Perfumed by golden lotuses: literary place and textual authority in the Brahma- and Bhāgavatapurāṇas

Abstract

The creators of the Hindu scriptures known as the Brahma- and Bhāgavatapurāṇas lavished a great amount of descriptive detail on mythical and 'mythologised' places where important discourses were enunciated: the Naimiṣa forest, Mt Meru, Kurukṣetra, and Ānanda on the banks of the Ganges. At first glance this might appear to be idle expression of literary virtuosity, but I suggest that this careful creation of literary place has an impact, intentional or not, on the reception of the text. Drawing on the idea of the construction of authoritative discourse and reader-response criticism, I suggest that the perfect, transcendent literary spaces created by the narratives' authors exert a specific effect on their reception by the puranic interpretive community. The discourse enunciated in such space appears to be perfect and transcendental. The power of literary place imbues and valorises the discourse and assists it to function as authoritative.