The Renewal of the Priesthood: Modernity and Traditionalism in a South Indian Temple 9780691225517, 0691116571, 069111658X, 2003040491

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THE RENEWAL OF THE PRIESTHOOD

T H E R E N E WA L OF THE PRIESTHOOD

MODERNITY AND TRADITIONALISM IN A SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLE

C. J. Fuller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright  2003 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuller, C. J. (Christopher John), 1949– The renewal of the priesthood: modernity and traditionalism in a South Indian temple / Chris Fuller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 0-691-11657-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN: 0-691-11658-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Priests, Hindu—India—Madurai. 2. Maturai Aruo`miku Ma˚o¨a˚o`ci Cuntara˚svarar a˚layam 3. Ma˚na˚ko`a˚ (Hindu deity)—Cult—India—Madurai. 4. Madurai (India)—Religious life and customs. I. Title. BL1241.44.F83 2003 294.5'61'095482—dc21

2003040491

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the priests of the Minakshi Temple and the members of their families

Contents

Figures and Tables

ix

Preface

xi

Note on Transliteration

xv

Key to Figures 1 and 2

xvii

Chapter One The Priests and the Minakshi Temple’s Renovation Ritual

1

Chapter Two Rights, Duties, and Work

19

Chapter Three Family and Domestic Life

57

Chapter Four The Agamas and Priestly Education

80

Chapter Five Religious Politics and the Priests

114

Chapter Six Modernity, Traditionalism, and the State

152

Notes

169

Glossary

191

Bibliography

195

Index

205

Figures and Tables

Figures 1. Plan of the Minakshi Temple, Central Area

xix

2. Plan of the Minakshi Temple (adapted from the plan dated 1896 in W. Francis, Madura [1906])

xx

3. Partial Genealogy of Leading Priests in the 1995 Renovation Ritual

13

4. Partial Genealogy of Kulacekara Priests and Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar’s Heirs

25

Tables 1. Leading Priests at the 1995 Renovation Ritual

12

2. Men’s Educational Standards by Age

46

3. Women’s Educational Standards by Age

46

4. Pillaiyarpatti School Daily Timetable

100

Preface

THIS BOOK about the priests of the Minakshi Temple in the South Indian city of Madurai is partly a sequel to Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple (cited throughout as SG), which was published in 1984. That book was mainly based on fieldwork carried out in the Temple for twelve months in 1976–77 and two months in 1980. In 1984, 1988, and 1991, I returned for short visits to Madurai, each lasting about two weeks, and even on the first occasion I could see that the priests’ position had started to improve. By 1991, the improvement in their fortunes was unmistakable, and I then planned a further period of research to collect the material needed to bring the priests’ story up to date. In the winter of 1994–95, I carried out four months of fieldwork, supplemented by another visit later in 1995 to observe the Temple’s renovation ritual (described in chapter 1), and I also returned to Madurai for short periods each year from 1996 to 2002 (except 2001). On each of these visits, I also spent time in Chennai (formerly Madras) collecting information about the wider context of political and religious change affecting the priests. A large part of the information reported in this book was collected in 1994– 95, but some of it comes from earlier years and some from the more recent visits, which, despite their brevity, have allowed me to keep an eye on the continually changing picture. As I noted in the preface to SG, the Minakshi Temple cannot be given a pseudonym. In 1976–77 and 1980, the priests were very concerned about their future in the Temple and therefore justifiably worried about the effect of the publication of any potentially damaging information. Now that conditions have changed, there is less worry, but as in SG, I have sometimes suppressed or omitted information because it might be damaging or hurtful, and again I must ask the reader to believe that the accuracy of my account has not been compromised. In some respects, indeed, the problem of anonymity and confidentiality is now more difficult than it was. In SG, I never identified living people in the Temple by name; this was quite easy because all the priests used to be in fairly similar circumstances, so that differences between individuals did not matter very much. By the 1990s, that was no longer true; as this book shows, the priesthood has become increasingly differentiated, especially by education and income, and particular individuals have become more prominent. In telling the story of the priests today, therefore, I cannot avoid reference to individuals altogether, and in practice it would be impossible to disguise their identity by giving them pseudonyms. Anyone familiar

xii

P R E FA C E

with the priests would easily identify these individuals, even if they were given false names (which would probably just sow confusion about who actually is who), and to anyone unfamiliar with them—almost all my readers—it makes no difference anyway. In this book, I have therefore decided to use real names (usually formal given names but for some men the nicknames by which they are always known), although I only do so for people I know fairly well or, in a few cases, for priests who have taken on public roles (as in the renovation ritual); I have also tried to ensure that nobody is ever identified by name when I am referring to anything that might be regarded as prejudicial. To the priests, I have always made it clear that one main purpose of my research would be to write about them. In general, the priests are fairly well educated and they belong to a community in which education and learning are traditionally accorded very high value, so that they had little difficulty in understanding the nature of research. Moreover, the priests probably know more about my work than most anthropologists’ informants do, because they have received copies of SG, in both English and Tamil. When SG was published in 1984, I presented one copy to the priests’ association at a ceremony in the Temple, but in those days I just could not afford to give away lots of expensive hardback books. In 1991, a South Asian edition of SG was published in Delhi, and I arranged for a copy to be given to every household, so that all the priests and their family members would have access to it. In 1999, a Tamil translation of SG was published; its release was marked by a ceremony in the Temple and copies were again distributed to all priestly households. A few people have complained that their families never got copies, but although fairly confident that this is untrue, I admit that I have no idea how many people have ever looked at the book. Some priests have told me that they are convinced that most of the books, in both English and Tamil, have disappeared unopened into cupboards, except for a glance at the photographs. On the other hand, I know that the handful of priests who can read English reasonably well have looked at the original text, and that a sizeable minority of men have consulted the Tamil version. One young man read the whole book in Tamil carefully and made some quite detailed comments about it, but as far as I can tell, the majority of the priests who have looked at it have been interested in reading about their own history, and especially the description of their rights and duties in the Temple (SG, ch. 4), which has been periodically consulted for information on specific issues. A couple of priests have complained that information about them should never have been published at all, but many more—even if they have not read it—have said that they are pleased that a book about them exists. Some younger men have expressed particular satisfaction that they can now read about their own history. To some extent, my decision about what to

P R E FA C E

xiii

include and omit in this book, and about the use of names, has been reached on the basis that the priests who have given me information have been able to see the previous product of my research and have a reasonable understanding of it. In my research in the Minakshi Temple, partly because of my relationship with the priests, I have never had close contacts with officials in its administration. I have obtained some information from officials, who have always been formally polite to me, but I should make it clear that their side of the story is largely unreported in this book. In the preface to SG, I expressed sympathy for the priests in their less than ideal predicament in the late 1970s, but also said that I had tried to avoid any lapse into partiality on the priests’ behalf. In this book, reporting on the renewal of the priests’ fortunes, I remain sympathetic, but again I have tried to avoid partiality, and like all liberal secularists, I am dismayed by the rising tide of religious nationalism in India, which has contributed much to the priests’ betterment. My acknowledgments must begin with the Minakshi Temple priests and the members of their families—almost all of whom have always been courteous, friendly, and helpful—and as a token of my immense gratitude I dedicate this book to all of them. Some priests, of course, have given me much more information than others, but it would be invidious to try to discriminate among them. However, I do owe special thanks to Sathasiva Bhattar for many years of friendship and, alongside his wife, Chellammal, and the rest of his family, for a great deal of hospitality as well. The material on priestly education reported in this book could not have been collected without the kind cooperation of the gurus and students in the schools at Allur, Pillaiyarpatti, and Tirupparankundram. I visited Tirupparankundram school frequently and am particularly grateful to its guru, Raja Bhattar, and his students. In SG, I thanked K. S. Sasisekaran, my research assistant who also acted as an interpreter. After working with me in 1976–77 and 1980, Sasi moved permanently to Chennai, where he eventually became a senior computer engineer and trade unionist, but when I have returned to India, he has usually taken leave for a week or two to work in Madurai, and with his assistance my productivity in the field has always dramatically improved. Our working partnership and friendship have lasted for twenty-five years and I am immensely grateful to Sasi for all the help he has given me. I also owe thanks to several other part-time research assistants: in Madurai in 1994–95, I was helped by D. Rajesh and S. Sukumar, and in Chennai in 1995–97 by Haripriya Narasimhan, who also, with Thulasirani Rajkumar, carefully collected press cuttings for me. Ve´ronique Be´ne´ı¨, John Harriss, and Johnny Parry read an earlier draft of this book, on which they gave me valuable advice and criticism, although I

xiv

P R E FA C E

also want to express my gratitude to them for sustained encouragement and critical support over many years. Mattison Mines and Peter van der Veer read the penultimate version for Princeton University Press, and I thank them for their endorsement and critical comments; I also thank Haripriya Narasimhan for her perceptive observations on this version. For twenty years, in all my writing about Agamic texts and education, I have depended greatly on the expert advice of He´le`ne Brunner, to whom I am most grateful. During the course of my research and writing, countless other friends and colleagues have helped me with encouragement, advice, information, and comments. Unfortunately, it is impossible to name them all here, but I particularly thank Jackie Assayag, Laura Bear, Andre´ Be´teille, Nick Dirks, Henrike Donner, Tony Good, Thomas Hansen, Ginni Ishimatsu, Helen Lambert, Loki Madan, David Mosse, Caroline and Filippo Osella, M.S.S. Pandian, Sheldon Pollock, P. Radhakrishnan, Arvind Rajagopal, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Marie-Louise Reiniche, Gilles Tarabout, and Sylvia Vatuk. I also owe thanks to Mary Murrell for her efficient support and Barbara Coster for her precise copyediting. In Chennai, I have long depended on M. A. Kalam for consistently interesting conversation, perceptive insights, and practical assistance, and I am also indebted to him and Nagina for all their hospitality. In Madurai, especially in 1994–95, I was grateful to be given a great deal of practical help and useful information by S. Kitchlu and much kind hospitality by Fatima. I thank K. Rajivan for providing important information and unblocking bureaucratic obstacles in Madurai and Chennai, and with Anuradha Rajivan, for generous hospitality. I thank Francis Jayapathy for his always wise insights and his loyal support. In 1994–95, I received a lot of help and hospitality in the French Institute of Pondicherry and the E´cole Franc¸aise d’Extreˆme Orient, for which I am particularly grateful to Jackie Assayag, Franc¸ois and Sonia Houllier, and the late Franc¸oise L’Hernault; I also thank S. Sambandha Gurukkal of Pondicherry for valuable advice on Agamic texts. Versions of parts of this book have been presented in lectures, seminars, workshops, and conferences in Britain, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, and the United States, and I thank all those who gave me the benefit of their comments on those occasions. Among them are many of my present and former colleagues and students in the London School of Economics, to whom I am particularly grateful. I thank Mina Moshkeri of the LSE for carefully preparing the figures in this book. Thanks are due to the Economic and Social Research Council, which financially supported the research in 1994–95. Subsequent research visits were supported by the ESRC or the LSE. As always, I have an inestimable debt of gratitude to my wife, Penny Logan, and my son, Alexis.

Note on Transliteration

THE MAJORITY of technical ritual terms used in the Minakshi Temple, as well as the names of deities and texts, are Sanskrit in origin, and in the speech of Temple officiants their pronunciation does not deviate very far from Sanskrit. Transliterated Tamil orthography often makes these words almost unrecognizable by other Indianists, however. For these reasons, almost all these terms and names are transliterated from their Sanskrit form, unless the context requires the Tamil form. Occasionally, it is impossible to avoid a rather odd mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil forms. All words, Sanskrit or Tamil, are systematically transliterated with diacritical marks on their first appearance; thereafter, they are printed without diacritics and their spelling is adjusted in the usual way: ri for r , ch for c, v or w for v, sh for s´ and s, and in Tamil the consonantal sounds g, j, d, b, sh, and s are indicated. An exception has been made, however, for the names of the Temple priests’ groups, so that they are consistent with the spellings used throughout SG: thus Vikkira Pantiya, Kulacekara, and Tirucculi, instead of Vikkira Pandiya, Kulashekara, and Tiruchuli. Terms and names that occur at more than one or two places in the text are included in the glossary. Personal names, geographical and historical names, and the names of castes are, however, spelled in their conventional, anglicized forms. The Tamil-speaking region of the Madras Presidency became Madras state after Indian Independence; the state was renamed Tamilnadu (Tamil Nadu) in 1969. The name of its capital city was changed from Madras to Chennai in 1996. Throughout this book, I use the modern names for the state and city, except where the historical context requires “Madras.” Tamilnadu is divided into administrative districts that have been repeatedly reorganized and renamed; they are referred to by their names at the time of writing. •

•

Key to Figures 1 and 2 Figures 1 and 2 are simplified versions of the more detailed maps 3 and 2 respectively contained in SG (xx–xxvi). Unless otherwise indicated, all numbers refer to deities’ immovable images. “AM” and “MM” in figure 1 indicate the ardhaman d apa (“half hall”) and maha¯man d apa (“great hall”) respectively. It has been impossible to avoid a sometimes odd mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil forms of names in this key. • •

• •

Minakshi’s Temple 1 Mı¯na¯ksı¯, principal image (mu¯lamu¯rti) in main shrine 2 Can d es´varı¯, form of goddess to be worshipped after Minakshi 3 Bedchamber (palliyar_ai) with movable image of Minakshi (Palliyar_ai Amman_) inside 4 Main flagstaff of Minakshi’s temple, next to sacrifice stone (balipı¯t ha) 5 Ku¯t al Kuma¯ra, “Kumara [Subrahman ya] of Madurai,” with his two consorts Te˘yvaya¯n_ai (Devasena¯) and Valli 6 Fire-sacrifice hall (ya¯gas´a¯la¯), used for festivals celebrated for Minakshi alone 7 Kuma¯ra, with his two consorts 8 Siddhi Vina¯yaka, “Vinayaka with all the powers” 9 U¯n˜cal man d apa, “swing” hall, the location for the weekly festival of Minakshi and Sundareshwara seated on a swing •

