Jason Schwartz

Jason Schwartz’s work reconstructs the lived religions of the early medieval Deccan and the juridical and institutional imaginaries that made them possible, while attending to the surprising persistence of similar sensibilities and social forms throughout early modernity, down into the present. His approach marries painstaking philological work on prescriptive and literary texts in Sanskrit, Old Marathi, and Kannada and engagement with largely unexamined traditions of multilingual documentary records with studies of material culture informed by extensive ethnographic field work. Drawing on mostly unstudied archives, his manuscript in progress, Universalizing Hindu Dharma, recovers a deep history of the post-Gupta era—what scholars have alternately called the “early medieval” or the “Śaiva Age”—wherein Indian religions are virtually defined not by a canonical orthodoxy or even orthopraxy, but by their embrace of a capacious epistemological and legal pluralism that underwrites religious diversity. This framework for institutionalizing and conserving diverse modes of doing and being ultimately promoted the flourishing of a myriad of localized distinctive life-worlds, aligned with social agents across the spectrum of caste and class, with their own modes of sociality, canons of authority, traditions of exegesis, and approaches to ritual.

Having reconstructed the largely unfamiliar site- and community-specific life-worlds that defined the religious mainstream in the early medieval western Deccan in their nuanced particularity, Universalizing Hindu Dharma then recovers the concrete history, mediated by text, document, and stone, of a conceptual revolution that in the middle of the thirteenth century emerged from within the tradition of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra. Situated in the court of the Seuṇa Yādava kings of Maharashtra, this sea change rendered the lived realities of the medieval Deccan provincial and subaltern, making possible the centering of the more familiar Brāhmaṇical imaginaries of early modernity and the colonial era and the transmutation of many of the older esoteric traditions into Dalit religions. Ultimately, what emerges out of the sources is the counterintuitive story of an internal revolution in Brāhmaṇical jurisprudence, ritual theory, and statecraft that abruptly called into question and overturned the longstanding radically pluralistic episteme by questioning the juridical foundations for the autonomy of non-state monastic institutions. His second book in progress translates the late-twelfth-century Old Marathi “Ocean of Discrimination” (Vivekasindhu), which captures for the first time the irascible idiom of the yogins of the Deccan, while offering a multilingual and multi-religious reception history tracing its influence and appropriation within its author’s lineage, as well as among Śākta-Śaiva yogins, householder Smārta Brāhmaṇas, Vīraśaivas, and Deccani Sufis. Other projects in progress include alternative histories of the appropriation and reinscription of Brāhmaṇical identity over the longue durée, and a series of case studies reading the inscriptional record in relation to material culture preserved in situ, offering site-specific institutional histories of the Non-Brāhmaṇa monastic estates of the Kālamukhas and their modes of governmentality. The first of these, “What the Kālamukhas Can Tell Us about Identity, Institutions, and Community in the Early Medieval Deccan,” is forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to Tantric Studies. He is on the steering committee for the Tantric Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

His second book in progress translates the late-twelfth-century Old Marathi “Ocean of Discrimination” (Vivekasindhu), which captures for the first time the irascible idiom of the yogins of the Deccan, while offering a multilingual and multi-religious reception history tracing its influence and appropriation within its author’s lineage, as well as among Śākta-Śaiva yogins, householder Smārta Brāhmaṇas, Vīraśaivas, and Deccani Sufis. Other projects in progress include alternative histories of the appropriation and reinscription of Brāhmaṇical identity over the longue durée, and a series of case studies reading the inscriptional record in relation to material culture preserved in situ, offering site-specific institutional histories of the Non-Brāhmaṇa monastic estates of the Kālamukhas and their modes of governmentality. The first of these, “What the Kālamukhas Can Tell Us about Identity, Institutions, and Community in the Early Medieval Deccan,” is forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to Tantric Studies. He is on the steering committee for the Tantric Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion.

Other projects in progress include alternative histories of the appropriation and reinscription of Brāhmaṇical identity over the longue durée, and a series of case studies reading the inscriptional record in relation to material culture preserved in situ, offering site-specific institutional histories of the Non-Brāhmaṇa monastic estates of the Kālamukhas and their modes of governmentality. The first of these, “What the Kālamukhas Can Tell Us about Identity, Institutions, and Community in the Early Medieval Deccan,” is forthcoming in the Oxford Companion to Tantric Studies. He is on the steering committee for the Tantric Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion.