Hinduism was never a single doctrinal highway running through
a wilderness of heterodoxies. Too much in India was taking place
simultaneously, and no center held it all together. While kings built
temples, cities, and empires, and while Brahmins were bridging this
world with other, more perfect ones through sacred sciences, other
people were equally busy. Doctors, artisans, and craftsworkers,
members of the low castes and remote tribes, villagers, and women
everywhere created worldviews no less compelling than the few that
came to dominate the scriptures. These many groups—only some
qualifying for what sociological jargon calls "marginalized"—did not
actually occupy a separate universe. Of course, in the absence of
a literary tradition, there is little we can know about the philosophy
of a remote tribe or a fifth-century housewife. Still, in subtle and
indirect ways, their productivity did, in fact, make it into the pages
of sutras and shastras, where one can find its traces if one knows where
to look.
From the first appearance of Vedic literature and all the way to
the popular temple pamphlets sold in India today, the ideas and actions of these groups played counterpoint to Brahminical ideologies.
A mere sampling of the most prominent examples from the Vedic
to the Gupta periods, which this chapter will undertake, is impressive. It includes eclectic speculations in the "Fourth Veda," the
Atharvaveda,  along with its associated ritual text the  Kaushika Sutra,.
Nearly as important as these two was the Rig  Vidhana, the early