Maraimalai Adigal: How to Understand His Reform of Tamil Shaivism?

Abstract

Although there is growing agreement between scholars about the crucial role of Maraimalai Adigal in the early stage of the Tamil nationalist movement, the state of current understanding of this “religious phase of Tamil nationalism” is far from satisfactory. Authors of this article focused on three important claims in the currently accepted view on the character and goals of Adigal’s religious reform. The first stance portrays his efforts for purification of the Tamil language from foreign influences as “anti-Aryan” and “anti-Sanskritic.” The second claim describes the reformer’s efforts as a move from polytheism to “Shaiva monotheism”, and builds on ideas of the early Orientalists and Christian missionaries in India who formulated the “Sanskritic hegemony” thesis. As an assumption running through the debates about Adigal’s reforms, there is conviction that the Tamil intellectual basically accepted the crystallizing Aryan Invasion Theory as true description of both Ancient India and roots of the social problems in Tamilnadu of his times. In their thorough analysis of Adigal’s work and scholarly debates, authors of this article disclose the role of unexamined assumption about religious competition being the main form of cultural encounters in India, and argue for very different understanding of Adigal’s efforts to revive Shaivism.

1. Introduction

During recent decades, the roots of Tamil nationalism have been debated by several scholars and today, there is a growing agreement that the Tamil Shaivite movement “played a major role in preparing the groundwork for the mobilisation by the radical Self-respect movement of the Tamil vernacular public.” (Vaitheespara 2009, p. 45). In other words, the emergence of the newly conceived Shaivite religion is understood to constitute the early stage of Tamil nationalism. Several scholars have discussed how the originally religious reforms were appropriated and changed into secular goals of the Self-Respect movement in the 1920s and 1930s. They noted that the period of forces joined happily by the older generation of Shaivite reformers, led by Maraimalai Adigal,1 with the secularists led by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker2 lasted only as long as their common targets of criticism were Tamil Vaishnava traditions (especially the followers of famous Ramanujacharya) and Shankaracharyas of Kanchi. When the leaders of the Self-Respect movement started to also criticize Shaivite traditions, rituals, texts, etc., cooperation with Adigal and others turned into bitter disputes. “At the end of it all, the Shaivites were pushed to the margins of Tamil politics and their protestations turned out to be nothing more than inaudible whimpers. In stark contrast, the Self-Respect movement emerged as an anti-elitist mass movement, with its ideology influencing, in varying degrees, Tamil politics for decades to come.” (Pandian 1994, p. 96). However, the writings of Adigal continue to enjoy popularity in Tamilnadu, used in both scholarly and political discourse. In volume 33 of the series of Adigal’s reprinted works, issued as a part of the Centenary celebrations of the Pure Tamil Movement in 2016, the editor A. Mathivanan claimed that “the views of Maraimalai Adigal formed the basis for the Justice parties and the Dravidian parties to work for the renaissance of Tamil language and the upliftment of Tamil race.” (Adigal 2015h, p. 4).

Ravi V. Vaithees claimed in his recent work that in order to understand the later developments of Tamil national politics, we should look closely at “the religio-cultural transformations that took place during this early phase” (Vaithees 2015, pp. 2–3). We agree with Vaithees on this point and also on the way he approached the task: If we wish to understand the initial phase of the formation of such an important phenomenon (the creation of a modern nation in South India), it is necessary to analyze closely the ideas of the leaders of such a change. In this article, we will follow his choice of Maraimalai Adigal, unquestionably one of the most influential figures of the “religious phase” of Tamil nationalism. However, we will show that despite the work already carried out on the topic, Vaithees and other influential scholars barely touched on several important questions that arise when we consider problems of understanding Adigal’s ideas about Shaivism, the relationship between religion and language, and how these relate to Brahmins and other castes of his times.

In respected works of both Indian and Western scholars, there is a set of claims about the Tamil intellectual, which became accepted. Its general formulation, that Maraimalai Adigal was opposed to the Brahminical (“Aryan”) dominance in Tamilnadu, became a truism. More specifically, his anti-Brahminical position is described as follows: Firstly, Adigal developed a form of monotheistic Shaivism, rooted in his understanding of Shaiva Siddhanta philosophy. This “neo-Shaivism” was a religion, which should prevail over other religions of his country (not only “Brahmanism”, but also Vaishnavism or Jainism). The so-called ills of Tamil society pointed out by Christian missionaries and Orientalists, such as caste hierarchy, irrational superstitions, or strange rituals, were blamed on the corrupting influence of the Brahminical religion on the Ancient Tamil religion. Secondly, Adigal’s efforts to defend Tamil language and keep it pure are indicative of the importance of Tamil religious thought, very different from the religious ideas of the Aryans, identified with Brahmins of the colonial times in Tamilnadu. Hence his opposition to and rejection of Sanskritic traditions. According to Ramaswamy, pure Tamil language was seen by neo-Shaivites as a way to reach pure Shaivism (Ramaswamy 1997, pp. 30–33). This new religion, expressed in Tamil language purified from the Sanskritic influences, is supposed to be the essence of the early Tamil nationalism. Such is, for example, the core argumentation of Vaithees in his monograph on Adigal:

The book advances the argument that it was anti-Aryan, anti-Sanskritic, and anti-Vedantic imperatives and the spirit of the neo-Shaivite movement … that came to inform and animate the neo-Shaivite readings of the Tamil and Indian past and indeed the articulation of neo-Shaivite Tamil religion as a form of non-Brahmin Tamil nationalism.

(Vaithees 2015, p. 14)

As the third important topic, the role of the Velala caste in Adigal’s thought has been pointed out. According to Shrilata Raman, the Tamil thinker succeeded in “removing” this group “from the substantiality of caste or region and located in an imaginary lost landscape of Tamil people” (Raman 2009, p. 79). Let us notice that according to Raman, this “constructed political, social and moral category of Velalas” not only was seen by Adigal as embodying essential Tamil virtues, but also as “standing in opposition to everything which might signify Aryanism and Aryan-Brahminism” (Raman 2009, p. 79). So far, we offered only a brief summary of the ideas that are often expressed less clearly, sometimes in scattered form over different paragraphs and chapters of the influential scholarly texts. We will focus on the relevant ideas and evidence of the discussed works in more detail in the following sections of this article. Let us also note that this set of claims is not prevalent in academia only; in fact, it became the accepted truth about the early stage of the Tamil nationalism in popular understanding (compare Hardgrave 1965; Irschick 1969; Geetha and Rajadurai 1998; and Pandian 2007).

What is problematic with the ideas we just summarized? While reading Adigal’s works closely, we encountered a considerable number of claims which simply do not support them. Passages quoted as evidence for these explanations are in some cases clearly indicating something very different from the presumed meaning; in other cases, Adigal formulated ambivalent or contradictory ideas, hardly resonating with the explanation summarized in the previous paragraphs. We will provide a discussion of these problems of the dominant view and argue that they raise a need for a different explanation of Adigal’s understanding religion, Brahminical dominance and the importance of keeping the purity of the Tamil language. Adigal’s response to the Aryan Invasion Theory requires specific attention in this debate, because it seems to be the basic theoretical perspective which enabled him to discern clearly between the religions of Tamils and Aryans. We will argue that although it seems that Adigal accepted the theory about the advent of Aryans in South India, prevailing in his era, and certainly used several of its claims, he tried to attempt something different than to create a monotheistic Dravidian religion which would be purified from all Aryan thought. Finally, although we acknowledge the scholarly debate which has been considering the specific role of the colonial intellectual framework within which Adigal developed his ideas, we think that the following remark from Shrilata Raman to this point is still valid: “…how in fact, Caldwell’s views—and more generally, the Orientalist idioms of race, language and culture—came to be incorporated, modified, and even transformed in post-Caldwellian … Dravidian discourses is yet to be fully understood.” (Raman 2009, p. 85). The following analysis is an attempt to contribute to such a better understanding.

