Until recently, the study of South Asian intellectual history—and Sanskrit intellectual culture in particular—took for granted the notion of an epistemic rupture which occurred upon the advent of colonial modernity. I contribute to the growing scholarship which complicates this idea and propose the “late second millennium” as a coherent period in Sanskrit intellectual history.This dissertation focuses on the work of three scholar-practitioners of Śrīvidyā: Bhāskararāya (18th C), Pañcānana Tarkaratna Bhaṭṭācārya (1867-1940), and Svāmī Veda Bhāratī (1933-2015). I examine and compare their views on textual authority, ontology, and principles and bases for practice, attending carefully to both the arguments and the strategies they used to make them. Through my study of these authors, I engage with three kinds of issues. First, I seek to locate each of these scholars in their respective intellectual historical contexts. In this context, I discuss Bhāskararāya’s articulation of Bhakti Mīmāṃsā to make room for Śrīvidyā and his innovative approach to Advaita Vedānta and Mīmāṃsā; Tarkaratna’s formulation of a new Vedānta and how it relates to Śrīvidyā; and SVB’s engagement with Advaita Vedānta, Śrīvidyā, and the role of Yoga in his thought. Second, in exploring these aspects of their scholarship, I argue that the study of Sanskrit intellectual culture is better served by the idea of the “late second millennium” which makes room for the continuities of both mode and intellectual resources that we observe in this period while still accommodating a diversity of stories. Finally, I explore the idea of ‘initiatory moments’ as they appear in the work of these scholars. Through a critical engagement with postcolonial theory, I demonstrate that although initiation interacts with the realm of history, it cannot be fully comprehended through it, and concepts from the realm of history or postcolonial theory are either at a loss in the realm of initiation or transformed beyond recognition.