The project ‘Hindu Temple Legends in South India’ explores the temple legends of the South Indian city of Kanchipuram in their different forms of transmission and makes them accessible in a digital environment. At the core of the project is the production of digital editions of the Sanskrit and Tamil texts. In a second step, these editions are linked with the documentation of the respective temple architecture and iconography as well as the related rituals and oral traditions. In this way, textual and non-textual forms of the temple legends are brought together in a consolidated digital corpus, creating a new understanding of this important cultural heritage both in its historical significance and as living practice.
The project was initiated in 2022 and is scheduled to run for sixteen years. Its main base is the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, with a branch office functioning in Pondicherry, India, in cooperation with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO).
The Material
Temple legends (Sanskrit māhātmya oder sthalapurāṇa) are Hindu texts that relate the origin stories of temples and other holy places through mythological narratives. A large number of such texts was composed during the medieval and early modern periods in the transregional language of Sanskrit, but also in regional Indian languages. Temple legends provide the link between pan-Indian and local traditions and between historical and contemporary Hinduism, making them extremely valuable sources for the study of Indian religiosity.
At the same time, temple legends do not only exist as texts, but also in oral, performative, and material form. They are told from mouth to mouth, they are ritually enacted, they are painted on temple walls and fashioned into sculptures. Their narratives are also of central importance for today’s lived Hindu traditions. As such, temple legends provide the unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between textual precept and lived practice and between textual and non-textual transmission.
The Site
The project focuses on the temple legends of the South Indian city of Kanchipuram, located around 70 km west of Chennai (Madras) in the state of Tamil Nadu. Counted among the seven sacred cities in Hinduism, Kanchipuram is a site of great religious importance. At the same time, all three major traditions of Hinduism—Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, and Śāktism—are equally strongly represented in the city. With its numerous historical temples and its vibrant living religious traditions, Kanchipuram is a particularly suitable site to study temple legends in their relation to historical and contemporary Hinduism.
The Texts
The goal of the project is the production of digital editions with annotated translations of the entire corpus of Kanchipuram’s temple legends. This corpus comprises eight sizeable texts in Sanskrit and the local language Tamil, which will be studied and made accessible through the project. Including the entire corpus of Kanchipuram’s temple legends allows comparing different sectarian versions as well as parallel versions in Sanskrit and Tamil.
The editorial program involves the digitization of all available textual witnesses (manuscripts and prints), their investigation through philological methods, and the preparation of digital editions and translations. These editions do not aim at reconstructing a putative urtext, but will render the various often widely diverging versions in which the texts have been transmitted visible. The results will be published in the form of digital editions, which will allow a flexible visualization of different versions of the texts as well as the linking of parallel texts. The editions will be complemented by English translations of the texts along with extensive annotation.
Material, Oral, and Performative Transmission
Apart from editing the texts, the project records the temples that are described in the texts as well as material, oral, and performative versions of the temple legends. To this end, the monuments and their iconography will be documented through photographs and oral retellings and ritual enactments of the temple legends will be recorded on video. These data are linked with the text editions, creating a consolidated corpus that allows accessing all versions of Kanchipuram’s temple legends irrespective of their format in a digital environment.