• •

••

••

•

•

•

••

• •

Sundareshwara’s Temple (Inner Area) 10 Sundares´vara, sva¯yambhuva (“self-existent”) principal lin˙ga in main shrine 11 Co˘kkar, movable image of Sundareshwara kept in his temple during the day and taken to the bedchamber at night 12 Ve˘lliyampalam (“silver stage”) Nat ara¯ja, Shiva as “lord of the dance,” with his consort S´ivaka¯mi 13 Daksin a¯mu¯rti, Shiva as the ascetic guru 14 Lin˙godbhava, Shiva within the linga of flames 15 Siddha, “Shiva with all the powers” 16 Durga¯, fierce form of the goddess 17 Can d es´vara, form of Shiva to be worshipped after Sundareshwara 18 Sarasvatı¯, goddess of learning and music ••

•

•

• •

•

xviii

FIGURES 1 AND 2

19 Utsava Na¯yakar, “lords of the festival”; this shrine contains the movable, festival images of Soma¯skanda (Sundareshwara) and Minakshi, and other deities 20 Ka¯s´ı¯ Vis´vana¯tha shrine, the Temple’s principal replica of the Vishwanatha (Shiva) temple at Banaras 21 Fire-sacrifice hall (ya¯gas´a¯la¯), used for festivals celebrated for Minakshi and Sundareshwara 22 Maha¯laksmı¯, goddess of good fortune and wealth 23 Bhairava, the dreadful form of Shiva •

Sundareshwara’s Temple (Outer Area) 24 Tan t a¯yutapa¯n i, the ascetic Subrahmanya at Palani temple 25 An_ukn˜ai Vina¯yaka, “Vinayaka who grants permission” 26 Mukkur_un i Vina¯yaka, Vinayaka whose belly equals “three kuruni [measures of rice]” 27 Navagraha, “Nine planets,” including inauspicious S´ani, Saturn 28 Main flagstaff of Sundareshwara’s temple, next to sacrifice stone (balipı¯t ha) and massive image of Nandin, the bull who is Shiva’s vehicle and devotee 29 Agnivı¯rabhadra and Aghoravı¯rabhadra, “fiery” and euphemistically named “nonterrifying” forms of Virabhadra, an angry and destructive form of Shiva 30 U¯rdhva Ta¯n d ava, Shiva dancing with his leg erect, and Bhadra¯ka¯lı¯, a similar image of the goddess Kali dancing 31 Kalya¯n asundara, “beautiful lord of the wedding,” Minakshi being married to Sundareshwara by Vishnu 32 Nat ara¯ja with his consort • •

•

•

•

• •

•

•

Outer Precincts 33 Nat ara¯ja with his consort 34 Van n i-tree Vinayaka temple; a small modern temple built in a garden •

• •

xix

FIGURES 1 AND 2

North Adi Street

32 31

100 – Pillar Mandapa Second Prakara 20

21 15

10

14

12 24

AM

MM

29 28

11 25

13 19

27

30

East Adi Street

Prakara

Mandapa

West Adi Street

17

16

23

Kambattadi

22

First

18 26

Second Prakara

Second

6

First 2

3

1 AM

MM

Kitchens 7

4

Prakara

Prakara

8

Kilikkudu Mandapa

5

Pottamarai Kulam (Golden Lily Tank)

9

Javandishwara Temple Garden

South Adi Street Rooms

Offices

South Tower 0 0

50

100 feet 25

50 metres

FIGURE 1. Plan of the Minakshi Temple, Central Area

N

xx

FIGURES 1 AND 2

West Chittirai Street West Tower

North Chittirai Street North Tower

Temple

Minakshi’s

North Adi Street

South Tower

Temple

Sundareshwara’s

South Adi Street

West Adi Street

Pottamarai Kulam

Viravasantaraya Mandapa

South Chittirai Street

East Adi Street

34

1000 – Pillar Mandapa 33

Mandapa

Nayaka

Minakshi

East Adi Street

16 – Pillar Mandapa

East Tower

Ashta Shakti Mandapa

East Chittirai Street Pudu Mandapa 0

200 feet 50

100 metres

N

0

100

FIGURE 2. Plan of the Minakshi Temple (adapted from the plan dated 1896 in W. Francis, Madura [1906])

