connection came from the Atharvaveda, the magic spells incorporated only late
into the Vedas. The Vaishnavas, worshippers of Vishnu, formed their own
collection of sacred texts around 100 b.c.e.–100 c.e. (alternatively, ca. 300–
800 c.e.) as rival to the Brahmanical samhita (Pandey, 1986; Eliot, 1988:
2:136–205; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 3:12–93; Raju, 1985: 439). Virtually all
the most prominent Hindu religions in the Common Era were unorthodox
from the point of view of traditionalist Brahmans.
The Hinduism which we can speak of as acquiring political power was
rather a mixed bag. The old Vedic alliance between Brahman priests and the
kings for whom they performed court rituals was gone. Replacing it were
several divergent forms of religious organization. New theistic cults were
celebrated at court. Many kings identified with Shiva in their official propa-
ganda, perhaps because of his ferocious aspect as destroyer and creator of the
universe; there was also much royal identification with deities who were not
central to the Hindu literary pantheon, especially Surya the sun god (Craven,
1975: 55, 104, 177, 181; Eliot, 1988: 2:206). Such court ceremonial sometimes
went along with performance of the great Vedic sacrifices under Brahman
auspices, but could also replace them. Another variant consisted of the popular
devotional cults of the late medieval period. Unlike the Vedic ceremonies,
which had no temples and were carried out either in the house or at outdoor
turf altars, these bhakti cults had a new material base—the permanent temple
with its autonomous staff (Smith, 1989: 151; OHI, 1981:32–33). Here a
second form of state-religious patronage was possible; some kings built temples
to Hindu deities and endowed their priests with incomes from land. Such
temple building generally came later and followed earlier patterns of Buddhist
endowments, which had pioneered collective religious property in India. From
the 800s onward, the ascendancy of the bhakti devotional cults displaced the
Vedic gods and shifted the center of popular attention to the temples. Both
these forms of Hinduism had a rather conventional alliance with the state.
They posed some rivalry to patronage of the monastic religions but were not
necessarily incompatible with it. There was nothing organizationally incongru-
ous about a ruler’s spreading largess simultaneously to several religions; ideo-
logically the adjustment was made by each cult’s recognizing some of the
other’s spiritual symbols while assigning it a lower place in one’s own religious
cosmology: the Buddha was eventually regarded as an incarnation of Vishnu,
and Jainas in their late syncretizing period incorporated lay worship of Hindu
gods as junior spirits subordinate to their own enlightened Tirthankaras.
The more radical challenge came from the version of Hinduism that
emerged as the Brahmans reorganized their power position vis-à-vis the state.
Indian states, following a tradition dating back to the entrepreneurial kings
who cleared the forest frontiers, always claimed absolute ownership of the
External and Internal Politics: India • 189