UTE H\u00dcSKEN
Heidelberg University\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 huesken@uni-heidelberg.de<\/p>\n\n\n\n
VEGAVAT\u012a IN KANCHIPURAM’S STHALAM\u0100H\u0100TMYAS: TEXT, LANDSCAPE, AND LIVING TRADITION <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project Hindu Temple Legends in South India<\/em> 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 \u201cseven cities leading to mok\u1e63a<\/em>\u201d, 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 sthalam\u0101h\u0101tmyas<\/em> and talapur\u0101\u1e47ams<\/em>, while simultaneously documenting their material, performative, and oral dimensions\u2014bringing textual and non-textual forms of the temple legends together in a consolidated digital corpus (KANCHI). This paper takes the river Vegavat\u012b as its thread into this multimodal tradition. Vegavat\u012b’s origin story encapsulates the dynamics that lie at the heart of the sthalam\u0101h\u0101tmya<\/em> 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 sthalam\u0101h\u0101tmya<\/em> texts across their \u015aaiva, Vai\u1e63\u1e47ava, and \u015a\u0101kta variants. It further considers how the river Vegavat\u012b, 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 sthalam\u0101h\u0101tmya<\/em> literature\u2014a genre that is simultaneously a textual artefact, a ritual script, and a claim upon physical space\u2014for understanding the relationship between the Pur\u0101\u1e47as and the local traditions they generate and sustain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UTE H\u00dcSKENHeidelberg University\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 huesken@uni-heidelberg.de VEGAVAT\u012a IN KANCHIPURAM’S STHALAM\u0100H\u0100TMYAS: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2174","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2175,"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2174\/revisions\/2175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dicsep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}