Introduction
In the introduction to this series, the figure of Maraimalai Adigal was introduced as one of the intellectual progenitors of what would later become the Dravidian movement. Unlike the fiery iconoclast Periyar, who denounced all religion and even publicly destroyed and disrespected murthis of various devatas, Maraimalai Adigal claimed to be a staunch believer and claimed to be upholding the true Saiva Siddhanta tradition. Adigal’s thought linked nation, religion, and language in a way which calls for analysis of the very specific situation which led this Indian thinker to represent the Tamil people as a nation. Apparently, he picked up the idea of Tamil speakers being a separate Dravidian nation (as opposed to the Aryan nation) from the British/Europeans, but much more should be explained about this reaction. Adigal was one of the prominent members of a number of late nineteenth to early twentieth century intellectuals from the Saiva Vellalajati, who were claiming that Saivite traditions, and Saiva Siddhanta in particular was a quintessentially Dravidian religion, while simultaneously rejecting any tradition they perceived as Sanskrit-based or Brahmanical as an Aryan addition to Tamil culture. This article will analyze certain questions and problems that help us understand how Maraimalai Adigal understood the concepts of religion and nation, and how he linked both of these to language. The focus of this article is on Adigal, because of the extensiveness of his writings about the subject matter, compared to other Tamil ideologues around the same time period.
Firstly, what was religion to these Saivite intellectuals? More specifically, how did they conceptualize Saiva Siddhanta as a religion? Secondly, how did the Tamil nationalists understand the idea of nation? What makes Tamil speakers into a nation? Why didn’t they consider Brahmins as a part of the Tamil nation? Thirdly, how did the Tamil nationalists link religion and nation? What makes Saiva Siddhanta a Tamil religion? Why did the Tamil nationalists exclude the Sanskrit based traditions that had been practiced in Tamil Nadu for centuries, as foreign? Finally, how did the Tamil nationalists link both religion and nation to language? Why did they want a ‘pure’ Tamil divested of Sanskrit words?
The previous article delved briefly into the origin and crystallization of the ideas of the Aryan and Dravidian peoples. The origin of these ideas are to be located in the writings of British and European Orientalists and missionaries, as well as British administrators. Far from producing knowledge about India, the European or Western descriptions of India gives us insight into Western culture. The European intellectuals were attempting to make sense of and lend coherence to their experience of India, using the attitudes, conceptual tools and thought structures that were part and parcel of their cultural background.
This article begins by delving into the Adi Dravida movement in Tamil Nadu that began in the second half of the nineteenth century, which predates and foreshadows the late nineteenth century Saivite intellectuals who proclaimed that Tamil speakers were a Saiva Dravida nation.
Next, the article touches upon the political developments in the Madras Presidency from the late nineteenth to the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. These developments contributed to the genesis of the Dravidian movement. Firstly, there was a preponderance of Brahmins in civil and administrative positions in the Madras Presidency. Brahmin elites who occupied senior positions in the legal and administrative apparatus of the Madras Presidency, began to articulate a vision of India as a Hindu Aryan nation, with the Brahmins being the custodians of Hindu dharma.
It was also during this time that the British government implemented certain reforms that expanded the legislative assembly, and allowed local political parties to be elected to the legislative assembly. One of the parties that contested, and ended up winning the first of these elections was the South Indian Liberal Federation, or the Justice Party. The Justice party’s main platform was their opposition to Brahmin domination in educational and government positions. Many of the key members of that party were Saiva Vellalas who claimed that the Vellalas were the original Dravidians who later became subdivided into different jatis. For these Vellalas, Saiva Siddhanta was the basis for Dravidian or Tamil culture. Although Maraimalai Adigal was one of the most important figures in the Dravidian movement in terms of his intellectual contributions, it was certain members of the Justice party that transformed Dravidian ideology into a political movement. These political developments are covered in more detail in the relevant sections of the article.
