“ Most scholarly accounts of Dravidian nationalism have focused on tracing the socio-economic and political dimensions of the movement. This primary emphasis has precluded scholarly interest and a deeper understanding of the important regional, socio-cultural and religious roots of the movement. Contemporary scholars engaged with the politics of Dravidian nationalism have also contributed to this signifiîant lacunae by focusing largely on the "progressive" post-Saivite, " Self Respect" phase of the Dravidian movement. As a result, important questions regarding the early intellectual, sociocultural and religious roots of the Dravidian movement remain unclear. Despite conceding the important role that missionaries and missionary Orientalism played in the Dravidian movement, there has been no significant attempt to locate their contribution to the movement, that is sensitive at the sâme time, to their wider missionary objectives for South Indian society. Similarly, despite the fact that Tamil/Saivite revivalists formed the "indigenous" vanguard of the Dravidian movement, there has been little detailed scholarly analysis of the Tamil/Saivite revivalist movement in Tamil Nadu and its relationship to the Dravidian movement.”
So begins Ravindran Vaitheespara’s 1999 thesis - “ Caste , Hybridity and the construction of cultural Identity in colonial India - Maraimalai Adigal and the intellectual genealogy of Dravidian nationalism - 1800 -1950 “
Maraimalai Adigal (15 July 1876 – 15 September 1950) was a Tamil orator and writer and father of Pure Tamil movement. He was a fervent Tamizh Saivite. He wrote more than 100 books, including works on original poems and dramas, but most famous are his books on his research into Tamil literature. Most of his literary works were on Saivism. He founded a Saivite institution called Podhunilaik Kazhagam. He was an exponent of the Pure Tamil movement and hence considered to be the father of Tamil linguistic purism. He advocated the use of Tamil devoid of Sanskrit words and hence changed his birth name Vedhachalam to Maraimalai.
At the age of seventeen, he married Soundaravalli and soon after his marriage, he moved to Madras to work as a sub-editor to a journal Siddantha Deepikai. Later, in March 1898, he quit this job to work with V. G. Suryanarana Sastri as a teacher in Madras Christian College. In his time in Madras Christian College he toured throughout Tamil Nadu giving lectures on Saivam. At about the same time he started a society for Saivam called Saiva Siddhanta Maha Samajam.
It is with R.S. Vedachalam Pillai, later known by the ‘pure Tamil’ name of Maraimalai Adigal, that the ideas generated by figures such as Robert Caldwell (1814–91), G.U. Pope (1820–1907), Somasundara Nayakar (1846–1901), P. Sundaram Pillai (1855–97), and Nallasvami Pillai (1864–1920) finally found their most elaborate and powerful expression—and particularly in and for the Tamil intellectual and cultural milieu. It is for these reasons that I regard Adigal is as the central ideologue of the Dravidian movement.
Centring the narrative around the life and career of Maraimalai Adigal, this chapter attempts to both map out and reconstruct the largely unknown history of the neo-Saivite movement and provide a biographical sketch of Adigal and the multiple forces and influences that shaped him as the principal architect of the neo-Saivite movement and ultimately as the central ideologue of non-Brahmin Tamil nationalism and the Dravidian movement.
Robert Caldwell's espousal of Saiva Siddhanta as a distinct Dravidian religion had an profound influence on Maraimalai Adigal. Caldwell, a Christian missionary and linguist, argued in his works that Saiva Siddhanta was a pure form of Tamil religion, distinct from Brahminical Hinduism. This notion resonated with Tamil nationalists and scholars who sought to emphasize the uniqueness and antiquity of Tamil culture and religion.
Maraimalai Adigal influenced by these ideas, adopted and further developed the concept of Saiva Siddhanta as an indigenous and distinct Tamil religion. Adigal's works often focused on the promotion of Tamil identity, language, and culture, and he sought to revive and purify Tamil Saivism from what he viewed as corrupting influences.
Therefore, Caldwell's portrayal of Saiva Siddhanta contributed to the intellectual environment that shaped Maraimalai Adigal's thoughts and actions, ultimately leading to his efforts in promoting a distinct Tamil religious and cultural identity.
From the time of William Jones, a view of Indian civilisation as the work of an ancient Aryan race that migrated to India around the second millennium was elaborated by many of the adherents of this school of orientalism. Sanskrit, the language of this ancient Aryan "race", came to be considered as the parent of alI the vernacular languages of India. As the dominant school of Orientalism during the time of Caldwell, his work both challenged and integrated much of the assumptions of this school of thought. In response, however, Caldwell had once referred to these scholars derisively as "Western Brahmins", Max Muller was one of its finest representatives and Caldwell had acknowledged his help for his work. Although Caldwell's philological work was aimed at challenging the primacy given to Aryans and Sanskrit by the members of this school, he nevertheless accepted their belief that ancient Aryans were the carriers of the great culture of India.
