For most of the twentieth century, Kashmir Shaivism as a distinct field barely existed outside Kashmir itself. The Tantraloka and the wider corpus around it survived chiefly in manuscripts held in Kashmiri Pandit households and a handful of local libraries, largely unread by the wider study of Hinduism, which had organised itself mostly around Vedanta, the classical schools of philosophy, and the great epics and Puranas. The turn began with the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, a publishing project begun in the early twentieth century that printed critical editions of Abhinavagupta's works and those of his school for the first time, making the Tantraloka available to scholars who had no access to the manuscripts themselves.
The deeper recovery came later, through sustained philological and philosophical work connecting the printed texts to the practising Kashmiri Shaiva tradition that had preserved a living memory of how to read them, most visibly through the twentieth-century teacher Swami Lakshmanjoo, who taught the Tantraloka and related texts to Indian and Western scholars in Srinagar in the second half of the century. Academic Indology outside India followed this thread from the 1970s onward, producing critical translations and studies that treated Kashmir Shaivism not as a marginal regional cult but as one of the most philosophically sophisticated tantric systems India produced.
The nineteen ninety Kashmiri Pandit exodus, which scattered the community that had quietly kept this textual and oral tradition alive for a millennium, gives the recovery story an edge of urgency: the scholarship that reconstructed Abhinavagupta's system for a global academic audience was substantially racing a living transmission that was simultaneously being broken up and dispersed.