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This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use of the heritage language is not always at the forefront, despite a monolingual Tamil language policy, because religious transmission is given priority over language transmission. At the same time, there are certain motivations that influence the use of Tamil: to index the close relationship between language and religious culture and to index one's membership of the ethnoreligious community. This paper draws on ethnographic data to provide both a macro and micro view of these motivations – what drives adolescents to use their heritage language, how it is deployed from their linguistic repertoires, and how it contrasts with the use of the students' dominant language, English. The analysis takes a whole of conversation approach to understanding the relationship between religion and heritage language use for second-generation migrant students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The five articles which make up this special issue of South Asia explore the role of the Ramayana in Sri Lankan art, literature, religious ritual and political discourse in shaping Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Saiva perceptions of the island's distant past. Contributors work to answer the question as to when and how Sri Lanka came to be equated with the mythic 'Lankapura' of Valmiki's epic, exploring both positive and negative portrayals of Ravana (ruler of Lanka antagonist of the Ramayana) in Sinhala and Tamil literature from the late medieval period to the present day. Authors work to account for the politicisation and historicisation of the Ramayana in twenty-first century Sri Lanka (including similarities to and differences from the contemporary Indian situation), along with the appropriation of Ravana as a Sinhala Buddhist cultural hero, and the incorporation of Vibhishana as a 'guardian deity' in the Sinhala Buddhist pantheon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the identification of the island of Sri Lanka with the 'Lankapura' of Ramayana literary fame, tracing the transmission of the mythical geography of the epic from late medieval South India to Sri Lankan Tamil temple literature. The invading Cholas of the tenth century were the first to identify Sri Lanka as the 'Lanka' of the Ramayana, a geographical equivalence maintained by the Arya Cakravarti rulers who dubbed themselves 'guardians of Rama's bridge' (cētu kāvalan). I highlight the uniquely sympathetic treatment of Ravana by the Hindus of eastern Sri Lanka, and explore the likelihood that Tamil impressions of Ravana impacted his appearance in Sinhala Buddhist literature from the fifteenth century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Qutb Shahi formation of Shiʿism with its material culture, sacroscape, literature, and ritual practices, sought to understand local Deccani religious grammars of the body and integrate its metaphors, metonymies, and scripts. This paper examines the use of thepanjah(hand) and the n‘al (crescent-shaped nose-plate or horseshoe) as a means of cultivating a ‘context-sensitive’ process of domestication of Shiʿism by the Qutb Shahs. This domestication of Shiʿism was effected in three different yet integrally related ways: (1) Through the formation of a Deccani form of Gangā-Yamunītahzīb(culture) as a means of integrating Qutb Shahi Shiʿi religious practice with local Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions; (2) Through processes of intersemiotic exchange of indexical sign and referent of religious objects among religious communities, and (3) In the polytropically relational nature of Muharram ritual and material practice that was fostered by the sultans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which encouraged people to cross religious boundaries and participate in rituals and devotionally engage sacred objects from their own perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, south India had witnessed a widespread sectarianization of its religious landscape. We observe a growing polarization among religious institutions, the social and economic networks they mediated, and religious discourse across genres, whether Sanskrit or vernacular, whether devotional poetry or systematic theology. The present article examines the textual culture that emerged from the intersectarian discourse of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tamil country. In particular, I focus on a definitive but overlooked dimension of this discourse that I refer to as ‘public philology’: text criticism that serves as public theology. During the early modern centuries, sectarian theologians across community boundaries increasingly challenged their rivals specifically on philological grounds, combing the scriptures of their rivals for textual corruptions and unstable recensions. Focusing on one particular case of public philology in practice – the debate concerning the scriptural justification for bearing the sectariantilakaon the forehead – I argue that the philological ventures of these early modern theologians served simultaneously aspublic theology. This trans-sectarian public theology, far from being a strictly academic enterprise, served to solidify the boundaries between sectarian communities. By adjudicating public standards for orthodox religious belonging, ‘public philologians’ left a lasting impression on the religious landscape of south India up to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders sites, practices, and ideas about the physical remains of the special dead in South Asian religions. Questioning the common notion of "relics" as a point of distinction between "Buddhism" and "Hinduism," it explores