Ramesh ed. by T.S. Ravishankar, S. Swaminathan, Delhi, Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2016, pp. 27-42.
This article, “Forerunners of Chola Meykkīrttis,” submitted for the felicitation volume of K.V. R... more This article, “Forerunners of Chola Meykkīrttis,” submitted for the felicitation volume of K.V. Ramesh, finally, and sadly, appeared in his commemoration volume entitled Abhyudaya: Recent Researches in Epigraphy and Numismatics: Commemoration Volume in Honour of Dr. K.V. Ramesh ed. by T.S. Ravishankar, S. Swaminathan, Delhi, Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2016 pp. 27-42. The original submitted text has however been dramatically altered. The transliteration scheme has been changed and many errors have crept in during the process. This is a corrected version of the article. The pagination is that of the published version. One endnote (No. 30), the transliteration scheme (of the Madras Tamil Lexicon) MTL and the marking in bold of Grantha letters in the quotations of inscriptions have been restored. The misprints have been corrected. E. Francis 2017-03-15.
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When we look at the monuments that are the material traces of Bhakti, we expect kings and their immediate relatives to have played a key role in producing them. But temples commissioned by ruling kings are in fact relatively rare: most sacred sites resonate with the voices of many different patrons responsible for commissioning the buildings or supporting the worship conducted there. Queens, princes, palace women, courtiers, local elites, Brahmin assemblies, merchant communities, and local individuals all contributed to the dynamism of Bhakti.
Far from downplaying the importance of kings as patrons, this volume explores the interactions between these different agents. Do they represent independent and separate streams of Bhakti? Or is there a continuum from large-scale royal temples to locally designed ones? What is the royal share in the development of a Bhakti deeply rooted in a specific place? And what is the local one? How did each respond to the other? Was the patronage by members of royal courts, especially women, of the same nature as that of ruling kings?
After an introduction by the editors, fifteen scholars address such issues by examining the textual foundations of Bhakti, the use of Bhakti by royal figures, the roles of artists and performers, the mediation of queens between the royal and local spheres, and the power of sacred places. The volume concludes with an afterword by Richard H. Davis.
Bhakti, broadly defined as an attitude, a strategy or a style of devotion—one that may be intellectual, emotional or rooted in acts of worship—towards God or the Divine, manifests itself through the personal voices of devotees as well as through the collective effort that constitutes the building of a temple. The “archaeology of Bhakti” aims at correlating different realms of representation, such as texts and images, in order to illuminate the elusive, pan-Indian phenomenon of Bhakti. The focus is on sources, agencies and layers. A special attention is given to inscriptions, which belong both to the realm of artefacts and to that of texts, and which help to distinguish royal demonstrations of Bhakti from local manifestations. In the realm of textual sources, “archaeology” is put to work to identify how literary conventions and concepts have formed and been incorporated, layer upon layer, into a given composition.
After an introduction by the editors about the complexities of the concept and practices of Bhakti in the Indian world, essays by nine scholars explore the phenomena of Bhakti and their chronology from different perspectives (textual, epigraphical, archaeological, iconographical). In the course of these explorations, the reader is transported from the North to the South of the subcontinent, back and forth between Mathurā and Maturai.
Au début du 19e s., Francis Whyte Ellis (1777-1819), une des figures majeures de l’orientalisme, notamment en tant que découvreur des langues dravidiennes, composa en tamoul un traité pour convaincre les populations indiennes de procéder sans crainte à la vaccination antivariolique, présentant celle-ci comme un sixième bienfait de la vache. Un manuscrit conservé à la BULAC à Paris contient l’unique version tamoule connue à ce jour de ce texte. On donne ici l’ébauche d’une recherche plus approfondie à propos de ce manuscrit, de son texte tamoul, du projet d’Ellis et de son contexte historique.
http://ceias.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/3553/francis_2015_tamil_epigraphical_lenses.pdf
He further speculates that, in one of its appearances, the curse responded directly to an act of vandalism by Vaiṣṇavas: the desecration—generally dated to a much later period—of the Rāmānujamaṇḍapa.
When we look at the monuments that are the material traces of Bhakti, we expect kings and their immediate relatives to have played a key role in producing them. But temples commissioned by ruling kings are in fact relatively rare: most sacred sites resonate with the voices of many different patrons responsible for commissioning the buildings or supporting the worship conducted there. Queens, princes, palace women, courtiers, local elites, Brahmin assemblies, merchant communities, and local individuals all contributed to the dynamism of Bhakti.
Far from downplaying the importance of kings as patrons, this volume explores the interactions between these different agents. Do they represent independent and separate streams of Bhakti? Or is there a continuum from large-scale royal temples to locally designed ones? What is the royal share in the development of a Bhakti deeply rooted in a specific place? And what is the local one? How did each respond to the other? Was the patronage by members of royal courts, especially women, of the same nature as that of ruling kings?
After an introduction by the editors, fifteen scholars address such issues by examining the textual foundations of Bhakti, the use of Bhakti by royal figures, the roles of artists and performers, the mediation of queens between the royal and local spheres, and the power of sacred places. The volume concludes with an afterword by Richard H. Davis.
Bhakti, broadly defined as an attitude, a strategy or a style of devotion—one that may be intellectual, emotional or rooted in acts of worship—towards God or the Divine, manifests itself through the personal voices of devotees as well as through the collective effort that constitutes the building of a temple. The “archaeology of Bhakti” aims at correlating different realms of representation, such as texts and images, in order to illuminate the elusive, pan-Indian phenomenon of Bhakti. The focus is on sources, agencies and layers. A special attention is given to inscriptions, which belong both to the realm of artefacts and to that of texts, and which help to distinguish royal demonstrations of Bhakti from local manifestations. In the realm of textual sources, “archaeology” is put to work to identify how literary conventions and concepts have formed and been incorporated, layer upon layer, into a given composition.
After an introduction by the editors about the complexities of the concept and practices of Bhakti in the Indian world, essays by nine scholars explore the phenomena of Bhakti and their chronology from different perspectives (textual, epigraphical, archaeological, iconographical). In the course of these explorations, the reader is transported from the North to the South of the subcontinent, back and forth between Mathurā and Maturai.
Au début du 19e s., Francis Whyte Ellis (1777-1819), une des figures majeures de l’orientalisme, notamment en tant que découvreur des langues dravidiennes, composa en tamoul un traité pour convaincre les populations indiennes de procéder sans crainte à la vaccination antivariolique, présentant celle-ci comme un sixième bienfait de la vache. Un manuscrit conservé à la BULAC à Paris contient l’unique version tamoule connue à ce jour de ce texte. On donne ici l’ébauche d’une recherche plus approfondie à propos de ce manuscrit, de son texte tamoul, du projet d’Ellis et de son contexte historique.
http://ceias.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/3553/francis_2015_tamil_epigraphical_lenses.pdf
He further speculates that, in one of its appearances, the curse responded directly to an act of vandalism by Vaiṣṇavas: the desecration—generally dated to a much later period—of the Rāmānujamaṇḍapa.
Manuscript Cataloguing in a Comparative Perspective: State of the Art, Common Challenges, Future Directions
7-10 May 2018, CSMC, Hamburg.