Philology was everywhere and nowhere in classical South Asia. While its civilizations possessed remarkably sophisticated tools and methods of textual analysis interpretation and transmission they lacked any sense of a common disciplinary or intellectual project uniting these indeed they lacked a word for ‘philology’ altogether. Arguing that such pseudepigraphical genres as the Sanskrit puranas and tantras incorporated modes of philological reading and writing Cox demonstrates the ways in which the production of these works in turn motivated the invention of new kinds of sastric scholarship. Combining close textual analysis with wider theoretical concerns Cox traces this philological transformation in the works of the dramaturgist Saradatanaya the celebrated Vaisnava poettheologian Venkatanatha and the maverick Saiva mystic Mahesvarananda. About the Author Whitney Cox University of Chicago is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at that university and a member of the Collegium of the Zukunftsphilologie research project Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. He is the author of Politics Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain (Cambridge 2016).