The book under review offers a complex thesis about the making of Tamil nationalist ideology. It argues that building blocks of the Dravidian nationalist discourse, that is, a consistent position that the Tamil language and people have a longer and greater independent history (as superior to a Sanskrit-based north Indian Aryan Brahmanic culture) to be reclaimed and restored, had been worked out by the leaders of a neo-Saivite revival movement between 1870s and 1920s, well before the more ‘secular’ currents of Self Respect movement emerged. This is a clear challenge to the dominant scholarly position that the ‘secular’ phase of Tamil nationalism had superseded the earlier ‘religious’ phase in terms of radicalism and popularity. The author further challenges the universality of the analytical distinction between the religious and the secular with an account of what he calls ‘religion making’, ( David Chidester has written extensively on the concept of "religion making.") a process whereby aspects of traditional faith practices are selectively translated into a set of intellectual doctrines for them to be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the colonial regime with its new ‘discourse of religion’.
The book is an intensive case study of the life and career of one such ‘translator’. It explores the methods and strategies through which Maraimalai Adigal, arguably the most celebrated exponent of neo-Saivism and Saiva Siddhanta in early twentieth-century Tamil Nadu, forged a distinct ideological projection of a Tamil nation in contradistinction to an Aryan Brahmanical nation, even as he recast Saivism and Saiva Siddhanta as an exclusively Tamil religion. At another, broader, level, the author offers a new model for exploring the diversity of the colonial cultural encounter, arguing that it laid the discursive foundations for a range of contending subjectivities, including a pan Indian Hindu nationalist ideological formation on the one hand and ethno nationalist and identitarian movements on the other.
Early Hindu response to Christian missionary work in mid-nineteenth-century Madras emerged as a general ‘Hindu’ Brahmanical discourse, led by Arya Samajists, Brahma Samajists and Theosophists. The neo-Saivite revival appeared much later as a challenge to those earlier streams of Hinduism for power and popularity. In fact, Christian missionary literature and ideology laid much of the intellectual foundation for neo-Saivite revival in Tami Nadu. The missionaries, armed with material from modern disciplines of philology, archaeology and history, had assigned to Dravidian languages, culture and people an independent origin and identity in opposition to the Aryan-Brahman language, culture and people. Robert Caldwell emphasized the anteriority and purity of Dravidian language, literature and culture, calling for their recovery from the corrupting influence of Sanskrit and Brahmanism. His coinage of the word Dravidian – with a new history and subversive potential – appealed to the rising class of non-Brahamans as the core conceptual core around which to mobilize linguistically diverse caste groups as a ‘nation’. G.W. Pope’s identification of Saivism as the authentic Dravidian or Tamil religion provided another basic structuring of this discourse.
These key propositions were fabricated into a complex and multilayered indigenous discourse by English-educated, non-Brahman, middle-class Tamil Saivites. Many of Somasundara Nayakar’s works elucidating basic principles of Saiva Siddhanta and recommending the appropriate institutions and priests to Saiva Siddhanta practitioners, for instance, were published to counter an ascending neo-Hinduism. P. Sundaram Pillai prepared the ground for articulating a consistent non-Brahman, neo-Saivite reading of the Tamil past, conflating the majority of Tamil people with Saivism and embedding debates on Tamil literary history with articulation of a non-Brahman Tamil nationalism. Along the way, he re-conceptualized Tamil Saiva literary tradition as a ‘rational’ alternative to ‘fabulous’ Sanskritic neo-Vedantist traditions.
The life and career of Maraimalai Adigal embodied the most elaborate and powerful embodiment of these ideas and practices. While existing scholarship concedes Adigal a major role as the chief protagonist of ‘secular’ pure Tamil movement, Vaithees emphasizes greater interconnectivity between his commitment to Saivism and his helming of the pure Tamil movement. The basic framing device is Arvind Mandair’s concept of religion making, or privileging of the more doctrinal aspects of faith traditions to the marginalization of practices, in conformity with a modern ‘discourse on religion’ imported from the west, by pioneer ‘cultural brokers’ or English educated men looking to build a bridge between traditions brought together by power asymmetries. Vaithees’ original contribution rests primarily on a fine-grained application of post-secular insights from Mandair and Talal Asad.
