Elaine M. Fisher, "The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India" (Oxford UP, 2025)

In The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs Vīraśaiva origins from unstudied multilingual archives, overturning the conventional narrative of a monolingual Kannada bhakti movement protesting Sanskrit Brahmanism. The evidence reveals Vīraśaivism as multilingual from inception—its anti-caste inheritance deriving from Sanskrit Śaiva tradition, not rejecting it. Fisher proposes a "linguascape" model replacing unidirectional vernacularization with multidirectional flows through which local Vīraśaivisms were translated into being across south India. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.