Sectarianism And Pluralism

In the tranquility of a small Brahmin village on the outskirts of Tirunelveli in southern Tamil Nadu, past and present collide fortuitously for the twentyfirst-century observer. This village, or agrahāra, granted by Madurai’s chieftain Tirumalai Nāyaka to the illustrious poet-intellectual Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita in the seventeenth century—or so the story goes—remains in the possession of the scholar’s modern-day descendants. Still treasured as the true ancestral home of a family of Chennai businessmen and engineers, the village of Palamadai is repopulated annually for the calendrical celebrations of the life of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita: the anniversaries of his birth (jayantī) and death (ārādhanā). Although nearly four hundred years have elapsed since Nīlakaṇṭha himself graced the village’s single street and worshipped the goddess Maṅgalanāyakī in its local temple, the past lives on through his descendants in more ways than one—not least of which are certain fundamental concepts about religion.

FIGURE 1. The Śaṅkarācārya Maṭha in Palamadai, outside of Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu. This branch monastery of the Sringeri Śaṅkarācārya lineage was commissioned in the 1990s by descendants of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita. Jagadguru Bhāratī Tīrtha personally visited the village to perform the installation of the maṭha. The family proudly displays photos of the Jagadguru visiting the house Nīlakaṇṭha himself is believed to have inhabited in Palamadai.

While engrossed in observing the Vedic recitation (pārāyaṇa) staged in honor of Nīlakaṇṭha’s ārādhanā in January of 2011, I chanced to hear word from the family’s elder, P. Subrahmanyan,^[1] of a Western visitor who had received a particularly warm welcome during a previous season of festivities. This young researcher, I was told, was truly accepted as one of the family, and participated actively in all religious observances for the duration of his stay in the village—because, quite simply, this person was a Śaiva, a devotee of the Hindu god Śiva, and was wholeheartedly accepted as such by the community. Having received Śaiva dīkṣā, or “initiation,” in his home country, he was able to recite without prompting the Lalitāsahasranāma, a hymn popular among the family, and fluently navigated the codes of conduct a Śaiva initiate would be expected to observe. Curious to learn more, I inquired of Dr. Subrahmanyan, “Then, do you believe this person has become a Hindu?” “Oh no,” cautioned the elderly Brahmin. “There is no need for someone from the West to become a Hindu. Our teacher, Jagadguru Bhāratī Tīrtha, has shown that everyone must practice the religion they have learned in their home country. They can remain Christian and still follow the same path as we Hindus do.”

Implicit in this seemingly self-contradictory message we can perceive a confluence of two distinct systems of categorization. Beneath the translucent veil of Hindu universalism accumulated in recent centuries, an older model of religious identity remains equally definitive of social interactions for present-day inhabitants of Palamadai. To be a Hindu, Dr. Subrahmanyan suggests, requires Indian heritage and birth in a Hindu family, an assumption as old as V. D. Savarkar’s nationalist envisioning of Hindutva—a state of being that inheres in its members and cannot be extrinsically cultivated. And yet, to be a Śaiva is something else altogether. A Śaiva, one may glean, is an individual who has adopted a particular set of ritual practices, beliefs, and cultural values suitable for participation in a Śaiva religious community. Becoming a Śaiva, however, is by no means categorically dependent on one’s identity as a Hindu, according to this model. Rather, the stark juxtaposition of these two terms, Hindu and Śaiva, calls attention to the categorical drift that the centuries have witnessed within the religion that we—contemporary scholars as well as practitioners—now call Hinduism.

Much has been written in recent years about the historical origins of the category of Hinduism. The Hindu religion itself has been postulated both as a construct of the colonial enterprise and as an organic whole that emerged gradually from within the Indic cultural system through systematic reflection and encounter with dialogical Others. Advocates of the first position have argued that the very idea of Hinduism was fabricated in the service of foreign interests, whether by European Orientalists or the British colonial regime.^[2] On the other hand, critics of this constructionist argument have sought to locate a moment of juncture before colonial intervention at which the very idea of a unitary religion crystallized in the Indian cultural imaginaire.^[3] The birth story of Hinduism, in other words, has been told and retold in scholarly literature of the past decades. What all accounts share, however, is the postulate that by some means or other Hinduism has been transformed into a unitary religion, in which any diversity is necessarily eclipsed by the internal cohesion of the concept itself. By attempting to narrate a genealogy of the present, however, scholarship has perhaps gone too far in erasing the variegated textures of the Indic religious landscape, layers of difference that persist unabated to this day beneath the guise of Hindu unity.

