Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India.

• Author: Patel, Alka
• Position: Book review

Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India. By TAMARA I. SEARS. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. Pp. 300, illus. $75.

The book under review is clearly the result of years of dedicated and painstaking fieldwork, documentation, research, and careful writing. It brings much needed attention to a genre of architecture, the Saiva monastic complex, definable on a spectrum bookended by the "permeable" ascetic's retreat and the monumental, enclosed monastery (cf. chapter 3). These structures, though already documented in the nineteenth century by the nascent Archaeological Survey of India, have nevertheless been in the shadow of temple architecture in the scholarship on ancient and medieval India. (1) From the beginning, the work emphasizes the tandem development of monasteries and temples, with the former often preceding and eventually supporting the foundation of places of worship (p. 9). It thus provides a salutary correction to prevalent scholarly methodologies, which currently tend to treat temple architecture in isolation. The book merits wide readership by all investigators of medieval India including historians of art and architecture, religion, politics, and culture, not only because it brings to light a little known corpus of material and epigraphic evidence, but also because of the further questions it raises in the process.

The introduction and chapters 1-2 thoroughly inform the reader about the protagonists of the book, the Saiva sect of the Mattamayuras, whose monasteries proliferated between the ninth and twelfth centuries in central India. This region can be further delineated by two historical and political understandings of the geography: the area of analysis comprised ancient Gopaksetra or Gwalior and its vicinity, ruled not by a central and localized power but by feudatories of the Gurjara-Pratiharas, paramount at Ujjain and Kannauj between the eighth and eleventh centuries; and Dahaladesa, roughly coinciding with the lands of the Kalachuri empire based at Tripuri, spanning the late eighth through early thirteenth centuries.

A useful overview introduces the several branches of Saiva asceticism burgeoning during the eighth through tenth centuries, ranging from the atimarga or truly antinomian Kalamukhas, to the mantramarga or more socially acceptable Kapalikas and Mattamayuras (pp. 37-38). All of these strains of Saiva doctrine and ritual presented a plethora of alternatives to the...