The article provides a short biographical background of Maraimalai Adigal, and gives an overview of Adigal’s conceptualization of the Tamil people as a nation. The article also presents the criteria Adigal used to determine what was part of Tamil culture and what wasn’t, including the exclusion of Brahmins from the Tamil nation, and the purification of Tamil language from Sanskrit influence.
Next, anomalies and counter-evidence confronting the Brahmin vs Dravidian, and Tamil vs Sanskrit conflict hypothesis are presented. Then comes the central section of the article, the analysis of Maraimalai Adigal’s understanding of the notion of nation and religion, and the manner in which he tied the two together. The final section of the article summarizes the arguments of the article, and its implication for Indian and Tamil Nadu politics.
Paraiyars as Adi Dravidas (Original Dravidians)
During the middle of the nineteenth century, a group of people from the Paraiyarjati began to claim that they were the original Dravidian population of Tamil Nadu, who were conquered and relegated to the bottom of the caste system by the invading Brahmins. These Paraiyars formed associations that demanded educational concessions and jobs in the government service. Most prominent among this group was a man known as Iyothee Thoss who ran a weekly magazine known as Oru Paisa Thamizhan (one paisa Tamilian), in which he propagated the notion of Pariayars being the original Dravidians, and a new history of the Paraiyars based on this notion.
In all likelihood, the notion of Paraiyars as Adi Dravidas (original Dravidians) emerged from missionary writings identifying certain jatis in Tamil Nadu as the original natives or aboriginals of that land. The tendency to classify certain groups, whom the British perceived as ”primitive” tribes or castes as aboriginals, was a common pattern in British writings about India. This in itself is a subject that warrants further research.
Robert Caldwell was one of the first to hypothesize that the Paraiyans were the original inhabitants of the Tamil speaking country. In his book, The Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), in the chapter ” Are the Paraiyars of Southern India Dravidians?”, Caldwell speculates that the Paraiyans belong to a different race than the Dravidian population, that they are descended from the true aborigines of the country, i.e. older than the Dravidians themselves, and then subjugated by the Dravidians to servitude, who were in turn subjugated by the Aryans. Following this speculation, however, Caldwell concludes that the evidence to make such a claim is insufficient. Following the publication of his book, however, many members of the Paraiyar jati living in the Madras Presidency caught on to this idea, and began referring to themselves as Adi Dravidas.
The presence of roads, railways, and especially the introduction of the printing press had enabled the Paraiyars in the form of magazines and newspapers, to mobilize a political movement and identify themselves as Adi Dravidas. Educated Paraiyars began to increasingly reproduce and propagate the story about their jati being the dispossessed and downtrodden indigenous people of Tamil Nadu, that involved rewriting the history of Tamil Nadu. In 1857 (coincidentally the year following the publication of Caldwell’s book) the Adi DravidaMahajana Sabha was formed. The DravidaMahajana Sangam as well as the DravidaMahajana Sabha were formed in 1881 and 1891 respectively, by both Paraiyars as well as other ”depressed castes” in the Madras Presidency. The first conference of the DravidaMahajana Sangam was held on December 1, 1881, in which they formulated their demands, including a law to punish those who refer to their jati as pariahs. They also demanded separate schools for panchamas and depressed classes. Finally, employment in government services should be ensured to all those among the depressed. Ten years after this, the DravidaMahajana Sabha held a conference at Ooty in December 1891 in which they passed resolutions such as educational concessions, and a share in the appointment of government service.
Iyothee Thassar (1845-1914) started a weekly magazine called Oru Paisa Tamilan in 1907. or simply Tamilan. It was intended as a mobilisation tool of the new Buddhist movement among the so-called Panchamas and Paraiyans. It included discussion of current events as it pertains to Tamil Nadu, and polemics against what it saw as the mainstream Hindu religion. It had a wide circulation beyond Madras city, where it was published, to Bangalore and Bombay. In the magazine Tamilan, Thoss argues that Paraiyars were in fact, the original Dravidians. They had a rich civilization which practiced egalitarianism: there was no caste hierarchy and no restrictions on interacting and interdining. But their civilization was destroyed by Brahmanical migrants from the region north of the Saraswati river, who in turn, imposed their Hindu religion and caste system on them.
