The Construction of India’s Sectarian Publics

[Full title: Public Theology: or, The Construction of India’s Sectarian Publics]

The very idea of a religious public, read through the prescriptive lens of liberal political theory and the precedent of a Western model of civil society, may strike the contemporary reader as a sheer contradiction in terms. A brief thought experiment, however, may clarify why such a concept never came under fire in Indian intellectual circles. It is no surprise that, after Europe witnessed the ravaging destruction of the Wars of Religion, educated minds across the continent would seek to limit the influence of religion in the domains of politics and civil society. In India, on the contrary, history unfolded differently, and the relationship between religion, society, and violence took on another form altogether. In 1598, to name a single example, a group of Vaiṣṇava clergy in Tamil Nadu sought royal sanction to install a prominent temple image of Viṣṇu for worship at the temple of Cidambaram, one of the most staunchly Śaiva sacred centers of the Indian subcontinent. In retaliation, the Śaiva priests threatened to commit mass suicide to prevent the image of Viṣṇu from being installed, and twenty priests ended up jumping to their deaths from the temple tower. So far as our historical records can detect, this was the face of religious violence in early modern south India. Where religious violence did erupt in premodern India, it did not take the shape of large-scale militarized clashes on the scale of the European Wars of Religion,^[1] which might have imprinted a memory of cultural trauma on the popular imagination—as, for instance, was undoubtedly the case in the aftermath of independence and partition in twentieth-century South Asia. And while no culture is immune to the everyday violence of inequity and coercion, much of which is inflected with religious concerns, such everyday violence can rarely suffice to shift public opinion toward instigating a renunciation of religion as such. No one, to our knowledge, took another life specifically over a competing interpretation of the Brahmasūtras.

Quite simply, there were no Wars of Religion in India to prompt a critical response from Indian intelligentsia. Organized religion never experienced substantial backlash from intellectual circles, as social conditions never warranted a move toward limiting religion in public space. In fact, far from moving toward a secularization of public discourse, early modern thought in India became radically theologized in its outward expression. Classical knowledge systems that had previously eschewed any mention of divinity rapidly adopted the vocabulary of devotionalism and sectarian piety.^[2] It is with this theologization of public discourse in mind that I add the second of our two terms to the word public—and that term is theology. By identifying in early modern south India the rise of a distinctively new public theology, I wish to argue that theological discourse was by no means incidental to the intellectual history of the period, nor was it a stultified relic of premodern Indic civilization. To the contrary, sectarian theology was crucial to the social and cultural constitution of south India by the sixteenth century, leaving an enduring impression on the religious landscape of the region today. Religious identity and community formation have taken the shape they have today largely because of the influence of the theologization of discourse and the discourse of theology.

The term public theology, as employed in the study of contemporary American religious discourse, was first coined by Martin E. Marty in an influential 1974 article on the extratextual ambitions of the renowned American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose eloquent words frequently influenced the deliberations of policy makers and worked their way into the speeches of presidents. Public theologians, according to Marty’s model, do not merely operate in the abstract, ruminating about the nature of divinity; they also, in a particularized and concrete fashion, engage with the beliefs and conduct of the religious at large. Broadly speaking, public theologians are those “various figures who have interpreted the nation’s religious experience, practice and behavior in light of some transcendent reference” (Marty 1974, 332). Seventeenth-century south India, naturally, was no nation-state in the modern sense, and we cannot speak meaningfully at this point in history of a South Asian civil society, deemed necessary by some analysts as the purview of public theology. Nevertheless, in their theologically inflected writings, Nīlakaṇṭha and his contemporaries addressed—and indeed spoke on behalf of—a religious public unconstrained by the walls of a monastery, the vows of asceticism, the hierarchies of lineage (paramparā), or the boundaries of any single religious institution. They spoke on behalf of a public that spanned a multiplicity of social locations, hailing from a number of distinct caste, regional, and linguistic communities, all of which had come to participate in the networks of an overarching Śaiva public culture.

This phrase public theology contains two key words that I believe are fundamental to understanding both the motivations behind intellectual discourse in seventeenth-century south India and this discourse’s effects on subsequent generations. The first of these is the term public. The most widely known theory of the public (or of publicness, Publicität) is naturally Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. In its original formulation, Habermas’s “public sphere” was intended to describe a unique structural transformation in European society, contemporaneous with or somewhat postdating Nīlakaṇṭha’s floruit of the mid-seventeenth century. In Habermas’s model, late seventeenth-century Europe witnessed the emergence of a public domain, housed in the coffee shops and salons of an educated bourgeois society, in which public opinion was crafted through the process of rational debate. This “bourgeois public sphere” coincided temporally—and indeed causally, for Habermas—with the rise of political liberalism and early capitalist social orders, forming a necessary foundation for constitutional democracy as we understand it today.