Indeed, among the definitions of Hinduism proffered by practitioners themselves, the most celebrated today are those that elevate unity over diversity—quintessentially, perhaps, and most notoriously, the definition put forth by V. D. Savarkar in his monograph Hindutva, first published in 1923. In Savarkar’s vision, Hinduism, as a unified religion, is coterminous with the geographical boundaries of the emerging nation-state that would soon become India, the cultural unity of the concept of Hindutva thus prefiguring the anticipated political unity of the Indian nation-state. Fewer are aware, however, of a competing definition of the Hindu religion offered by Savarkar’s contemporary and compatriot in the struggle for Indian independence, Balagangadhar “Lokamanya” Tilak, publicized during a speech at the 1892 Gaṇapati Festival in Pune.

In the form of a memorable Sanskrit verse, Tilak defines Hinduism as follows:

Acceptance of the ultimate validity of the Vedas, multiplicity of ways of worship
And lack of restriction on the divinity that one may worship:
This is the definition of the [Hindu] religion.^[4]

A mere three decades, it seems, made a substantive impact on the self-reflexive definition of Hinduism articulated from within the tradition. What stands out in Tilak’s definition, for those who read Savarkar’s Hindutva as an inevitable prologue to the rise of an exclusivist Hindu fundamentalism, is the apparent diversity that Tilak locates in what many twentieth-century and contemporary Hindus experience as a unified religion. Our attention is drawn to the phrases “multiplicity” and “lack of restriction,” as Tilak underscores the seemingly obvious fact that under the umbrella of Hinduism lies the coexistence of a diverse array of communities, each with its own chosen deity and mode of worship. What are we to make of Tilak’s emphasis not on the unity but on the diversity of Hinduism? In fact, when we consult the historical archive of precolonial Indian religion, we find a great deal of precedent for Tilak’s claim that the unity of Hinduism must be predicated upon its internal diversity. Over the centuries immediately preceding the rise of British colonialism, early modern south India, for instance, witnessed the crystallization of a number of discrete Hindu lineages and devotional communities. The boundaries between these communities, indeed, were deliberately circumscribed through the efforts of public theologians, each of whom was committed to defending the authenticity of his sectarian lineage as the pinnacle of an overarching Hindu orthodoxy.

With this book, I set out to complicate just what it means for us to speak of the unity of Hinduism—and, specifically, what it meant to be a Hindu on the eve of British colonialism. At whatever stage a unitary concept of Hinduism may be said to have emerged—and this subject has generated no small amount of controversy—the diverse religious communities we describe collectively as Hinduism have each preserved a fundamental independence. This independence comes to light, historically, both in the social institutions that govern their practice and in the religious identities embodied through participation in these traditions. In short, Hinduism has historically exhibited a marked tendency toward pluralism—and plurality—a trend that did not reverse in the centuries before colonialism but, rather, accelerated through the development of precolonial Indic early modernity. This is not to say, obviously, that diversity is absent in other world religions; nor is it to invalidate the usage of Hinduism by practitioners and observers, past and present, to describe genuine commonalities in doctrine and practice. And yet, to be a Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava in early modern India, to be a Mādhva, Smārta, Gauḍīya, or a member of any other such community, constituted the core of one’s religious identity with a nuance that inclusivist categories such as āstika (orthodox) or Vaidika (Vedic) failed to capture. Even today, when a unified Hinduism is experienced as a living reality, Hindus such as the residents of Palamadai maintain a deliberate awareness of their simultaneous identity as Śaivas—and more specifically, Smārta-Śaivas affiliated with the linage of the Sringeri Śaṅkarācāryas, devotees of the current Jagadguru Bhāratī Tīrtha Svāmigaḷ.

Nevertheless, the bare fact of Hinduism’s plurality before British intervention and the nationalist movement takes us only so far in understanding how Hindu identities were experienced, performed, and re-created in the religious ecosystem of early modern South Asia, a region in the midst of rapid social and economic transformation largely unattributable to the beneficence of the European world system. In our received scholarly narrative, succinctly, Hindu difference has been read though the lens of the term sectarianism. In the academic study of Hinduism, sectarianism, by and large, signifies nothing more than “Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism”—the worship of so-called sectarian deities. And yet, to participate in Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava religiosity, in this reading, militates against the unity of a presumed Brahminical hegemony. This metanarrative resonates with the popular use of sectarianism to connote deviance from the mainstream, thus, in the context of Hinduism, translating devotion as dissent, and community as a potential precursor to communalism. One of my primary aims in this book, in this light, is to excavate the emic genealogy of Hindu sectarianism—a mode of religious engagement, I contend, that did not fragment a primordial whole but was the primary vehicle for the earliest expressions of Hinduism as a unified religion. One could not be a Hindu in late-medieval or early modern India without first and foremost being something else, without participating in a community governed by the religious institutions and networks that formed the backbone of a broader religious public.

