Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Fletcher Jones Foundation Imprint in Humanities. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism The Emergence of Modern Hinduism Religion on the Margins of Colonialism Richard S. Weiss UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press Oakland, California © 2019 by Richard S. Weiss This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Weiss, R. S. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism: Religion on the Margins of Colonialism . Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.75 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weiss, Richard (Richard Scott), author. Title: The emergence of modern Hinduism: religion on the margins of colonialism / by Richard S. Weiss. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons [CC-BY-NC-ND] license. To view a copy of the license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019010309 (print) | LCCN 2019012915 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520973749 (Epub) | ISBN 9780520307056 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Hinduism—History—1765- | Ramalinga, Swami, 1823–1874—Influence. Classification: LCC BL1153.5 (ebook) | LCC BL1153.5 .W45 2017 (print) | DDC 294.509/034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010309 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C ontents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Diacritics and Italics xi 1. Introduction: Rethinking Religious Change in Nineteenth-Century South Asia 1 2. Giving to the Poor: Ramalinga’s Transformation of Hindu Charity 27 3. The Publication of Tiruvarut .pā: The Authority of Canon and Print 52 4. Ramalinga’s Devotional Poems: Creating a Hagiography 73 5. The Polemics of Conflicting Modernities 97 6. The Modernity of Yoga Powers in Colonial India 122 7. Conclusion 148 Glossary 155 Notes 159 Bibliography 185 Index 199 vii Illustrations F IG U R E S 1. Ramalinga Swami 12 2. Title page of Tiruvarut .pā, 63 3. Velayuda Mudaliyar 65 M A P 1. South India and Sri Lanka 3 ix Acknowled gments I would like to thank the Royal Society of New Zealand for their generous financial support in the form of a Marsden Grant (VUW1006), which funded much of the research and writing of this book. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington supported this research in numerous ways, providing financial support and approving periods of leave in India, Germany, and Singapore. The Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore provided a vibrant scholarly setting as I began the project, and the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University gave me an intellectual home in Germany as I wrote the latter parts of the book. I am very pleased to see the book appear with University of California Press in its Luminos Open Access series. I would like to thank Reed Malcolm for taking it on. Reed was very enthusiastic about the work from the time I brought it to him, and he supported its transformation from manuscript to book form in a variety of ways that have improved it considerably. Archna Patel at UC Press provided expert assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. My colleagues in Religious Studies at Victoria University, Michael Radich, Geoff Troughton, Paul Morris, Joe Bulbulia, Philip Fountain, Eva Nisa, and Aliki Kalliabetsos, always have been collegial, inquisitive, and challenging, providing a stimulating environment in which I wrote much of the book and subjected them to frequent research seminars about it. G. Sundar at the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai provided support and guidance in locating valuable works that enriched the book. Mr. Sundaramurthy at the Maraimalai Adigal Library directed me to original editions of a number of works central to this study, including the x Acknowledgments 1867 edition of Tiruvarut .pā. Ms. Subhulakshmi at the U. V. Swaminatha Iyer Library helped me find relevant secondary literature. V. Rajesh provided crucial help in a number of ways. He oriented me to Tamil scholarship on Ramalinga; we read nineteenth-century Tamil prose works together; and we discussed much of the content and ideas in the book. The work benefited greatly from his interest, collegiality, and scholarly acumen. R. Ilakkuvan helped me read Toluvur Velayuda Mudaliyar’s “History of Tiruvarutpa. ” Among many others who commented on the work in various ways, I would like to thank Darshan Ambalavanar, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Michael Bergunder, Nola Cooke, Wendy Doniger, Prasenjit Duara, Sascha Ebeling, Stephen Epstein, Peter Friedlander, Rafael Klöber, Michael Linderman, Layne Little, Thomas Nagy, Indira Peterson, V. Rajesh, Srilata Raman, Bo Sax, Ben Schonthal, Amiya Sen, David Shulman, Will Sweetman, McComas Taylor, Torsten Tschacher, Ravi Vaitheespara, Peter van der Veer, and A. R. Venkatachalapathy. Finally, Susann Liebich read and commented closely on many of the chapters here, and she helped me develop the sections that focus on print culture. She, and our daughters Clio and Leni, are my most trea- sured companions, and I dedicate the book to them. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as Richard S. Weiss, “Accounting for Religious Change: Ramalinga Adigal’s Transformation of Hindu Giving in Nineteenth-Century India,” History of Religions 56, no. 1 (2016): 108–38. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as Richard S. Weiss, “Print, Religion, and Canon in Colonial India: The Publication of Ramalinga Adigal’s Tiruvarutpa, ” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 650–77. N ote on Diacritics and Italics I have not used diacritical marks in rendering Tamil personal names or places. I have used diacritics when referring to titles of texts and also for important South Asian words that I frequently use, such as dāna, Tirumur .ai, et cetera. In cases where South Asian words have a form that is commonly used in scholarly litera- ture in English, I use those conventional renderings (e.g., Veda, Agama, Shaiva, yoga, shastra, bhakti, matha, rather than the Tamil vētam, ākamam, caiva, yōkam, cāstiram, patti, mat .am ). I have used italics when referring to South Asian words that are not commonly rendered in English (e.g., dāna, camayam ). xi 1 1 Introduction Rethinking Religious Change in Nineteenth-Century South Asia For millennia, one of the most consistent characteristics of Hindu traditions has been variation. Scholarly work on contemporary Hinduism and its premodern antecedents ably captures this complexity, paying attention to a wide spectrum of ideologies, practices, and positions of authority. Studies of religion in ancient India stress doctrinal variation in the period, when ideas about personhood, liberation, the efficacy of ritual, and deities were all contested in a variety of texts and con- texts. Scholarship on contemporary Hinduism grapples with a vast array of rituals, styles of leadership, institutions, cultural settings, and social formations. However, when one turns to the crucial period of the nineteenth century, this complexity fades, with scholars overwhelmingly focusing their attention on leaders and move- ments that can be considered under the rubric “reform Hinduism.” The result has been an attenuated nineteenth-century historiography of Hinduism and a unilin- eal account of the emergence of modern Hinduism. Narratives about the emergence of modern Hinduism in the nineteenth century are consistent in their presumptions, form, and content. Important aspects of these narratives are familiar to students who have read introductory texts on Hinduism, and to scholars who write and teach those texts. At the risk of present- ing a caricature of these narratives, here are their most basic characteristics. The historical backdrop includes discussions of colonialism, Christian missions, and long-standing Hindu traditions. The cast of characters is largely the same in every account, beginning with Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj, moving on to Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, and ending with Swami Vivekananda’s “muscular” Hinduism. These narratives focus on expressions of Hindu reform that emerged out of an encounter between Hindu leaders and Western ideas and 2 chapter 1 models. They assume a narrative that is dominated by colonial, cosmopolitan set- tings, that is national in scale, that is concerned with elite leaders and movements, and that posits a radical break between this new, modern Hinduism and prior traditions. At their most successful, these studies contribute insightful accounts of cosmopolitan processes within which Hindu leaders transformed their traditions through engagement with diverse actors, institutions, and sensibilities. However, as I will show, these accounts also reinforce dichotomies between Western moder- nity and Indian tradition, emphasizing the role of the West in Hindu innovation and consigning expressions of Hinduism that were largely untouched by Western ideas to the realm of static tradition. In this book, I present a narrative of the emergence of modern Hinduism that challenges these conventional accounts. I do this through a close study of the writ- ings, teachings, and innovations of Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Ramalinga was a Shaiva leader who spoke and wrote in Tamil in a local setting, was marginal to colonial and Hindu institutional authority, was grounded in Hindu traditions, and did not engage the West in any visible way. I argue that Ramalinga’s teach- ings were modern because they displayed an acute awareness of challenges of the present, innovated in ways that addressed those challenges, were founded on a desire to transform the world in specific ways, and presaged later developments in Hindu traditions. He drew on Shaiva tantric, devotional, and literary traditions in developing creative responses to contemporary challenges such as poverty, fam- ine, and caste discrimination. He attacked social hierarchy, developed rituals of food-giving to the poor, founded a voluntary community, and promised ordinary householders yogic powers and immortality. When he gained popularity among a wide range of caste and class communities, leaders of the established Tamil Shaiva elite attacked his teachings and initiatives. By examining Ramalinga within broader narratives of Hindu modernization, I present a new model for Hindu modernity that emphasizes the capacity of Hindu traditions to provide inspiration for new forms of Hinduism that remain influential today. In a broader context, my findings have important implications for the ways that scholars think about the impact of colonization and Westernization on non-Western religious traditions. Ramalinga provides a fascinating case study of a Hindu leader who was actively transforming Hindu traditions outside of cosmopolitan colonial centers. The phrase “colonial modernity” does not comprehensively account for the conditions in which he wrote and lived, because his world was much more than a “colonial” one. He carried on his work in the town of Vadalur, near the village of his birth- place and about twenty kilometers from the colonial outpost of Cuddalore. He was also about twenty kilometers from Chidambaram, home of the famous Shiva Nataraja temple, and sixty-five kilometers from Tiruvavadudurai, home of one of the most powerful Shaiva institutions in South India. This location suggests a number of important relationships that I will explore in this work. That is, he was close to, but also removed from, colonial centers as well as established centers Introduction 3 Map 1. India and Sri Lanka. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. of Shaiva devotional and scholarly activity. His relationship with powerful Shaiva monasteries was at times strained, a result of his middling caste status and the critical spirit of his writing. His position on the periphery of colonial activity and Shaiva institutional power provided an ideal space in which he advanced a criti- cal and creative reformulation of Shaiva traditions. In the last years of his life, he attempted to transform Vadalur into a “northern Chidambaram” that would pro- vide an institutional alternative to existing Shaiva centers of power.