Multifarious Sacred Geographies

Multifarious Sacred Geographies takes an in-depth look at the sacred geography of the South Indian temple city Kanchipuram. Kanchipuram”s particularly diverse religious landscape, with over four hundred temples, is attested to in numerous Sanskrit and Tamil texts that glorify the city. Malini Ambach investigates for the first time three of these glorifying Sanskrit Sthalamāhātmyas in detail and comparatively with regard to their literary geographies of Kanchipuram. These texts link mythology with the local physical landscape and each coloured by a sectarian perspective, they describe the same sacred space, Kanchipuram, by constructing shared and contradictory notions of the temple city.