2019 foregrounded the political lives of states within the Indian Union even as the latter sought to affirm its sovereignty in singular ways. Whether this had to do with the results of the Lok Sabha elections, the dismembering of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the interrogation of citizenship in Assam or, more simply, the varied ways in which states have sought to stretch their autonomy – we realized how geography and history are linked in the subcontinent.

I wish to explore this relationship of geography and history in the Tamil context – in and through what might be termed Tamil exceptionalism, the claim that historically and culturally the Tamil region owes almost nothing to the rest of the subcontinent. This claim has had a new lease of life with the recent archaeological findings at the village of Keezhadi, which suggest that the region was home to early and sophisticated urban settlements, leading to speculation that these could be related to Indus valley urbanism.¹

On the other hand, the Hindu right appears determined to annex this exceptionalism to its purpose – the latest instance being the attempted saffronisation of that symbol of an always, already ‘secular’ Tamil culture, Thiruvalluvar, the Jain poet.² This is a Sangh Parivar project that has been long in the making. Tarun Vijay, closely associated with the Parivar, has been proclaiming for a while his love for Thiruvalluvar’s Kural, a rich repository of gnomic wisdom, statecraft, and guidelines for everyday virtue, including in one’s erotic life. He has demanded that the Kural be made part of the national curriculum and that Mother Tamil be given her due!³ While this has won him some praise from Tamil quarters, on the whole, his efforts have aroused suspicion, since lovers of Thiruvalluvar consider the Kural a secular text, espousing values and ideals which are the opposite of those held by Brahminical Hinduism.

 

Whatever the anxieties that attend Tamil exceptionalism, its stubborn ‘otherness’ bears examination, if only to understand how we live with and negotiate cultural and other traffic, even as we remain anchored in particular geographies. The work of Tamil literary historian and writer Raj Gautaman is a good place to start this discussion. He has refused the easy division of Tamil literary history into pre-brahminical and post-brahminical phases, as is often done, and instead argued that it has been constituted by multiple influences, including sramana traditions. Importantly, he has pointed to how these influences were absorbed and recast and how such recasting produced new cultural objects that were distinctive.

Consider, for instance, his reading of the Tholkappiyam, a grammatical text from the second century BCE. He refuses to view it, as some scholars have done, as derivative of the Sanskrit grammar of Panini, nor does he insist, as some others have done, that it is an ur-Tamil creation. Rather he marks it as one that fielded both brahminical and sramanic influences with aplomb, transmuting them into a singular and incomparable textual object.

 

Or take the texts of Tamil bhakti: he reads these as mediating old Tamil life worlds, as featured in the earliest literature, in a new historical context, which saw the advent of early Vaishnavism, an import from outside the Tamil context. The new faith’s affective charge and the old world’s sensuousness, he argues, came together to deflect the moral seriousness that we find in Jaina and Buddhist texts. Interestingly, he does not make the simple claim that the latter were ‘revolutionary’, rather he argues that they helped create a distinctive social morality suitable to an emergent agrarian order. In time these texts had to contend with those that proclaimed devotional bhakti and a different vision of society and rule. The point is texts and the cultural values they express are not to be viewed as expressions of hegemony or compromise, rather they have to be seen as actively rearranging influences and ideas.⁴

Gautaman’s reading of literature constructs Tamilness, less as identity and more as a complex node that absorbs, radiates and interlinks different lines of influence, proceeding from diverse histories and geographies. Thus, at one stroke, he refuses those easy binaries that are usually called in to explain historical development in the subcontinent: the nation and region; great and little traditions; Sanskrit and the vernaculars; varna and prevarna social formations… Yet he does not let go of an ineluctable sense of historical being, of how Tamils make and remake their cultural worlds, drawing from past literary landscapes. Memory, Gautaman appears to suggest, is intimately tied to place in the Tamil context and its resilience has to do with a remembered geography as much as history.

I would like to draw on Gautaman’s work to understand better some modern claims, such as this one that has been popular for a while now: that Tamil society will never give into the Hindu Right. Different people make this claim and different reasons are adduced by way of argument. Some point to Periyar’s abiding influence, others to the nature of Dravidian politics, which has refused any easy compact with governments at the Centre, even when they have been in thrall to them. Yet others point to the exceptional Tamil past that has never quite taken to Brahminical Hinduism. But all such arguments concur on this point: that there is something distinctive about Tamil polity and society that renders either inimical to the lures of the Hindu Right.

 

Significantly, such claims usually proceed from an unmarked secular perspective, which is dismissive rather than critically engaged with religiousity. This is curious and interesting, considering how pervasive religion is in the state. The innumerable temples that dot its landscape, the continuing building of temples and the marking of the year through a series of religious observances: Tamil people are certainly not irreligious. Neither are popular religious practices entirely Brahminical. The most popular ones have to do with the worship of local resident deities and tutelary gods and goddesses, some of whom are fierce and demand blood sacrifices. Brahminical Hinduism is alive and well too, nurtured by a range of temples and familial and caste practices, and granted pride of place in the media, including state owned television. Tamil Christian life cycles, especially those that are associated with Catholic communities, are equally punctuated with festivals, which often take on local colour and bear the influence of long-standing and pre-Christian traditions of worship. Likewise, dargah-based Islamic practices in parts of the state involve elaborate public ceremonies which echo local custom.

 

Dalits as much as others are religious, but often find themselves having to fight for their place in religious observances and festivals, with caste Hindus determined to not share temple honours with them. Dalits also have their own gods and temples. On the other hand, historically, they have been foremost in both rejecting and exiting from Hinduism: they have embraced Islam even at the moment of its arrival in these parts, and in the long 19th century, many converted to Christianity, as we know. From time to time they have turned to Buddhism as well.

