Repetition and adaptation: narrative style of the Kashikedaramahatmya

It is common knowledge that māhātmya is a specific literary genre of the Puranic corpus turned to the glorification of local entities. Generally considered of poor value in the study of Indian literature, māhātmyas, on the contrary, are fundamental sources for the understanding of sacred places and their representation. The main purpose of these texts is, in fact, to justify the existence of a certain place and to explain its special power. Māhātmyas directly address worshippers, giving them instructions about the propitious actions and revealing the divine mysteries connected to the specific place. Māhātmyas link local places to the great events of the mythical past. This creative process has been defined as “the geographical equivalent of Sanskritization: it is the attempt of peripheral realities to participate in the Pan Indian tradition, which is here represented by the Mahāpurāṇas, whose authority is widely recognized; in fact, māhātmyas often claim to be appendixes of well-known Purāṇas. Moreover, they use a specific narrative style, which adapts and retells the existing mythological material in order to promote a specific representation of the local dimension. This paper aims at showing the elements we mentioned as they are specifically employed by the Kāśīkedāramāhātmya to promote the local sacred place, that is Kedāreśvara Temple in Banāras. After introducing the text and its content, we will focus on King Divodāsa’s myth as a revealing example of how the local tradition is constructed by the devotional text; we will briefly retrace the evolution of the Puranic version of the myth up to the most renowned variation of the Kāśīkhaṇḍa (Kkh), which is the main canonical source on Varāṇāsī and its sacred geography5, in order to highlight the original adaptation of the Kāśīkedāramāhātmya (Kkm).