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Today I'm speaking with Dr. Elizabeth Cecil from Florida State University on her exciting new book, Mapping the Pashupa The Landscape, Narrative Place in the Shiva Imagery in Early Medieval North India. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Raj.
So of the many places we could start to dive into this work, let me ask you about Pashupata. What is that? What's that referred to? Okay, so the term Pashupata in my work is used to refer to a particular community of Shiva devotees.
They're actually the earliest group of devotees or the earliest, let's say, community that we know of, at least from textual sources. So one of the things that my book is trying to do is phrase the early history of this community and understand not only how that community developed over time, but also how it developed geographically across different places. And the term Pashupata of course comes from a familiar epithet of Shiva, and that's Pashupati or Lord of Creatures. Good old Shiva Lord of Beasts.
So just to impact that, just to tease that out, so is that to say that that Shiva worship is an older than the medieval period? Can you answer the first community? Sure, so it absolutely is older. I mean we have images from Matura from the Kuchana Period that show people worshiping the linga.
And we have images that seem to anticipate the deity that we come to know as Shiva on coins for example. But what we have with the Pashupatas in not only the early medieval period, but also a little bit before that in the fifth and sixth century is this idea of an identifiable community, of a group of people who identify themselves by this name and to understand a certain kind of set of practices or norms as defining their community. And in the earliest sources we have the Pashupatasutras and Kondinias commentary on those sutras. A community is really presented as one that's exclusively male, it's comprised of Roman males, and they're engaged in these kinds of aesthetic antinomian practices that many people I think readily associate with shyness.
People who are feigning madness or hanging around in cremation grounds with with skull bowls, things like that, things that seem very, let's say, anti social or again social norms. And I think for a long time that's how this community has been imagined or considered, but that's been changing in recent years, I would say in the past, in the past decade, with the gradual editing and publication of a text called the Skandapurana. And that text is significant because it gives us a really different kind of perspective on this community, and it emerges not so much as this exclusively male Roman community engaged in aesthetic and antinomian practices, but a community that's opening up or opened up to a broader, let's say, lay devotional practice and aspect as well. So one of the interesting things about your work is the way you dovetail different kinds of data, or you have some people study texts and material culture, there are folks like yourself who are brave enough to do both and piece them together.
And so we'll touch on the sort of different kinds of data you engage, but since you've already opened the door to the wonderful world of the Skandapurana, which is a textual source, tell us a little bit about the Skandapurana or at least how it plays into your argument. Sure. So there may be certain listeners who are familiar with this term Skandapurana, there's a text called the Skandapurana that was published by the Vencateshra Press in the early 1900s. But the text that I'm referring to, the Skandapurana or what some people call the early Skandapurana is actually an entirely different textual tradition, which is quite surprising.
And it's the only tradition that we know of that actually refers to itself in the manuscript call of arms as the Skandapurana. The text that's published by the Vencateshra Press, actually those sections of text of those manuscripts refer to themselves as kandas, so as pieces or portions of the Skandapurana. So the question prior to the discovery of this earlier text was, okay, well what was that Skandapurana? Because it seems that there is some kind of earlier body of literature that has not survived or is not part of the received tradition.
And that text was known only kind of obliquely, peripherally through references in Dharmani Banga literature, so the authors of these bodies of literature were citing certain prescriptions from the Skandapurana. But we didn't really have the text itself. So that changed with the discovery of different manuscript recensions, the oldest of which is the Nepalese recension of this early Skandapurana, this text that calls itself the Skandapurana. And that's the text that is the subject of this ongoing critical edition, which has been focused in the Netherlands.
And that's the text that I'm using to reconstruct or recover this early Pashapasa history. One of the things that this Skandapurana, this early text does is give us the first narrative account of the Pashapasa tradition, and it does that through a kind of ideological myth whereby Shiva said to descend to earth in a particular place called Karohana, which is today identified as a village in Gujarat. And he creates four Brahmins from each of his four mouths and through these agents or through these disciples, he disseminates this Pashapasa doctrine. And these pupils then go forth and spread that doctrine through various locales in North India.
If you will indulge me just a tiny nerdy little footnote before we dive into the material content, the critical editing process, where is where are you in that process? So, yeah, so I think that fifth volume is going to be coming out next year, and there are probably, I would say, at least three or four more volumes to go, so the text is quite luminous. Great. So there is a curse in this, as I'm speaking to you, there seems to this parallel to what's happening with the Pashapata narrative, the Skandapurana, and then what we see of the Surya worship in the Sanbapurana, and this is recently put on my radar because of recent application that I was working on, talks about sort of movements of the community across actual known geographical space, interspersed with installation of various deities and various associations.
