UTE HÜSKEN
Heidelberg University huesken@uni-heidelberg.de
VEGAVATĪ IN KANCHIPURAM’S STHALAMĀHĀTMYAS: TEXT, LANDSCAPE, AND LIVING TRADITION
The project Hindu Temple Legends in South India is a long-term research project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, established in 2022 with a planned duration of sixteen years. Its focus is the city of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, one of the “seven cities leading to mokṣa”, whose religious significance is grounded in a rich body of mythological narratives transmitted since the medieval period in Sanskrit and Tamil, as well as through temple architecture, iconography, ritual performance, and oral tradition. The project produces digital critical editions and annotated translations of the complete corpus of Kanchipuram’s sthalamāhātmyas and talapurāṇams, while simultaneously documenting their material, performative, and oral dimensions—bringing textual and non-textual forms of the temple legends together in a consolidated digital corpus (KANCHI). This paper takes the river Vegavatī as its thread into this multimodal tradition. Vegavatī’s origin story encapsulates the dynamics that lie at the heart of the sthalamāhātmya genre: a sacred waterway emerges through mythological narrative as an axis of divine power that defines the landscape of Kanchipuram. The paper explores how this narrative functions within the sthalamāhātmya texts across their Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, and Śākta variants. It further considers how the river Vegavatī, as described in these texts, maps onto the contemporary topography of Kanchipuram and beyond. In doing so, the paper reflects more broadly on the project’s methodology: the necessity of reading the living landscape alongside the textual tradition, and the particular opportunities offered by sthalamāhātmya literature—a genre that is simultaneously a textual artefact, a ritual script, and a claim upon physical space—for understanding the relationship between the Purāṇas and the local traditions they generate and sustain.