According to Iyothee Thoss, there were group divisions among the Dravidians, but it was based on occupation and not hierarchical. He also claimed that the primary religion of the ancient Dravidians was Buddhism. The people who are referred to as Paraiyars today were originally Buddhist monks and their disciples. They wore a sacred thread which signified that they had acquired jnana or knowledge, rather than a caste marker. In Iyothee Thoss’ narrative, the Brahmins through cunning and deception disguised themselves as sages and appropriated Buddhist texts and teachings as their own. They manipulated the Dravidian kings into accepting the Brahmins as their gurus, and proceeded to destroy the Buddhist monasteries, reducing the Dravidian Buddhist sages and their disciples to untouchable Paraiyar status. Thoss claims to have discovered the true Dravidian past in a bunch of palm leaf manuscripts, written by the Sage Aswakosa, whose name sounded similar to the sage Asvaghosa who authored the Buddhacaritra, in Sanskrit. Iyothee Thoss doesn’t offer any proof to substantiate this claim.
As is shown later, Maraimalai Adigal reproduces the narrative of Iyothee Thoss, at least its basic outline. His narrative about the Brahmins is almost identical to that of Thoss. The main difference is that the Vellalas take the place of Paraiyars as the original Dravidians. In this sense, the Adi Dravida movement foreshadowed the Saiva Dravida nationalist ideology.
Political Background
British Administration
A Pandora’s box is the best way to describe the developments in the Madras presidency in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The British, through their administrative decisions in the Madras presidency, had opened up a Pandora’s box of political grievances and conflicts between different groups in the presidency that sowed the seeds of Dravidian nationalism in the future.
The British administration had to manage such a huge and diverse province while extracting revenue from it. In the 1870s, in order to increase revenue and learn more about the population they were governing, the British administration began expanding the scope of the government at the local and municipal levels, and created local self-governing boards in many of the towns and villages of the Madras presidency to achieve this goal. The local self-governing boards were powerful because they were involved in revenue collection as well as relieving the administrative burdens of the provincial government. The power and influence of these local boards, along with the fact that the provincial government were staffing these boards with members of the native population, caused many of the locals to vie for positions on them, since being elected to a board meant having substantial political power and influence within the community.
It was also during the late nineteenth century that the provincial government started taking detailed censuses in the Madras presidency in order to achieve a more efficient administration. When the British provincial government tried to classify the various castes within the Madras presidency they were confronted with very confusing data. For example, the census of 1871 found 3,208 castes that were grouped into hundreds of subcastes. To make matters worse, no two divisions of people could agree on which caste or subcaste they belonged to. To allay the confusion and simplify the classification, the British government divided the castes in the census into two broad categories: Brahmin and non-Brahmin. Given their pre-existing assumptions about the Brahmins being descendants of a foreign nation and the non-Brahmin jatis being the indigenous Dravidians, this classification made sense and carried some familiarity for the British administrators. This distinction would eventually make its way into the legal system of the Madras presidency as well.
The administrator, J.N. Nelson, in 1886 claimed that it would be necessary to have separate legislation for the non-brahman castes, because he thought of them as essentially separate and distinct from the Brahmins (Irschick, 1986, p. 23). Consequently, the locals also began using these terms in order to communicate with the government and this division became ingrained in the daily language and goings about in Tamil Nadu society. The establishment and devolution of power to the local boards, as well as the establishment of the Brahmin/non-Brahmin categories into the legal and administrative workings of the provincial government, laid the groundwork for nationalist politics within the Madras presidency in the decades to follow.
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms
In 1917, when the British Crown was embroiled in the First World War, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India at that time, announced a series of constitutional reforms that would see the participation of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions. It is important to note that these reforms were designed to transfer administrative burdens, but not executive power, to the Indians. By 1919, the legislative council was expanded in the Madras presidency, with more Indian ministers, and local political parties given an opportunity to be elected to the legislative councils. The provincial legislative councils would have power over matters such as local self-government, education, and sanitation, while the main provincial government would retain control in the areas of defence, police, and land revenue.
