Philology and Public Religious Culture

Public philology, unlike the literature on Śrīvidyā devotionalism, was no internal Smārta-Śaiva affair. Under the pressure of elevated competition for material resources, brought on by the fragmentation of Vijayanagara into the Nāyaka kingdoms, sectarian leaders of all stripes—both proponents of Smārta-Śaivism, such as Appayya and his grandnephew Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, and quite a number of influential scholars of Vaiṣṇava lineages such as the Mādhvas and Śrīvaiṣṇavas—turned to text criticism to mobilize their own communities through parallel currents of polemical sectarian argumentation. This wide-ranging fascination with philological reasoning can also be witnessed through a discursive survey of the genres and themes that rose to an unprecedented popularity, and which now clutter the manuscript libraries of south India with numerous revisions and reproductions. Among the popular themes of these polemical treatises, we find both abstract considerations of textual meanings, such as analyses of the tātparya, or “general purport,” of the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and other texts popular across sectarian lines, as well as adjudications of the fine points of etymology and hermeneutics. Through ongoing cycles of debate, for example, numerous individual tracts were composed to formulate and refute theories as to why the name Nārāyaṇa contains a retroflex ṇ in its final syllable—and what implications this retroflex ṇ may hold with regard to the singularity of Vaiṣṇava orthodoxy.^[1]

Such pyrotechnics with phonetics may strike the observer as radically disconnected from the embodied practice of south Indian Hinduism. What part could the retroflex ṇ in Nārāyaṇa possibly play in the devotional relationship cultivated by Vaiṣṇava practitioners with their chosen deity? Inquiring into the theology of text criticism—no less than a study of texts studying texts—would appear anathema to what theorists have described as the “materialist turn” in the study of religion. In recent years, the attention in the discipline has turned—and rightly so—away from what Vasquez (2010) describes as its Protestant roots in “suffocating textualism” toward a salutary emphasis on the material aspects of religious practice, from the production and circulation of religious goods and material culture to networks of human relationships (Orsi 2006) and translocal flows (Tweed 2008). And yet, in the case of the textual practices of south Indian early modernity, philology was intimately intertwined with the material practices of religion, providing not an escape but an authoritative underpinning for the object-centered, bodily, or spatial religious practices across Hindu sectarian communities. Paradoxically, as we shall see, a study of texts studying texts tells a great deal about the embodied religious identity of the early modern subcontinent.

Strictly speaking, to locate philology—most commonly recognized as a European textual science that flourished in the nineteenth century—in the textual practices of seventeenth-century India presents us with a number of historical and theoretical ambiguities. How precisely do we define the term philology in this context, and can such a term possibly correlate with anything in the emic conceptual map of a seventeenth-century south Indian pandit? In his programmatic essay defending the discipline of philology and its future prospects, Sheldon Pollock (2009) defines philology, broadly speaking, as “the discipline of making sense of texts[,]... the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.”^[2] By way of this transhistorical definition, Pollock makes the case for philology as a global phenomenon, a critical reflexivity toward textual meaning that surfaces at various occasions and in numerous textual cultures, irrespective of language and location. As such, there is nothing intrinsically European or modern (or even early modern) in this model of philology, a concept that can be applied fruitfully to any number of historical scenarios.

Nevertheless, our historical narratives often portray philology, in its regnant role as queen of the sciences, as a prototypically early modern invention, allied as it was with the Renaissance rediscovery of the Western world’s classical past and, in turn, with the rise of Orientalism as colonial-period scholars reconstructed a parallel golden age of India’s pre-Islamic antiquity. In social and historical context, a genuine case could be made that Renaissance Europe revolutionized the practice of philology, as exegetes expanded the extant corpus of classical works, moving in a rapidly urbanizing world in which printed books not only were readily available but also circulated fluidly as a commodity of trade. Renaissance humanists, Anthony Grafton (2015) has argued, prefigured the institutionalized philology of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century universities by developing an arsenal of new text-critical techniques—attention to the individuality of an author’s voice, for instance—to build on the foundations of the classical and scholastic past. In the domain of early modern India, then, did the philology of Hindu sectarian theologians merely echo or expand the techniques of textual interpretation developed by philosophers and linguists over the preceding two millennia?