So maybe we can talk about privately, but parallels between the two. So you have this ancient, how ancient, by the way, how long do you get this kind of put on? Sixth century, let's say. So this sixth century, send a put on, and you have found it to be useful, each whole into what's being said of the life of this community.
And so you're not just looking at the world of the texts, you're also looking at other kinds of evidence, you can tell us a little bit about that. Sure, so this mapping of this, what I call the Pashapata landscape, or the Pashapata shape, as the text calls it in the Skandapurana. So you can also send that to be a highly rhetorical textual construction on the part of these authors who are trying to locate what was likely and what other sources show to be a really kind of diverse community on the ground. And they're trying to find some way through this mapping to this authoritative vision to give that diverse body of practitioners and practices a greater coherence, right?
That's the rhetorical aim of the text as I understand it. And in addition to creating that coherence, they're locating it in specific places, specific kind of prestigious places in the landscape, like Oojang, for example, one of these kind of preeminent centers of culture and religion and commerce in the pre-modern. But in addition to using the text in this rhetorical construction, I have been interested to understand what other sources from this geographically circumscribed area might tell us about how chiva practitioners understood themselves to be part of this community, how they represented themselves, the kinds of things that they were engaged in. And not surprisingly, when you look at those sources, which I accessed through inscriptions, through physical landscapes, to archaeological sites, and also importantly through images.
What we see from those sources is that there are other kind of imaginings, there are other ways in which people understood themselves to be part of this community that are often challenging to the text. Maybe tell us about some of the ways in which the textual data may be at odds with material culture. Sure, and I don't want to say it's necessarily at all, I think there, maybe we can think of these as different voices, the different material sources, different textual sources present different voices, and so we need to consider all of these voices to understand the polyphony of the tradition, let's say. But, you know, for example, this kind of parada, while it does kind of open up to these broader Lao Quika concerns, it still is a text that's very much rooted in this kind of a medical tradition.
So of course, the agents of chiva on earth are still male brahmines who are disseminating this doctrine. But what we see on the ground, for example, in inscriptions is that it's not only male brahmines who are involved in contributing to Pashapata religious establishments, to supporting religious specialists, to being part of the tradition, we have, for example, copious evidence that merchants and guilds, so economic actors, were really integral to the creation of the Pashapata tradition that they were actually even more than kings or royal elites, the people that we would expect to be, perhaps, the major donors, the major funders. Actually, it was these, these mercantile groups, these guilds who were really central donors and integral to the creation of the religious institutions that supported the Pashapata movements. And we also see evidence of women being involved.
So there's a really interesting inscription from a place called Intraguar in Madhya Pradesh that talks about three daughters who were, or three women who were the daughters of a merchant, a local merchant. And after the death of their father, they kind of pool their resources together, and they make this donation to this temple of Gute Spera, and this is a temple in which Pashapata religious specialists are actively presiding. So they give a sense of the diversity of the community in that way. And it's not only the donors that are shown to be diverse, but we also get a sense from material and graphic evidence that the people who were religious specialists themselves were actually quite a diverse bunch.
So from Rajasthan, for example, there's a really interesting inscription from a place called Naparsha, and we learn in that inscription a lot about the religious specialists who were acted at this particular temple. And, you know, they're not, they're not all kind of proper brahman's with proper lineages. I mean, they're people that are really kind of rooted in a local landscape and rooted to particular landscape features and the temples that develop around them. So you have this kind of local strain that's operating as well.
And of course, you also see Pashapata religious specialists doing things that aren't necessarily Shiva. Again, not surprisingly, I mean, they're not busy being Pashapatas all the time, and temple complexes were diverse and incorporated a number of deities. So you find them donating to goddess temples or active in memorial practices. So these are just kind of some ways in which the tradition emerges as far more kind of complex and internally diverse than the textual sources admit.
Certainly, or use of the word polyphony, I think is quite apt in this case. This may require some conjecture. Do we have a sense of the origins of this community? What do you mean by origins?
So do we have a sense of whether this community originated with the permanent fold? Was it something that was folding at some point? Yeah, that's a good question. I think on the one hand it does seem that at least in the Sondaparana that the authors are actively trying to claim this tradition for.