Many Indians within the Madras presidency began vying for positions within these legislative councils. Some of these were lawyers linked to local patrons in rural areas. Others were wealthy business magnates. Still others were either well connected with or had important positions within the local boards discussed earlier. The members of the legislative councils were elected indirectly by an electoral college composed of members of various local boards. These local boards were a constituency that could act as a springboard for local politicians. During the course of provincial politics, two powerful rival factions emerged within the Madras presidency, each of them wanting to be the ruling political party in the legislative council. One was known as the Mylapore set, the other was the South Indian Liberal Federation, otherwise known as the Justice Party.
Mylapore Set and Brahmin Nationalism
During the time of these reforms and political changes in the presidency, there was a group of local politically influential lawyers and administrators from Madras city known as the Mylapore (a region of the Madras city) set. They were highly educated, wealthy and had personal connections and networks throughout the region. Another important commonality shared by members of the Mylapore set (which would come back to bite them politically) was the fact that they were all from the Brahmin-Iyer caste. The Mylapore set derived their political power from the fact that they made up most of the members of the Madras branch of the Congress Party and were also part of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League, lobbying for dominion status for India. Importantly, many of these Brahmin elites were part of Hindu organizations that were concerned about the state of Hinduism and were involved in different kinds of religious revivalism.
In the late nineteenth century, many Hindu Sabhas arose in response to Christian missionaries’ criticism and polemics against Hinduism and the caste system. Some of these Hindu Sabhas were structured very much like Christian organizations and churches, with their own rules, newspapers, tracts, and organized campaigns to attract public attention. They even imitated Christian worship and singing. It was during this time that many of the city-educated Brahmins were concerned that Brahmins were going astray from their original religion. A Brahmin administrator Manjeri Ramier noted how sad it was that most of the modern, educated Brahmins had abandoned their old traditions, such as sandhyavandhnam, and are drinking alcohol and eating meat. During a meeting of Brahmins in Triplicane (a Madras neighbourhood) in 1921, M.K. Acharya, a Brahmin lawyer, lamented that the Brahmins of the day were not ‘real’ Brahmins, and had abandoned their ancient dharma.
What is striking about the first resolution passed by the congregation of Brahmins in Triplicane was that they saw the decline of the Brahmana community as a cause of national deterioration. Similarly, the Brahmin intellectuals also promoted Hinduism as the national religion of India. But what is this Hinduism these Brahmin intellectuals were talking about? There is evidence that the Brahmin intellectuals were drawing upon the works of Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller as well as organizations such as the Theosophical Society to form their ideas about Hinduism, as well as their vision of Hinduism as the national religion of India. In his work, India: What Can It Teach Us? Müller promotes Hinduism as based on the revelation of the Vedas and the national religion of India. In response to the objection that the Vedas are not truly national in character and represent the thoughts of a small section of Brahmans, Müller responds that, just as the Bible represents the Jews, the Vedas represent the Indian nation. Given that the Brahmins are the priests of the Indian nation, and being the descendants of those who composed the Vedas, they had the right to speak for the whole nation.
In the same text, Müller also describes Sanskrit as the language of religion and law in India. Organizations like the Theosophical Society played an important role in popularizing the ideas of Orientalists such as Müller. Henry Olcott, president of the Theosophical Society, proclaimed in one of his lectures that the Aryans were the cradle of European civilization and their literature was the source of all Western religion and philosophy. Olcott considered Brahmins to be the direct descendants of the Aryan race within India and the inheritors of the Aryan religion. It is evident that many English-educated Brahmin intellectuals were very much influenced by these ideas when they spoke or wrote about their vision of the Indian nation. The Brahmin journalist Subramania Iyer in his text, ‘Arya Jana Aikiyam Allathu Congress Mahasabhai’ (Unity of the Aryan People or the Congress Party), published in 1888, is very explicit in his formulation of Hinduism as the religion of the Aryans, a pan-Indian religion, and Sanskrit is presented as the language of the gods.
