Mahimā Dharma, an autochthonous socio-religious movement originating from the feudatory states of Odisha in the nineteenth century, promoted a monotheistic order while questioning the elaborate rituals and caste hierarchies that plagued mainstream Hinduism. In the process, the movement marked its difference from Jagannātha worship (as metonymic of Hindu faith), which apparently sanctioned such regressive practices. Yet this departure was not a total erasure of Jagannātha from the Mahimā world-picture, with the former haunting the new faith as a spectral reality. The declaration of difference in Mahimā Dharma, articulated in the teachings of Mahimā Svāmī and later in the songs of Bhīma Bhoi, carried within itself Jagannātha’s absent presence and everything associated with his seat of authority in Puri. The article proposes a template that acknowledges the ambivalence and uncertainties in the delivery of Mahimā Dharma and foregrounds what may be termed “difference with repetition” insofar as Jagannātha practice is concerned. This ambivalence was not external to Mahimā Dharma’s evolution, nor its unintended spillages, but lay at its very heart. Instead of viewing the new Dharma as a container with stable boundary conditions, the article argues that the Dharma was constantly threatened by the specter of its negation—that is, Jagannātha, who continued to exist in the margins of Mahimā body culture.
This article examines the history of the modern Digambara Jain “Worship Ceremony for the Maṇḍala for Indra’s Banner” (indradhvaja maṇḍala vidhāna). Today, for the thrice-yearly “Festival of Eight Days,” Aṣṭāhnika Parva, lay Digambaras perform this ceremony by ritually transforming themselves into gods and goddesses and planting banners in a large diagram made of colored powder. Fieldwork from 2010 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, and examinations of early and medieval texts show how this modern Indradhvaja ceremony has its roots in early Jains’ subversions of different Brāhmaṇical festivals also called the Festival of the Banner of Indra (indradhvaja), or the Festival of Indra (indramaha, indramahotsava). While Brāhmaṇical accounts of this festival from the early centuries CE encourage the worship of Indra, the king of the gods, for eight days, contemporaneous Jain sources claim that this festival commemorates multiple indras’ worship of the jinas, and vestiges of this debate can be seen in modern worship practices. Indra plays an important role in Jain ritual to this day in part because of the popularity of festivals for Indra in the first millennium.
Can multiple, potentially contradictory versions of the Rāma and Pāṇḍava narratives coexist within a single canon without compromising their individual authority? This article examines how anxieties regarding the canon reinforce or threaten the limits of textual authority in the context of the epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. During the late medieval and early modern periods, these epics were widely treated as authentic records of the distant past (itihāsa, meaning “thus it was”). However, these two authoritative texts existed alongside a vast and diverse tradition of alternative Rāmāyaṇas and Mahābhāratas, composed in various languages and media. Anxieties concerning narrative coherence and historical accuracy shaped intense debates over which versions of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata were truly canonical. Central to these debates was the concept of kalpabheda (“difference of cosmic cycles”), an exegetical device invoked to reconcile divergent narratives by attributing discrepancies to separate cosmic epochs. This article argues that kalpabheda offered exegetes—particularly Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva theologians from South India, namely Madhva, Govindarāja, and Appayya—the opportunity to present the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and Vyāsa Mahābhārata as coherent accounts of events of the distant past without dismissing the existence of other competing versions of the epic stories. This reveals the unique manner in which the textual authority of the Sanskrit epics is constructed, specifically within the sectarian context of late‐medieval and early modern South India. Within the landscape of plural, competing epic narratives, textual authority becomes either a weapon or a shield in sectarian debates, deployed by theologians to bolster a version of the epic narratives favorable or central to their own arguments.
