Universalizing Hindu Dharma: The Invention of the Deśastha Brāhmaṇa and the Making of a New Kind of Dharma

Abstract

This presentation locates a neglected but profoundly significant formative antecedent to the
making of Sanātana Dharma emerging at the cusp of early modernity within the western
Deccan. In the thirteenth century, in the midst of a Śaiva Age defined by eclectic, internally
diversified, and largely sovereign monastic networks, we witness a sea change in values
centered in the Seuṇa court of central Maharashtra, representing a radical break not only from
the lived landscape of its time, but from the deep history of Dharmaśāstra and its visions of the
boundaries of Brāhmaṇical normativity. For the first time in the history of recoverable Hindu
thought, a Hindu state prescribes a systematic codification of ritual and institutional standards
as they apply across the entire spectrum of human society and then mass professionalizes an
entire cadre of ritualist bureaucrats to enforce these newly articulated standards. Inseparable
from this new investment in the management of everyday religion and all its varieties is a new
theorization of universalization of Hindu Dharma that entails an almost iconoclastic drive for
unification and standardization reflected in the śāstra, documentary records, and material
culture of the period. Integral to this conceptual project is the vast, thirteenth-century
dharmanibandha of Hemādri Suri, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi. In the Caturvargacintāmaṇi,
Hemādri reimagines the nature, place, and scope of activity of the Brāhmaṇa legalist across
religious cultures in a manner that directly informs later disciplinary projects intent upon the
management of a Hindu Dharma “for,” but not “by,” “everybody.”