It seems to me that Gautaman’s approach to the early Tamil past presents us with a viable method to assess religious life in the modern Tamil context, as both receiving and deflecting influences from elsewhere, including of Brahminical Hinduism or for that matter Buddhism. And here some things call for attention and analysis right away: What is termed Hindu in the Tamil context often has to do with particular geographies, traditions of clan and caste specific worship and centred on seasonal observances which are not part of the modern Hindu calendar, with its focus on pan-Indian gods and their exploits. Even in agamic temples, patronized by Brahmins and increasingly other castes, the deity is referenced in and through place-specific names and the temple in question has its own sthalapuranam which is transparent in its integration of a local story within a recognizably Hindu narrative.

This is the case even when deities are assimilated to the forms of Shiva or Vishnu, Ganesha or Karthikeya. Female deities by and large have resisted such incorporation: while some have become spouses of Hindu gods, others remain outside the agamic ambit, as guardians and fertility figures, inciting awe, fear and much affection. Clearly, Brahminical Hinduism, even as it continues to colonise local religious cultures, has to reckon with the reality of histories that it cannot merely put by or easily assimilate. Now and in the past, religious life in the Tamil context has been constituted by tension, contention and co-existence of Brahminical and non Brahminical practices.

 

What we witness, then, in the Tamil context, is a rather distinctive manner of making religious place: particular sites and spaces are charged with different meanings at different points in time, but these meanings are not imaginable outside of the place they reference, whether it is a temple or a deity or the village or town that houses either. Place-making in this sense happens in and through processes of naming and re-naming, shrine-making and the re-narrativisation of memory. Migrant Tamil dalit labourers who left these shores in the 19th and 20th centuries to work in South East Asia, recreated their symbolic landscapes on alien shores, enshrining familiar protective gods and goddesses to secure their well-being, as they laboured in malarial conditions, building railroads and making the plantation economies of these lands bloom.⁵

Closer home, vanniyars who migrated to Bangalore in the late 18th century recreated in the city they helped make a veritable landscape of memory. In their new urban context, they ‘made place’ by integrating parts of the city into a symbolic landscape, presided over by their tutelary goddess Draupadi Amman, who is worshipped across northern and north-western Tamil Nadu, which is where large segments of the vanniyar population reside to this day.⁶

 

Religious place-making is however not only about re-reading the new in terms of the familiar, it is also about ensuring that the new does not transgress the boundaries of memory, of what once was, or has been left behind, and in this sense it is acutely caste sensitive. Even when life experiences in new settings militate against older ways of relating across the social spectrum, spatial markers such as temples reproduce social relationships, and in turn, emerge as sites of both community as well as dissension.

Interestingly, the modern period witnessed a rather novel exercise in place-making, in which memory was called upon to play a radical rather than a conserving role. Pandit Iyothee Thass who converted to Buddhism in the late 19th century undertook this. He held that his taking to Buddhism was actually a homecoming, to a faith that he and his fellow Tamils (in this case dalits) had not entirely abandoned. He argued that contrary to popular and even scholarly understanding, Buddhism had not quite died in the Tamil country and that it lived on, in local religious lore and custom.

Thass read such customs in terms of what he considered their ‘Buddhist core’, arguing that the former represented the ‘now’ of Hinduism, and the latter the ‘eternity’ of Buddhism. That is, an originally Buddhist society had been laid over by Brahminical Hindu practices, and these appeared to be all that there was by way of religious life in the Indian subcontinent. But the truth was that generations of Brahmins had revised Buddhist beliefs and ideas, practices and habits through a complex hermeneutic process, which included fictionalization, imitations, revisions, and repetitions.⁷

Iyothee Thass was interested not so much in deconstructing this process, rather he desired to ‘restore memory’, to places and practices that were consistently misrecognized in everyday life. This ‘restored’ memory was startlingly new, but the places it sought to work over were actual and everyday village spaces, familiar to those who lived in them. Thass thus rendered memory boundary-less, and made it bear witness to an overarching sense of place; at once Tamil and Buddhist, this ‘new’ place contained within it the symbolic landscapes of Buddhism, as well as the everyday cultural worlds of Tamil society.

Tamils are religious, they are certainly casteist, but their place-making habits render their spiritual worlds rather distinctive, and it is not clear or evident that their sense of place will all too easily accommodate the contours of a nation, held together by common religious ties. Not that this is impossible, but if that happens, it will not be through the modality of faith and ideology but through instrumental and coercive means. As much as Tamil secularism, however we define it, Tamil religiousity too perhaps is disinterested in the idea of aggressive religious nationalism. It is an argument worth pondering over.

 

Footnotes:

1. https://scroll.in/article/937484/who-were-the-sangam-tamils-next-round-of-keezhadi-excavations-could-provide-crucial-evidence

2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/thiruvalluvar-saffronisation-triggers-political-row-in-tamil-nadu/articleshow/71885598.cms

3. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/bjp-leader-tarun-vijay-seeks-inclusion-of-thirukkural-in-national-curriculum/articleshow/70468790.cms

4. Raj Gautaman, Paatum Thogaiyum: Tholkappiyamum Tamizh Samooga Uruvaakamum. Tamizhini, 2006.

5. Fred W. Clothey, Ritualizing on the Boundaries: Continuity And Innovation in the Tamil Diaspora. University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

6. Smriti Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory. Orient Blackswan, 2004.

7. Stalin Rajangam, ‘Living Buddhism’, Special Lecture (unpublished paper), delivered at the University of Toronto, as part of Genealogies of ‘Dalit Learning and Humanist Buddhism in 19th and 20th Century India’ project, October 2018.