Editing Hindus (section)

=== Sacred geography ===
Scholars such as Fleming and Eck state that the post-Epic era literature from the 1st millennium CE amply demonstrate that there was a historic concept of the Indian subcontinent as a sacred geography, where the sacredness was a shared set of religious ideas. For example, the twelve ''Jyotirlingas'' of Shaivism and fifty-one ''Shaktipithas'' of Shaktism are described in the early medieval era Puranas as pilgrimage sites around a theme.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=51–56}}<ref>{{cite book|author=Knut A. Jacobsen|title=Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: Salvific Space |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Kn6_3oBFAqIC&pg=PA122 |year= 2013|publisher= Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-59038-9|pages=122–129}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=André Padoux|title=The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=odQZDgAAQBAJ |year=2017|publisher=University of Chicago Press|isbn=978-0-226-42412-5|pages=136–149}}</ref> This sacred geography and Shaiva temples with same iconography, shared themes, motifs and embedded legends are found across India, from the [[Himalaya]]s to hills of South India, from [[Ellora Caves]] to [[Varanasi]] by about the middle of 1st millennium.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=51–56}}<ref>{{cite book |author1=Linda Kay Davidson |author2=David Martin Gitlitz |year=2002 |title=Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Graceland; an Encyclopedia |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YVYkrNhPMQkC |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-1-57607-004-8 |pages=239–244 |access-date=24 August 2017 |archive-date=4 July 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230704100931/https://books.google.com/books?id=YVYkrNhPMQkC |url-status=live }}</ref> Shakti temples, dated to a few centuries later, are verifiable across the subcontinent. Varanasi as a sacred pilgrimage site is documented in the ''Varanasimahatmya'' text embedded inside the ''[[Skanda Purana]]'', and the oldest versions of this text are dated to 6th to 8th-century CE.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|p=56}}<ref name=Eck2012p34 />

The idea of twelve sacred sites in Shiva Hindu tradition spread across the Indian subcontinent appears not only in the medieval era temples but also in copper plate inscriptions and temple seals discovered in different sites.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=57–58}} According to Bhardwaj, non-Hindu texts such as the memoirs of Chinese Buddhist and Persian Muslim travellers attest to the existence and significance of the pilgrimage to sacred geography among Hindus by later 1st millennium CE.<ref>{{cite book|author=Surinder M. Bhardwaj|title=Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=D6XJFokSJzEC|year=1983|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-04951-2|pages=75–79|access-date=24 August 2017|archive-date=31 March 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240331131330/https://books.google.com/books?id=D6XJFokSJzEC|url-status=live}}</ref>

According to Fleming, those who question whether the term Hindu and Hinduism are a modern construction in a religious context present their arguments based on some texts that have survived into the modern era, either of Islamic courts or of literature published by Western missionaries or colonial-era Indologists aiming for a reasonable construction of history. However, the existence of non-textual evidence such as cave temples separated by thousands of kilometers, as well as lists of medieval era pilgrimage sites, is evidence of a shared sacred geography and existence of a community that was self-aware of shared religious premises and landscape.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=51–58}}<ref name=Eck2012p34 /> Further, it is a norm in evolving cultures that there is a gap between the "lived and historical realities" of a religious tradition and the emergence of related "textual authorities".{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=57–58}} The tradition and temples likely existed well before the medieval era Hindu manuscripts appeared that describe them and the sacred geography. This, states Fleming, is apparent given the sophistication of the architecture and the sacred sites along with the variance in the versions of the Puranic literature.{{sfn|Fleming|2009|pp=51–58}}<ref>{{cite book|author=Surinder M. Bhardwaj|title=Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=D6XJFokSJzEC|year=1983|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-04951-2|pages=58–79|access-date=24 August 2017|archive-date=31 March 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240331131330/https://books.google.com/books?id=D6XJFokSJzEC|url-status=live}}</ref> According to [[Diana L. Eck]] and other Indologists such as André Wink, Muslim invaders were aware of Hindu sacred geography such as Mathura, Ujjain, and Varanasi by the 11th century. These sites became a target of their serial attacks in the centuries that followed.<ref name=Eck2012p34>{{cite book|author=Diana L Eck|author-link=Diana L. Eck|title=India: A Sacred Geography|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rNlJOSf__xYC |year=2012|publisher=Harmony|isbn=978-0-385-53191-7|pages=34–40, 55–58, 88}}</ref>