Coffee shops, one may presume, were not commonplace in the urban metropolis of early modern south India,^[3] although the literary salon (sabhā), a South Asian institution of considerable antiquity, is another question entirely. Nevertheless, early modern India shared with Europe a flourishing network of scholars who began to gather in publicly demarcated spaces to debate issues of timely social interest. In north India, for example, the renowned scholars of Benares, one of the intellectual capitals of the subcontinent, petitioned to rebuild one of the city’s legendary temples, the Viśveśvara Temple. In the temple’s new incarnation, they constructed a pavilion known as the Mukti Maṇḍapa, the “Liberation Pavilion,” designed as a public meeting hall in which scholars applied their scriptural expertise toward solving vexing social problems of their day.^[4] In south India as well, poets and theologians traveled great distances to attend seasonal temple festivals, where performances of Sanskrit dramas served as conventions of regionwide literary society. Similarly, in written discourse, social debate flourished as representatives from rival religious sects put forth pamphlet after pamphlet defending their social and theological agendas. Our manuscript archives show a dramatic upsurge in debate through these “pamphlet wars” as sectarian tracts circulated widely across the region during the seventeenth century.

Of course, the most notable shortcoming of Habermas’s model when applied to early modern India is, broadly speaking, the issue of religion. Although Habermas, at least in his early work, does not address the issue, the bourgeois liberal discourse that constituted his public sphere most certainly was concerned with religion. More precisely, it was concerned with the limitation of religion in public space and discourse and, as a result, has often been implicated in the Western metanarrative of secularization. What, then, do we mean by the phrase religious publics? As numerous critics of Habermas have pointed out since the publication of his work in English in 1989, such a concept of the public sphere is by definition fundamentally antithetical to religion, founded as it is upon Enlightenment norms of rational discourse. That is, publicity, in Habermas’s estimation, centers on a neo-Kantian notion of communicative rationality, mapping onto a civil society that has deliberately evacuated religious concerns from the content of public discourse. In this context Hindu public theology stands out as the precondition for a rather different sort of public, fabricated by a mode of discourse that, while by no means nonrational, was fundamentally religious in its guiding concerns. The theologization of discourse, succinctly, is the process of Hindu theology’s going public—leaving the confines of the monastery or temple complex to cultivate the public ethos of a particular sectarian community, in the process demarcating it conceptually from its competitors.

In India, succinctly, sectarian tensions prompted an embrace rather than a rejection of religion in public space. No one religious sect was in a position to advocate universal orthodoxy for its doctrines; but rather, sectarian lineages cultivated separate and parallel public domains, each of which was suffused with the religious signifiers of that sect. Even today, visitors to India observe that religious signs and symbols permeate the landscape; and yet, no singular orthodoxy emerges from their conjunction, as each set of symbols belongs to a separate community with its own lineage, history, and devotional practice. And theologically speaking, the defense of this parallel sectarianism can be traced directly to the religious discourse of Indian early modernity. The theological debates of early modern India cultivated a heightened public awareness of sectarian identity that prompted relatively little violence or outright antagonism but greatly accelerated the formation of distinct religious communities across most of the subcontinent. It is precisely to describe the doctrinal dimensions of sectarian community formation during this period that I propose to locate a newly emerging public theology in the discourse of early modern south India. Public theology, in other words, served as the conceptual architecture for a parallel religious sectarianism that remains to this day the defining feature of the Hindu religion or, potentially, even of religious identity across the Indian subcontinent.

One of the central theoretical aims of this book, then, is to make the case for the early modern Indian public: one that, unlike its European counterpart, remained thoroughly and unapologetically inflected by religious concerns—specifically, the religiosity of distinct sectarian publics. Unlike the European case, then, we are obliged to speak not of a public sphere in the singular but of publics, as theologians of each sectarian community took initiative in reshaping the rules that governed public engagement of devotees and their interactions with those outside the tradition. The very idea of publics as multiple, naturally, comes as no surprise in the wake of numerous critiques of Habermas, as Nancy Fraser (1990), Michael Warner (2002), and others have aimed to decenter the normativity of the bourgeois public sphere by documenting the fragmentation of public discourse along lines of gender, class, or sexuality. These counterpublics, as Fraser describes them, by very definition run counter to a singular, hegemonic social order, in contradistinction to which they provide a social space for the cultivation of identities that conflict with the dominant cultural order. We have already seen, however, in the context of Hinduism, that the narrative of a singular hegemonic Brahminism against which sectarian identities are defined runs afoul of numerous historical incoherencies. Sectarian publics, as a result, are not Fraser’s counterpublics, nor are they spaces of resistance. Rather, sectarian publics exist parallel to one another, often colliding with networks of institutions occupying the same geographical and urban space. Sectarian publics are defined dialectically against one another rather than as subaltern shadows of a singular bourgeois Hinduism—which, when situated in the seventeenth century, is quite simply an anachronism.