Adigal’s exposure to high-quality English education and Saivite philosophy during his early education in the 1880s and early 1890s critically conditioned his intellectual perspective towards European scholarly works. This was also when many Tamil ‘classics’ were discovered and several journals reflecting the diverse religious currents struggling for hegemony in the Tamil vernacular public sphere would circulate. A keen follower and contributor to these journals, Adigal would also meet key Tamil Savite revivalist figures.
The subsequent move to Madras with a teaching position ( in Madras Christian College ) placed him at the centre of developments in the world of Tamil letters. His Saiva Siddhanta and Tamil revivalist efforts combined seamlessly with cultivation of a diverse English literature and Anglicized cultural practices. He wrote diary entries in English, for instance, from which Vaithees has liberally quoted. He engaged with theosophy, Yoga and European aesthetics, philosophy, geology, anthropology, psychology, ethics and literary criticism, Greek studies, eugenics, anthropology and Marxism, developing a rational, modern sensibility bordering almost on the secular, in contrast to the more doctrinaire, prescriptive and ritualistic aspect of Saiva Siddhanta typical of an earlier era.
By the 1920s, Adigal had become the most prominent champion of a Dravidian neo-Saivism that articulated a form of non-Brahman Tamil nationalism with increasing popular resonance in the Tamil region. He had forged a distinctive brand of Saiva Siddhanta campaign, institutionally and in terms of popularity. His social base came mainly from the middle and upper classes of non-Brahman merchant castes which formed the political base of the Justice Party. This was also when the Pure Tamil movement, looking to rid Tamil of ‘foreign’ words, was launched. Courtesy a prodigiously successful institutional collaboration with a friend and follower, Adigal’s interventions subsequently attained even larger reach and influence. Through its network of publications and conferences, this institution was leading anti-Hindi agitations in the 1930s and had established a major presence in school textbook markets.
However, by late 1920s, Adigal had to face up to the challenge of Periyar and the self-respect movement. Even as Adigal and Self Respecters differed sharply for a brief while during 1928, both could see, soon enough, that they shared a majority of core objectives such as anti-Brahmanism and a rejection of Sanskrit-based Aryan Vedic religion. Adigal characterized the radicalism of Self Respecters as a response to a conservative Saivism, ‘corrupted’, as it were, by Aryan influence, effectively projecting his brand of Saivism as the ‘true’ version consistent with Dravidian ideology and Tamil nationalism. This ‘core’ Saivism, effectively recast as a pure philosophy and belief rather than a set of ritual or bodily practices, in ‘striking harmony’ with post-enlightenment liberal rationalist thought, was purportedly devoid of ‘false’ practices such as caste discrimination, arranged marriage or discrimination against women. More importantly, the fundamental ‘secular’ claims and readings of Tamil pasts including the neo-Saivite claims for a separate racial and cultural genealogy for Tamils remained unchallenged by both Self Respecters and later Dravidian parties. Vaithess discusses their underlying ideological affinity in great detail towards the end with reference to a controversy in 1935 when Self Respecters even rose to Adigal’s defence.
This process, whereby formerly multilingual and polytheistic traditions became a ‘religion’ following unequivocal identification with a particular race, language and historical past is what Arvind Mandair calls ‘religion making’. Broadly, medieval and early modern ideas of ‘religion’ emphasized practices disciplining the body. Modern ideas of religion, informed by new rationalities emerging out of post-enlightenment thought since the nineteenth century, presented it as a set of essential doctrines or a belief system, universal and transcendent in application, and open to debates in the emerging public sphere. This transformation in turn made for a new eminence for ‘cultural brokers’ or those who rearticulated traditional faith practices into ‘religions’ in conformity with the new western discourse on religion as a universal phenomenon. But it also ushered in competition among such brokers, looking to earn respectability for their respective traditions, to be recognized as a valid religion. Adigal’s predecessors had worked out the basic postulates of neo-Saivism against this context. The emphasis on the debates and contestations around the process of translation shows that a multiplicity of contending subjectivities could be formed at the same time as the emergence of a pan Indian Hindu nationalist discursive formation. Adigal’s writing was rarely focused on Saivism alone; he wrote prodigiously on Tamil language and literature. His intellectual project fused two concerns: reinterpretation of chronology and status of Tamil language vis-à-vis a Northern Aryan Sanskritic tradition and establishment of a pure Tamil origin for Saivism and Saiva Siddhanta. Adigal projected Saiva Siddhanta’s philosophy of life and world as essentially material, earthy and rational and as flowing from the distinctive genius of Tamil civilization.