The Brahmin lawyer P.S. Sivasamy Iyer, in his convocation address to Madras University in 1914, exalts Sanskrit ”as the language which enshrines the highest ideas of Indo-Aryan civilisation”. Some of the Brahmin intellectuals accepted the Orientalist theory about the caste system as a hierarchical socio-religious system created by the Brahmins but defended it as something praiseworthy. The Brahmin politician, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, as late as 1952, referred to the caste system as a division of labour that organized production in such a way that it promoted individual skills.
Finally, some of these Brahmin elites and intellectuals felt that the Brahman jatis were most fitted to occupy the top political positions and lead the nation. In an article published in the newspaper New India in 1919, the lawyer G. Annaji Rao opined that what makes the Brahmin fit to guide politics was that he is a calming restraining influence on society because of his traditions and training. In articulating this vision, the Brahmins appear to be borrowing from the descriptions and framework provided by the Orientalists and missionaries. The kind of Indian nation these Brahmin intellectuals were proposing was one where the so-called Vedic religion of the Aryans would provide the foundation of the social life and institutions of the Indian nation. The Brahmins, in turn, are the best representatives of this nation, since it was from their ancestors that the Vedic religion originated, and it is the Brahmins who continue to preserve the Vedic religion by following their Brahmin dharma.
It is clear that the Brahmins who were promoting this kind of nationalism had accepted the truth of the descriptions provided by the Orientalists as well as the Theosophical society– namely that there was an invasion by an Aryan nation sometime in the remote past, that they instituted a religion in India, and that the present-day Brahmin jatis are the priestly descendants of these Aryans. In promoting India as an Aryan nation, Hinduism as an Aryan religion, and Sanskrit as the sacred language, however, the Brahmin intelligentsia were inadvertently sowing the seeds of anti-Brahminism and Tamil nationalism.
Although it is true that the Aryans and their religion are glorified and romanticized in the Orientalist descriptions, the other side of this story is that the Brahmins are the priestly class of the invading Aryans who imposed a hierarchical caste system on the indigenous non-Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. The very nature of this story is that it divides the people of Tamil Nadu into two peoples: Brahmins and non-Brahmins, and pits them against each other. The nationalism of the Brahmin elite would soon receive a rejoinder from the Justice Party.
Justice Party and Dravidian Nationalism
In the year 1916, a group of wealthy business magnates, landholders and politicians came together to form a party called the South Indian Liberal Federation, otherwise known as the Justice Party. The founders of this party were all non-Brahmin, and they presented themselves as representatives of the non-Brahmin community and their interests. The Justice Party published the ‘Non-Brahmin Manifesto’, which contained the ideology of the party, as well as their grievances and demands. The authors of the manifesto used statistics from censuses carried out by the British government, which showed that the Brahmin jatis have a monopoly on the civil and administrative positions in the Madras presidency and demanded that this be rectified.
At this point it is important to give some context and nuance to the statistics presented by the Justice Party about the domination of the Brahmins in civil and administrative positions. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that Telugu and Tamil Brahmins were the most literate castes in the Madras presidency, both in their vernacular language as well as the English language.
According to the census of the Madras presidency in 1911, 42 per cent of Tamil Brahmins and 39 per cent of Telugu Brahmins were literate in Tamil, and 11 per cent of Tamil Brahmins and 7 per cent of Telugu Brahmins were literate in English. If one takes all the Brahmin jatis as a group, their literacy rate in Tamil and English respectively was 37 per cent and 8 per cent. Thus, it becomes clear that the literacy of the Brahmin jatis far exceeds that of the others.
