The Smārta-Śaiva community of South India (Introduction)

Every May in the city of Madurai, devotees from across south India gather to celebrate the wedding of the god Śiva and the goddess Mīnākṣī in Madurai’s annual Cittirai Festival. The god and goddess leave the temple to greet the public in the city square as the streets become inundated with crowds, music, and impromptu dancing. In the seventeenth century, not far from the city center, one could also witness the performance of Sanskrit dramas, newly composed for the occasion and staged by south India’s most talented poets in honor of the festivities.^[1] In May of 1650, just such a play, called the Marriage of Kuśa and Kumudvatī, was debuted in a temple pavilion by court poet Atirātra Yajvan. For literati across the region, this was an occasion both for devotional pilgrimage and for the convention of a regionwide literary society, over which his elder brother, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita himself, Atirātra tells us, presided as “master of ceremonies” (sabhāpati).

While traditionally Sanskrit dramas opened by praising a patron and offering stage directions, Atirātra chose instead to present his audience with a remarkable autobiographical declaration:

“This poet, being himself a devotee of the goddess—just like Kālidāsa—does not even take a breath without her command, much less compose such a literary work.”^[2]

In light of the fervent sincerity of Atirātra’s confession, we might expect the Marriage of Kuśa and Kumudvatī to read as a tale charged with theological import, perhaps carrying resonances of the mythology and worship of the goddess who is at the center of this festival occasion. In reality, however, despite its considerable aesthetic charms, the narrative of the work is an entirely conventional—one might even say secular—account of love, loss, and reconciliation. But if the great goddess herself is apparently far from germane to the occasion at hand, how are we to make sense of Atirātra Yajvan’s earnest confession that his heartfelt devotion not only is foundational to his experience of the world but also forms the cornerstone of his work as a poet and scholar? And why does Atirātra compare himself to Kālidāsa, the most renowned Sanskrit poet of literary antiquity, whose writings scarcely contain the slightest trace of goddess devotion?

Kālidāsa, a fourth-century poet who dwelt in the Gupta and Vākāṭaka courts of central India, is remembered by scholarship and the Indian poetic tradition alike as the greatest celebrity of Sanskrit literary history, famed for his graceful command of the Sanskrit language. In Kālidāsa’s world, literature was an elite courtly enterprise segregated from the religious experiences of those who composed it. Like the majority of poets of Sanskrit classical antiquity, Kālidāsa participated in the erudite idiom of what Sheldon Pollock has called the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, a literary aesthetic that served the needs of royal power rather than those of the temple or monastery. Indeed, as Pollock has argued, the defining feature of classical Sanskrit literary culture was precisely its elision of particularities, whether in reference to place, time, or the personal devotional commitments of individual composers. For this reason, subsequent poets writing not only in Sanskrit but also in Telugu, Marathi, and other vernacular languages could be hailed by their contemporaries as Abhinava-Kālidāsa—the new Kālidāsa—simply by virtue of their literary virtuosity. To be just like Kālidāsa, for most of Indian history, had little to do with devotion and everything to do with laying claim to credentials that transcended time, space, and sectarian identity.

In the present context, however, Atirātra Yajvan’s confession is far from timeless. To the contrary, Atirātra released his statement into the public space of Madurai’s most cherished public festival at a crucial moment in the history of Hindu sectarian communities in south India, at a moment in which Kālidāsa was being reinvented as not only a scholastic but also a spiritual figurehead of the emerging Smārta-Śaiva community. Known today in popular parlance as “Tamil Brahminism”—although by no means are all Brahmins in Tamil Nadu either Smārta or Śaiva—the SmārtaŚaiva community itself was only in the process of being imagined in the early seventeenth century as a self-contained social entity. While the very idea of a community being imagined into existence may evoke the legacy of Benedict Anderson and the origins of nationalism, nations and sectarian communities do have one thing in common: both must rest upon an imagined collectivity founded upon shared features of identity, from language to devotional practice to the imagined legacy of a sacred past. Just as history is reinvented in the service of nation-building, a nascent sectarian community, though unattested in past centuries, requires a hagiography with an illustrious patrimony of the likes of Kālidāsa, widely celebrated as the greatest poet of Sanskrit literary history.

Self-consciously crafting the identity of their emerging community, the SmārtaŚaivas lay claim to the legacy of Kālidāsa as well as that of Śaṅkārācarya, India’s most iconic philosopher, as the exclusive intellectual property of the SmārtaŚaiva community. At first glance, such a claim appears superficially plausible: the community produces elegant works of Sanskrit poetry and rigorous philosophical tracts founded on Śaṅkara’s Advaita philosophy. But recall again the words of Atirātra Yajvan: when he tells us he is just like Kālidāsa, his intent is not simply to express that he has composed timeless poetry. Indeed, the comparison he draws is founded on an altogether different commonality: namely, that both he and his illustrious predecessor do not draw a single breath that is not inspired by the goddess’s grace. By crafting a new hagiography for history’s greatest Sanskrit poet, Atirātra Yajvan and his community reinscribed the Sanskrit literary tradition with new and unprecedented meanings scarcely imaginable within the classical past.

Atirātra Yajvan, in fact, is not the only poet to forge a conceptual alliance between the Sanskrit intellectual enterprise and the devotional worship of the goddess. Rather, his confession exemplifies a pervasive transformation of the religious ecology of the early modern Tamil country, one that began to crystallize perhaps a number of decades before the Kuśakumudvatīyanāṭaka was first performed in Madurai. Among the noteworthy intellectuals employed in the seventeenthcentury Nāyaka courts of Madurai and Tanjavur, a remarkable number were affiliated not merely by familial ties but also by a shared participation in sectarian religious networks.^[3] Indeed, on the Śaiva side, within the space of a single generation, Atirātra, Nīlakaṇṭha, and their colleagues across the Tamil country began to evoke their personal sectarian identities through remarkably similar textual and devotional practices. South Indian Vaiṣṇavism, for instance, whether Mādhva, Śrīvaiṣṇava, or otherwise, already had a history by the seventeenth century—a history that had been entextualized by poets and theologians and instituted in practice through religious centers such as temple complexes and monasteries. It was only in the early seventeenth century, in contrast, that Smārta-Śaivism first laid claim to a shared hagiography, began to profess devotional relationships with ecclesiastical authorities, and perhaps most strikingly, began to cultivate a shared esoteric ritual practice.

Indeed, for the Smārta-Śaiva theologians of seventeenth-century Madurai, the goddess in question was not simply Mīnākṣī, juridical figurehead of the Nāyaka state and divine embodiment of the Madurai region, whose sacred marriage the city was commemorating in a public festival at the very moment Atirātra compared himself to the great Kālidāsa. His allusion, to the contrary, was intended to invoke the worship of Lalitā Tripurasundarī, the lineage deity of the Śrīvidyā school of Śākta Tantrism. Śrīvidyā is a goddess-centered (Śākta) esoteric ritual tradition that, while guarded carefully in the initiatory lineage, has become something of an open secret in Tamil Brahmin society, forming a cornerstone of the collective culture of Smārta-Śaiva religiosity. Śrīvidyā, in its mature form, first flourished on the opposite side of the subcontinent some centuries earlier, in early second-millennium Kashmir,^[4] where it acquired the unmistakable stamp of the region’s sophisticated Śaiva and Śākta philosophical and ritual idiom. That Śrīvidyā was exported to the far South soon after its initial zenith in Kashmir is revealed unmistakably in the Tirumantiram,^[5] a work of the Tamil Śaiva canon heavily inflected with Śrīvidyā imagery. Its systematic ritual practice is best known to contemporary scholars and practitioners alike through the works of Bhāskararāya, an eighteenth-century resident of the Maratha court of Tanjavur, whose pathbreaking works have yet to be definitively situated in cultural context.^[6] And yet, that an entire generation of seventeenth-century literati professes to have actively engaged with the Śrīvidyā tradition puts us in a position to reconstruct a crucial moment in its efflorescence the Tamil South—and, more importantly, its role in shaping the contours of Smārta-Śaiva religious culture.

Indeed, Śrīvidyā initiation began to spread like wildfire, virtually without precedent, through the intellectual circles of Nāyaka south India in the early seventeenth century, and with it came the institutional apparatus of the preceptors who provided this initiation: the Śaṅkarācārya lineages of south India.^[7] The renunciants of the Śaṅkarācārya, or Daśanāmī, order trace their heritage through their hagiographies to the eighth-century theologian Śaṅkarācārya, who wrote the pioneering Advaita, or nondual commentary on the Brahmasūtras, the core scripture of Advaita Vedānta philosophy. So named for their hagiographical forebear, the “Śaṅkarācāryas,” or Jagadgurus—literally “world teachers”—of these lineages serve in succession as the abbots, or preceptors, of independent regional monasteries, each of which maintains branch outposts across the Indian subcontinent. Two of the five principal Śaṅkarācārya monasteries, or maṭha s, that exist today speak to the Smārta-Śaiva constituents of south India—one in Sringeri, on the western coast of Karnataka, and one in Kanchipuram, in northern Tamil Nadu. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the charismatic saints of the Śaṅkarācārya tradition began to attract a substantial lay following across the Tamil region. Included in their ranks were many of the most influential theologians and intellectuals who belonged to the first generation of the emergent Smārta-Śaiva community.