THE RENEWAL OF THE PRIESTHOOD

One The Priests and the Minakshi Temple’s Renovation Ritual

IN SEPTEMBER 1976, when I had just begun research in Madurai, two young men accompanied by their wives were consecrated as new priests in the Minakshi (Mı¯na¯ksı¯) Temple. Ugrapandya Bhattar was then twentyeight and Manikkasundara Bhattar was twenty-three; Ugrapandya had just married Madhuravani, Manikkasundara’s sister, and Manikkasundara had married Umarani, daughter of one of the Temple’s chief priests. Manikkasundara had also recently graduated from a religious school in which he had spent six years learning the Sanskrit ritual texts known as the Agamas (A¯gama), and he was now the first priest in the Minakshi Temple to possess this qualification. Nearly twenty-five years later, in April 2001, I visited Manikkasundara and Umarani at the Minakshi temple in Pearland, Texas, one of Houston’s sprawling southern suburbs.1 As I drove down a long straight road leading from yet another shopping mall, past new housing developments for the well-off and prefabricated “trailer” homes for the poor, the towers of a temple in the distinctive South Indian style incongruously appeared through the trees. In the car park, a young man who was playing basketball introduced himself to me as Praveen Kumar, Manikkasundara’s twenty-two-year-old son. Manikkasundara and his family had been in America for nearly six years, and as I soon found out, they were eagerly looking forward to going back to Madurai in May for their first return visit. Only recently had they acquired their green cards, which would allow them to reenter the United States freely. For Manikkasundara and Umarani in particular, settling down in Pearland had been difficult, and after six years they were still ambivalent about America and often homesick for India. Their children, however, had few qualms, and Praveen Kumar, studying for a degree in computer engineering, and his nineteenyear-old sister, Vijaya Shri, starting her training as a doctor, had thrived in American schools and adapted fairly easily to American life. To Manikkasundara and his wife, it was their children’s educational achievements that had made all their struggles worthwhile, and they were determined to stay in America at least until Vijaya Shri had qualified as a doctor. Praveen Kumar’s principal ambition was to work in America as a computer engineer specializing in software, just like the son of Rajarathna •

2

CHAPTER ONE

Bhattar, also from Madurai, who had been replaced by Manikkasundara when he retired, as well as the son of another priest from India also working in the Pearland temple. Praveen Kumar will probably succeed and Vijaya Shri will probably become a doctor, and in a few years’ time they will become two more members of the highly successful Non-Resident Indian (NRI) population in America, exactly the kind of professional people who prosper in Houston and drive out to worship in Pearland.2 In many respects, the transnational social mobility exemplified by Manikkasundara’s family is now a very familiar feature of globalization, but because he is a priest it has its distinctive features. In 1976, Thangam Bhattar, then in his late forties, who had briefly visited Malaysia three years earlier, became the first Minakshi Temple priest to work overseas when he went to a Singapore temple for a few months. In 1982–83, Thangam worked in Pearland for nearly a year when its Minakshi temple was first opened, and he was then replaced by his younger brother Rajarathna; Thangam also returned for over a year in 1986–88, when the temple was extended in size, but Rajarathna stayed on permanently in Pearland until retirement and now lives there with his wife. Thangam and Rajarathna both acquired green cards in the mid1980s. Back in 1976, though, nobody in Madurai would have predicted that Thangam, Rajarathna, and then Manikkasundara would work in Texas, and that the latter’s graduation from an Agamic school would be so important for his career in Madurai and his eventual move to America. Indeed, although it may be a very small element in the history of latterday globalization, the emergence of “traditional” education in Sanskrit scripture as a valuable asset in the United States is a striking sign of how the world changed during the twentieth century’s last quarter, for it was not only unpredictable in the mid-1970s, it was virtually unimaginable. This book’s principal objective is to describe and explain how events unforeseen in Madurai and the Minakshi Temple twenty-five years ago came about, and what they have meant for its priesthood during the intervening years.