It was part of a concurrent project to devise an inclusive Tamil nationalist ideology for all non-Brahman Tamils within a diffuse Tamil Saivite Vellalar hegemony, to ‘make’, that is, a ‘religion’ for non-Brahman Tamils. Adigal’s institutional ventures, particularly since the 1910s, rarely separated the cause of Saiva Siddhanta revival from that of the cultivation of pure Tamil, for he conceived them as necessary strategies to liberate the Tamil people as a whole from their current split into ‘numerous castes, religions, habits and ways.’ Tamil language and ancient Tamil literary heritage was skilfully mobilized by Adigal and his followers for the non-Brahman Tamil nationalist project. They published literary historical discourses on ancient Tamil literature, which, through a strategic conflation of Tamil language and Saivism, at once served as a claim to an ancient and ‘pure’ genealogy for Tamil-Saivism and as a call for a reform of contemporary Tamil society by ridding it of ‘corrupting’ Aryan-Brahman and Sanskritic influences.
Vaithees explores in detail the discursive strategies whereby Adigal collapsed and subsumed the diverse and complex sociocultural and religious histories of the Tamils within an essential and monotheistic neo-Saivite spirit. Adigal chose ancient literary history to valorize the Tamil past to reverse the relative civilizational roles of Aryans and Dravidians in ancient India. In this reimagined vision, replacing the trope of Aryan superiority with Tamil superiority, Tamils inhabited the entire subcontinent, peacefully and at the pinnacle of civilization, when the crude and violent Aryans moved in. Tamils would produce excellent works of grammar and poetics, practice vegetarianism and live with an egalitarian ethic. It was to educate and civilize the primitive Aryans that Tamils had subsequently to devise less sophisticated philosophies as found in the Vedas and Upanishads. Subsequent to those well-meaning civilizing attempts, however, the ancient ‘Dravidian’ people, including Telugus and Malayalis, unfortunately had become divided and enfeebled following the loss of their essential linguistic purity. Adigal called for a return to the ‘pure’ literary legacy of the ancient Tamil poets and grammarians, underlining the centrality of linguistic purity as the key to the regeneration of Tamil society.
His reading of caste, argues Vaithees, was directed to a broader project of ethicizing caste in the Tamil region, that is, to work towards an internal solidarity following a rejection of caste Hindu practices, or to conceive of a united Tamil caste, as it were. The Saiva Vellalars were projected as the counterpoint to Aryan Brahmans, even as the category was emptied of hierarchic and exclusionary values and recast as a fluid ethical receptacle, open to all who subscribed to such likewise alternated between valorizing an innate chastity of the Tamil woman and approximating the modern ‘bourgeois ideal’ on women, gender roles and sexuality, celebrating the independent educated woman who chooses her own partner. He linked up the control of women’s sexuality by arranged marriage to the imperatives of caste power and control, and here his reinterpretation of ancient Tamil Saivas privileging worldly joy over other-worldly renunciation combines well with advocacy of romantic marriage.
Vaithees’ careful exploration of Adigal’s intellectual formation and trajectory shows his work was always characterized by dialogues, tensions and negotiations. Most of his early works, for instance, focused more on erecting an anti-Aryan Brahman polemic while since the 1920s he focused more on internal dialogues with Tamil Saiva Vellalars. His views on Saivism, caste and gender underwent similar shifts, the latter phase in responsive dialogues with the emerging politics of the Justice Party and Self Respecters. The tensions in his approach were more manifest, for instance, in the simultaneous privileging of Agrarian Vellalars and representing them as a broad accommodating ‘Tamil’ archetype or in the uneasy cohabitation of an image of greater fidelity and chastity among Tamil women with celebration of romantic love and free choice of partners. Similarly, his initial approval of pan Indian nationalist politics gave way to a clear break since the late 1920s, reflecting more or less an unqualified dismissal characteristic of Self Respect politics. Adigal’s dialogic engagement with the Self Respect movement in particular, and the ensuing shifts in his positions on caste, language and gender, eventually made him the greatest champion of non-Brahman Tamil Saivite nationalism. But most importantly, Vaithees manages to destabilize the neat analytical divide between the religious and the secular which informs a majority of scholarship on South Asian history and politics. By emphasizing the complex ‘ethicized’ re-imagination of religion, caste and nation in the cultural politics of Dravidian nationalism, this work opens up valid perspective with which to reconsider the cultural politics of nationalism elsewhere in modern South Asia. It will hopefully stimulate more research on the ‘secular’ role of ‘religious’ figures and institutions, and vice versa, encouraging engagements across their porous borders. Methodologically, Vaithees’ close and dense reading of the entire corpus of Adigal’s work, particularly his private diary entries, in dialogic relation to his interlocutors stands out for its rigour and detail. However, smaller length and tighter organization of arguments could have made the work more powerful yet.
(Rajsekhar Basu, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Will Sweetman)