Continuity and Controversy in Citation: Quoting An Anti-Caste Mantra in the Śaiva Oeuvre of Southern India

Abstract This essay excavates the unstudied intellectual history of an anti-caste Sanskrit mantra that was utilised by Śaivas of southern India as an authoritative scriptural citation in Sanskrit and Telugu texts throughout the second millennium of the Common Era. This mantra, which I term the śivabhaktamantra, was perennially attributed to the Muṇḍakōpaniṣad by an ecumenical body of Śaiva intellectuals. Yet this mantra does not seem to exist in any extant recension of the Muṇḍakōpaniṣad. In fact, employing text-critical arguments, the sixteenth-century Mādhva scholastic Vijayīndratīrtha emphasised the textual untraceability of this specific mantra in his rejoinder to Appayyadīkṣita, but this Mādhva problematisation of the mantra's provenance did not hinder later Śaivas from affirmatively citing it. In addition to these case-specific developments, through this study, I discern not only a potential case of scriptural continuity between the Kālamukhas and Vīraśaivas but also an attestation of how anti-caste theology rooted in Sanskrit sources was a mainstream phenomenon in precolonial Śaiva Hindu literature.