the constellation of ideas and practices surrounding the remains of gods, demons, people, and animals in South Asian religions. Archaeological and literary evidence for li...gas, stūpas, and related sites and structures are used to explore shared discourses and practices among Buddhists and Śaivas in particular. Through such test cases, it shows how bones and other physical remains of the special dead could become areas of engagement, especially when linked to sacred landscape. Attention to these contact zones reveals sharing, borrowing, and competition among ancient and medieval groups that modern scholarship has studied primarily in terms of assumed differences between "Hinduism" and "Buddhism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the emblem of Pāśupata identity, representations of the deified teacher called Lakulīśa (the ‘Lord with a Club’) became a prominent feature of the expanding Śaiva religious landscape in early medieval northwest India. This study works to recover some of Lakulīśa’s historical contingency by reading his appearance in both text and image as a reflection of or response to particular concerns of the developing Śaiva religious community. The significance of Lakulīśa’s literary debut in the Nepalese recension of the earlySkandapurāṇais examined first. I then explore the visual representations of this figure by considering patterns in Lakulīśa’s iconography and the place of his images within sanctified spaces. Since temples were vitallociof interaction across a wide spectrum of social groups and religious communities, even ostensibly Śaiva centres would have accommodated a range of deities, religious practitioners, and devotional repertoires. Given the multivocality of these sanctified spaces, I propose that Lakulīśa images would have been subject to multiple ‘readings’ or interpretations. With his attributes signifying power, fertility, and protection, I suggest that Lakulīśa functioned not only as a potent sign of Pāśupata identity, but as a multivalent persona, facets of which would have resonated with a broader religious community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article introduces chapter 6 of the Śivadharmaśāstra which contains a lengthy mantra invoking all cosmic powers and deities for appeasement (śānti). Following a brief introduction to the Śivadharma corpus of texts, the form and characteristics of the mantra are illustrated by means of a few examples of invocations to individual deities. The mantra includes references to various iconographical and mythological aspects of the deities invoked that can be used fruitfully for historical research into their development. It is argued that the invocation systematically presents all deities and powers as oriented towards Śiva, thus establishing the authority of Śaivism. A brief discussion on the use of the mantra as attested in theŚivadharmaand in inscriptions concludes the article. It is shown that the mantra was specifically used for securing the wellbeing of the kingdom ruled by a Śaiva king. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The powerful shadow cast by the Dravidian movement on its very scholarship has meant that the focus of scholarly attention has been on the recent, institutional and secular history of the movement, with scant attention paid to its earlier religious roots. While the important role played by the pioneer Neo-Saivite elites has been noted, there have been few attempts to understand or theorise either the significance of this Neo-Saivite factor or the strategies and methods through which the Neo-Saivite revivalists fashioned and articulated a form of non-Brahmin Tamil nationalism. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by examining the largely untapped accounts of the Neo-Saivite movement written by orthodox Saivite contemporaries, who were highly critical of the movement and sought to expose both its deviation from ‘true’ Saivism and its political agenda. It is these criticisms of the Neo-Saivites that best illuminate how Saivism was deployed for a Dravidian and non-Brahmin Tamil nationalist project. The paper also argues that it is through a critical study of the Neo-Saivite movement that we can adequately address the question of the social base of the Dravidian movement, which has long continued to haunt its scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the religious experience of the founding poet-saints of the Saivite bhakti movement in the Tamil country of the sixth to ninth centuries CE with that of contemporary Saivite devotees. The historical background of the bhakti tradition within Tamil Saivism is sketched, with a brief description of its spirituality. Material collected in interviews with Tamil-speaking Saivites is presented, including personal accounts of the origins of the interviewees' religious faith and reports of their experience of God in their daily lives. This material is discussed in terms of Fowler's developmental stages of faith, with additional reference to other categorisations of religious motivation. It will be shown that the experience of the founding poet-saints is not entirely dead in contemporary Saivism, but that it is restricted to quite a small minority of devotees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of Kashmiri Pandits women in Indian culture and politics. The group is considered a repository of traditional language, founders of the influential school of Shaivism and the Indian theory of aesthetics. They became refugees after a brandish of anti-Hindu propaganda by Muslim separatists, but later on have become equally astute and have given the nation its most prominent post-independent prime ministers such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.