Yeah, or the grammatical world or the grammatical tradition writ large, let's say, and there are certain kind of extreme or more antinomian practices that say are not part of the kind of run as envisioning of what the Pashapata tradition is. So in that sense, maybe it's being domesticated is not the right word, but it's more exoteric than esoteric, right? A lot of the earlier Pashapata literature is far more esoteric whereas the Sondaparana is more in and of the world. So that's one difference and that's perhaps some evidence that that tradition is being kind of actively incorporated within a more again kind of Lao-Kika tradition.
But there's also this really interesting figure who is part of the Pashapata tradition and that's Lao-Kulisha or Lao-Di in Sondaparana, the Lord with a club. And this figure who in Sondaparana is kind of hinted at being an act type or representation or a kind of embodiment of the Lord of the deity is this kind of founding figure. And images of Lao-Kulisha as this teacher bearing the club, very much a kind of aesthetic type, much predate the text. So we have images that much predate this kind of Pashaparana which suggests that this figure was also one that was known in the greater landscape and the greater religious landscape.
So there's also some kind of interesting element about that idea of a founding figure as well and how that founding figure made point to some kind of charismatic figure or lineage on the ground. The text is also claiming. How much more ancient is in the true culture of this founding figure? So the earliest Lao-Kulisha images as I recall are 4th-th century, there are some images from Mathura.
Fascinating. So obviously there's a fair bit of conjecture in what we're doing here but that's a sense I got about the sense, not being nearly as versed in the data as you are obviously but I got the sense that you made it snippets on the ground that potentially got folded into this chronic narrative which may well have been the case, for example, for the day they've been taught if you both of them have been best. And there's a way to really know and it's a fascinating tension. And I think it's also, I don't know how much can connect the day to Mahami with particular places but I think with the Pashapata movement, it's also something that is really tied to particular places and especially this site, Karohana in Gujarat, which is still today a place that is actively engaged in this Pashapata movement still.
I mean, this is a tradition that's been kind of resurrected in Karohana and also interestingly, it's the only place that I've found that has a kind of consistent way of depicting Lao-Kulisha, this Lord with the Club, this founding figure, it has a really stable iconography. So he's depicted in the same way from the earliest images up until the present day. And that's something that you don't observe anywhere else in India. So it does seem to be that this place also has a really important role to play in the history of the tradition.
And one that may very well predate the text. Now how did you stumble upon this fascinating project? Was it while engaging with your culture or was it through this textual people on this kind of banana? How did you get here?
Yeah, well, it was primarily through the Sannapurana, that's sort of what started my inquiry into Pashapata's shydism. And that began in 2011. I was doing my PhD at Brown actually, and I had the opportunity to go to the Netherlands for a year and work with Hans Bakker, who was at that time leading this critical editing project. And Hans had long been someone that I admired and the scholar had admired because this was something that he did.
He was really incorporating textual evidence, of a graphic evidence, material evidence, archaeological evidence, he was kind of making use of all the available sources. And that I think has always been a kind of model for me of what scholarship in our field should be, right? That you can access all of the available sources and tell a really nuanced and complex story through them. But it's also of course a really difficult thing to do because it means that you have to somehow get experience working with these sources and being able to travel to India for long periods of time.
And that was also something that I was lucky enough to kind of get some hands on training through working with the Sannapurana project and being able to go to India for two field seasons. You know, with the members of the projects before I started my field work on my own. So yeah, I was really going to the Netherlands and being part of Skannapurana project that's turned me on to the tradition and to also working with sources outside the text. Clearly, this is groundbreaking work on seminal early in the earliest known Shai Ywai community, which itself is a huge achievement.
What would you say the main takeaway argument perspective? What would you say the main takeaway of this work here? Sure. So, I think one of the main takeaways or one of the kind of main points that I want to make with this book is that the story that the text tells while I think incredibly important and significant is not the only one.
And in order to understand or attempt to understand as best we can as scholars, what's happening in the religious landscape of early medieval India, we do need to access all of these available sources. And I think one of the important things those sources tell us is that a lot of the kind of established narratives that we had in mind about shivism say that it's a community of of antinomian aesthetic types, or that's when we think about temples and religious institutions, specifically shy institutions that we need to think immediately of kings and rulers as the primary donors and the primary architects of the religious landscape. But those things really need to be reconsidered because when we go to the evidence and we go to the inscriptions and actually read them, it shows quite clearly that at this time at least, you know, building temples and overseeing religious institutions was not yet really part of that royal repertoire. It becomes so later, but at this time, there are other people and other social groups who are much more involved merchants, agrarian communities, traders, guilds, really local communities, and these religious institutions were really integral and kind of actively creating these communities and he's really part of the religious institutions specifically.