The Minakshi Temple Priests and Change since the 1970s My previous monograph about the Minakshi Temple priests, Servants of the Goddess (SG), was based on fieldwork carried out in 1976–77 and 1980, and those years provide the main baseline with which the contemporary position will be compared.3 As explained in SG (ch. 5), a crucial date in the Minakshi Temple’s modern history is 1937, when its management was taken over by the provincial government of Madras through its agency, the Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Board. Two years later,

R E N O VAT I O N R I T U A L

3

the Temple was opened to untouchable Harijans (Dalits) and low-caste Nadars, who had always been excluded from it, and virtually all the priests then began a “strike,” which lasted until 1945. During the six years when the priests were absent, they became much poorer and the Executive Officer in charge of the Temple since 1937 imposed a series of changes that greatly undermined their rights and privileges; in the years after 1945, the priests’ position mostly continued to deteriorate, notably when their tax-free lands were confiscated in the 1950s following land reform legislation. In 1970, when the anti-Brahman Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party was in power, the government of Tamilnadu brought in legislation to abolish the hereditary temple priesthood throughout the state. The abolition act was challenged in the courts, and in the end its impact was minimal, but in 1976, when I first worked in Madurai, the Minakshi Temple priests had witnessed forty years of continual decline, including a recent threat to their very existence. For understandable reasons, demoralization was widespread among the priests, most of whom said that they hoped their sons would find better jobs outside the Temple. The constant pressure exerted on the priests by the Temple administration (Devasthanam) and, at one remove, by the Tamilnadu government and its Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department (which had replaced the old Board) was further increased by continual criticism of their incompetence and ignorance of the Agamas, the Sanskrit texts that are believed to contain the instructions of Shiva (S´iva) himself for his proper worship. The priests themselves had internalized this criticism, and in concluding SG (166), I said that they could only respond to it by insisting on their devotion to Minakshi—the devotion (bhakti) of “a compelling love which overcomes all rational barriers” (O’Flaherty 1973: 38–9). Social scientists have a poor record in foretelling the future, and my implied prediction has turned out to be wrong. The priests’ position in the Temple, and their demoralization as I saw it in 1976–77 and 1980, did not continue to worsen. On visits to Madurai in 1984 and 1988, some improvement was already apparent, especially in their economic position and in their more relaxed attitude toward the government, and this continued during the 1990s and until the present day.4 Just as importantly, the priests’ growing commitment to Agamic education for their sons and themselves, which is both product and cause of their generally improving morale, has meant that they have been able to respond to reformist criticism much more effectively than earlier seemed likely. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that by the end of the 1970s, the worst was actually over for the priests. But it was not obvious either to them (or me) at the time, mainly because they had been suffering forty years of actual or threatened losses to their rights and privileges, so that it was only reason-

4

CHAPTER ONE

able to assume that the decline would continue. Furthermore, because the most senior priests could remember the better days before the templeentry dispute, there was a persistent tendency to hark back to them, which only served to exacerbate pessimistic comment about the future. Since the late 1970s, the Minakshi Temple administration and its superior authority, the HR&CE Department, have been no more favorable to the priests than they were in earlier years, and there are still constant complaints about them. On the other hand, anti-Brahmanism as a political ideology has greatly weakened over the last two decades. Moreover, in almost all directions, the religious policy of the Tamilnadu government has become considerably more favorable to the priests’ interests, especially since 1991 when the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) party came to power under the leadership of Ms. J. Jayalalitha. Her government further encouraged religious revivalism, and started to support and promote Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism almost as if it were the state religion, a development linked to the rise of Hindu nationalism—most evident in northern and western India—since the late 1980s. For the priests, although the state still has a negative side represented in particular by the Temple administration and the HR&CE Department, it has acquired a more positive, supportive side as well, especially since the early 1990s. The administration’s control over the priests has also been diluted inasmuch as they now do far more work outside the Temple than they used to before the early 1980s, and this—together with the introduction of more expensive forms of private worship inside it—has significantly raised their income. The priests’ autonomy and standard of living have therefore both improved. These changes have mainly come about as a result of rising middle-class affluence produced by India’s economic liberalization—which began in the mid-1980s and accelerated from 1991— assisted by the Tamilnadu government’s religious policy, especially its support for temple renovation rituals, which also provide many priests with extra sources of income. A significant minority of priests, following in Thangam Bhattar’s footsteps, has been working abroad as well, and this has been made possible by the growing prosperity and strengthening ethnic identity among overseas Hindu communities, whether in older regions of settlement such as Malaysia and Singapore or newer ones such as Britain and especially the United States, where the wealthy NRI population has rapidly expanded. At the root of the priests’ changed circumstances, therefore, both in their relationship with the state and their economic standing, is the particular conjuncture of declining anti-Brahmanism plus religious revivalism in Tamilnadu combined with resurgent Hindu nationalism and economic liberalization in India as a whole; the development of the Indian diaspora