When it comes to the Brahmin monopoly on civil and administrative government jobs however, the picture becomes less clear. While the proportion of Brahmin jatis in civil and administrative jobs in the Madras presidency was higher than that of the other jatis, most of those positions were petty low-paying clerkships. Moreover, even if one takes all the Brahmin jatis in the Madras presidency as a whole, only a small proportion of Brahmins worked in administrative jobs.
While the Justice Party and their manifesto talk about Brahmin domination of government positions, their goal was the power and influence that came with the few influential jobs at the top of the British administration, such as the position of judges and district collectors. More importantly than high-level positions in the administration, the Justice Party – like any other political party – were looking to win votes and control the majority of seats in the legislative council, and as a result have substantial power in the public and political life of Tamil Nadu. Even though the Justice Party was challenging the power of a few elite Brahmins, in a brilliant political move, they presented themselves as the political party of the non-Brahmins (who make up the majority of the population in the Madras presidency), challenging the centuries-old hegemony of the Brahmin jatis. According to the manifesto, the preponderance of Brahmins in the British administration was part of a historical trend of Brahmin domination in Tamil society. Ironically, the nationalism promoted by the Justice party is a mirror image of the nationalism of the Mylapore Brahmins.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a group of Saivite intellectuals began to call for a revival of Saivism, and specifically the Saiva Siddhanta tradition in Tamil Nadu. While there were many revivalist movements of this sort going on in both India and Tamil Nadu at that time, this Saivite revivalism in Tamil Nadu was unique in the sense that they were formulating the Saiva Siddhanta tradition as a uniquely Tamil religion, which played a central role in shaping Tamil culture and civilization. Most of these Saivite intellectuals came from the Saiva Vellala caste (one of the jatis well known for their adherence to Saivite traditions), and they formed the backbone of the Justice Party.
Quite a few key figures and leaders within the Justice Party were Saiva Vellalas, such as Natesha Mudaliar, Somasundaram Pillai, and Marthandam Pillai (Irschick, 1969, p. 241, 247) These Saiva Vellala intellectuals were not merely trying to revive the Saiva Siddhanta tradition but using it as a vehicle for Tamil nationalism. The Vellala historian M.S. Purnalingam Pillai, in his work on Tamil literature, claimed that Saiva Siddhanta is the native philosophy of South India and the greatest product of the Tamil intellect. Starting in 1886, many Saiva Siddhanta Sabhas began to be established for cultivation of Dravidian languages, and popularizing the Dravidian religion of Saiva Siddhanta.
As the Vellala writer M.S. Purnalingam Pillai expresses in his book A Primer of Tamil Literature (1904), there was a period when the native Dravidian religion of Saiva Siddhanta was the only religion practised by the Tamil people, and that the Vedic Brahmin religion was the first foreign influence on it. This idea became quite commonplace among non-Brahmins in the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of the non-Brahmins accused Brahmins of corrupting the Dravidian religion with their foreign Vedic doctrines. In addition to corrupting the Saiva Siddhanta religion with their foreign religion, the Brahmins were accused of introducing the caste system into Tamil society.
The remarkable aspect of the Tamil nationalism disseminated by the Vellala intellectuals is that it is identical to the nationalism of the Brahmin intellectuals in structure. Like the Brahmins, the Vellala elites’ concept of the nation is grounded in religious tradition. For the Brahmin intellectuals, it was the Vedic religion that provided the basis for Indian civilization, its institutions and laws, thus making the Indian people into a nation. For the Vellalas, it was Saiva Siddhanta that served as the foundation for the Tamil people’s traditions and civilization. All three Brahmin, Paraiyan, and Vellala intellectuals form a connection between nation and caste. All three claim to be the descendants of the original caste, or people from which arose their respective nations and religions. In the case of the Brahmin intellectuals, they claimed to be the descendants of the Aryans who introduced the Vedic religion into India, which in turn unites the Indian people together into a nation. Both the Vellalas and the Paraiyans, on the other hand, claim to be the original Dravidian caste who were the first of the Tamil nation and founded its national religion. This linking of caste and nation by Indian intellectuals is an important pattern which will be addressed in detail later.
…To be continued
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