The Sakta Pithas

D. C. Sircar was an epigraphist and historian who held the chair of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the University of Calcutta, and this Motilal Banarsidass monograph is his scholarly study of the Shakta Pithas, the network of goddess pilgrimage sites spread across the Indian subcontinent. Its strength is Sircar's own expertise in reading the primary Tantric texts, chiefly the Pithanirnaya, on which the traditional list of fifty-one Pithas rests, tracing the origin and development of the concept from that textual base rather than from later popular retellings. Its limit is that it works from a specific body of late Tantric textual material, so a claim about how any one Pitha is understood or practiced by pilgrims today needs a source grounded in contemporary fieldwork rather than this textual-historical study alone.