Cementing their ties to their new institutional homes, the Śaṅkarācārya Jagadgurus of the Tamil country initiated leading Smārta-Śaiva theologians as their disciples^[8] and, at the same time, into the esoteric ritual practice of Śrīvidyā, which remains the personal cult of the Śaṅkarācāryas of Sringeri and Kanchipuram to this day.^[9] In fact, despite the purportedly covert nature of Śrīvidyā ritual, a substantial body of textual evidence survives in which various intellectuals acknowledge firsthand their devotional relationships with Śaṅkarācārya preceptors and attempt to negotiate a place for Śrīvidyā practice within a wider Śaiva orthodox culture. It is this master-disciple relationship that secured a connection between the Śaṅkarācārya monasteries themselves and the wider lay population, who came to participate in what I refer to as the Smārta-Śaiva community. Thus for the first time in South Asian history—in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—we encounter lay householders professing devotion for a Śaṅkarācārya preceptor and receiving from that preceptor an initiation that would formally grant them access to a community of devotees. In contrast, Appayya Dīkṣita himself, despite his systematic engagement with Vedānta philosophy, mentions the name of no Śaṅkarācārya preceptor in his entire oeuvre. In essence, rather than fragmentary accounts of personal devotional practice, we discover an active discursive network—and one that had begun to radically alter the social fabric of sectarian identity in early modern south India.

Addressing a substantively different social context, the original Śaṅkarācārya, we may recall, went so far as to expressly forbid the study and practice of Vedānta among nonrenunciants. As a role model, then, Śaṅkarācārya fits somewhat ambiguously with the social and religious values of seventeenth-century south Indian intellectuals. As a result, it may come as no surprise that Smārta-Śaiva theologians of the seventeenth-century promulgated a radically revised hagiography of the original (Ādi) Śaṅkara. While the eighth-century philosopher himself was an avowed Vaiṣṇava and adamant critic of both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava Tantric practice, the Śaṅkarācārya of seventeenth-century hagiography emerged—just like Kālidāsa—as a Śākta devotional poet and pioneer of Śrīvidyā esoteric ritual, whose life culminated in pilgrimage to the seat of the goddess Kāmākṣī in Kanchipuram and rapture with the vision of the god and goddess as Kāmeśvara and Kāmeśvarī, the sixteen-year-old divine couple in sexual union.

Likewise, the Smārta-Śaivas of the seventeenth century envisioned a radically different Kālidāsa, one who scarcely resembled his historical namesake of the fourth or fifth century. Inspired perhaps by a creative misconstrual of the meaning of the poet’s name, as the dāsa, or “servant,” of the goddess Kālī, they recast him as an ardent devotee of the goddess whose literary craft was the direct expression of divine grace. In fact, the identities of these two hagiographical figureheads of Smārta-Śaivism were often deliberately blurred, which produced a single—or at least monochrome—ecclesiastical history of the Smārta-Śaiva community. The theologian Lakṣmīdhara, for instance, in commenting on the Saundaryalaharī, or “Waves of Beauty,” a devotional goddess hymn anachronistically attributed to Śaṅkara, extols the virtues of Kālidāsa in terms that had previously been reserved solely for the eighth-century Advaita philosopher: the “Blessed Feet [Bhagavatpāda]” of Kālidāsa.

And then, in violation of our expectations, he tells a story that explains why Kālidāsa has been granted this lofty status, attributing Kālidāsa’s poetic genius solely to the divine intervention of the goddess in his life:

“The Blessed Feet of Kālidāsa, being deaf and dumb, spoke the pair of hymns, the Laghustotra and Carcāstotra, through the power of the contact of [the goddess’s] hand with his forehead. By that power, the goddess placed the water used for bathing Her lotus feet in his mouth.”^[10]

The Kālidāsa of the Smārta-Śaiva community, then, was born not only without poetic talent but also without the capacity for speech; the goddess, by her grace, saw fit to elevate his status by placing in his mouth the water used to bathe her feet, a widespread symbol in Hindu traditions for the grace-bestowing power of a particular deity or saint. More specifically, in the Tantric discourses where the trope originated, this substance is equated with an alchemical nectar that flows in the subtle body of a human being. Transmuted through the practices of Kuṇḍalinī yoga, this nectar divinizes the body of the adept. Dripped into the mouth of the young Kālidāsa, it transformed an impotent voice into the most sublime vehicle of poetic speech known to Indian history. Emulating the transformation they accorded to the young Kālidāsa, Smārta-Śaiva theologians, then, represented their worldly profession as an externalization of their inner devotional experiences. For many of these poets, Śākta devotionalism and literary genius were fundamentally inextricable from each other.