They catalyze these really kind of remarkable social synergies that bring people together and I think that is really important for thinking about how pre-modern religion was practiced in early South Asia. And yeah, I think that's a kind of takeaway that is significant for the early history of of cultural activism, but I think it's something that resonates with kind of larger questions and issues that we as scholars of the pre-modern world have to deal with. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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Pay for by the government of Ontario. It's sort of this how to phrase this. The material culture, tempers or enriches the polyphony of perspectives. I get the sense that this work is predicated upon almost a reticence.
Just look at what's in the text in terms of there needing to be some sort of corroborating or to your evidence such that, you know, when I read a text for narrative purposes, I read it for literary ethical, you know, spiritual philosophical purposes. I don't particularly look to texts for sociocultural data. But if I were to do so, I don't necessarily know about the world beyond a text. What I know is what the text is telling me about what all I know is what the world of text is crafting.
And so it seems that a key part of what you're doing is showing the utility and the necessity of corroborating with material culture claims the texts were possible. Well, I also really think, I mean, I agree with you, but I think it really depends as you kind of said yourself on what questions you're bringing to the sources, right, what you want to know, what you're after, what kind of knowledge you want to think. So, yes, I think of myself also as a kind of cultural historian. So I'm always eager to or trying to put things in context, not just text, but all kinds of historical evidence.
And then, you know, coupled with that, I'm also always really interested in what, you know, this sounds very innocent and simple, but what people were really doing. And of course, we can never access the subjectivities of pre-modern actors. But I do think that by bringing different kinds of sources into conversation, we do get different perspectives. And it's really interesting to consider those different perspectives or different voices as multiple tellings of the same story.
Right. So we have a kind of a runner that gives us, you know, one telling or one account. And it's interesting to me then to complicate that, to try to complicate it as much as possible through the incorporation of other kinds of tellings of the same history. And while it is sometimes tempting, I think, to read sources to corroborate other sources, right, to kind of come to a neater historical picture.
I think there's also something to be said for letting that historical picture continue to be a little bit complicated and maybe a little bit messy and to have, you know, not all of the edges neatly aligned. Right. There are some things that, yeah, we can't necessarily reconcile. That's also, I think, part of the story.
I mean, any book is going to be hopelessly perspective, it seems, you know, very present before the present is according to our very eyes into craft and narrative of what the heck's going on right now. You're really impressed. And so obviously there's going to be various perspectives and various sort of peep holes into the past. And it's interesting that we sort of, we do different things with the text, but for example, my work looking at chronic narratives, primarily literature.
Sort of fights the impulse, this ancient impulse of looking to them for sources purposes. And so work like yours sort of corroborates the notion of looking as a text as a text, right, as a narrative, right. And the narrative may or may not look any narrative, right. In a modern news narrative may or may not accurately represent what's happening in the window.
Much less an ancient, you know, religious narrative. So I find that quite fascinating. What you looked at a fair bit of data is also taking you. There's obviously a great many hours of tracking and research went into this.
So maybe you could talk about one of the sites or what I want to ask you is really what really surprised you or stood out for you or, you know, I want to leave it as open as possible. Sure, sure. So yes, so for this book I did about two years of field work, because the main locales that I wanted to explore in Northwest India are kind of at a distance from each other. So I so in terms of geography, I had three primary kind of case studies or case locations.
So one of those was in the North Duncan around Mumbai. And I was looking at some cave temple sites there on Elefanta, Yogeshwari, Mundipeshwar, and some other locales around Nausic in Maharashtra. And this kind of region corresponds to what the kind of Veronica calls the Stalya mountain, which is their southern boundary of the Prashir Patha landscape. That was one of the regions I considered.
The other was more in Central India. So in Madhya Pradesh around Chaturgar and Deshapura. And that corresponds to, yeah, this kind of crossroads region of the kind of Veranas narrative landscape, where luckily, just people are kind of moving through. And then finally I ended up in Northwest Rajasthan around, yes, Apatalaksha.
So this is kind of north of Jodpur around Chaturgar and this is called Mount Harsha. And this region, which is kind of known for its salt lakes, so it's a major salt production area, was I think the Jambu Marga, which is another prominent locale of the kind of Verana. So I explored a lot of different temple sites and archaeological sites in the process of kind of moving through this landscape. And a lot of that material, of course, doesn't make it into the book, but I was able to focus on some really interesting places.
