From Sthalamāhātmya to Talapurāṇam: The Multilingual and Multimodal Transmission of Temple Legends in Kanchipuram

Abstract

The mythical origin stories of Hindu holy places in India have been handed down in the form of texts known as sthalamāhātmyas (a subgroup of the māhātmya genre) in Sanskrit. Similar texts also exist in regional Indian languages such as Tamil, where they are known under the term talapurāṇam (from Skt. sthalapurāṇa). Moreover, the same stories are locally also transmitted in the form of oral narratives and materially represented in the form of sculptures and paintings. The present paper is using the South Indian city of Kanchipuram as a case in point to discuss the relationship between Sanskrit and Tamil texts on the one hand and between textual and non-textual forms of transmission on the other hand. As will be shown, the relevant texts for the city’s Śaiva temples are the Kāñcīmāhātmya (KM), a Sanskrit text of unknown date, and the Tamil Kāñcippurāṇam (KP), which the author Civañāṉa Muṉivar composed in the late eighteenth century. While the KP follows the KM very closely on a narrative level, it is composed in a much more complex poetic style, thus refuting prevalent clichés about Sanskrit as the “elite” language of South Asia. At the same time, the KP is today considered authoritative by the local Śaiva temple traditions, whereas the KM has almost completely fallen into oblivion. This case study invites us to reflect more generally on the multilingual transmission of māhātmyas and their relationship to non-textual traditions.