Self-Surrender (prapatti) to God in Shrivaishnavism

Tamil Cats or Sanskrit Monkeys?

Srilata Raman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134165377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Filling the most glaring gap in Shrivaishnava scholarship, this book deals with the history of interpretation of a theological concept of self-surrender-prapatti in late twelfth and thirteenth century religious texts of the Shrivaishnava community of South India. This original study shows that medieval sectarian formation in its theological dimension is a fluid and ambivalent enterprise, where conflict and differentiation are presaged on "sharing", whether of a common canon, saint or rituals or two languages (Tamil and Sanskrit), or of a "meta-social" arena such as the temple.

Srilata Mueller, a member of the Shrivaishnava community, argues that the core ideas of prapatti in these religious texts reveal the description of a heterogeneous theological concept. Demonstrating that this concept is theologically moulded by the emergence of new literary genres, Mueller puts forward the idea that this original understanding of prapatti is a major contributory cause to the emergence of sectarian divisions among the Shrivaishnavas, which lead to the formation of two sub-sects, the Tenkalai and the Vatakalia, who stand respectively, for the "cat" and "monkey" theological positions.

Making an important contribution to contemporary Indian and Hindu thinking on religion, this text provides a new intellectual history of medieval Indian religion. It will be of particular interest to scholars of Shrivaishnava and also Hindu and Indian religious studies.

1
INTRODUCTION

In the 1920s the humorist “S.V.V.” wrote the satirical piece An Elephant’s Creed in Court, originally published in Everyman’s Review.¹ The article mercilessly poked fun at the interminable quarrels over seeming trivialities between the two Vaiṣṇavite sub-sects² of the Śrīvaiṣṇava³ community of South India, the Vaṭakalais and the Teṅkalais.
It begins:

The dispute was whether the temple elephant should wear the Vadagalay or the Tenkalay caste-mark. We believe our readers know that the Vadagalays wear on the forehead a caste-mark resembling the shape of the U and the Tenkalays that of Y. The fights over the caste-marks between these two important Vaishnava sects in southern India, has long been of an acute and rancorous character, especially in places where there are rich and famous temples. The omnipotent God was often kidnapped out of his shrine to be compelled to wear this or the other Namam (caste-mark) and if he stuck to his shrine, was forced to submit to the varying moods of mundane Judges. Vessels, umbrellas, curtains, bells, vehicles and other paraphernalia belonging to the temple suffered a similar faith and had their persuasions fixed by decrees in courts, which changed as often as each higher tribunal reversed the decree of that immediately below. The turn now came to the temple elephant. Till now he belonged to the Vadagalay creed and piously munched the palm-leaves under a Vadagalay-namam bristling broad and thick on his forehead. But the Tenkalays said that he was not born, or bred in the Vadagalay faith and could not be permitted to wear that Namam consistently with his duties in the temple.⁴

The story goes on to detail the numerous court proceedings between the two communities:

The matter went up before a civilian District Judge in appeal, who reversed the decree of the lower court and dismissed the plaintiff’s suit. The High Court considered the matter in Admission, Second Appeal, Letters Patent Appeal, and the matter was considered by every Judge of that court under one nomenclature or another.⁵

The proceedings thus drag on, not culminating even with the death of the elephant concerned!

Natural historians say that the life of an elephant is only a 100 years. The elephant in suit piously lived its full term of life, and before ever the High Court could rudely shake its faith, died a devoted Vadagalay in the interior as well as the exterior, despite decrees, judgements and executions. And another young elephant took charge of the temple functions adopting his predecessor’s creed. ... We understand that the Tenkalays are now consulting the seniors of Madras as to what next ought to be done. We are not in the secret of the result of that conference but this much we know: the young elephant is now gambolling in the streets in perfect good humour with an aesthetically painted Vadagalay Namam on his forehead and with an air of perfect assurance that on whichever side truth and justice might be, law was certainly on his.⁶

Thus, by the 20th century, the sectarian split within the Śrīvaiṣṇava community had been reduced, at least in popular perception, to a petty squabbling about external appearances, a fit subject for some pointed social satire. Certainly, contemporary Śrīvaiṣṇavas or “Iyengars” as they are more commonly known today, are, for the most part, somewhat unclear about what it means to be a Vaṭakalai or Teṅkalai. They are likely to walk past the gigantic Vaṭakalai caste-mark, nāmam, on the walls of the Varadarājasvāmī Temple in Kāñcīpuram or the Teṅkalai nāmam on the walls of the Pārthasārathisvāmī Temple in Madras without a backward glance. Inter-marriage between the two sub-groups is not uncommon and historical circumstances in Tamil Nadu as well as modernity, globalization and the internet have created certain pan-sectarian, not to say defensive, pan-brahmanical, solidarities among sections of Śrīvaiṣṇavas. Indeed, the lay Śrīvaiṣṇava/Iyengar would share S.V.V.’s impatience with these “ancient” quarrels among the sectarian orthodox.

Yet, there were times in the past when the dispute was neither quite so abstract nor so abstruse and altogether far more virulent. It succeeded in splitting a community which had been one in the twelfth century into two by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We cannot, as yet, understand each stage of its development nor answer, with any degree of certainty some of the fundamental questions which arise about its trajectory. We cannot pronounce confidently on the process by which some theological aspects of the dispute fell into obscurity over time — such as the exact differences over the nature of kaivalya or how God pervades the soul — even as other ritual aspects — differences in aspects of ritual initiation, how women should preface their prayers, who has control over the management of important temples — have remained or even flourished. Yet, we can, through paying attention to hitherto neglected stages of the dispute’s trajectory, hope to gain greater transparency about specific features of it and thereby shed further light on the entire process which led to the division of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community. This is the intention of this book.

Most contemporary Śrīvaiṣṇavas are not different from other “Hindu Indians”, in being interested, however marginally, on how to make sense of the connections between an ill-understood, ancient tradition and its existence, however transformed, in modernity. The Śrīvaiṣṇava/Iyengar community in India and abroad today is extremely active through its web-sites and in its contribution to the construction of temples among the diaspora.⁷ This activism is accompanied by the desire to understand the tradition, its historical roots and textual sources. Books which deal with the history of the community are actively featured on the web-sites and discussed, and they contribute to a living debate whose future impact could be significant. Further, the modernization of “Hinduism” both within the Indian and the Hindu diaspora context displays certain common features, even while these features are adapted and modified within specific and unique contexts. These features, as Vertovec (2000) sums them up, include “the rationalization of belief and practice (Bellah 1965); an incorporation of facets drawn from neo-Vedanta philosophy into popular (largely Purana-based) belief (Fitzerald 1990); an insistence that Hinduism does not essentially differ in nature from Christianity or any other world religion (Bharati 1971); a diminution of beliefs and practices surrounding parochial or so-called ‘little traditions’ in favour of those of the Sanskritic or ‘Great Tradition’ (ibid.); and an emphasis on bhakti or loving devotion to God in any form, an orientation which ‘inspires not so much sectarian and denominational formations as a diffuse emotion of brotherhood, which softens the rough edges of group differences’ (Singer 1971:158). And in keeping with a centralization of the ‘Great Tradition’ aspects together with bhakti, there seems to be a dominant drive towards Vaishnavism (devotion to Vishnu and his incarnations, particularly Rama and Krishna) as probably the single most prominent orientation of worship.”⁸

In the context of this modernization, it feels much more enlightened to ignore specificities regarding the Vaṭakalai–Teṅkalai dispute with its uncomfortable connotations of unenlightened sectarian strife, despite its persistent virulence in orthodox quarters even in these times, and instead resort to some selective appropriation of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition along universalistic, neo-Vedāntic guidelines.⁹ Further, the Vaṭakalai–Teṅkalai dispute seems particularly arcane from the perspective of the twenty-first century, since in its core and in its early stages it remained theologically complex and a search for identity and meaning in modernity, often goes hand-in-hand with an impatience towards theological doctrine.

Yet, it is crucial that the interaction and the inter-penetration of theology and socio-religious practice in the creation of the religious ideology of a community be grasped and this is the task of scholarship. For, scholarly activity is concerned with issues of excavation and preservation: to retrieve the historical dimension of religion through scrupulous scholarship and to make it available in all its subtlety and diversity. One way of doing this, attempted in this book, is to focus on the cultural and historical specificity of theology at the expense of its own claims to a trans-historical universality. In order to do this a journey into the past is necessary. For, in an age which grapples with increasingly rigid conceptions of what constitutes a “Hindu” identity bolstered by a highly selective use of the past, it should be a matter of urgency both for those from within a religious tradition and those who study it (and the two are sometimes the same) to focus on the past of religion and the location within time, of living religious traditions. The continued existence of a problematic past in the present, to paraphrase Arjun Appadurai, should compel us into an excursion into the past.¹⁰ A scrupulous examination of the theological sources of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious dispute in the past, in the medieval period, the stress on its multi-dimensionality and its inbuilt capacity for negotiation that this study hopes to reveal, must and can lead to a more profound understanding of both the past and the present of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community.