We will start the discussion with a closer look at the allegedly religious reasons for Adigal’s efforts to purify the Tamil language. As the second theme we shall examine claims about the nature of the “reformed Shaivism”, which should have been a result of Adigal’s efforts to establish the original Shaiva monotheism of Tamils. As the third topic we will consider the role of the Aryan invasion theory in Adigal’s thought about religion and the relationship between the Aryans and Tamils. With these steps, we hope to answer the following questions: How should we understand Adigal’s efforts? In what sense did he appropriate the European debate of religion, which considered religious belief to be a significant characteristic of any race in his times? What were his concrete ideas about the purification of Tamil, and how is this linked to his reform of Shaiva Siddhanta? What role do the claims of the Aryan Invasion Theory play in the debate?

2. Adigal’s Concerns with Purity of the Tamil Language

If any thinker would try to purify his mother tongue from the influences of another language, because the latter brought into the former foreign concepts which convey religious meaning, what would this process look like? If Adigal purified the Tamil language from Sanskritic words, or even sets of phrases in this language, because he understood his efforts to be the recovery of the original Tamil religious thought, what exactly would he do? Such efforts would identify individual concepts expressed in Sanskrit words, or sets of phrases, in terms of their foreign religious content, which would be different from those which express a religious content of the Tamil thought. One would also expect discussion about the specific religious meaning of the individual concepts expressed in Sanskrit, which would be contrasted with a very different meaning of Tamil religious concepts. On the level of discussing literary resources, such an approach would certainly lead to discouraging Tamil people from reading Sanskrit literary works, at least those which clearly deal with “Aryan”, that is, foreign and strange, religious ideas. It is a striking fact that we did not find even one example of such a systematic procedure in Adigal’s works. Although Adigal criticized some Brahmins for animal sacrifices and other practices, when it comes to language, all his explicit reasons as to why to purify Tamil from Sanskrit words or phrases are not referring to “religious matters” at all. What did Adigal want to achieve by his language reform, then?

A close reading of his works reveals a sad picture of the general degeneration of the Tamil language use at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Adigal described the problems in terms of two interconnected processes. One process meant that especially “the so-called high caste communities” were carelessly introducing a considerable amount of English and Sanskrit words into their language use, which led “to a medley of speeches” (Adigal 2015h, p. 224). However, this process in itself was not the main concern with polluting the Tamil language. After all, languages have borrowed words and phrases from other languages, apparently the natural course in their development (with the exemption of very few, spoken by isolated human groups). Adigal himself stated that “any cultured language cannot exist without mixing with other languages” (Adigal 2015a, p. 84). He admitted that since ancient times, Tamil had absorbed words and phrases from other languages, and doubted whether there was a time when Tamil was pure and untouched by influences from other languages (Adigal 2015a, p. 85). Why was he concerned with the influences on Tamil, then? Adigal was dealing with much more serious problems which a process of borrowing from other languages can cause: the introduction of foreign words and phrases led to the corruption or even destruction of proper grammatical structure and phonetic usage of the Tamil language. In the natural course of its development, Tamil absorbed words from other languages over a period of more than two thousand years. Such words became Tamilized and Adigal did not object to this process (Adigal 2015a, p. 91). He did find the absorption of foreign words into Tamil very problematic only when certain writers “unnaturally forced” Sanskrit or English words into the Tamil language. By unnatural forcing he meant the inserting of words, phrases, or even sentences that do not comply with the grammatical structure and phonetic usage of Tamil. This is why he focused on these dimensions of the Tamil language: grammar, vocabulary, and phonetic usage, and on the deterioration of these three dimensions resulting from the linguistically improper use of words or phrases of foreign origin in Tamil (Adigal 2015a, p. 42).

In his essays on Tamil language, Adigal argued for the superiority of the grammatical structure of Tamil over the Sanskritic grammar. For example, in a text entitled “Ancient Aryans and Tamils”, Adigal made fun of the fact that Sanskrit and Hindi assign grammatical genders to inanimate objects and considered it illogical and unnatural (Adigal 2015b, p. 32). He also claimed that the basic vowel and consonant phonetic structure of other Indian languages, including Sanskrit, emerged from Tamil, while emphasizing that Sanskrit’s sister languages, such as Greek and Latin, do not have this phonetic structure. Adigal maintained that languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin have died out because of their flawed grammatical structure and phonetic usage, implying a less-civilized state of the people who spoke those languages (Adigal 2015a, p. 97). He praised the fact that Tamil has survived for millennia, and claimed that this is not only because of the highly civilized state of the Tamil people, but also because their language has gone through very few structural changes in terms of borrowing from other languages.

We shall also stress the fact that it was not only the influence of Sanskrit which Adigal criticized for the reasons summarized in the previous two paragraphs. He objected to the linguistically improper introduction of English and Hindi into Tamil, too. In one of his English texts, he described a conversation in a train, apparently common in his times. The conversation started “by introducing a subject in a few corrupt Tamil words”, followed by “a few more English words and short sentences”, flipping back to Tamil while “using long and high sounding Sanskrit words” and soon “jesting in Hindustani” (Adigal 2015h, p. 224). This description could remind some readers of the similar problems in the language struggles of different smaller nations of Europe in the 19th century. For example, the scholars studying emancipation of the Slavic nations in the Habsburg empire noticed how some members of the Czech, Serbian, or Croatian “emerging middle class” similarly used their corrupt mother tongue mixed with German, French or Hungarian. Such careless usage and pretension is a cause of “laughter and indignation”, in Adigal’s description (Adigal 2015h, p. 224), on the side of researchers of these nationalist revivals even today. Adigal’s ideas following the critical remarks we just summarized would also resonate in many parts of today’s world:

Can the real cultivation of mind be achieved in this slipshod fashion? No, it can result only from restraining one’s thoughts from wandering loosely and aimlessly from one thing to another. Thought and expression being most intimately related to each other, the process of strengthening, clarifying, and improving one’s thought can be accomplished in no other way than that of concentrating one’s attention on the proper, most accurate, and pleasing manner of using one’s own speech.

(Adigal 2015h, p. 224)

In this manner, we could continue by pointing out how the Tamil reformer understood the careless and uneducated use of language to be an indication of “lack of discipline, looseness of character and lack of serious purpose in life” (Adigal 2015h, p. 225). We could discuss at length Adigal’s reaction to the argument that introduction of a considerable number of Sanskrit words and sentences, together with many English words, would “enrich Tamil and keep it abreast of the needs of modern times” (Adigal 2015h, p. 223). It is important to notice briefly that Adigal did not reject this argument in principle, but because the enrichment of the Tamil language was not really the outcome he observed (Adigal 2015h, p. 223). Instead of developing these ideas further, we will finish this part of our debating the purification of Tamil with a reconsideration of a content of the conversation between Adigal and his daughter. We should bear in mind that this talk should have been “the initial and immediate catalyst” to start a movement which would purify the Tamil language from Sanskrit, according to Vaithees (Vaithees 2015, p. 126). Although Vaithees stated that this anecdotal reference might not have ultimately been of great significance for Adigal’s efforts to write in pure Tamil (Vaithees 2015), it is worthwhile to give the content of the conversation a second thought. Let us reconsider the following:

…an exchange between Adigal and his daughter Neelambigai while strolling in their garden …while the two were reciting a particularly moving piece of verse from Ramalinga Swamy’s Arutpa. They had apparently agreed that substituting a pure Tamil word—one for body (Yakkai) instead of the Sanskrit-derived word Thegam—would have made Ramalinga’s verse even more appealing.

(Vaithees 2015)

What do we learn from the conversation about Adigal’s reasons for purifying the Tamil language? First of all, the replacement of thegam with yakkai should have caused a greater appeal to those who cherished poetry. This means that the “pure Tamil word” sounded better to Adigal, and perhaps even improved the rhyme and rhythm of the verse in question; however, this change does not indicate any specific concern with differences in meaning between thegam and yakkai. In fact, both are considered as synonyms in standard dictionaries, conveying the general meaning of “a body” in English. The reason for this replacement of words was purely aesthetic. After all, this was only one isolated example of the replacement of words. Yet there is more important realization which can be derived from thinking about Adigal’s talk with his daughter.

If Adigal used the Tamil equivalents for dharma (ozhukkam), ishvara (kadavul) and other concepts that are usually understood to be religious, as synonyms of those Sanskritic terms (as we saw with the example of thegam and yakkai), we must reject the idea that he was able to identify a set of religious terms which were specifically Tamil. Such a usage would indicate a reservoir of shared ideas, expressed only in different words of different Indian languages, and not any conflicting religious views (Tamil versus Aryan). In the rest of this part of our debate we will argue that this is indeed the case, while providing an overview of an important passage from Adigal’s writing on religious vocabulary.

While summarizing the content of his lectures on Shaiva Siddhanta, Adigal focused on the six entities which are described by words used in Tamil. Let us note passim the fact that Vaithees mentioned only three “essential and unchanging principles”: pathi (Lord), pacu (individual soul), and pacam (bonds)” in his characterization of Adigal’s expose of Shaiva Siddhanta, allegedly because the relationship between them captures, for Adigal, the essential teaching of the school (Vaithees 2015, p. 202). Although there are texts where Adigal mentioned these three principles, for the proper debate it is important to follow lectures in which Adigal strived to explain six fundamental principles of Shaiva Siddhanta, not only the three mentioned by Vaithees. Explanation of the six principles is pertinent to the question of possible replacing of the originally Sanskrit words, which would suggest a different conceptual content between Sanskrit and Tamil. Where should we start looking for such a possibility, if not in the case of these basics of Shaiva Siddhanta teaching? In the introductory part of his “Shaiva Siddhanta as a Philosophy of Practical Knowledge”, Adigal decided to quote from the work of G. U. Pope, instead of presenting his own description:

There are six entities which have no beginning. The first of these is the Lord (Pathi) Who is One. The second is the aggregate of all Souls (Pacu) with their undeveloped potentialities of thought and act, interpenetrated by a divine but hidden influence. The third is the impurity of Anavam wearing the form of darkness. The fourth is twofold deeds (Vinai). The fifth and sixth are the two kinds of Mayai, the pure and impure the substratum and material of the phenomenal universe.

(Pope 1900, p. li; cited in Adigal 2015e, p. 20)

The first two words, pathi and pacu, are clearly Sanskrit derivatives, which did not compel Adigal to make any changes to them. These words are commonly used by different Indian traditions in basically the same meaning. Another concept is expressed by anavam. To discuss the range of its meanings would need perhaps a journal article on its own, because it is a word shared across several Indian languages, including Sanskrit anavam, changing its meaning within different traditions over many centuries. Adigal’s usage does not indicate any effort on his side to find a Tamil word which would replace this one.

The most striking example, for readers without special knowledge about Indian traditions, is the use of vinai. The word is well-known in Sanskrit and Prakrits, translated as deeds, or actions, into English. What is striking about the usage? The fact that while explaining in detail about the two kinds of deeds, Adigal stated “It is such repeated actions of living beings that have come to be collectively called karma or vinai in Shaivism…” (Adigal 2015e, p. 25). Here, we are observing the proponent of the language purification using happily the well-known Sanskrit word, referring to the very same concept as vinai. Another interesting case is to be observed in his usage of maya, also a well-known word in Sanskrit and many other Indian languages. Adigal strived to show that “originally” it had the same meaning for both Tamil Shaivas and Sanskritic traditions; only much later the teaching of mayavada school appeared and this changed the meaning of this word (to “illusion”). This is one of the rare examples when Adigal discussed the problems with a concept in Sanskrit in terms of its religious meaning, as against the teaching of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta. Let us stress that even in this case, he did not suggest to replace the Sanskrit word with another “purely Tamil” word. Instead, he retained its usage and argued that the Sanskrit word originally referred to the same concept both in Tamil and “Aryan” understanding, described the concept by another Sanskrit word, and supported his claim by reference to the Sanskritic Upanishads (Adigal 2015f, pp. 66–67)!

As another example, we can point out how Adigal used ozhukkam as a synonymous word for dharma. Interestingly enough, this usage shows his unproblematic acceptance of other related concepts, expressed in Sanskritic terms, such as varna and sattva-guna. Adigal’s work clearly states that the division of Indian society into four groups designed as varna was good, initiated by the Tamil sages and kings (including Manu!). Character, knowledge and maintenance of traditional practices are the main criteria for the varna divisions between people, and the highest level of sattvic qualities is connected with the highest level of ozhukkam. Our Tamil reformer leaned on the authority of Sanskritic work again, Mahabharata in this case, in order to explain what the proper differences between varnas are, and specifically, what qualifies a person to be a Brahmin (Adigal 2015c, pp. 83–88). This section of Adigal’s text is also noteworthy for our concern here, because he used the Sanskrit terms jnana, karma, and dharma, with the Tamil synonyms in the brackets (Adigal 2015c, pp. 87–88).

It should be clear by now that although Adigal’s ideas about the proper use of Tamil are interesting and thought provoking even today, they do not hint at any criticism of the religious content of the foreign words and phrases introduced into his mother tongue. Therefore, we can only stress the point: If the main reason for purification of the Tamil language from Sanskrit influences should have been religious reform, one would expect from Adigal an attempt at identifying such a foreign vocabulary, or a set of phrases, which would be clearly differentiated from those of the Tamil origin in terms of their religious meaning. Instead of such a kind of evidence, we keep encountering a set of very different reasons and argumentation, formulated by the Tamil reformer: they point out general degeneration of the grammatical structure and phonetical usage of Tamil; uneducated carelessness; giving up the educated usage of Tamil for the sake of currently prevailing “upper-class” fashion; or, as in the case of conversation between Adigal and his daughter, they express purely aesthetic concern with the use of different words in poetry. And for the same reasons, all far from any religious discussion, Adigal objected to the introduction of words, phrases and sentences from English and Hindi into the Tamil usage. In fact, when we encountered individual words derived from Sanskrit which are usually understood as conveying a religious meaning in Adigal’s works, oftentimes, he happily went on with the Sanskritic usage. This finding needs more attention, also because a deeper discussion of such word usage would lead us to the analysis of structures of ideas which are considered religious. Would the level of religious argumentation in Adigal’s thought perhaps present a clear formulation of reasons for rejection of an “Aryan/Sanskritic religion”? With this question in mind, we shall turn to the discussion about Adigal’s reform of Shaiva Siddhanta.

3. Shaiva Monotheism as Original Religion of the Tamils?

The prominent explanation of Adigal’s religious reform keeps stressing its core assertion that the Tamil reformer wanted to reconstruct the teaching of the old school of Shaiva Siddhanta as a Shaiva monotheism, a religion which would define Tamils and also defend them against the imported (“Aryan”) religion of the Brahmins. How much this claim depends on certain assumptions of the Aryan invasion theory will be discussed in the next section. For the time being, we shall consider several problems of the claim itself. Let us start with a quote from Pandian’s text which characterizes Adigal’s criticism of the “Aryan” religion: “Not only that the Brahmin lacked compassion, but also maintained his old uncivilized ways of worshipping minor deities, that is, he did not seek salvation through the monotheistic Shaivism.” (Pandian 1994, p. 93; emphasis added). Here, surely, one is inclined to think, is an important difference between the Brahminical religion and newly conceived Shaiva Siddhanta: whereas the former keeps worship of a number of “minor deities”, Adigal’s reform brought about the worship of only one god, Shiva. The Tamil reformer allegedly reconstructed the old teaching of Shaiva Siddhanta in order to show that in the distant past, Tamils worshipped only one deity, and the polytheistic worship is a result of later Aryan/Brahminical influences which caused the degeneration of the original Tamil religion. In this sense, it was a revival of the “old good monotheism”, very different from the “Vedic religion”:

Appealing again mainly to ‘commonsense’ (Pakutharivu) Adigal argued that such ‘powerfully moving’ and ‘profound’ Tamil-Shaivite works such as Manickavacagar’s Thiruvaacagam and Meykandar Deva’s Sivajnabotham which invoked the one and only supreme Lord Shiva and which were against the practice of worshipping minor Aryan gods like Indra and Agni and the practice of animal sacrifices, could not possibly be referring to texts like the Vedas that were clearly inimical to such Shaivite practices as monotheism and non-violence.

(Vaithees 2015, p. 193)

Leaving the problematic shortcut about monotheism being equaled to “Shaivite practices” to a future debate, we followed closely Adigal’s ideas about the development of the Tamil concept of “the one and only supreme Lord Shiva”. We found that the explanation does not stand to serious scrutiny. Pandian, Vaithees and other scholars sharing the idea of monotheistic revival of the Tamil Shaivism ignored several points discussed by Adigal in considerable length. It is a fact that the Tamil reformer himself used “theism” as description of his ideas; however, already his specific use of “pluralistic monism” in this context (borrowed from William James) should raise our research curiosity, if not suspicion (Adigal 2015h, p. 262). For the sake of our analysis, we will narrow our focus to three specific problems. First of all, a reader of Adigal’s ideas about the original religious unity in South India will be surprised that the Tamil reformer wrote about the original worship of several deities, including that of Narayana. How can one account for this, if the original deity should have been Shiva only? Secondly, while reconsidering the concept of god which Adigal developed, we will see that it is dualistic in one line of his thoughts, which also raises a question about the validity of the “monotheistic” explanation. Deeper reading about this dualism, as Adigal developed it, will lead to surprising discoveries of the facts which he used as evidence in order to argue for his vision of the original Tamil religion. Thirdly, while trying to ascertain what exactly the Tamil reformer understood under the core concepts of Shaiva Siddhanta connected with his ideas about god, we will come to our question about the possible differences in the content of religious thought between Shaiva Siddhanta, as expressed in Tamil words, and other Indian traditions using Sanskritic terminology.

We begin by noting how Adigal formulated his ideas concerning the development of the concept of god in India, which shaped his vision of religious history of the subcontinent. His was a thesis about a gradual realization or clarification of the spiritual vision between many generations of Indian teachers. This should have led to identification of two principles “in the Godhead”, male and female. In this perspective, the male principle was associated with fire, burning effects and red colour by Adigal (also with help of some linguistic and literary speculations3), whereas the female principle was tied with water, with cooling effects and blue colour (Adigal 2015g, pp. 142–45, 155–58). However, this differentiation was not known to the most ancient era, which Adigal believed to be described in Tolkappiam (dated 2400 B.C. by him):

From the total absence of all allusions to a benign female deity in the Tholkappiam, I am led to conclude that seers in those primitive times did not attain to such a high degree of mental and spiritual development as would enable them to discriminate between the real male principle and the female in God.

(Adigal 2015g, p. 142)

While reading Adigal’s ideas about the two principles “in God”, the difference between his articulation of several characteristics of this “God” and the dominant view which trivialized the account to a “Shaiva monotheism” label becomes evident. In sum, Adigal postulated “the supreme principle of spiritual fire” which needs “the spiritual cold principle” for creation of the material world (Adigal 2015g). The Tamil thinker did not elaborate much on the reasons for his conviction; instead, he offered analogy with colours that could be seen in physical fire, perhaps somehow akin to spiritual vision of the great Tamil teachers of the past.

In the fire itself, if you look through it acutely, you will see a pale blue light. Just as this pale blue cannot be seen as easily as the bright light of fire, so also the blue spiritual form of the Divine Mother cannot be seen so easily as the brilliant ruddy form of the Father.

(Adigal 2015g, p. 143)

In this way, existence of Shiva and Uma, “Divine Mother” and “Divine Father” who are “unborn, immortal, and superhuman”, is postulated in different texts and speeches of Adigal. One line of his ideas is noteworthy in this connection. It is an ongoing struggle to account for other principles and personalities which were part of the old Tamil traditions. The “Hindu Triad” of the creating, maintaining and destroying principles, identified with Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra, is prominent here. First of all, Adigal tried to show that the old Tamils “held a fourth being Lord Muruga to be superior to the three”, and that there were “many higher beings who are called Rudra” in the Shaivite tradition, but finally, they are all “mere servants” of the greatest Lord Rudra (Adigal 2015g, p. 156). Secondly, in somewhat obscure argumentation following these statements, the conviction about creation of the material world from “an appropriate combination of not three but only two principles, the fiery and the watery” serves as the reason for rejecting the validity of the concept of “Hindu Triad” (Adigal 2015g, p. 157). However, it is not rejection of the whole idea about creating, maintaining and destroying principles, but its reformulation:

As we have seen these two Supreme principles together performing the creative, the preservative, and the destructive functions, it is all against all reason and science to uphold an independent third principle either to direct or to control the function of preservation. Further, preservation is not a separate function, but is involved in the creative, it being nothing more than the mere continuation of the creative process, so to speak.

(Adigal 2015g, p. 158)

How is the ancient worship of Narayana connected with these ideas in Adigal’s account? Here, we face a problem with explaining the parts of Adigal’s texts which are not clear, and can be taken as contradictory. On the one hand, Narayana was “the conception formed in the minds of his worshippers”; but on the other hand, the concept should testify to the proper idea of a deity which does not have births, “just as Lord Shiva is invariably spoken of as unborn and immortal” (Adigal 2015g, pp. 148–49). Whatever Adigal wanted to express by these claims, he asserted that this concept was the proof that worshippers of Narayana “in the early times paid their worship to the actual Supreme Being”! (Adigal 2015g, pp. 148–49). The understanding of Narayana changed, according to Adigal, and gave way to a different concept of god. As the “Motherhood of God”, or the “Blue principle”, became clearly recognized by the later seers, Narayana was possibly connected with the female principle of god and his worship retained in the temples of Shiva. Some worshippers of Narayana did not like it, though, and kept the concept of Narayana as male-god. Finally, under the degrading influence of the Aryan migrants, the worshippers of Narayana accepted wrong ideas about the nature of their god and created a religious schism in the “old Hindu church” (Adigal 2015g, pp. 140–52). However these somewhat obscure parts of Adigal’s texts will be taken, they certainly express his conviction that besides Shiva, at least one more deity was recognized as “the Supreme Being” in the ancient history of the Tamils.

Yet another important conclusion must be derived from this discussion: Adigal believed in a unity of the ancient Indian traditions (expressed by misleading “the old Hindu church”), which was based on the development of “spiritual vision” of their many teachers. Although we cannot accept his claims about “the old Hindu church” and a religious schism within it, allegedly caused by deluded Narayana worshippers, the facts presented by Adigal in this regard should catch our attention: that in the old Tamil classical works which should testify to the religious unity of ancient times, we find “glorification not only of Shiva and Muruga but of Narayana also” and that a poet chosen as an example of this glorification “has invoked their blessings with an intense devotion to all three” (Adigal 2015g, p. 144). That in these old Tamil works, alongside with Narayana, the goddess Uma is oftentimes invoked, too. That in “all the Shiva temples you will find not only the images of Lord Shiva and Uma but also that of Lord Narayana set up in separate compartments and duly worshipped” (Adigal 2015g, p. 144). According to Adigal, nothing indicates the religious rivalry between worshippers of these different deities in the old poems:

For instance, the poet Perundevanar has composed invocatory verses addressed to the three gods and has prefixed them separately to some of the magnificent collections of sweet, simple and pure Tamil lyrics… And in a very beautiful lyric collection called ‘Paripadal, we find three poems composed by the poet ‘Kaduvan Illa Eainanar’, of which two glorify Lord Narayana and one Lord Muruga, and in which neither the one nor the other is exalted at the expense of the other.

(Adigal 2015g, pp. 144–45; emphasis added)

All the evidence presents serious problems for the prevailing monotheistic explanation of the Shaivite revival. It certainly suffices to establish that Adigal understood “conception” and “worship” of Narayana to be as much “the recognition of the Supreme Being” as those connected with Shiva. Moreover, this finding raises several questions concerning reformers’ ideas about that “Supreme Being”. Are there two different “manifestations” of the Supreme, or even more, in his thought? Can we even talk about one Supreme Being under this description, and, hence, understand it as a monotheism? It is not only the question of explaining the equal status of Narayana to Shiva; there is also a need for deeper discussion of the two principles “in the Godhead” (male and female, depicted as Shiva and Uma).4 Clearly, Adigal’s thoughts cannot be trivially taken as establishing “the one and only supreme Lord Shiva” in the description of Vaithees and others.

Another problem arises when we consider Pandian’s and Vaithees’ claims concerning Adigal’s rejection of the “worship” of Agni, the Vedic deity of fire. It is true that we did not find any evidence indicating that Adigal would support the Vedic rituals connected with Agni—fire. However, it will need a thorough debate to clarify his conviction that “the ancient Shaiva religion holds that light itself is God”, because the sentences developing this idea suggest that fire is “the manifestation of God” and that “no known process of reasoning can prove fire to be a material substance” (Adigal 2015e, p. 37). In Adigal’s thought, fire was “brought about by Himself out of grace for illuminating both the outer and the inner eyes of the finite souls” (Adigal 2015e, p. 37). Such claims must be systematically studied and explained, which remains as a task for future research. Yet, even in this brief summary we see that fire (agni) played a significant role in his concept of “the Supreme”, hardly a proof of a simple rejection of fire worship. We are convinced that Adigal himself struggled here with the ideas about “God” and Indian religious history which were developed by the Western missionaries and Orientalists. To this line of thought we will turn in the following section. Let us sum up that in the course of our analysis concerning both the reasons for the purification of Tamil from Sanskrit words or phrases and the allegedly specific Tamil content of Adigal’s religious thought, our findings brought us to the following conclusions: (a) There is none such specifically Tamil world of religious ideas which would be expressed in sets of concepts or phrases very different from the content expressed in Sanskrit. (b) Adigal envisioned one “old Hindu Church”, which held worship of Shiva, Narayana and other deities in its centre. The teaching of this ancient ages cannot be trivially described as “monotheistic Shaivism”; rather, further analysis is needed in order to understand his ideas about “male and female principles in God”. (c) While arguing for his explanations, Adigal constantly used quotes from Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata and other “Sanskritic scriptures” in order to support his claims. These findings raise the following question: if this is the case, how can one account for the persistence of the claims about Adigal’s strong opposition, nay, rejection of the “Aryan/Sanskritic” religion?

4. On “Demonolatry”, “Sanskritic Hegemony”, and Competing Religions in Tamilnadu

So far, we have been discussing particular problems with the prevailing explanation of Adigal’s ideas. Now, we shall turn to a larger task: it is important not only to see in which particular cases the explanations cannot be held, but also to understand the theoretical background of these claims. Although this theoretical background is clearly the Aryan invasion theory, which postulated the Aryan–Dravidian division, raised questions about the original religion of the two races, etc., it is not a simple task to disentangle its role in our discussion. Why? Because we must clearly discern between three different positions viś-a-viś the Aryan invasion theory (AIT in the following text): (a) There is the crystallization of the theory itself, with its claims about races, their religion and languages, as seen in works of Caldwell, Pope, F. Max Müller and other Western scholars whose work Adigal studied. (b) Although it could seem that Adigal accepted the basic claims of the AIT from these scholars, we will show that in fact, the Tamil reformer formulated ideas which oppose or otherwise do not fit the claims of the theory. In other words, there is an important question of Adigal’s understanding of and reacting to the theory. (c) Finally, we should consider the role of the AIT in the modern scholarship which shaped the explanations we analyzed in the previous sections. Running through the scholarly discussion is a background assumption that the AIT is the best explanation not only about the ancient history, but also of the emerging modern society of India, and specifically, that it explains a lot about the condition of Tamils in South India in Adigal’s times. Only the consideration of these three perspectives will enable better understanding of Adigal’s ideas about religion and language of Tamils.

Central to the debates about Aryans and Dravidians, as developed by Christian missionaries and Orientalists of the nineteenth century, was connection between physical characteristics of a race and its inner character and development of mind, which meant religious beliefs in the first place. Although the famous Dravidian proof showed the crucial differences between Southern and Northern Indian languages in terms of vocabulary and grammar, and linguistic research was connected together with racial speculations about human prehistory (Trautmann 2006), it was a part of a larger project: the development of theories about the religious history of India. For Caldwell, Pope and many others, the differences in grammar and vocabulary were expression of differences between the levels of human mind’s development in its capacity to understand the true God (revealed in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures). This fundamental dimension of theorizing about races in India was underestimated by several respected scholars. For example, S. Ramaswamy had a point when describing the Western Orientalist attitudes of Adigal’s times:

The ‘inflectional’ Indo-European, representing the summit of linguistic (and racial) achievement, was the standard by which the ‘tonal’, ‘isolating’, and ‘agglutinative’ languages that were not Indo-European were evaluated: the latter were declared incapable of expressing complex, abstract, refined thought. Correspondingly, their speakers were ‘primitive’, ‘barbarous’, and ‘morally deficient’.

(Ramaswamy 1997, p. 37)

However, it is not the character of the languages itself, which caused the “primitive” and “morally deficient” situation of the studied peoples. In the understanding of both Christian missionaries and early Orientalists, the nature of language was a direct reflection of the particular level of human mind’s development in its capacity to conceive of the true God5. Such ideas were part of much older debate, which struggled with the question about the original religion of Ancient India. Could it be the pristine monotheism, as argued by William Jones and several other Orientalists, or did the original monotheism already degenerate into idolatry when the forefathers of Indian people reached the subcontinent? These debates presumed the historical truth of the Biblical account and dealt with the linguistic evidence loosely, or worse6. Within the limits of this questioning, the Western missionaries and scholars hypothesized a civilizational ladder for all human kind, and could formulate such strong condemnation as Gover, the missionary stationed in Madras:

We may say generally that a large number of them... belong to the lowest Paleozoic strata of humanity[,] ...peoples whom no nation acknowledges as its kinsmen, whose languages, rich in words for all that can be eaten or handled, seem absolutely incapable of expressing the complex conceptions of the intellect or the higher forms of consciousness, whose life seems confined to the glorification of animal wants, with no hope in the future and no pride in the past. They are for the most part peoples without a literature and without a history [,] ... peoples whose tongues in some instances have twenty names for murder, but no name for love, no name for gratitude, no name for God.

(Gover 1871, pp. vii–viii)

Let us stress that behind such descriptions, there is a very specific understanding of “the higher forms of consciousness”, which would have concepts of “love”, “gratitude” and “God”. They should develop the Judeo-Christian concept of God in the first place; otherwise, no matter how much refined in respect of other topics, a consciousness lacking this concept was delegated to the lower levels of human thought. Within this larger framework of ideas, Robert Caldwell hypothesized about the origins of Shiva worship and used the concept of demonolatry, one of the crucial concerns of the Christian thinkers for centuries. Caldwell believed that the ancient Dravidians (not only Tamils) were adherents of shamanism, a rude and primitive form of religion which was defined as worship of demons. Let us stress the fact that Caldwell accepted the ideas about the origins of shamanism in India that were shared by many influential scholars of his times. This demonolatry was ascribed to one of the great races of humankind, the Scythians, and speculations about the development of several languages within this race went hand in hand with speculations about the beliefs and practical expressions of this religion. Bloody sacrifices, wild dances and magicians exciting themselves to frenzy—such is the description of shamanism from the missionaries and Orientalists alike. On the larger topic of the speculations about shamanism, we recommend the research of Andrei Znamenski, especially his book The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination (Znamenski 2007). For the application of hypothesizing shamanism in the Dravidian debate, see relevant parts of Caldwell’s A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Or South-Indian Family of Languages, especially the “Ancient Religion of the Dravidians” (Caldwell 1875, pp. 579–97), repeated by others7. For our debate, it is important to notice that worship of Shiva was understood by Robert Caldwell as expression of this demon-worship. In his opinion, the old Dravidian demon Rudra was absorbed into the Brahminical religion of the Aryans:

It appears to me that an element of demonism, ready to receive further development, may be traced even in the Aitareya Brahmana of the Rig-veda, in connection with the character attributed, and the worship offered, to Rudra, afterwards identified with Śiva. I apprehend that we have a mythical record of the adoption of the aboriginal demonolatry into the Brahmanical system … in the Puranic story of the sacrifice of Daksha…

(Caldwell 1875, p. 581)

The ability to absorb different “aboriginal” and “lower” deities, even demons, was ascribed to the “Brahmanical system” by many Christian missionaries working in India. Behind such speculations we can trace an important assumption which became an implicit truism of the AIT. It presents a model of religious competition which is inevitable: Religions must compete because their core beliefs are crucial for life of their adherents; in other words, their specific doctrines are fundaments for law, morality, social order and many other dimensions of human life. Religious beliefs are the core characteristic of different races, expressed in their specific languages, and differences in physical features are secondary and even dubious. Let us not forget that religions, on this understanding, must compete also because they are expressions of different levels of the human mind’s capacity to conceive of the one true God. In this perspective, Caldwell identified several periods of Tamil cultural development, which clearly reflect his understanding of it being a religious history: from the “Jaina cycle” through “the Tamil Ramayana cycle” to “the Shaiva revival cycle”, and “the Vaishnava cycle”, and further to more recent times. From reading the passages on these periods it becomes clear that Caldwell saw them as sequences of one religion competing with and replacing another. Even in case of the evidence for the co-existence of Shaivas and Vaishnavas in one period of time, his deeply rooted assumption of inevitable religious competition led him to this conclusion:

If there was so wide a separation between Puritans and Churchmen in the seventeenth century in England, we need not wonder that many centuries earlier the Shaiva and Vaishnava poets of the Tamil country, though probably contemporaries, or nearly so, believed that they had no ideas in common, and moved in the orbits of their several creeds far apart.

(Caldwell 1875, p. 144; emphasis added)

How did Adigal react to all these explanations of his own people? While reading works of the Tamil reformer, it is easy to conclude that he basically accepted the Western ideas about religion, language, race and their role in the Tamil past and present. Indeed, several passages repeat the claims from works of R. Caldwell or G. U. Pope, and Adigal’s works are replete with quotes from the works of Western Orientalists, such as H. H. Wilson, F. M. Müller, M. Monier-Williams, G. Bühler, Z. A. Ragozin, or M. Winternitz. Adigal’s acceptance of the emerging AIT seems to be obvious; for examples, see his “Can Hindi be the Lingua Franca of India?” and “The Effect of Brahmin Colonization” (Adigal 2015e, pp. 6–54, 2015g, pp. 153–55). It looks as if he only changed the evaluation of the ancient Tamil people within the accepted Western structure of ideas: Whereas for the British scholars, the Aryans migrating from the Northern India brought advanced language and culture to barbaric Dravidian people, in Adigal’s view the Tamil religion and culture was higher than that of the coming Aryans, led by Brahminical priesthood. However, a careful reading of his texts confronts us with a puzzling problem. Although the Tamil reformer repeated the set of core ideas which characterized the differences between Dravidians and Aryans in Western thought, he de facto rejected them all.

Let us start with the differences between Adigal’s and Caldwell’s explanations about the origins of Shiva worship. Adigal simply ignored Caldwell’s idea of ancient Tamil demonolatry absorbed into the “Brahmanical system”, perhaps thinking that his positive description of sublime Shaiva Siddhanta showed where Caldwell and others were wrong. In “The Conception of God as Rudhra” and several other relevant texts, Adigal’s argumentation concerning the origins of Shiva worship is striking: in order to defend his understanding of Shiva being the same deity as Rudra, the Tamil thinker was leaning on the authority of the Vedas, the allegedly Aryan scripture, which should have propagated “minor gods” in the dominant understanding of scholars today:

Do not these traits in the portrayal of Rudra in the Rig Veda and of Shiva in the ancient and later poems in Tamil clearly indicate the identity of the Rudra of the former Aryan work with the Shiva of both the ancient and later works in Tamil? To these facts one more might be added as showing in a still clearer light the oneness of the apparently two gods.

(Adigal 2015e, p. 43; emphasis added)

Had Adigal really seen the Vedas as alien (or even inimical) to Tamil traditions, why did he not simply join Caldwell and rejoice in criticism of the “demon-worship” which Aryans should have practiced? Adigal could easily draw a divisive line between the alleged Aryan understanding of Rudra and his own claims about the Tamil concept of Shiva, and rejoice in the contrast between the two, the despicable demon of the Aryans and the sublime god of the Tamils. Why did he painstakingly work with the Vedic verses in order to prove that Vedic Rudra is indeed the very same deity as Tamil Shiva? In doing so, he de facto accepted the Vedic tradition as an important source of the Tamil thought and practices concerning Shiva. This is hardly an act of rejection of the Sanskritic traditions and their “minor deities” or “demons”:

Now, let me turn to the oldest literary records both in Sanscrit and in Tamil in order to determine the intrinsic nature and function of Rudra from the descriptions given of him in them.

(Adigal 2015g, p. 109)

This can be generalized. Although we found some passages in Adigal’s work which repeat some of the AIT claims about the religious differences between Dravidians and Aryans, there are many parts which de facto accept the authority of Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata and many other works in Sanskrit. Manu and several other important personalities of the “Aryan” traditions were originally Tamils, according to Adigal. If Manu was a Tamil law-giver, and varnas a very good, nay, “scientific” organization of the ancient Tamil society, later accepted by the Aryans in the perspective of our Tamil reformer, we should contrast these claims with the understanding of R. Caldwell, H. H. Wilson, F. M. Müller and others whose work Adigal used8—and also with the understanding of the currently dominant story about differences between Tamil and “Aryan” religion. If Adigal wrote about the benefits of the varna system and even claimed Tamil origin of Manu and other characters from the Sanskritic traditions, how could several scholars characterize his efforts as “anti-Brahminical”, and a fight against the “caste hierarchy”?

Add to these findings another fact: Adigal did not accepted the basic ideas behind the theorizing of the origins of the caste system, that is, the enslavement of the Dasyus by the invading Aryans. For Ragozin and other Western scholars, Vedas contained the evidence of the Aryan race subduing the Dravidians, and of racial hatred expressed also in religious competition. The once-conquering Aryans should have been forefathers of the Brahminical communities in South India. For Adigal, however, the two groups were rather peoples of different traditions and levels of dharma, who mixed together a long time ago: “…it has been shown in this section that the existence of a separate Aryan race in India is a mere fiction and nothing more” (Adigal 2015h, p. 296). Instead of the invasion of the mighty warriors and their priests with superior religion, Adigal described small groups of poor migrants who lived at the mercy of the Tamil kings.9 The migrating Aryans were poor materially, but also in terms of their religion and culture. In his view, these were the Tamils themselves who should have been responsible for the degeneration of their language and religion. We should also take into account that according to Adigal, the degeneration happened many centuries after the alleged advent of Aryans in South India:

But all the great glory of the ‘Tamils’ past has, within the last three or four centuries, been eclipsed thoroughly by the influence not of the Aryans whose numbers in this vast Indian continent had, from the first, been very small, but of the crafty Tamils themselves who embraced the Aryan cult and adopted their language and later Puranic myths to serve their own end. A parallel course pursued by the modern day brahmins who are making English as their own, strikingly exemplifies what their forefathers did in the centuries preceding our own.

(Adigal 2015d, p. 12; emphasis added; compare with Adigal 2015h, pp. 298–99)

So much for the puzzles of Adigal’s own theorizing. Now, we shall turn to the assumption running throughout the work of recent scholarship on Adigal. There is almost unequivocal acceptance of the AIT’s model of competing religions, which should also have been accepted by Adigal. Let us recall that the theory itself assumes validity of the general rule about religious competition; it assumes that one race (the Aryans) attempted to subdue and dominate the other (the Dravidians), and this is specifically revealed in the enforcement of the Brahminical religious worldview and practices on the subdued people. This understanding found its expression in the idea of “Sanskritic hegemony”. Thus, for example, Sumathi Ramaswamy described the era from the 7th to the 13th centuries, having followed works of Kamil Zvelebil, Sheldon I. Pollock, and others:

These latter centuries saw the growing linguistic, literary, ritual, and political hegemony of Sanskrit in the Tamil-speaking region, not least of the manifestations of which were the increasing Sanskritization of Tamil vocabulary, syntax, and genres; the tremendous Sanskritization of kingship and rule; and the consolidation of Sanskritic ‘Hinduism’ as the dominant religion of the land.

(Ramaswamy 1998, p. 70)

In other words, religious competition must be the cause of the oppression of local languages in this perspective. Sanskrit is understood as a “sacred language” of the ruling people which has been competing with the Tamil usage. While the former was flourishing and spreading, the latter was presumably suffering and degenerating. We shall leave aside here questions concerned with the specific historical steps, that is, how exactly and when the Brahminical ideas and practices should have been imposed. Instead of this line of inquiry, we will keep our focus on the guiding idea of imposition of one group’s religion and language on another. It is present even in evaluations of Tolkappiyam, an important grammatical text which Adigal often used for his argumentation. In the view of P. T. S. Iyengar,

Tolkappiyar …tries to impose the Arya canon law on the Tamils and to equate Tamil customs, social and literary, to Arya ones; yet his attempts to mix up Arya and Tamil culture is not much of success, for the two cultures, one based on the fire cult and the other on the fireless cult, one, the product of a religious aristocracy and the other, of a social democracy, could blend as little as oil and water.

(Iyengar 1985, p. 18)

The view establishes a stark and essentially determined difference between the “two races”, implying somewhat automatically competition or enmity, which does not allow thinking about other possible modes of mutual interactions between different groups of people, or their co-existence. As an unquestioned assumption, this description ruled debates for many decades. If Ramaswamy and many other scholars were convinced about the validity of the AIT, it is understandable that they saw Adigal’s work as its endorsement. Yet, as we have shown in the case of the reasons for purification of Tamil, on problems with the allegedly monotheistic Shaivite revival and now, in the case of Adigal’s de facto rejection of the AIT claims, this explanation cannot be held anymore. In this situation, we have to ask how to make sense of these problems and how to proceed to a better explanation of Adigal’s work?

5. Conclusions: Towards Adequate Understanding of Adigal’s Efforts

It is time to recollect findings from all the previous sections: (a) We can convincingly show that Maraimallai Adigal’s efforts to purify Tamil language from Sanskrit (and even Hindi and English) influences had several good reasons, but none even slightly connected with the differences of meaning in terms of their religious content. In fact, when Adigal discussed matters usually understood as religious, such as the nature of Shiva, differences between human deeds, etc., he used Tamil and Sanskrit words as synonymous. At the same time, he kept the usage of words clearly of Sanskritic origins, even in the discussion of the core concepts of Shaiva Siddhanta. This indicates a pool of concepts shared between Sanskritic and Tamil traditions, where the very same concept is referred to by different words of the respective languages. (b) We presented strong evidence against the alleged difference between Aryan and Tamil religion in Adigal’s thought, namely, that it should have been that of the Vedic polytheism versus the monotheism of Shaiva Siddhanta. Just on the contrary, there are quite many indications for his belief in certain unity of the old Indian traditions. (c) This led us to a broader topic of Adigal’s de facto rejection of the AIT claims concerning the religious differences between Aryans and Tamils. On the one hand, we found rejection of animal sacrifices and meat eating, and of some points of Shankaracharya’s teaching, but, on the other hand, his acceptance of the Vedas, Upanishads and other Sanskritic authorities whenever Adigal discussed important topics about Tamil traditions, starting with explanation of Shiva. This cannot be understood as a rejection of the “Aryan” religion as such. In fact, his description of the Aryans opposes the Western theories of the racial conquest, and directs this or that particular point of criticism raised against Aryans finally to Tamils themselves.

In order to understand Adigal’s ideas and the claims of the old and recent scholarship about them, we must reconsider the role of the AIT in the debate. It is truly strange when you think of it: while Caldwell and other Western scholars presumed the model of competing religions, which should have characterized the relationship between the Aryans and the Dravidians, and many modern scholars accepted it, Adigal de facto rejected both the claim and its many related ideas. We should also notice how those who adhere to the AIT’s model of religious competition between the Aryans and the Tamils did not consider many passages from the work of our Tamil reformer showing the facts. They can only lean on those quotes in Adigal’s work which seem to endorse the AIT. And because this stance precludes deeper analysis, their claims remain vague, only seemingly supported by isolated quotes from Adigal’s work.

How to make sense of the problems which our analysis of Adigal’s ideas brought to surface? Our close reading of his works revealed strange puzzles and contradictions, which we take as a consequence of a very specific dialogical situation. Let us imagine his times: Did Adigal have a choice not to engage in the debates within the framework of the AIT, including its basic assumptions, concepts and questions, as established by the British colonizers, if he wanted to lead his people to solutions of severe problems of the era? Given the colonial situation in education, public debates, etc., he did not have another choice. Adigal must have entered the arena of debates about his own culture via one specific route: by accepting the framework of ideas of the foreign colonizers about his own culture. He must have used sets of concepts introduced by this theorizing, such as Aryan and Dravidian races, religion, god, demons, worship, etc. Let us stress that his acceptance of the debate about his own culture, introduced to India by the Western scholars, does not mean that the Western descriptions, questions and theories were intellectually superior to the domestic thought. It is just a recognition of the very specific situation of colonial times.

Another assumption underlies the accounts of Adigal that became prominent in the last few decades: the assumption that he understood the Western theories about Indian religion and culture well. Since he frequently used terms like Aryans and Dravidians, and quoted from the works of Western scholars, he obviously developed his own ideas about their meaning. However, from this it does not automatically follow that he understood or endorsed them. Indeed, Adigal used specific concepts or series of ideas from the theories of the Western missionaries, Orientalists and others, but their use by the Tamil intellectual indicates a different background of ideas which has nothing to do with the original meaning and context of the Western ideas in question. We presented ample evidence that Adigal did not just accept the Western ideas about Tamil people. We suggest that Adigal tried to express his domestic understanding and concerns, in other words, a set of very specific Indian ideas, in the concepts of the Western framework of thought. In this way we understand Adigal’s conviction about the “original Hindu church” of the Ancient India, his acceptance of the authority of the Sanskritic texts, and other ideas and moves of the Tamil reformer which testify against the model of competing religions of the Aryans and Dravidians, to be indications of another set of ideas about the domestic situation in Tamilnadu.

What are these specific Indian ideas that shaped Adigal’s thought? Several of them were mentioned, when we reconsidered his dealing with the basic concepts of Shaiva Siddhanta: ideas about human deeds, a way they are conducted, and their consequences (vinay, karman, but also sattva-guna, etc.), or concepts such as pathi, pacu and mayai. For our debate about the validity of the model of competing religions, we shall especially consider Adigal’s ideas about ozhukkam. This Tamil word was synonymous for him with Sanskrit dharma, and Adigal used it mainly for description of practices which he considered crucial on the path of Shaiva Siddhanta, such as non-violence and a vegetarian diet. These are in turn basic for cultivation of compassion (karuna), seen as the root of dharma in various Shaiva Siddhanta sources. Although a vegetarian diet could be seen as having small importance in our debate about religion, and as a trivial issue in today’s world, for Adigal, it was an essential practice needed in the development of human beings. In his vision, every living creature has the right to live, thrive and thus grow its understanding and promote its capacity for happiness. If a human being, “in its eagerness to fill its stomach”, kills and enjoys the meat of animals, it “descends lower down in the scale of culture and delicacy of moral sense and joins the brute creations.” (Adigal 2015g, pp. 184–85). Here, we should notice Adigal’s ongoing efforts to preach the vegetarian diet, to study relevant Indian and Western sources on it, and to join forces with the organizations which promoted it (such as The Bombay Humanitarian League).

The focus on karuna, which encompassed the practice of vegetarian diet, is seen also in Adigal’s claim about the Tamil origin of non-violence, helping others, etc. He was convinced that “Buddhist ethical religion itself was a development of one important phase of the Tamilian faith” (Adigal 2015g, p. 46), and that the old Tamil agricultural communities were the examples of a society practicing compassion and other virtues. This is where his praise for the Vellala community of Tamilnadu comes into our debate. Vellala jati of Adigal’s times was the heir and guardian of the highest ozhukkam for the Tamil intellectual. We do not have to accept these views, but we should realize how in his attempts to use the results of work of Western scholars about his own people, Adigal drew on the Indian resources and formulated a very different criticism of “the Brahminical priesthood” than Caldwell and others. The Tamils who were “influenced by the Aryans” should have abandoned animal sacrifices, non-vegetarian diets, harmful behaviour to others, adultery, pride, etc. It is a criticism of practices and immoral acts in the first instance, which does not establish any specific difference between Aryan and Dravidian religions in terms of their doctrinal content. In fact, Adigal indicated a vision of Indian communities that differ from each other only by a certain level of understanding and practices of the very same dharma, and gave a warning to those who would spread hatred between the Shaivas of Tamilnadu and other communities:

By this I do not mean that we must hate the Aryans and their converts; on the other hand, I wish they must be let alone to work in their own way for their own well-being. And it may not be against our policy, to lend even our help and support them, provided that course of action does not affect the welfare of our own people.

(Adigal 2015g, p. 230; emphasis added)

We suggest that a careful analysis of Adigal’s thought brings to light another model of relationships between different traditions, reflecting the Indian situation much better than the model of competing religions: the model of co-operation, with some conflicts and quarrels here and there, but over-all, enabling different Indian traditions not only to live together, but also to enrich each other. This is how we can explain what Adigal meant by the original unity in “the Hindu church”; by ancient “Dravido-Aryans” who were allegedly ruled by Manu (Adigal 2015h, pp. 297–98); by repeated statements about different deities which were “duly worshipped” in Shaivite temples; by recognition of different deities in the old Tamil poetry, which “did not exalted” one deity “at the expanse of the other”; by de facto recognizing the Sanskritic traditions as resources for Tamil understanding of Shiva, etc. These are indications of a cultural framework which does not have doctrinal conflict between different religions at its core. Because we have come to the end of our analysis in this article, we can only briefly refer to the research which supports our suggestion.

For example, David Shulman’s work presents a vivid picture of the culture where the Tamil and Sanskritic traditions enriched and inspired each other, sharing ideals of highly educated or cultivated people (Shulman 2016, pp. 204–06). In opposition to Caldwell’s claim about the separation between Shaivas and Vaishnavas, compared to the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants of the seventeenth century England, Shulman described the shared focus of both Shaiva and Vaishnava Bhakti traditions, their fascinating synthesis of Tamil and Sanskrit poetry, etc. He also stressed that the Bhakti poems of both Shaivas and Vaishnavas in Tamilnadu “are full of praise for the Veda, for Brahmins, for Sanskrit erudition and orthodox rituals’’ (Shulman 2016, p. 120). This is how Shulman described the development of Tamil traditions:

This crystallizing Tamil literary tradition was, in its own terms, highly autonomous and self-regulating, but not in the sense of being remote from Sanskrit sources or influences; there is no such dichotomy in any of our sources (…) Pallava-period inscriptions are primarily in Sanskrit but also reveal strong Tamil elements, including Tamil verse forms and biruda royal titles.

(Shulman 2016, p. 105; emphasis added)

This leads us to awareness of another important problem in the debate about “Sanskritic hegemony”: It simply ignores the fact that in these rich interactions of different traditions, Tamil poetry strongly influenced and changed Sanskrit language use. Instead of “hegemony”, that is, the ruling of one language over another, resulting in one language being impoverished and oppressed, we see mutual enrichment going both ways between Tamil and Sanskrit. In these conclusive remarks, we can only point out another example of the research which can be followed more closely. Sanskrit recitations (stotras) have been composed for many centuries by now in Tamil Vaishnava traditions, but their Sanskrit is formed by the influences of the Tamil language and poetry to a great extent. The following insight from Vasudha Narayanan is valid also for the Shaiva stotras (with the necessary change of “Alvar” to “Nayanar”):

Evidence internal to the stotras makes it doubtful that these Sanskrit devotional compositions were written for persons outside the milieu of the Tamil-speaking areas. For one thing, they contain too many nuances based on the direct rendering of Alvar phraseology into Sanskrit to be fully comprehended—let alone enjoyed!—without an intimate knowledge of the Alvar hymns. For another, they abound in references to local temples and deities, meaningless to those outside the Tamil-speaking region.

(Narayanan 1993, p. 59)

If we are right about the model of co-operating traditions (and it was our aim to show how the model of competing religions is the crucial misconception, which is at the root of untenable assertions about Maraimalai Adigal’s work), then the co-operation model will be more fruitful for understanding the work of other South Indian scholars and reformers. We are convinced that it is time to start over again in theorizing differences between groups of people in India, distancing ourselves from the pervasive assumptions of the AIT. Such research should also look into the far-reaching changes in Indian society which came as a result of the British colonization in a new way. Instead of repeating the untenable claims about Brahmins being a unified group which originated with the advent of the Aryans, the fresh research will take seriously evidence about the variety and specific position of the different Brahminical groups (see (Wagoner 2003; Fuller 2011) for interesting and telling examples). In the same manner, it will be necessary to deal with our understanding of Vellalas and other groups. Instead of repeating vague and sloppy arguments of the ideologues of Tamil nationalism, who effectively rejected Adigal’s ideas, such research will strive toward coherence and clarity in its formulation of ideas. After all, is this not one of the inspiring legacies of Maraimalai Adigal?