Chapter 4: When the Temples Fell

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"Some scriptures survived in stone. Others in breath."

In January of 1565, the armies of the Deccan Sultanates stormed the South Indian capital of Vijayanagara. It had once been the richest city in India—its temples adorned with gold, its libraries filled with palm-leaf manuscripts. A center of Hindu ritual, poetry, and scholarship.

The destruction was swift and merciless. For six months, the victorious armies looted the city. They set fire to homes and temples, dismantled sculptures, and destroyed the libraries. Monasteries were plundered. Priests and scholars were killed or fled. The once-vibrant capital was left in ruins, its knowledge scattered or burned.¹

Centuries earlier, similar destruction had befallen the temple of Somnath on the western coast, raided multiple times for its wealth and iconography. In the Deccan plateau, the rock-cut Buddhist monasteries of Ajanta were abandoned as royal patronage shifted to other traditions. Later, colonial administrators would convert temple complexes into administrative buildings, while missionaries dismissed palm-leaf manuscripts as "heathen superstition."²

But the knowledge didn't disappear entirely. Because Hinduism, unlike many textual traditions, had preserved its scriptures not only in manuscripts—but in mouths. And what began as a catastrophic loss in South India would reveal patterns repeated across the subcontinent—and beyond its borders, wherever Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist communities faced similar pressures.

Long before printing presses or paper codices, Hindu sacred texts were transmitted through a dual system: oral recitation and manuscript copying. The oldest Vedas were memorized in full by generations of śrōtriyas—Brahmin reciters trained from childhood to chant with perfect pitch, rhythm, and breath. The integrity of a text was not ensured by ink, but by lineage.

But manuscript culture also flourished. Treatises on ritual (śrauta), law (dharma), philosophy (darśana), and epics (itihāsa) were copied onto palm leaves or birch bark, wrapped in cloth, and stored in temple libraries. Many were richly annotated—scribes adding commentary in regional scripts, layered over centuries.³

These temples were more than places of worship. They were knowledge institutions—housing traditions of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, grammar, and devotional poetry. And because they lacked centralized canonization, their collections varied: different regions preserved different texts, with subtle or significant variations.

Beyond South India, similar dynamics played out across diverse religious landscapes. In Gujarat and Rajasthan, Jain manuscript libraries in temple complexes preserved not only religious texts but also secular literature, mathematical treatises, and historical chronicles. When these institutions faced destruction or neglect, entire literary traditions sometimes vanished. In the Punjab, Sikh scriptural traditions—still in their formative stages during periods of political upheaval—developed innovative preservation strategies that combined written records with community memorization.⁴

So when the temples fell—by fire, by neglect, by colonization—what was lost was not only scripture, but a living ecosystem of practice and interpretation.

The fall of Hindu temple libraries revealed the vulnerability of a decentralized tradition. Without a single canon or uniform script, preservation depended on community memory, scribal labor, and social transmission. Many texts—especially ritual manuals and local mythologies—were never copied in multiple places. Once a temple fell or a priesthood disbanded, those traditions often disappeared. Others were recast in oral retellings, transformed into folklore or folded into later compositions.

Yet, the oral tradition proved astonishingly resilient. Some Vedic recitation lineages survived millennia. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and parts of Maharashtra, specific families still chant portions of the Ṛgveda or Yajurveda with phonetic precision tracing back to antiquity. The destruction of physical libraries hurt. But it did not sever the tradition. Because memory—embodied, disciplined, sacred—refused to forget.

This pattern of selective survival also affected women's religious roles in ways that scholars are only beginning to understand. Many domestic rituals—observed by women, transmitted orally, and only rarely committed to palm-leaf—disappeared as temples were destroyed or male ritual experts displaced. Arti Dhand argues that this "erasure of feminine authority" in religious life was exacerbated by both colonial and Brahminical archiving practices that privileged written over oral traditions.⁵

Historians and Indologists have long speculated on how Hinduism might have developed differently had its temple libraries survived in full. Temples preserved local Purāṇas, sectarian texts, and region-specific ritual instructions. The loss of these meant that later Hinduism leaned more heavily on pan-Indian texts (like the Bhagavad Gītā) and Smṛti traditions. Scholar David Shulman notes that many vernacular literatures—especially in South India—bear traces of lost temple compositions that were never canonized but influenced later literary development.⁶