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5

has also had an effect. The particular case of the Minakshi Temple priests and their changing lives has to be placed in a much wider context—social, religious, political, and economic—which also has local, regional, national, and even global dimensions. A large part of this book is about the wider, multidimensional context and hence about how the priests, despite their unusual characteristics, are caught up in much the same flow of rapid, radical change as millions of their fellow Indian citizens. One sign of change in the Temple in 1976, whose full significance would only become clear ten or fifteen years later, was Manikkasundara Bhattar’s consecration as the first priest to have graduated from an Agamic school. Agamic education, as I explain in chapter 4, has played a crucial role in how the Minakshi Temple priesthood has changed during the last two decades. The growing commitment to Agamic education has been stimulated by the general improvement in the priests’ position, especially by better opportunities for educated priests, but it has also contributed to that improvement and to restoring the priests’ morale. In these respects, too, the state has been influential, because priestly ignorance was first criticized as part of the early nationalist movement for socioreligious reform, and subsequently the HRE Board, followed by the HR&CE Department, has pursued policies intended to improve priestly education and training. Even though priests have persistently resented government interference in their working lives, they have accepted that the criticism of their ignorance is justified, and their growing commitment to Agamic education since the 1970s is partly a recognition that the HR&CE Department’s policy is right. This commitment has also actively reinforced the priests’ insistence on the rightfulness of traditional authority and its absolute expression in the texts containing Shiva’s words. Agamic education has indeed helped to strengthen the priests’ traditionalism, so that compared with twenty years ago, they more forcefully express their ideological commitment to the authority and legitimacy of tradition, as embodied in Agamic texts but also as vested in the Temple’s ancient customs and their own hereditary rights. Yet priestly traditionalism also goes hand-in-hand with the growing adoption of a range of modern attitudes and values about the importance of education, training, and professionalism, as well as about money-making and economic rationality, or, less consistently, about the dispensability of old-fashioned rules about purity and pollution or caste and marriage. The priests have become better informed about the wider world and less provincial in their outlook; albeit implicitly, they have recognized that their lives have been “disembedded” from their local roots, because they can now be shaped—especially by men who have worked outside Madurai—through supralocal and even transnational networks. Priests with an Agamic education, especially if they are well educated in the secular

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system, too, also tend to display a positivist attitude toward book-based knowledge, and in their eyes both types of education are about acquiring rational knowledge that may be used reflexively to examine and reform religious and social practices. For the priests, however, a better knowledge of the Agamas should also enhance devotion to god because it (ideally) leads to an improved understanding of what Shiva’s words mean and how they are to be put into practice. Among the priests, tradition is always positively valued, whereas modern change is not, so that the relationship between them is asymmetrical; roughly, the traditional is the positive, marked pole and the modern is the negative or residual pole. Nonetheless, from the observer’s sociological point of view, the priests have become both more traditionalist and more modernist; although this may look contradictory, it does so only through the lens of a predominantly Western misconception about modernity driving out tradition. Consequently, a crucial part of the argument throughout this book, to which I particularly return in conclusion, has to do with a critical reexamination of the relationship between modernity and tradition or traditionalism in the Indian context. All the changes just itemized are more evident among younger educated men, who are sometimes more vocally traditionalist than their older uneducated colleagues, as well as more self-confident about their status as Brahman priests and more modernist in many of their attitudes. Indeed, Agamic education has been the principal cause of a growing educational and generational division within the priesthood: the mainly younger educated priests can perform rituals better because they can recite the Sanskrit texts that they have memorized, and they can lay claim to an expertise that mainly older uneducated priests lack. Educated priests are also in a better position to improve their income, especially by working outside the Minakshi Temple and going overseas. This new division has not eliminated older cleavages among the priests, but it has significantly modified relationships between them. Furthermore, the entire priesthood has been affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by the emergence of a cohort of educated men, because every priest recognizes the veracity and authority of the Agamas, even if he has not had an Agamic education himself. Deference must therefore be paid to educated priests with more Agamic knowledge, and despite grumbling and complaints, there can be no serious opposition to their superior status and leadership. The educated men, who form an elite reference group within the Temple, have therefore had a disproportionate influence on the changing position of the priesthood as a whole. That this is so became most dramatically apparent at the Minakshi Temple’s 1995 renovation ritual.

