Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Tradition, and the Geographic Imaginary

The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrative episodes that eulogise the Śaiva terra sancta writ large, the text’s authors designate a small region of northwest India as the ‘Pāśupata landscape’, a salvific region celebrated as the birthplace of the Pāśupata movement. It was here that Śiva assumed a human form and disseminated the Pāśupata doctrine via four students, each of whom presided over a prestigious locale—the storied cities of Ujjain, Mathura, Jambumarga, and Kanauj. The text’s claim to colonise a region that occupied the sociopolitical heart of northwest India presents an imagined geography—not a fanciful representation; rather, a spatial rhetoric intended to localise, order, and authenticate a particular vision of community. This process of localisation served three discrete, yet intertwined aims: (i) it presents a cosmological vision of a sanctified world or Śaiva hierotopy, (ii) provides a normative model for community, and (iii) stakes a geopolitical claim.