Innovation and Social Change in the Vale of Kashmir, circa 900–1250 C.E

It is well known that religious agents in premodern South Asia appealed to the purported timelessness and transcendence of their scriptural sources to secure not only their legitimacy but also that of the ideas found in them. Equally well known—in no small part due to the work of Alexis Sanderson on the social history of Śaiva and other religious traditions in early-medieval Kashmir and elsewhere—is the fact that premodern South Asian religions do not appear as unchanging and immobile traditions in social stasis. Quite the opposite: the various religious traditions of medieval South Asia were nothing if not