Description: The Meeting of Rivers reconstructs the prehistory of India's newest religion, Virasaivism (or Lingayatism) from its own voices, drawing on unstudied and unpublished archival sources in several south Indian languages. By radically reframing our understanding of the origins of Virasaivism, Elaine Fisher provides a counterpoint to inherited models of both Hindu devotional traditions as well as the history of vernacularization in South Asia.