And I think the place that most captured my imagination was Mount Harsha, which is this mountain top temple complex in Northwest Rajasthan. And it gains prominence later in the early medieval periods on the ninth and tenth century, because it is the royal temple complex of the Chahmanas, who are a localized ruling lineage that gains prominence first as subordinate or affiliated rulers with the Patehars. And then they really kind of claim their own territory. And one of the things that they're able to do is control this mountain, this Mount Harsha, which is a regional landmark.
I think it's a regional landmark for trade. It's positioned amidst the salt lakes. It's a really economically important and lucrative position to control. And one of the first things they do when they claim this place is they build a temple for Jiva by the name of Lord Harsha.
And they commissioned this really long Sanskrit inscription that tells about their donations and also gives the lineages of the various Pashapatsa religious specialists that were active at the site and also involved in donating and making built interventions in the landscape. And then finally, it has an interesting prose section that records a lot of donations made to the temple by local people, farmers, traders, horse traders that came from further Northwest India, salt merchants, all kinds of people were coming to this temple and were engaged in making donations, both local and kind of trans-regional. So for that reason, it's a fascinating place, but also in terms of the material remains and material culture, it's absolutely fascinating because before I had gone there, I'd read the inscription, of course, you get the impression that there's a mountaintop temple, it's this really imposing structure, but you don't get any sense of what else was going on there. And then when I went there for the first time, I was absolutely overwhelmed at this kind of temple complex, which was absolutely massive.
I mean, at least the remains of 23, if not 25 or more temples. And the iconography is also really complex and interesting because again, all the inscription tells us a lot about this place as a shiva place. The iconography tells a really different kind of story, actually images of Shiva or of kind of Shiva themes are not so, you know, not so copious, there aren't so many. There are a few interesting lingos and there's a lingo of Babur-Morti, so this image that shows the manifestation of Shiva in this kind of fiery column and Vishnu and Brahma searching for the end of that.
And aside from those icons, the material evidence gives us evidence that there was a really active Vaishnava community, also very unique kind of Vaishnava images there. Soourya imagery is also really interesting, so it really suggests that this was a place where the identity of Shiva and Soourya was also coming together and being enmeshed in really interesting ways, because one of the things that we have, whether we start to see an early Rajasthan of like the 9th century are these, what I call, the corporate icons, so you get kind of these fusion images in which you have icons that combine elements of Vishnu and Shiva and Brahma and Soourya, but with Soourya as the main deity or as the primary deities. So I think that's making a kind of theological claim that all of these other deities are affiliated with Soourya, but he's still primary. And we see a lot of those actually from Mount Harsha, which suggests a little bit of religious competition that again you don't get any evidence of that from the inscription.
And finally, the goddess imagery is also really complex and interesting, because it suggests that there was a thriving Yogini cult at Mount Harsha, and there's also this very kind of strange structure that survives there. It's this open-aired temple kind of complex that today is a vibrant shrine and also partly a residence, but it really is also where most of these Yogini images and most of these goddess images are found. So it really suggests to me that this was one of the kind of quintessential open-air type Yogini temples. And that was also kind of an integral part of this temple complex, which again is not something that's mentioned in the inscription.
So these are all things that you are able to see by spending time at a place and visiting a place and I've been to Harsha, I think, five times. So it takes a long time, or at least it took me a long time to kind of make sense of what was happening with that material archive or with that visual archive to kind of understand or try to understand at least how those various facets of the site kind of fit together. So that was interesting and challenging and rewarding at the same time. So please tell me that Luscious Dada will find a home somewhere.
So there are a lot of images of the goddesses, especially some interesting Yoginis in the book. There's my favorite is this elephant-headed Yogini. So yeah, she's there. Seems that her crucial part of your work is this idea of place and place-making and even sort of religious authority, the intersection of religious authority in place-making, sacred geography.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? Maybe even some, if you do rely on theory, you can share that, or it seems to be a huge theme of your work. I think even understated within the work that you've come across some fascinating insights for theorizing place, I feel. Is that something you want to say something about?
Sure. Well, I think one aspect of this kind of theorizing of place comes through in the analysis of the textual data. I'm going to make some arguments about the rhetorical aims of mapping and kind of what maps can do whereby they kind of create models for a kind of society or models for a community, that they're kind of idealizations in a particular kind of way. Well, at the same time, actively creating boundaries and determining who's in and who's out, who's part of the community and who's not and where the community is.
