Innovation and Social Change in the Vale of Kashmir, circa 900–1250 C.E.

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 innovative 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 thequestionof religious change inpremodern 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 practices 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 that