Hindu sectarianism, as we will see, is by no means equivalent to Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism writ large on India’s historical stage. Not all of Śaivism was equally sectarian, nor was all of Śaivism’s history equally Hindu. By the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era, Śaivism had crystallized as a functionally distinct religion^[5] —perhaps even, as Alexis Sanderson has argued, the dominant religion of the greater Sanskrit Cosmopolis. It was only by the late-medieval period that Śaivism began to represent itself as a “sect” of a larger orthodoxy we might call Hinduism. Regarding this period, we can begin to speak, with a certain trepidation, of such a phenomenon as Hindu sectarianism, as the very phrase presumes the preexistence of a larger whole—namely, Hinduism itself. Historically speaking, emic categories such as āstika (believers) and Vaidika (Vedic), terms that isolate a purported orthodoxy from heterodox religious movements, achieved a newfound popularity concurrently with terms for individual sectarian communities, such as sampradāya. Certainly, taxonomies of “orthodox” (āstika) and “heterodox” (nāstika) sects came to occupy the theologians of medieval and early modern India, whose doxographical treatises may suggest a similar conceptual understanding of the relationship between sect and religion, as Andrew Nicholson has argued in his 2010 monograph, Unifying Hinduism. And yet the seeming unity that late-medieval theologians located in Hindu scripture—Vedas, Upaniṣads, Purāṇas, and the six darśana s, or schools of philosophy—is thoroughly permeated by difference. Purāṇas, for instance, were understood as intrinsically sectarian—Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava—and were interpreted in light of the Āgamas and sectarian Dharmaśāstras, scriptures accepted only by particular sectarian traditions.

Indeed, within the emerging āstika, or “orthodox,” fold, not all Hindu darśana s were accorded equal authority. By the sixteenth century, the regnant discipline of Hindu theology was without question Vedānta, the traditional exegesis of the Upaniṣads as modeled after the Brahmasūtras of Gauḍapāda. Formerly a philosophical tradition relegated to the margin of Indian intellectual life, Vedānta experienced a dramatic renaissance in south India during the late-medieval and early modern periods, but entered the public domain as a discourse not of consensus but of contention. In fact, sectarian theologians from disparate Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava communities differentiated themselves primarily by way of their trademarked exegetical interpretation of the Brahmasūtras, demarcating their identity on the basis of ontological doctrine, whether “dualist,” “nondualist,” or some variation thereof. Indeed, a novel commentary on the Brahmasūtras had become the ticket to competing in the marketplace of emerging Hindu sectarian communities. Nevertheless, there was no such thing as an unequivocally Hindu Vedānta: the discipline was fragmented at the core along sectarian lines, divisions that simultaneously correlated philosophical ontology with religious identity.

The story this book tells, then, is not only one of theology and doctrine but also one of communities and publics: the story of how a particular Hindu sectarian community—namely, the Smārta-Śaivas of the Tamil country—acquired its distinctive religious culture. More broadly speaking, however, to delineate what constitutes a sectarian community in early modern south India requires a theorization of how new religious identities come to be shared and remembered across time and space: in other words a theory of south India’s early modern publics. Such publics, indeed—and religious publics no less—were invariably multiple, overlaid with one another in the urban space of thriving temple towns and connected with each other across space by networks of patronage and pilgrimage. Religious publics crystallized, by and large, around the charismatic authority of renunciant preceptors, pontiffs of monastic lineages with branch communities spanning the southern half of the subcontinent and often beyond. And yet the modes of religious identity cultivated by their devotees were promulgated, first and foremost, by a discourse we can aptly describe as public theology, circulated through the writings of major sectarian intellectuals who sought both to cultivate common bonds of devotion and to foster shared modes of public engagement that visibly demarcated the boundaries between distinct sectarian communities. As a result, fashioned through reciprocal dialogue and polemic, sectarian communities functioned as independent public spheres, cultivating, in other words, a pluralistic religious landscape that mediated conflict through independent coexistence.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Names have been changed.

[2]:

Such works include W. C. Smith (1962), Dalmia (1995), Stietencron (1989), Hawley (1991), B. K. Smith (1989), and numerous others.

[3]:

This position has been most notably advocated by Andrew Nicholson in his book Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (2010). See also Pennington (2005), van der Veer (1994), and Lorenzen (1995, 1999), to name a few.

[4]:

The Sanskrit śloka reads: “prāmāṇyabuddhir vedeṣu sādhanānām anekatā | upāsyānām aniyama etat dharmasya lakṣaṇam ||” Quoted in Inamdar (1983).

[5]:

I speak primarily of the Āgamic Śaivism of the Mantramārga. See chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of the transformation of Śaivism from a hegemonic, pan-Indian religion to a sect of an overarching Hindu orthodoxy.