This does not preclude, naturally, the possibility of such counterpublics existing elsewhere in premodern India. While publics can indeed generate a powerful setting for social critique, India’s scholarship, as with that of Europe, was produced and consumed largely by a restricted class of educated elite—indeed, this is precisely the class of people who participated in Habermas’s public sphere. Likewise, the sectarian religious publics of early modern south India, while constituted in part by the Sanskritic discourse of theological speculation, extended well beyond the boundaries of intellectual circles to include those of diverse social backgrounds who interface with sectarian institutions. As our historical archive bears out, the architecture of the sectarian public was indubitably founded upon a sort of rationality, couched in the language of Sanskrit śāstra—systematic philosophical discourse—or its equivalents in the numerous vernaculars of south India. Sectarian theologians were by and large elite social agents, whether Brahmins by class or members of groups with a significant economic power base in south India, such as the Vēḷāḷas of the Tamil country. The constituency of such a public, as a result, cannot possibly evoke the universal connotations of the twentieth-century usage—the public as an umbrella term for all individuals—which Habermas himself highlights as antithetical to his own vision of the public sphere. Nevertheless, the sectarian public is by no means an exhaustive descriptor, and by no means excludes the potential explanatory force of other overlaying public domains. Nor does the Hindu in “Hindu sectarian publics” imply that there were no publics composed of Muslims, Christians, Jains, or adherents of any other religious community. Rather, by the “Hindu sectarian publics of south India,” what is intended is simply an empirical description of one of the most salient sources for the construction of personal identity and belonging across the Hindu religious ecology of south India’s early modernity.

As in the European case, furthermore, Indian intellectual debates held wide-ranging consequences that changed the face of popular culture and society well beyond the confines of intellectual circles. For this reason, when I use the term public in public theology, I refer to the educated public of which Habermas speaks, but also to the resonances of public discourse across diverse sectors of society, what we might describe as another sort of “public” in modern parlance. This “other” sort of public—the domain of popular culture, if you will—is as fundamental an object of inquiry as the manuscripts of elite philosophical treatises. It is perhaps just this sort of public that is best captured by the work of Christian Novetzke (2016), who locates a public sphere in thirteenth-century Maharashtra that by virtue of its modes of discourse is not necessarily rational nor even necessarily literate. In India, these two publics were by no means the disparate phenomena one might imagine, and I would hazard to guess this holds true across cultures and continents. The question, methodologically speaking, is how to trace the influence that the “bourgeois public” exerted on a wider public culture, which Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge (1995), most notably, have described as “public culture.” When studying preprint and premedia religious cultures, the task requires careful attention to patterns of discourse and religious practice.

Take, for example, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita’s engagement with the popular mythology of the city of Madurai, which I treat in greater detail in chapter 4. One of Nīlakaṇṭha’s literary and devotional interests was a cycle of myths known as the “Sacred Games of Śiva,” a set of sixty-four narratives depicting the divine interventions of the god Śiva in Madurai, where Nīlakaṇṭha himself lived in the seventeenth century. Through his religious literature and devotional hymns, Nīlakaṇṭha contributed actively to circulating and popularizing the “Sacred Games” among Śaivas of all social backgrounds, well beyond the Madurai region. As a result, the “Sacred Games” attained such heights of popularity in the city of Madurai that festival performances of several of the narratives were added to the calendrical rituals of the city’s central temple, and they are still performed to this day. In short, Nīlakaṇṭha’s influence reached well beyond the circles of Śaiva Brahmins to shape the popular religious culture of Śaivas across south India. The study of sectarian publics, in short, does not restrict us to the analysis of discrete, provincial worldviews—to the contrary, it is the intersection between such publics and the wider population at large that marks perhaps our most fruitful point of inquiry for understanding the shifts in religious identity and values that govern the longue durée of the history of Hinduism.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

It is important to distinguish sectarian conflict from the armed militarism of religious renunciants who served as mercenaries in north India (Pinch 2006). See ClémentinOjha (1999) for a colonial-period example of more properly sectarian conflict.

[2]:

Venkatkrishnan (2015).

[3]:

Lutgendorf (2012).

[4]:

O’Hanlon (2011).