COLUMN: Theology at the Cutting Edge 100 volume 27 number 2, March 2015 NTR Locating Lore in the Monkey Kingdom by Anthony J. Evensen “All sacred things must have their place.” 1 View of the Tungabhadra River and Hampi environs from Anjanadri Hill, birthplace of the monkey god Hanuman. L ast summer, I spent five weeks in south India. It was my ninth trip to the subcontinent and for this visit I had a specific research objective in mind: to locate as many versions as I could find of a medieval Sanskrit text called the Pampā-māhātmya, or “e Greatness of Pampā.” None of the available manuscripts or print edition ver- sions is complete or available in English translation. My current project includes preparing a critical edition and English translation of the select sections of the Pampā-māhātmya that pertain to my research interest. Pampā in the title refers to the local river goddess associated with a rural temple town situated on the shore of the Tungabhadra River called Hampi—a variant of her name as rendered in the local language. Visitors are im- mediately impressed by a landscape of orange-brown, boulder-strewn hills, groves of coconut palms, bamboo, and 1 Cited in Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward eory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xii. See Smith’s footnote com- menting on the history of appropriation of this citation, beginning with a native Pawnee informant to A.C. Fletcher to Claude Lévi-Strauss to Smith himself. Anthony J. Evensen, Ph.D., is an independent scholar of South Asian history and religions, conducting ongoing research on Rāmāyaṇa mythic topography traditions and the place of the gods Rāma and Śiva in the political theology of the Vijayanagara kings. He teaches at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois.