Introduction: Missionary attacks on Indian religion as Idolatry
From the time of the first European contact with India all the way up to the nineteenth century, one of the oft heard and common attacks from missionaries of all stripes (Protestant, Catholic, Reformed, Wesleyan etc) towards Indian religion was the charge of idolatry. During the nineteenth century, missionaries in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka aggressively went after the local traditions.
The common thread in all the missionary attacks against Saivite and other Indian traditions is the charge of idolatry and false religion. In fact, both are synonymous with each other. To the missionaries there is only one true God, the God of the Bible, and worship of anything other than the true God is idolatry and therefore false religion, with the objects of worship being false gods. The missionaries regarded all the rituals and traditions revolving around the devatas as false religion, with the texts connected to these traditions (Vedas, Smritis) as false doctrines.
Hindu Response to the Missionary Attacks
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in response to the Christian missionaries’ attack on their traditions, many Hindu organizations started springing up around India, including Tamil Nadu, in response to the aggressive proselytizing of many Christian missions of that time. Many of the educated Indians started building Hindu institutions and organizations in the same vein as Christian missions, such as the Veda Siddhanta Sabha and the Hindu tract society. They began writing books and pamphlets about the so-called scriptures and doctrines later, and giving many of their practices a doctrinal foundation. Whether these texts (both Tamil and Sanskrit) were doctrines or not is a question I will get to later. The structure of these native organizations in many ways resembled the structure of the Evangelical organizations the Tamil intellectuals were opposing. For example, in the Sadur Veda Siddhanta Sabha, all of the basic features of a modern religious organization were present like printing press, newspaper, tracts, and organised campaigns to influence public opinion. Its members imitated Christian worship with scripture reading, preaching, and singing.
These organizations’ response to the missionary attack took various forms. Some of the criticisms of the missionaries towards the Hindu traditions were accepted as true, and a reform of these traditions were called for. For example, the famed nineteenth century Bengali intellectual Raja Ram Mohan Roy, on the surface, appeared to echo the missionaries in his criticism of murthi puja and other rituals directed towards the other devatas. Born into a traditional Brahmin family, he eventually rejected these practices as superstitious and heinous idolatry that led to all sorts of immoralities in Indian society. He also thought these practices were antithetical to the original so-called central scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas and Shastras, which he thought contained the teachings of and about the one true God Brahman. Roy expressed that the transcendental, invisible God cannot be limited by images, and that the original monotheism of the Vedas had become corrupted into polytheism by the Brahmins. Roy’s writings about the corruption of the original monotheism of the Vedas reproduces centuries of European thought and writings about Hinduism. Whether or not he understood idolatry or monotheism is a separate matter which will be addressed later.
Other organizations began publishing pamphlets and magazines that counter attacked the Christian religion, and simultaneously defended their traditional practices against the attacks of the Christian missionaries by drawing parallels between Hinduism and Christianity. The Hindu idea of punyasthalā for example, was reconciled with the Biblical idea of sacred places, like Jerusalem being the holy city. Similarly, the worship of the Ark of Covenant was equated with murthi puja. Thus, in the process of defending their traditions against the missionary attacks, the Tamil intellectuals were compelled to talk and write about their traditions using Christian theological terms and concepts, including idolatry and image worship. It was in the nineteenth century that there was an attempt to synthesize the different Indic traditions into one Hindu religion.
Did MaraimalaiAdigal Understand Theology?
In Tamil Nadu, the English-educated Brahmins and neo-Saivites (mostly Vellalas) were among the most prominent groups involved in these kinds of projects. MaraimalaiAdigal was very much influenced by the European missionaries (whom he was both a student and opponent of) at that time. Following in the footsteps of missionary G.U. Pope, whom he cites in the introduction of his essay, Saiva SiddhantaGnanabodham (The collection of knowledge in Saiva Siddhanta) (1906), Adigal describes Saiva Siddhanta as a Tamil religion (native to the Tamil-speaking regions), which is monotheistic, and has a God of love and grace, just like Christianity. It is important to keep in mind that Adigal’s writings about Saivism were, in part, a response to missionaries to show that the Tamil religion too is as morally and intellectually respectable as Christianity, with its own brand of monotheism and its own benevolent Lord. In his English introduction to this collection of essays, Adigal describes Saiva Siddhanta as a philosophy consisting of four main concepts: pathi, pasu, anavam, and vinai (karma). In English, he translated these words as God, souls, darkness/evil and moral and immoral deeds. Adigal himself uses the term ‘God’ in his English writings about Siva. In Adigal’s introduction, he claims that Saiva Siddhanta is a monotheistic religion with one God (Siva), and the essential properties of this God are pure love and bliss.
Adigal also describes God as transcendent and immanent. Next, he moves to the concept of the soul, stating that every organism on earth is an individual soul and that they are as eternal as God. These souls are all mired in anavam, which he calls darkness or evil. He uses a quote from Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World to illustrate this concept, MaraimalaiAdigal seems to be describing a Tamil version of Christianity, with a loving God, eternal souls and the presence of evil. However, this leads to the following questions: Did he really understand these concepts? What is God to Adigal? What is religion to him? What would the soul be in his understanding? All of these words are terms within Christian theology that have very specific meanings. Did his native cultural framework allow him to understand Christian theological concepts such as God, grace, and sin? Or did he create an incoherent jumble because (a) he did not have access to the larger framework of which they were part and (b) still tried to use them and create Tamil equivalents as though this vocabulary adequately described Indian traditions and jatis?
All these terms (‘God’, ‘soul’, etc.) are embedded in a larger conceptual framework and interlinked with each other and a series of other concepts within that framework. They form clusters of concepts and the range within which each term can be meaningfully used is constrained by their linkages to the other concepts in the cluster. That is, the larger framework sets limits on how these terms can be understood and used; if one goes beyond those limits, one gets statements that are either extremely difficult to make sense of or plain nonsensical. So the question is: Was Adigal aware of the larger framework and the interlinkages among its concepts when he used terms such as ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘religion’, etc.? In that sense, did he have access to the larger conceptual framework in which these terms are embedded? These questions raise three possibilities:
1) MaraimalaiAdigal knew Christian theology well and was able to understand Christian theological concepts. If this is the case, his English writings should demonstrate the use of theological terminology in a coherent and consistent manner that showed that he knew how the concepts were interrelated within the Christian framework. In addition, the Tamil words that he uses to translate the theological terminology should capture the meaning of those terms.
2) The second possibility is that Adigal was like many of today’s English-speakers in the Western world: he did not know Christian theology and did not know the primary meanings of these terms or explain how these concepts are interlinked with each other within the Christian theological framework. However, he had an intuitive understanding of the notions of God, soul, religion…, of the primary meaning of these terms, and of their interlinkages, much like native English speakers in the West and those who are able to map English vocabulary on their own European language. That is, he had access to the background framework shared by Western English-speakers which constrains the way in which they learn to use a vocabulary. If this is the case, the Tamil terms used to translate Christian theological terms should at least partially capture the meaning of those terms and might be variants of Christian theological concepts.
3) Finally, the third possibility is that Adigal did not have access to and did not understand Christian theology and its conceptual vocabulary. The consequence of this possibility would be that MaraimalaiAdigal’s writings would show evidence of incoherence and/or distortion of Christian theological concepts. Moreover, if his native cultural framework did not allow him to access or comprehend the Christian theological framework, the Tamil terminology he utilizes would not translate the Christian theological terms at all. In order to test which of the three possibilities is , I examine both the Tamil and English writings of MaraimalaiAdigal. At this point, a caveat is required: Although my dissertation analyzes the writings of MaraimalaiAdigal, the object of this analysis is not Adigal’s individual ideas about religion, nation, and language, but instead about the cultural framework he was operating under.
In order to show that Adigal’s ideas about Saiva Siddhanta and the Tamil nation are patterns of thinking that are part of the larger cultural framework he operates under, my analysis also references the writings of other Indian intellectuals such as Nallaswami Pillai and Raja Ram Mohan Roy on religion, as well as traditional Saiva Siddhanta texts from which Adigal draws many of his ideas about the Saiva Siddhanta religion. Analysing Adigal’s writings serves a twofold purpose. First, the way in which he makes use of Christian theological concepts such as ‘God’, ‘soul’, and ‘worship’ will tell us whether or not he understands these concepts. If MaraimalaiAdigal distorts these concepts and/or uses them in an incoherent and contradictory manner, this is an indication that the culture in which he was born and raised in lacked these theological concepts.
This brings me to the second reason for analyzing MaraimalaiAdigal’s writings. Of the three possibilities I outlined, if the third possibility turns out to be true, and the Tamil terms used by Adigal do not translate the Christian theological concepts at all, then this raises a slew of interesting research questions. If these Tamil words are not equivalents or variants of Christian theological concepts then what are they? What role do they play within the Saiva Siddhanta tradition? And finally what kind of phenomenon is the Saiva Siddhanta tradition if it is not a variant of Christianity? Just as the English language has a rich corpus of theological writings, the Tamil language also has a rich body of writings, a product of the wide variety of intellectual traditions native to Tamil Nadu, including but not limited to the Saiva Siddhanta tradition. As a result, these traditions gave rise to theoretical terms that over the centuries have become part of the cultural common-sense of the people of Tamil Nadu, similar to how Christian theological concepts have become part of the everyday commonplace ideas in Western culture. Studying the conceptual terminology MaraimalaiAdigal uses to describe Saiva Siddhanta, the Tamil people, and the relationship between the two should give us insights into the theoretical framework used by MaraimalaiAdigal as well as the cultural common-sense of the Tamil people.
Translating Theological Concepts
In my brief biographical sketch of MaraimalaiAdigal, I mentioned that he had received his secondary school education at Wesleyan Mission High School in Madras. It was a common sight in colonial India during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century for English-educated Indian intellectuals to have studied in convent/mission schools run by British missionaries. Education from these schools were considered prestigious and also beneficial from a practical point of view, because of the quality of English education, which in turn was useful in gaining employment in the colonial government’s civil service as well as institutions such as colleges and universities. Many of the colleges and universities in the Madras Presidency, such as the Madras Christian College, were also operated by missionaries. Through their missionary teachers, these Tamil students not only learned English, but were also inevitably exposed to Christian doctrine and theology (to varying degrees).
The Tamil intellectuals’ exposure to Christian doctrine was both overt and covert. Firstly, the missionaries in Tamil Nadu were overtly propagating the Christian faith through various mediums, from journals to pamphlets as well as teaching the Bible in schools. The covert way which the Christian doctrine spread among the people of Tamil Nadu was through the English language itself. Specifically, the learning of the English language in and of itself becomes a vehicle through which the native populace is exposed to Christian theology. What do I mean by this? In Europe, theological terminology has become part of the natural language over many centuries so thoroughly, that one doesn’t realize certain words are part of a theological nomenclature. English is no exception to this phenomenon. Words like ‘God’,‘soul’, and ‘evil’ are part of the theoretical vocabulary of Christian theology. However, these terms have been part of the English language for so long that they are no longer limited to the domain of theology and have become part of everyday language. Furthermore, the concepts that these theological words express have become part of the cultural common sense of native English speakers. Since Christian vocabulary has become part of natural language usage in European languages and since the terms of this vocabulary are connected in particular ways, a background framework continues to guide their usage and the common ways of understanding them and making sense of them. That background framework is still determined by Christian theology even though we are not generally aware of this.
When missionaries from Britain arrived in Tamil Nadu, they realized that they needed to learn the Tamil language not only to be able to communicate with the natives but also to spread the word of God among the natives. Learning the Tamil language was also necessary for the missionaries to teach English to the native population. In the process of learning the Tamil language, the missionaries began to look for and found Tamil words to translate Christian theological terminology. These missionaries assumed that these Tamil words were synonyms for the Christian theological vocabulary they were familiar with. They thought ‘Katavul’ was the Tamil word for God, ‘Anmā’ the Tamil word for soul, and so on. Therefore when Tamil intellectuals such as MaraimalaiAdigal learn English in Christian mission schools, they learn Christian theological terminology through words in their native languages that have already been mapped on to these theological terms by British missionaries.
There are some problems that come to the fore as a result of this learning process. These problems have to do with the translatability of Christian theological concepts into the Tamil language. What are these translatability problems? S.N. Balgagangadhara outlines different kinds of translation problems when translating words and concepts from one language to another. If we consider abstractly two languages X and Y, we have the problem of translating words and sentences from one language into another. On the one hand we have phenomena and objects that are found universally around the world such as water, milk and grass. In such a case, it is simply a matter of speakers of language X learning the words in language Y that are used as signifiers for said objects. On the other hand, we have scientific and technical terms introduced into one language (by a scientific theory formulated in that said language), such as ‘genes’ and ‘electrons’ for which we have to invent new words in other languages.
Having considered abstractly the problem of translating terms words from one language into another, Balagangadhara moves on to address other translation problems. Using the examples of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, Balagangadhara proposes a hypothetical scenario where English words in Newton’s theory are translated into German words in Einstein’s theory. Balagangadhara uses this example to point out that even though we are translating words from English into German, the problem of translation is one of ”translation of the vocabulary of one rival theory into the vocabulary of another’. Thus, translation problems are not limited to translating words from one natural language to another. It also involves problems of translating the technical terminology of one scientific theory into another.
Having established these above translation problems, there are translation problems related to cultural differences. Firstly, we have the problem of translating Christian theological vocabulary from one natural language, English, to another, Tamil. This is a problem because Christian theology possesses a theoretical framework and terms like ‘God’, ‘grace’ and ‘soul’ are technical terms within this theoretical framework. Of course, this parallel does not imply that Christian theology shares all other characteristics of scientific theories. They are not designed to solve empirical problems, nor can they be tested empirically. But there is a parallel between theoretical terms in theology and theoretical terms in scientific theories. ‘Gravitation’,‘genetic code’, ‘molecule’, ‘atom’…are technical terms embedded in a particular theory. This is also the case for theological terms such as ‘God’, ‘grace’, and ‘soul’: they are theoretical terms embedded in a Christian theological framework; it is only by learning about this framework that one can also learn the meaning and correct usage of these terms.
Although these theological terms have been part of the English language for centuries, theTamil language developed over millennia in a non-Christian culture. This raises the question of whether there are words in Tamil that can accurately translate Christian theological vocabulary. This is the first problem. Of course, it is true that missionaries have translated English religious sermons, pamphlets and the King James Bible itself into Tamil. But if it is the case that the Tamil words the missionaries used to translate Christian theological terminology do not capture the meaning of these theological terms, then it follows that the Tamil intellectuals including MaraimalaiAdigal wouldn’t have been able to make sense of the theological concepts they encountered in the English language. This is the second problem. Because of this second problem, a third problem arises. When the Tamil intellectuals use Tamil words to translate theological concepts – for instance, Katavul = God – it is not simply the case that a signifier in one language takes the place of a signifier in another language that refers to one and the same object which is obviously and universally present in all societies. e.g. thaneer = water. Unlike the word water, the word God expresses a concept that is part of a theological complex, connected with other theological concepts, and hence comes with a huge theological baggage.
In Christianity (and Judaism), ‘God’ refers to the God of the Bible, the supreme and omnipotent creator of the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; even when the term ‘God’ came to be used more loosely in Western languages, its implicit reference is to this creator. The same considerations apply to terms such as soul and sin. Hence, when Tamil writers use these theological terms in their writings such as ‘God’ and ‘soul’, they inevitably carry over into their writings a cluster of theological ideas and concepts. They would assume that these Christian theological concepts have equivalents in their language. What these writers see as an issue of translating and hence choosing the ‘right’ Tamil equivalents for certain English-language words, then, is much more than that. It is not simply a question of translating one word from English into another word from the Tamil language, much like translating ‘water’ into ‘thaneer’. It is a question of translating terms embedded in a conceptual framework into the language of a culture where this framework is neither known nor present and where other background frameworks guide natural language usage. In summary, this is not a translation problem but a problem of understanding concepts that come from one cultural framework using the tools and resources that come from a different cultural framework. Keeping these three problems in mind, analyzing MaramalaiAdigal’s writings should yield new insights.
Maraimalai Adigal and the Concept of God
Let us begin by examining two major examples of incoherency in MaraimalaiAdigal’s writings when he is writing about God and monotheism. In his essay ThamizharMatham (Tamilian‘Religion’) (1941), MaraimalaiAdigal states that behind every movement, and happening in the universe, there is a thinking living being, whom he calls Shiva, the lord of the universe. This is a well-known argument that has been used for centuries by Christian theologians as well as deists such as David Hume to argue for the existence of God. It presupposes a being whose intention or will governs the universe. In the very same essay, however, MaraimalaiAdigal cites a passage from the text Sivajnana Botham that states that God’s creation, sustenance and destruction of the universe has no purpose, just as the dreamer has no benefits from his dream in the waking state.
Adigal cites these quotes and also states that God is untouched by action and abstains from acting in this world. He uses the analogy of a magnet attracting a needle. Similar to how a magnet attracts a needle without moving or changing its state, God (Katavul) is able to effect the forming, sustenance and destruction of the cosmos without acting. This description of Siva as a mere witness who is without purpose and doesn’t act is opposite in nature to that of the Biblical God. In the Abrahamic religions, the universe is governed by God’s purpose and he is perceived as acting on the world with numerous references to God’s works in the Bible. This example of incoherence on the part of MaraimalaiAdigal when talking about God or Katavul, is a strong indication that the Siva of Saiva Siddhanta is not the same or even the same kind of being as the Biblical God.
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