| This dissertation centers on the Maharthamanjari ("The Flower-Cluster of the Great Purpose") of Mahesvarananda, a unique and unjustly neglected text composed in the South Indian city of Cidambaram around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The work is an amalgam of philosophical treatise, liturgical guidebook, and visionary literary essay, cast in a highly unusual, bilingual form. Unravelling the formal and rhetorical details of the text forms a primary task of this thesis. This is partly founded on a text-critical study of the Maharthamanjari which reveals previously unnoticed features of the work's history of transmission and reception.; The Maharthamanjari also provides the occasion for an inquiry into what I refer to as Cidambaram's textual culture, the wider set of institutions and presuppositions that governed texts and their users in this time and place. The city's rise to prominence over the course of the twelfth century can be best understood as contingent upon transformations in the ways in which the city's literate elites used and created works of textualized language. In turn, the public claims enunciated by the other Cidambaram texts surveyed here find an analog in the Maharthamanjari 's efforts to fashion its own community of reception, a project founded on an unprecedented synthesis and extension of ideas associated with earlier Sanskrit literary criticism.; The study of this single textual culture raises larger questions about the historical and civilizational presumptions that guide the study of the Indian past, questions that are explored in this dissertation's conclusion. |
