Puranas

The word means "ancient", and the texts themselves define what a Purana should contain: the pancha lakshana or five marks. Sarga, the primary creation of the world; pratisarga, its re-creation after each dissolution; vamsha, the genealogies of gods and sages; manvantara, the vast cycles each presided over by a Manu; and vamshanucharita, the histories of royal dynasties, given for the dynasties of the sun and moon and continued, remarkably, in the future tense for kings who ruled after the texts claim to have been composed.

The definition fits the actual texts poorly, and the mismatch is informative. In most of the eighteen, the five marks occupy a small fraction of the material. The bulk is something else: instructions for vratas, vows and observances tied to the calendar; tirtha literature praising particular pilgrimage places and specifying the merit of bathing there; temple ritual, image installation, gifts, funerary rites, genealogies of sects, and long sectarian narratives establishing one deity as supreme. Some contain grammar, medicine, iconometry and architecture. The Agni Purana is close to an encyclopaedia.

The eighteen are conventionally listed as Brahma, Padma, Vishnu, Shiva, Bhagavata, Narada, Markandeya, Agni, Bhavishya, Brahmavaivarta, Linga, Varaha, Skanda, Vamana, Kurma, Matsya, Garuda and Brahmanda, with variation in the lists themselves, since some substitute Vayu for Shiva. Sizes vary enormously; the Skanda Purana, at some 81,000 verses, is the largest of them and effectively a library of local temple traditions. Below the Mahapuranas sit dozens of Upapuranas, including the Devi Bhagavata, and below those the sthala puranas of individual temples, which are still being composed.

No Purana has a date, because no Purana is one text. Each is a compilation that was added to, rearranged and locally recensed over centuries, and manuscripts of the same Purana from different regions can differ so far that they share little beyond a title. The Skanda Purana is the extreme case: a Nepalese palm-leaf manuscript of the ninth century preserves a version substantially unlike the printed vulgate.

The datable spread runs roughly from the third or fourth century CE, for the oldest strata of the Vayu, Brahmanda, Markandeya and Matsya, through to material still being added in the sixteenth. The Bhavishya Purana, whose name means "future", contains passages describing Mughal and British rule, and in some printed editions Queen Victoria, which tells you precisely how open the genre stayed. Dating individual passages is possible; dating a Purana as a whole usually is not.

All of them claim greater antiquity. The tradition holds that Vyasa compiled the Puranas as he compiled the Vedas and the Mahabharata, and each text is framed as ancient speech relayed through a chain of narrators, commonly the bard Lomaharshana or his son Ugrashravas reciting to sages assembled in the Naimisha forest. That framing is doing real work: it borrows the epic's authority and asserts continuity with the Veda for material that is often quite new.

The relation to the Veda is the point of the genre. A Purana is smriti, human in composition, and beneath shruti in formal rank, but it may be recited to and by anyone, including women and those excluded from Vedic study, and it is often described within the tradition as the fifth Veda. Formal subordination, practical primacy.

The Puranas are not neutral. Each promotes a deity, and the collection as a whole is best read as the literature of competing devotional movements consolidating in the same idiom. The conventional sorting puts six under Vishnu, six under Shiva and six under Brahma, and the Padma Purana supplies a sharper version: it classifies the eighteen by the three gunas, assigning the Vaishnava texts to sattva, purity, the Shaiva to tamas, darkness, and the rest to rajas. This is presented as description; it is a Vaishnava polemic, and the Shaiva Puranas return the compliment. The Markandeya Purana contains, in the section called the Devi Mahatmya, the foundational scripture of goddess worship, recited entire in Shakta ritual and at Durga Puja.

The Bhagavata Purana is the most consequential of them. Twelve skandhas, some 18,000 verses, and a tenth book on the childhood and youth of Krishna, the butter theft, the lifting of Govardhana, the flute, the circle dance with the cowherd women, that supplied Indian devotional poetry, painting, dance and drama with their central repertoire for a thousand years. It is also self-consciously literary, imitating Vedic language, and philosophically ambitious, arguing that devotion rather than knowledge or ritual is the highest path.

Scholars generally place its composition in the ninth or tenth century CE and argue on linguistic grounds and on its evident debt to the Tamil Alvar poets for an origin in southern India; al-Biruni lists it around 1030, which fixes an upper limit. Tradition assigns it to Vyasa as his final and completing work.

Its influence runs through the entire later devotional map: Chaitanya in Bengal, Vallabha in the west, and the vernacular retellings, Potana's Telugu version, Eknath's Marathi, the Bhagavata Mela dance-drama, which carried it to audiences who read no Sanskrit at all.