Tattva is an intellectual notebook. Most of what appears here is written by me; occasionally, a friend or fellow traveller contributes an essay that belongs in these pages more than anywhere else. The concerns of this site are narrow and, I hope, deep. I am interested in the Indian textual traditions — darśana, tantra, kāvya, the ritual manuals, the commentarial literatures — and in the long historical arc by which these inheritances have arrived, bruised but still breathing, at our own moment. I am interested in how colonial discourse reshaped what we are now able to see of our own past, and in how a dharmic sensibility survives, adapts, or quietly withers under the pressures of the modern nation-state, the market, and a globalised idiom of selfhood. Tattva, the word, names that which simply is — the suchness of a thing before our descriptions of it. The site is an attempt, necessarily incomplete, to sit with a few such things: a forgotten Upaniṣad, a lineage of Śaiva rājagurus, a yoga posture carved into a temple wall in the tenth century. I write partly to understand, partly to keep a record, and partly because some of this material deserves a reader it does not easily find elsewhere. The site is updated when I have something worth saying. Readers who wish to correspond, suggest an essay, or point out an error are welcome to write to me at my personal address at manishmaheswari@gmail.org
Manish is the founder of the Tattva Heritage Foundation and the Centre for Shaiva Studies, Pondicherry. He publishes under the Karṇāṭa imprint and is based in Mysore.
OM TAT SAT