5. The audience

We know little more about the audiences of these texts than we know about their authors. There are hints from the visual arts and, in both sculpture and painting, we sometimes see teachers, text in hand, apparently delivering a lecture or teaching a class of students seated before them. We also occasionally come across figures reading or possibly reciting texts on their own.

I have argued elsewhere that modern practice might be a useful guide to premodern habits (Taylor 2016). While researching the contemporary performance of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa—a close relative of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa—I identified three broad patterns of textual consumption. First, devout individuals literate in Sanskrit may read the text to themselves, either silently or in a low murmur, at the rate of a chapter or more a day. This is a means by which the reader may acquire religious merit and social capital. Second, a pious individual may engage a student or scholar to read the text on their behalf, in which case the sponsor earns the merit. Alternatively, a sponsor may dedicate the merit to someone else, such as a sick relative, an unmarried child or an aspiring student or professional.

The third way in which texts are experienced—and the one that reaches the largest audience—is through public oral performance. Again, a pious sponsor will engage a scholar to recite the text in part or in full before an audience. As Sanskrit has always been the language of an educated elite, these recitations are accompanied by an explanation in a local language that everyone can understand. The upshot of this is that the majority of people experience these texts aurally, through oral performance, rather than as text read privately, as in modern reading practice. All three modes of textual reproduction are believed to confer great merit on all concerned. While we do not have any direct evidence of how the Viṣṇu Purāṇa was consumed in premodern times, these three patterns provide a useful proxy in the absence of better evidence.