Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PURANA (Mythical Discourse and Religious Agency in the Puranic Ecumene)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28
The Purāṇas (Primordial Texts) constitute the most voluminous and enduring genre of Sanskrit literature. These anonymous texts narrate the mythic cycles associated with the major deities of Hinduism (Viṣṇu, Śiva, Brahmā, the Goddess, etc.). The Purāṇas have also been integral to processes of ‘place-making’ by creating maps of geography and celebrating the salvific potential of sacred sites in myths that imbue the landscape with divine agency. While many important Purāṇas were first recorded and circulated in the first millennium CE—a time of significant social change marked by the flourishing of regional devotional movements and innovations of temple and image-centered religious practices—the genre has remained a living tradition through the colonial period until the present day. Despite the tradition’s centrality for cultural production in South Asia, we know very little about their historical embeddedness, as the Puranic composers and transmitters—in accordance with the anonymity characteristic of the genre—disguised their own historicity behind claims of ‘primordiality’ and divinely inspired teachings. More than just a body of literature, the Purāṇas are a dynamic mythical discourse.
PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Purāṇas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts—from Hindu scribes and Persian poets to Portuguese Jesuits and Khmer rulers. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Purāṇas’ mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis—establishing what we call a ‘Puranic Ecumene’: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.
PURANA makes a critical intervention in the field by tracing the composition, transmission, translation, and agency of the Purāṇas as a transregional and transhistorical process involving multiple actors, audiences, and geographic contexts—from Hindu scribes and Persian poets to Portuguese Jesuits and Khmer rulers. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we argue that the Purāṇas’ mythical discourse underlies and unites the religio-political culture of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis—establishing what we call a ‘Puranic Ecumene’: a vast part of the inhabited premodern world united by a distinctive mythical discourse, a hegemonic vision of the integration of society and cosmos, and a remarkable way of anchoring the present in the continuing ancient past.
In the first two years, the project team has been established. Filling the third postdoctoral position (on Southeast Asia) took a little bit longer but this has been filled now as well (September 2024). The team includes the Principal Investigator (PI), two international research collaborators, three postdoctoral researchers, one PhD student, and two affiliated PhD students. All team members are based at Leiden University, while the research collaborators are located at Florida State University and Kyoto University.
During the initial reporting period, the project organised a conference titled Material Texts: Religion and Mobility and a roundtable event, Telling Stories: Narrative Traditions from South and Southeast Asia. The project also held regular group reading sessions of Sanskrit texts at Leiden University and hosted sessions in preparation for the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa. These sessions took place at Leiden University and Kyoto University. Team members actively presented their research at international conferences and workshops, conducted fieldwork, and performed archival research in various libraries and museums.
To date, several articles have been published, with a special issue—stemming from the first conference—set to be released in the journal Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation soon.
A project website has been launched, which provides further details on the team's work and is updated regularly: https://purana.pubpub.org(opens in new window). Since PubPub announced that they would start charging fees for hosting, a website has been set up with Commons: https://purana.hcommons.org(opens in new window). This replaces the old site and has been active since 2025.
During the initial reporting period, the project organised a conference titled Material Texts: Religion and Mobility and a roundtable event, Telling Stories: Narrative Traditions from South and Southeast Asia. The project also held regular group reading sessions of Sanskrit texts at Leiden University and hosted sessions in preparation for the critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa. These sessions took place at Leiden University and Kyoto University. Team members actively presented their research at international conferences and workshops, conducted fieldwork, and performed archival research in various libraries and museums.
To date, several articles have been published, with a special issue—stemming from the first conference—set to be released in the journal Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation soon.
A project website has been launched, which provides further details on the team's work and is updated regularly: https://purana.pubpub.org(opens in new window). Since PubPub announced that they would start charging fees for hosting, a website has been set up with Commons: https://purana.hcommons.org(opens in new window). This replaces the old site and has been active since 2025.
The project takes an ambitious and interdisciplinary approach to Purāṇas, combining textual, material, spatial, and religious studies. To support these goals, a new Open Access journal titled PURANA Media: Past, Present, Future has been launched, with its first issue scheduled for spring 2025. This journal will bring together research on historical sources (textual, visual, and material), critical reflections on heritage and museum studies, and contributions from art, design, photography, and other media—pushing the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.