When applied to the entire historical field of Indic textuality, the very idea of philology may seem to suffer from a troubling overextension (or ativyāpti, as Sanskrit scholars would call it). Simply put, making sense of texts, or even language, is perhaps the single fundamental building block of Indian systematic thought. Such was argued, for instance, by Frits Staal (1965) in his well-known essay “Euclid and Panini,” in which he maintains that the grammatical systematicity of Pāṇini’s approach to the Sanskrit language played a crucial structural role in the history of Sanskritic discourse, much as geometrical reasoning proved foundational to philosophy in the Western world. One is not hard pressed to think of examples of both Sanskrit and vernacular discourse that would qualify as philology, ranging from Kumārila’s source-critical evaluation of Smṛti literature, Purāṇas, and the Āgamic corpus,^[3] to the Marathi poet-saint Eknāth’s critical edition of the Jñāneśvarī.^[4] Although we may be warranted in perceiving an efflorescence in philological reasoning at certain periods in Indian history—the early modern centuries witnessed philological undertakings of the magnitude of Sāyaṇa’s Ṛgveda commentary^[5] and the hermeneutic acrobatics of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara^[6] —there is nothing new, or navya, about philology as so defined for the scholars of the seventeenth century.

On one hand, Hindu sectarian theology in early modern centuries did inherit the legacy of classical Sanskritic thought through reference to a common focal point—namely, the interpretation and exegesis of the Brahmasūtras—leading sectarian lineages to nominally demarcate their identity on the basis of ontological doctrine, whether “dualist,” “nondualist,” or some variation thereof. Equally impressive techniques of exegesis were marshaled to defend one interpretation over another; and yet, despite protests to the contrary, no faction managed to achieve even a marginal victory by common consensus. It was perhaps because of this philosophical stalemate—and, no doubt, the social and economic stakes of theological marginalization—that, as time progressed, sectarian debate began to overflow the boundaries of ontology as theologians, in search of some common ground for dialogue, began to question even the most fundamental rules of Sanskrit textuality and disciplinarity.

On the other hand, thinking from within traditional Sanskritic categories may tempt us to equate philology, for a Sanskrit-educated audience, with the strict confines of a single śāstric discipline: the hermeneutics of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. Although traditionally viewed by doxographers as a discrete school of thought (darśana) in its own right, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā exercised a pervasive influence on the idea of textuality across disciplinary boundaries in India, so that it now seems redundant even to make the observation. For instance, the work of Lawrence McCrea (2009) demonstrates the foundational role played by Mīmāṃsā interpretive techniques in the development of Sanskrit literary theory (Alaṅkāraśāstra) as an academic discipline. Thus, the genuine centrality of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā to Sanskrit hermeneutics often leads to an impasse when the category of philology is applied to Sanskrit intellectual history as an etic theoretical lens. Anterior to the publication of sectarian philology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prominent sectarian theologians, including the fourteenth-century Lion among Poets and Logicians (Kavitārkikasiṃha), relied heavily on the theoretical apparatus of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā in his approach to textuality, even when attempting to dismiss the theological presuppositions of classical Mīmāṃsakas themselves.

And yet Vedānta Deśika approached much of his oeuvre with penetrating philological insight, developing an eye for the textual integrity of his tradition’s scripture rarely seen in preceding centuries (Cox 2016). As with the case of European philology and its Renaissance humanist legacy, sectarian public philology of the seventeenth century owes a significant debt to a sort of scriptural “renaissance” undertaken by Vedānta Deśika and his contemporaries from various sectarian communities. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was during this period—between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries—that Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas simultaneously embarked on a large-scale rapprochement of the sectarian scriptures of their lineage with a wider concept of Vedic—or Hindu—orthodoxy. Sectarian scripture in south India witnessed significant “textual drift”—or forgery, rather, depending on one’s inclination—during this formative period. Śaiva scriptures such as the Sūtasaṃhitā gradually conformed to the south Indian religious landscape—placing new emphasis on Cidambaram, the center of Cōḻa-period Śaiva temple culture—and adopted a notably Vedānticized inflection to hybridize, perhaps for the first time, Śaiva religiosity with the teachings of the Upaniṣads. It is likely no accident that theologians such as Vedānta Deśika were inspired to develop new tools to think historically about the nature of scriptural authenticity.

What we witness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, is an upsurge not simply of philology but intersectarian philology—pugnacious critiques of theological rivals on text-critical grounds. It is these moments of encounter that I aim to examine, tailoring to the Indian textual sphere the methods of discourse analysis, in the Foucauldian sense, not individual works but the irruption of philological concerns into the intersectarian circulation of philological polemic. Included in this discourse are the works of major intellectuals, which deserve to be remembered as classics of Indian theology in their own right, as well as the broader sphere of sectarian discourse as such: polemical pamphlets, student essays, and handbooks for debate, most of which lie unpublished in the manuscript libraries of south India. In fact, this circulation of pamphlets, many designed to prepare theologians for public debate, underscores the extent to which philology was not, simply speaking, a matter for the manuscript archive but a subject of increasing social significance. I aim, then, not only to bring unused source materials to light but also to explore the extent to which philological approaches to sectarian debate moved beyond the rarified circles of the intellectual giants to shape the contours of the south Indian religious landscape. In such circumstances, a wider discursive analysis of early modern textuality in India can illuminate substantive shifts in the south Indian religious ecology in a way that fails to emerge from adhering strictly to the scriptural classics.

