Public Theology in Action

[Full title: The Making of a Sectarian Community: Public Theology in Action]

As a case study of this larger socioreligious dynamic, this book examines the sectarianization of Hinduism in microcosm by telling the story of a particular Hindu sect in the process of coming into being. This community, the Smārta-Śaiva tradition of south India—otherwise known as Tamil Brahminism^[1] —ranks among a handful of independent Hindu lineages that, when viewed in toto, palpably dominates the public religious life of south India today. And yet little scholarship to date has inquired into its contemporary religious culture, let alone the historical conditions of possibility that led to its emergence.^[2] The renunciant branch of modern Smārta-Śaivism, the Śaṅkarācārya order of ascetics, has garnered significant attention as a pan-Indian monastic lineage rooted in four (or five) maṭha s at the corners of the Indian subcontinent and as a primary vehicle for the dissemination of Advaita Vedānta philosophy. Before the early modern centuries, however, Vedānta was the exclusive purview of such ascetic orders, as the theological canon expressly forbade its practice by all but Brahmin renunciants. Smārta-Śaivism, however, as a sectarian community, incorporated the charisma of the Śaṅkarācārya Jagadgurus into the consolidation of an extensive lay populace, many of whom began to cultivate a relationship of personal devotion with these iconic figures. Many of these lay theologians, in turn, crafted the systems of meaning that gave birth to the religious culture of Smārta-Śaivism as such. As a result, it is in their writings—their doctrine, polemic, ritual procedures, and devotional poetry—that this project’s inquiry is grounded.

The public theology of the Smārta-Śaiva community in and of itself is a discourse still in need of excavation. I draw primarily from the theologically inflected writings of major sectarian theologians—whether philosophical speculation or overt sectarian polemic. The first task at hand, then, has been both to reconstitute the discourse of public theology and to allow it to tell its story to contemporary audiences. Only when read as an active field of discourse can Śaiva public theology speak to the lived reality beyond the text, in which theology is enacted through public ritual and socioreligious institutions. I bring the pamphlets of virtual unknowns in dialogue with the polished treatises of iconic Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava theologians. As a historical archive, necessarily constrained by the happenstance of manuscript collection and preservation, this source material provides a representative sampling of the theological discourse that shaped the boundaries of the nascent sectarian communities of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century south India. As a result, the vast majority of sources cited are either unpublished manuscripts or published editions rarely accessible in readable condition.

The textual culture of early modern south India, moreover, is fundamentally polyglot in its linguistic composition. Products of a hybrid Tamil-Telugu regional culture, Smārta Brahmins, educated in the classical Sanskritic knowledge systems, rubbed shoulders with court poets and theologians writing exclusively in the Tamil and Telugu vernaculars. Indeed, the educated publics they addressed likely overlapped to a significant degree. A responsible inquiry into this discursive field, then, must necessarily take a multilingual approach to the textual archive, particularly when the object of study is not simply the text itself but simultaneously the context—the extratextual sectarian community shaped by that same multilingual discourse. Śaiva theology, to name but one example, was written in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada—and Sanskrit-educated theologians were by no means ignorant of their vernacular counterparts.

Chapter 1 begins by setting the scene for the emergence of an autonomous Smārta-Śaiva sectarian community. I first contextualize the salient features of early modern Smārta-Śaivism through their genealogical development from earlier pan-Indian Śaiva Tantric traditions. Śaivism, as we will see, in its earliest instantiations required no reference to an overarching religious identity that we might call Hinduism; as a result, Śaiva and sectarian are by no means synonyms but rather a dyad in need of historical disambiguation. Moving forward in history, then, I situate the earliest stages of the community’s manifestation within the milieu of early sectarianization in south India. I conclude this chapter by introducing the major players in the sectarianization of Smārta-Śaivism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, poet laureate of the Nāyaka kingdom of Madurai, whose theology may be viewed as representative of the generation of intellectuals who played midwife to the emergent Smārta-Śaiva community.

Chapter 2 captures the moment of crystallization of the major structural features of Smārta-Śaivism at around the turn of the seventeenth century. Specifically, this moment marks the juncture at which the south Indian Śaṅkarācārya lineages, centered institutionally at Sringeri and Kanchipuram, came to function as the doctrinal and institutional hubs of a public sectarian network that extended far beyond the walls of the monastic lineages themselves. Although certain monasteries had been incorporated as religious institutions some centuries before, particularly the Sringeri maṭha in western Karnataka, and had even entered into relationships of ideological exchange with ruling powers,^[3] the seventeenth century witnessed a marked transformation in the religious public that came to define itself in relationship to these monastic lineages. This chapter focuses on the case of the Śaṅkarācārya networks of Tamil Nadu, which, in the process of ensconcing themselves institutionally in the vicinity of Kanchipuram, forged an alliance with the intellectual elite of Sanskritic Śaiva circles. As a result, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita and a number of his close associates entered into devotional relationships with Śaṅkarācārya preceptors and publicly professed their allegiance to the esoteric ritual tradition associated with the Śaṅkarācārya lineages, the Śrīvidyā school of Śākta Tantrism. We witness the emergence, in the space of a generation, of a completely unprecedented socioreligious network, one that has proved foundational to the present-day constitution of south Indian Smārta-Śaivism.

