The recent scholarship of Jürgen Hanneder has shed significant light on a collection of Sanskrit texts composed by a particular family lineage that flourished in Kashmir, particularly its most prominent author and teacher—Sāhib Kaul. After tracing some of the literary, religious, and intertextual backgrounds of Sāhib Kaul who flourished in the mid-seventeenth century, I will reflect on the scope and genres of his corpus, noting how his writing participates in several transregional trends of this period. This will form a context for introducing the stotra literature composed in the subsequent generation of authors of his family lineage. These praise poems are largely dedicated to venerating Sāhib Kaul himself and comprise the focus of a translation project I am currently working on in collaboration with Hamsa Stainton of McGill University. By examining representative samples of these stotras dedicated to Sāhib, I will consider how the eclecticism of Sāhib Kaul’s writings and his self-awareness as an author is mirrored in the way his disciples visualized and eulogized him as a guru. 

About the speaker:

Dr. Ben Williams is an intellectual historian focused on Indian religions and the history of Shaiva tantra. He has received extensive training in Indian philosophy, literature, and aesthetics in Sanskrit sources. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Hinduism at Naropa University, where he is the department head of Naropa's MA program in Yoga Studies. He also serves on the academic advisory council of the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute, which is dedicated to the preservation of scriptural and philosophical texts of classical India, and is also on the steering committee for the Tantric Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Current projects include a monograph on the medieval luminary Abhinavagupta as well as two collaborative translations, which are also book-length projects.