1.1 The historical dispute

Most general studies of Śrīvaiṣṇavism which attempt a historical chronology would trace the beginnings of tensions in the Śrīvaiṣṇava community to a century or so after the great theologian Rāmānuja (traditional dates: CE 1017–1137) and to his successors who lived in the 13th and 14th centuries of the common era. In this period ācāryas of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community of South India evolved oppositional views on a number of doctrinal matters in their scholastic writings. The ācāryas most directly concerned were Vedānta Deśika (traditional dates: CE 1268–1369) who was domiciled mainly in Kāñcīpuram in the northern part of Tamil territory and Piḷḷai Lokācārya (traditional dates: CE 1264–1327) domiciled further south at Śrīraṅgam in the Kaveri delta. Even though neither of these two ācāryas, nor even their immediate followers, saw themselves as founders of separate schools or as instigating sectarian rivalry, it is clear, with hindsight, that if the theological argumentations of one of the acāryas were to be unilaterally upheld to be correct, this would necessitate the rejection of the views of the other — in other words, the divide was potentially irreconcilable.¹¹

This, in fact, was what occurred with the passage of time. The evidence that needs to be examined to determine what happened is from a wide variety of sources: archeological, inscriptional and textual. A series of studies on the history of the major Vaiṣṇavite temples of the Tamil region such as Raman (1975) on Kāñcīpuram, Hari Rao (1976) on Śrīraṅgam and Viraraghavacharya (1974–82) on Tirumala as well as the work of Ramanuja Tatachar (1937) on the Vānamāmalai maṭha and Desikacharya (1949) on the Parakāla maṭha have provided valuable perspectives on the growth of sectarianism from the fourteenth century onwards. Appadurai’s (1983) examination of the dispute in his study of the Pārthasārathisvāmī temple in Triplicane, Madras appears to be the most comprehensive and convincing version thus far, in that it cumulatively evaluates all this evidence regarding kingdoms, temples and sectarian maṭhas starting from the fourteenth century and seeks to give the broader picture. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that, impressive as this evidence is, it does not and cannot by any means offer us the complete picture. By its very nature it focuses almost entirely on the arena of the temple and the elites connected with it. Thus, as far as the development of the historical dispute is concerned, we have scant means of evaluating how it affected the lives of the vast majority of non-elites in the pre-colonial period and the nature of their allegiance to one or the other branches of Śrīvaiṣṇavism.

In examining the dispute’s development one may formulate three broad phases: one between 1350–1500, the second between 1500-1700 and the third from the eighteenth century with the rising impact of colonialism. The first two phases show that the emergence and rise of sectarianism among the Śrīvaiṣṇavas is linked to the growing power of the tradition as a result of the rise of the Telugu warrior-chieftains of Vijayanagara. Vijayanagara historiography, as Burton Stein has pointed out, has linked its origins and existence with a pre-colonial Indian nationalism arising from the overthrow of foreign, “Muslim invaders” and the restoration of Hindu orthodoxy and temple worship.¹² In actual fact, successive Vijayanagara dynasties patronized several religious institutions and depended for the strength of their armies on Muslim soldiers, thus adopting the religiously tolerant and socially pragmatic policies of South Indian kingdoms before theirs. Nevertheless, several of them starting with the Sāluva dynasty were staunch Vaiṣṇavite, and later the Rāya kings of Vijayanagara, Kṛṣṇadevarāya (1509–29) and Acyutadevarāya (1529–42) had as their personal or family deity Veṅkateśa at Tirumala.¹³ The Vijayanagara period also saw a substantial increase in temple building, with new temples being built and old ones renovated and enlarged. The resources flowing into the temples also led to ritual innovation, with elaborate and well-endowed new rituals being created, necessitating a corresponding increase in the categories of persons associated with temple management and services.¹⁴ This political and religious environment proved advantageous to a spectrum of Śrīvaiṣṇava leaders already associated with temples — elite males, ācāryapuruṣas, who came from prominent families closely associated through kinship with Rāmānuja, and Śrīvaiṣṇava ascetics, Cīyars, who founded maṭhas. Mutually advantageous ties between sectarian leaders and the Vijayanagara kings and dignitaries accelerated this process: “The Telugu warriors linked themselves to the temple as a source of honor through the patronage of sectarian leaders and the reallocation of land and cash to these sectarian figures. At the same time they associated these sectarian figures with their own k...