In chapter 3, I examine the doctrinal constitution of “orthodox” Smārta-Śaivism from the outside in—that is, by way of polemical encounter with rival sectarian traditions, such as the Mādhva and Śrīvaiṣṇava communities, both major shareholders in the transregional south Indian networks of monasteries and temple complexes. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, sectarian polemic suddenly irrupts in popularity as a distinct textual genre, as major theologians launch a discoursewide, interdisciplinary inquiry into the canonical status of scriptures affiliated exclusively with particular sectarian traditions, such as the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas. Debate soon overflows the confines of strictly philosophical contention, as polemicists circulate pamphlet after pamphlet with the express aim of discrediting, on text-critical grounds, the scriptural foundations of rival lineages. We observe, as a result, a heightened philological sensitivity emerging at all levels of public discourse, which, in the process of cementing the text-critical foundations of both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava claims to orthodoxy, provides a conceptual language for differentiating sectarian communities as autonomous social systems.

In chapter 4, I explore the influence of sectarian theology on the wider public religious culture of the Tamil region by reconstructing the emergence of the Sthalapurāṇa of Madurai as a living canon of Śaiva religious experience. First entextualized in the thirteenth century, the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam—a cycle of narratives depicting Śiva’s sixty-four sacred games in the city of Madurai—emerged out of the domain of elite literary practice and went on to transform the public face of local Śaiva religiosity, in no small part owing to the intervention of Madurai’s Śaiva public theologians. The “Sacred Games” attained the status of a public site of memory over the course of mere decades owing to the cross-pollination of the Tamil region’s diverse, multilingual literary cultures—Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit—later venturing into the territories of Marathi and Kannada as well. As a result of their dramatic upsurge in literary popularity, several of Śiva’s “Sacred Games” were woven into the texture of Śaiva temple ritual, publicly enacted to this day as annual processional festivals. In short, by interfacing with a multilingual domain of public culture, theologians such as Nīlakaṇṭha exerted an influence well beyond the circles of Śaiva Brahmins and shaped the popular religiosity of Śaivas across south India. Public theology, in the case of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam, began with the poetry of celebrated Sanskrit and Tamil literati only to leave an indelible impression on public religiosity of the region, as the “Sacred Games” are today inextricable from the experience of being a Śaiva in the city of Madurai.

My archive is primarily textual, but always thoroughly contextualized. I analyze religious discourse with a view of text not merely as a world unto itself but as a medium for communication, for the production and dissemination of systems of meaning that constitute sectarian systems as lived religious communities. In fact, it is the very project of public theology that gives rise to the structures of meaning that perpetuate religious communities such as the sectarian traditions of early modern south India. I aim to illustrate, through the study of intellectual history in microcosm, how public theological discourse both constructs and maintains the cultural artifacts—from monasteries to ritual performance to soteriological belief—that endow each religious community with its autonomous sectarian identity. I aim to document the sectarianization of Hinduism not in its aftermath, then, but in its very process of coming into being.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

A more recent history of the Tamil Brahmin community’s trials and transformations in the twentieth century can be found in Fuller and Narasimhan (2014), Tamil Brahmins: The Making of a Middle Class. Those unfamiliar with the religious landscape of Tamil Nadu should note that the term can be misleading: by no means are all Tamil Brahmins Śaiva, nor were Smārta Brahmins in a position of relative social dominance in the seventeenth century let alone today, an intellectual rather than political or economic elite.

[2]:

Fuller and Narasimhan (2014) discuss the social structure of Tamil Brahminism in the early twentieth century, what they describe as the “making of a middle class.” On the religious culture of the contemporary Smārta-Śaiva Brahmin community, see Douglas Brooks (1992b), as well as Leela Prasad (2007), a lively ethnographic account, if not specifically grounded in the Tamil south.

[3]:

See in particular Clark (2006) on the history of the Sringeri Śaṅkarācārya maṭha.—

sa svāmī mama daivataṃ taditaro nāmnāpi nāmnāyate.

This line occupies the final pāda of each verse of the Śivotkarṣamañjarī.