About this episode
In ?The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs V?ra?aiva origins from unstudied multilingual archives, overturning the conventional narrative of a monolingual Kannada bhakti movement protesting Sanskrit Brahmanism. The evidence reveals V?ra?aivism as multilingual from inception—its anti-caste inheritance deriving from Sanskrit ?aiva tradition, not rejecting it. Fisher proposes a "linguascape" model replacing unidirectional vernacularization with multidirectional flows through which local V?ra?aivisms were translated into being across south India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