By tracing this newfound prominence of Śaṅkarācārya and Kālidāsa in Smārta-Śaiva religious culture, I aim, in this chapter, to tell the story of the emergence of Smārta-Śaivism as a distinct sectarian community. As a fledgling sect of Hinduism competing for social prestige and patronage with the better established institutions of the Śrīvaiṣṇava, Mādhva, and Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta lineages, Smārta-Śaivism, like its rivals, was founded first and foremost on networks of religious agents. In this case, we can trace the coalescence of Smārta-Śaivism as a religious community to the first inroads of the Śaṅkarācārya lineages in the Tamil country, which soon began to build connections with the lay populace and, in particular, with local theologians who gave voice to the devotional commitments, doctrines, and values of the community at large. Through these foundational forays into shaping a public religious culture for the Smārta-Śaiva community, theologians such as Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, Atirātra Yajvan, and many of their contemporaries first made room for the practice and embodiment of a new sectarian identity. Whether produced in the guise of devotional poetry, commentarial treatises, or ritual manuals, these works served, succinctly, to consolidate the religious culture of Smārta-Śaivism. Circulating strictly within the confines of a delimited religious public, their compositions readily evoked the authors’ shared commitment to Śrīvidyā ritual and devotion to Śaṅkarācārya preceptors, an omnipresent feature of this sphere of intellectual production and circulation. These writings, in other words, formed a field of discourse that actively consolidated the networks of temples, monasteries, and religious publics that came to constitute the Smārta-Śaiva community.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

pāripārśvaka: adya srihālāsyacaitrotsavayātrāyām āryamiśrāḥ samāpatanti.

[2]:

kavir ayaṃ kālidāsa iva svayam ambikādāsatayā tadājñām antareṇa niśvāsam api na karoti, kiṃ punar etādṛśaṃ prabandham.

[3]:

Other sectarian networks prominent among court intellectuals in early modern South India include the Vaiṣṇava Mādhva and Śrīvaiṣṇava lineages. Much work remains to be done on the changing structure of these networks and their interactions. See for instance Stoker 2011; Rao 2014.

[4]:

The earliest known manuscript of what might be termed proto-Śrīvidyā, the Nityākaula, a Tantric work devoted to the worship of a set of Nityā goddesses, is currently under study by Anya Golovkova, PhD candidate at Cornell University. Further work remains to be done on allied texts devoted to the Nityās, such as the Ciñciṇīmatasārasamuccaya, and other antecedent traditions such as those centered on Tripurabhairavī (Sanderson 2003–2004, 367n50) . See also Dyczkowski (2009, 3:179ff, 2:216–244).

[5]:

The traditional dating of the Tirumantiram, extending back as far as the fifth to seventh century c.e., is, while accepted by Brooks and some others, historically inconceivable and incoherent outside of a Tamil nationalist agenda. See Goodall (2004, xxix). A date of the twelfth or thirteenth century is far more plausible. On the transmission of Śaiva and Śākta traditions from Kashmir to the Tamil country in the early second millennium, especially with regard to the Kālī Krama, an allied Śākta school, see Cox (2006).

[6]:

Many of Bhāskararāya’s contemporary lineage descendants trace his heritage and his Śrīvidyā ritual practice to the Andhra country, importing concepts that were not prevalent in Tamil Nadu in the seventeenth century.

[7]:

Clark (2006) provides a thorough overview of our knowledge to date on the Śaṅkarācārya orders, especially the alliance between the Sringeri maṭha and the early Vijayanagara empire. See also Kulke (1993, 1985) for a cogent revisionist proposition on the changing self-representation of the Śaṅkarācārya lineage of Sringeri in the late Vijayangar period.

[8]:

Śaṅkara, or Śaṅkarācārya, is the circa-eighth-century author of the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, the foundational treatise of the Advaita (nondualist) school of Vedānta philosophy. Around the middle of the second millennium, monastic centers such as Sringeri in western Karnataka, closely allied with the founding rulers of the Vijayanagara empire, began to claim direct lineage descent from Śaṅkara himself, each successive preceptor taking the title Śaṅkarācārya.

[9]:

Sanderson, “The Influence of Shaivism on Pala Buddhism.” Further, the personal attendant of the recent Jagadguru of Sringeri, Candraśekhara Bhāratī, reports that, in one instance, a certain Satyānandanātha, who studied Vedānta with Jagadguru Saccidānanda Śivābhinava Bhāratī, personally initiated Candraśekhara Bhāratī into Śrīvidyā on the day before his ascension to the pontificate (Rao 1990).

[10]:

bhagavatpādaiḥ aneḍamūkebhyaḥ laghucarcāstotradvayaṃ hastamastakasaṃyogamahimnā avāci. tanmahimnā bhagavatī pādāravindanirṇejanajalaṃ tanmukhe dattavatī. Elsewhere in the text, Lakṣmīdhara consistently refers to the Laghu and Carcā Stotra s, part of the Pañcastavī, as the work of Kālidāsa.