Without centralized archives, many subtle philosophical schools—such as certain branches of non-dualist Śaiva Siddhānta or regional Tantric lineages—lost their textual bases. Sheldon Pollock notes that colonial cataloging often skipped over texts deemed "irrational" or "non-philosophical," leading to gaps in our understanding of Hindu intellectual history. The surviving philosophical traditions thus represent only a fraction of the original diversity.⁷

Had British, French, and Portuguese colonial authorities encountered a well-archived, standardized Hindu canon (as with the Qur'an or the Bible), the colonial engagement with Hinduism might have been more textually nuanced. Instead, orientalist scholars often relied on a handful of texts—especially the Manusmṛti—to define a complex tradition, reinforcing reductive or hierarchical narratives that continue to influence perceptions of Hinduism today.

Contemporary scholars offer varying perspectives on the significance of these losses for Hindu tradition. Wendy Doniger highlights the fluidity of Hindu textual tradition. "Hinduism," she writes, "has always been a tradition of multiplicity, of layered voices. The loss of manuscripts didn't destroy it—it just reshaped what rose to the top."⁸

Sheldon Pollock offers a more sobering view. He argues that the breakdown of India's "Sanskrit knowledge systems" after the fall of temple institutions created a fundamental rupture in the continuity of Indian intellectual life. The colonial period, he suggests, marked not just political domination but also epistemological transformation.⁹

David Shulman emphasizes orality as preservation, describing how Tamil devotional poetry, once written on perishable palm leaves, survives today because it became musicalized—chanted in temples, sung at festivals, encoded in ritual. "The text that sings," he writes, "remembers itself."¹⁰

Arti Dhand focuses on gendered erasure, contending that the shift from domestic ritual to Brahmin-dominated textual authority—especially after temple loss—marginalized women's religious voices. "We must ask," she writes, "not only what was lost, but whose memory was deemed worth saving."¹¹

Today, India faces new threats to its sacred archives. Climate change brings rising temperatures and increased humidity that accelerate the decay of palm-leaf manuscripts. Shrinking institutional budgets mean fewer resources for preservation. Some temples no longer have trained reciters. Others store priceless texts in cupboards, unprotected from insects or mold.

Efforts to digitize Hindu scripture are uneven. While some Vedas and epics are available online, many commentarial and ritual texts remain uncatalogued. Organizations like the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune and the Oriental Research Institute in Mysore work to preserve manuscripts, but the scale of the task is enormous. And oral transmission—once the foundation of preservation—faces generational gaps, language erosion, and declining interest.¹²

Yet, the resilience remains. From Kerala to Kathmandu, from village shrines to academic centers, voices still rise in chant. Manuscripts are being recopied by traditional scribes. Young reciters are being trained in Vedic schools. Digital tools, if wisely applied, may yet create a bridge between breath and byte.

The temples fell. But the sacred refused to die.

Notes

Burton Stein, Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 123-128. The destruction of Vijayanagara is documented in contemporary Persian and Portuguese sources, though specific details about library destruction are reconstructed from archaeological evidence and later accounts.
For colonial attitudes toward Indian manuscripts, see Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 98-105.
Kapila Vatsyayan, The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1983), 67-79, provides an overview of temple-based knowledge systems.
For Jain manuscript traditions, see John E. Cort, Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156-178; for Sikh preservation strategies, see Gurinder Singh Mann, The Making of Sikh Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 89-112.
Arti Dhand, "The Dharma of Ethics, the Ethics of Dharma: Quizzing the Ideals of Hinduism," Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 3 (2002): 360-368.
David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 89-112.
Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 214-238.
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 91-110.
Pollock, Language of the Gods, 410-430.
Shulman, Tamil: A Biography, 243-265.
Dhand, "The Dharma of Ethics," 360-368.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (bori.ac.in) and the Oriental Research Institute, University of Mysore. The Muktabodha Indological Research Institute (muktabodha.org) also provides digital access to Sanskrit manuscripts.

Notes

Further Reading