The End of the End: Devotion as an Antidote to Hell

The history of literary descriptions of the hereafter in India extends back to the end of the second millennium BCE, to which period the earliest still extant Sanskrit hymns date. It was not until the emergence of ascetic religious movements, such as Buddhism and Jainism, in the fifth century BCE that hell developed into the place of judgment and of torment. During the first millennium CE, hell would find its place in Hindu literature, as the devotion for the gods Viṣṇu and Śiva gave rise to an impressive literary genre: the Purāṇas. Later, with the help of Sufism, Hindu devotional movements adopted a kind of defiance of the hereafter, as shown by pre-modern literature.