So there's a kind of geopolitics at work there as well. And what you see as far as place-making, I think in the inscriptions reflects, I think, the efforts of donors, primarily of non-royal donors, to use religious institutions as ways to create a sense of kind of being at home in the world, or to create a sense of stability or stasis. And I think it's interesting that we see so much evidence of that in the so-called market towns. These kind of hot does or monday because these merchant towns that develop in early medieval India, particularly in Rajasthan, where you have people kind of coming from all over.
And I think one of the things that they do, or one of the things the inscriptions show us that they do to create a sense of place, to create a sense of belonging that is grounded in a physical locale, is to invest in religious institutions. And we also see there are some really interesting collective inscriptions. So these aren't records that say, you know, such and such king did this or such and such elite donor did this. The records in which people come together, they make kind of corporate donations, they tithe, they give taxes on the goods they produce, they give donations that are kind of quite simple and modest.
And they do so all the while repeating that they are the people from x-place or y-place. So these donations and these religious institutions give people the opportunity to perform or to enact this sense of belonging. And it's a belonging to a religious tradition, but it's also very much belonging to a particular locale, because often we see that the deities that they're donating to, there's one particular deity called Kamiakeshwarah, who's the tutelary deity of the town called Kamiakah, that they enforce this sense of being in a particular place and being in a particular community. So I think there's rich scope for thinking about placemaking in that respect as well, not only in the rhetorical confines of the text, but in the physical landscape as well.
Very interesting stuff. It's really an aspect of the book that you hope to be with that. I think the only other thing I would want to bring up is the iconography of La Calicia, so one of the things I do, I have one chapter that's devoted to tracing the ways in which this figure, this Lord with the Club, how his visual representation changes over time and how changes in that visual representation, I think reflect larger changes that are happening within the community, whereby this quintessential aesthetic type figure with the club, it's a phallic, becomes too armed, typically becomes more and more a kind of representation of the DNA Shiva, so becomes multi-armed, becomes adorned with all of the kind of accoutrement of Shiva and has the weapons that we consider to be his emblems, and how that change in visual representation, I think, represents a broader change in the Pashapat tradition whereby that community gradually gets phased out and is replaced by later forms of Shaipism and later communities. So while I spend a lot of time talking about this kind of piranhas mapping of this landscape and this Pashapat tradition, it's one that ultimately does change in such a way that it is historically phased out.
So it's also a really interesting way, I think, to study change over time. You can study the changes in the text over time, but you can also use the changes in the imagery as a way to read changes in the larger tradition or the larger religious landscape. That's certainly fascinating. What now?
What are you working on now? Oh, thanks for asking. So I am making a change. I'm trying to do more now with Southeast Asia and working more with the geography.
So I have a new project that I am currently doing research for this year with funding from the ACLS and the Getty, and that's to look at temple landscapes in Laos and Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and think about how built interventions in the landscape temples and monumental instructions were kind of tools of political power in the formation of the earliest Hindu policies of South Asia. So, yeah, this is a very new thing. But one of the places that I'm really interested in right now is a site called Guapu. So this is in Southwest Laos.
And this place was an important early Shiva sites oriented around this mountain with a natural linga. It's called Lingaparvata in the inscriptions. And this really is becomes the heart of the Khmer Empire. So this is really kind of where Hinduism in the Khmer Empire starts.
And so right now I'm kind of focusing on tracing that development through the built landscape and also through the inscriptions. And it's interesting because we have a wonderfully preserved ethnographic corpus from the 5th century all the way up until the 11th or 12th century. So you can really see how the manipulations of this landscape. Yeah, change over time and how this place is built up as being kind of the preeminent seat of Shivaism.
Sounds like another quite fascinating project, assuming we all survive the current situation. Exactly. Something I'll be able to travel again at some point. Yeah, that would be nice.
You'll have to return to the program to share. You find in Southeast Asia. Gladly. All right, so for those of you listening, we have been speaking with Dr.
Sisal, Elizabeth Sisal and her fascinating new book mapping the Pashibata landscape. It just occurred to me that I could take requests for those of you who have works that you would like to be featured on the program. You can send me an email with suggestions or feedback at rajatroshmarkarne.com. This is really great having you on the program.
Thank you so much. It was great. Thanks so much. Until next time, everybody, keep waiting.
Take care.