An Independent Śiva Purāṇa and Śiva’s Reverence to the Man-Lion

This article traces the history of a small independent Śiva Purāṇa that has circulated across South Asia for centuries. Rather than focusing on its theological and narrative content alone, this article also focuses on the text’s material manifestation in three distinct time periods: Medieval, Mughal, and Colonial. The first section considers its material and textual history with attention to manuscripts. The second section elucidates the value of this approach by considering one episode from the text: the Śarabha-Narasiṃha story. In the process of illuminating the Śiva Purāṇa tradition, this article uses this Purāṇic example to experiment with approaches to scriptural materiality through Pierre Bourdieu’s lens of a “double existence”.