How, then, did public philology shift the religious ecology of south Indian sectarian communities? Most evidently, major thinkers of the sixteenth century achieved what may be an unprecedented public circulation of their works through sectarian networks, prompting an explosion of interest in philological questions across all strata of discourse, from the most elevated to the most banal commentarial essay, a trend that continued even into the colonial era. Where doctrinaire theologians failed to defeat each other on strictly philological ground, they frequently returned to key questions of scriptural authenticity and meaning to undermine their opponents’ foundational sources of knowledge and veridicality; over the course of a handful of generations, philology had become a pillar of the unspoken rules of polemical discourse. That is, sectarian theology came to be a matter not for the temple or literary salon but for public debate, circulating readily across regional and sectarian boundaries. More importantly, however, philology went public in early modern south India by inquiring directly into the role of sectarian identity in public space. Having surveyed the extent and scope of public philology as a discourse of intersectarian polemic, we will turn to its direct engagement with the world outside of the text, to illuminate through a concrete example how sectarian theologians aimed to reshape the boundaries between religious communities.

I begin, then, by highlighting three problematics that occupied the minds of scholars such as Nīlakaṇṭha, on the Smārta-Śaiva side, and his Vaiṣṇava rivals from the Mādhva and Śrīvaiṣṇava lineages. First, exegetes of rival traditions turned their attention to their respective scriptural canons, each negotiating standards of text criticism that might distinguish their own canon from that of their opponents. In particular, a lively debate surfaced regarding the validity of the Śaiva Purāṇas as authoritative scripture, necessitating a collective reconsideration of precisely what textual features of the Purāṇas as they had been transmitted signaled their authenticity as prescriptive revelation. Second, even the tools of interpretation came under fire in the seventeenth century, as disciplinary approaches of reading texts, such as Nyāya (logic) or Mīmāṃsā, were claimed as the exclusive property of one sectarian tradition or another. As a result, we observe an increasing methodological divide between Smārta-Śaivas, whose hermeneutics come to be equated strictly with the field of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, and other lineages such as the Mādhvas, who claimed the school of Navya Nyāya as a distinctive domain of expertise. As a result, participants in these debates were forced to reason afresh about textual validity without the support of the knowledge systems that had sustained Sanskritic thought for centuries. And third, among the disciplinary approaches to textuality called into question during this period, the fields of etymology and lexicography came to occupy something of a contentious place in the domain of scriptural interpretation, and we witness a rise in fascination with etymological acrobatics (including catalogues of hundreds of “valid” Pāṇinian etymologies of the names of deities) along with a well-deserved skepticism of the utility of such an analytic approach. One issue that proved a hotbed of contention was the proper spelling of the name Nārāyaṇa; the debate generated countless polemical tracts claiming to adjudicate the valid referents of the name on etymological ground.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Manuscripts authored primarily to offer explanations of this retroflex ṇ in Nārāyaṇa are numerous. Specialized lexicons are often invoked for the purpose of explaining the syllable ṇa as a distinct word endowed with its own denotative capacity. For instance, Govinda Nāyaka (ca. eighteenth century) invokes a certain Ratnamālā to the effect that “the word ‘ṇa’ in the masculine gender is in the sense of a lover, Bhairava, thorn, or a sound,” on which grounds the name Nārāyaṇa can be derived as signifying “the lover of the women of Vraja.” See below for a discussion of this passage and of manuscripts concerned with the ṇa-tva, or retroflexion, appearing in the name Nārāyaṇa.

[2]:

Pollock, “Future Philology,” 934.

[3]:

See Tantravārttika 1.3.1.

[4]:

See John Keune (2011, 225) for details on the evidence for Eknāth’s editorial project. Hagiographies that narrate this episode include Keśavsvāmī’s Eknāthcaritra (1760 c.e.) and

Mahipati’s Bhaktilīlāmṛta (1774 c.e.)

[5]:

For the conceptual and social implications of Sāyaṇa’s work, see Galewicz (2010).

[6]:

See for instance Minkowski (2004, 2005, 2008).