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The Minakshi Temple’s Renovation Ritual in 1995 Before turning to the renovation ritual, a little background information is required. Madurai, in southern Tamilnadu, is an ancient city, although it is also a modern industrial, commercial, and administrative center with a population in 2001 of 1.2 million, many of them living in new suburban housing colonies encircling the central area.5 At the very heart of the old city stands the Arulmiku (“grace-bestowing”) Mı¯na¯ksı¯-Sundares´vara Tirukkoyil (“holy temple”), which is dedicated to the goddess Minakshi and her husband, Sundareshwara, a form of the great god Shiva. Minakshi, rather than her consort, is regarded as the preeminent deity, and the Temple is usually known simply as “Mı¯na¯ksı¯ koyil,” the Minakshi Temple.6 The Minakshi Temple is one of the largest in India, and its most famous architectural features are the twelve towers (gopura) over its gateways; the four highest, each about 150 feet tall, straddle its outer gateways and dominate the city’s skyline. Most of the Temple as seen today was built when the Hindu Nayaka dynasty ruled Madurai between the early sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Like all Shiva’s South Indian temples, the Minakshi Temple is a double structure, incorporating separate temples for the two presiding deities, which I refer to as Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s “temples” (lowercase t) to distinguish them from the entire complex, the Minakshi Temple. In the main shrine at the heart of Minakshi’s temple is a standing stone image of the goddess; in the main shrine in the god’s temple there is a stone lin˙ga, the phallic emblem of Shiva. In numerous other shrines throughout the Temple are subsidiary images of forms of the goddess and Shiva, as well as of Shiva’s two sons, Vina¯yaka (Gan es´a, Gan apati) and Subrahman ya (Murukan_, Skanda), and a host of other deities. Performing the rituals of worship (pu¯ja¯) for Minakshi, Sundareshwara, and the other deities, both during the daily worship and at the periodic festivals (utsava), when bronze images of the deities are often taken in procession on Madurai’s streets, is the Minakshi Temple priests’ primary responsibility, as we see in more detail in chapter 2.7 In principle, a temple should have a renovation ritual (kumbha¯bhiseka) in every twelfth year (counting inclusively). Throughout Tamilnadu from the early 1990s, after Jayalalitha’s AIADMK government came to power, the number of temple renovation rituals started to rise steadily (see chapter 5). Among these events was the Minakshi Temple’s maha¯kumbha¯bhiseka—literally “great water-pot bathing ritual”—which was celebrated on a spectacular scale over twelve days from June 26 to July 7, 1995. Even the grandest festivals celebrated in the Temple never need as much manpower and resources as the renovation ritual, and during its last five •

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days, which were the most important, around 250 priests had to work together, so that the Minakshi Temple’s own complement of nearly 100 men were joined by over 150 from other temples. The climax of the ritual on July 7 (and the reason for its name), when priests poured vessels of water from the top of the Temple’s twelve high towers, was watched by an estimated five hundred thousand people standing on the roofs of the Temple and every other tall building across the city.8 Even by the standards common in Madurai at major religious festivals, the crowd of spectators was immense. The renovation ritual was also the occasion for extensive refurbishment of the Temple, including repainting its twelve towers and many inner halls, which had started several years earlier. In the modern era, renovation rituals had previously been held in 1878, 1923, 1963, and 1974. The 1963 kumbhabhisheka was the first large-scale renovation of the entire Temple and cost about Rs 2 million, which—allowing for inflation—is very close to the cost of the 1995 event, around 20 million rupees. The renovation in 1974 was less extensive. Because renovation rituals should occur in every twelfth year, the one in 1995 was late by a decade, mainly because the Tamilnadu government repeatedly postponed approval. Despite the grandeur of the Minakshi Temple’s renovation ritual, its basic underlying structure can be described quite simply.9 The main arena for the most important kumbhabhisheka rituals was the eastern end of North Adi Street, which runs beside the Temple’s outer wall. In this street, four temporary pavilions were constructed, each made out of bamboo poles and thatch, decorated with paint and colored paper. The main pavilion was built at the easternmost end of the street and it contained two “fire-sacrifice halls” (ya¯gas´a¯la¯), one on the northern side for Sundareshwara and the other on the southern side for Minakshi. In the center of each hall was an altar (vedı¯), surrounded by twenty-five fire pits (kun da), made in various specified shapes by building low, enclosing brick walls. Along the northern and southern sides of North Adi Street, west of the main pavilion, were two other smaller ones, less elaborately decorated. Each of these pavilions was divided into six small fire-sacrifice halls, each with its own altar surrounded by five fire pits. Farther along the street was a fourth pavilion, simply decorated, which housed twenty-nine small altars, each with a single fire pit. The total number of fire pits was therefore 139. After a series of preparatory rites on the first seven days, the kumbhabhisheka proper began when the priests ritually moved the deities’ power (s´akti) from their images inside the Temple into water pots (kumbha), which were then carried to their respective altars in the fire-sacrifice halls. The images inside the Temple were now “empty” artifacts, and Minakshi, Sundareshwara, and the other, subsidiary deities were now installed in North Adi Street. In 1990, before repair work on them began, the divine • •

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power was ritually removed from the Temple’s towers, and vessels containing this power were also placed in the halls. After the water pots of Minakshi and Sundareshwara had been placed on their respective altars in the evening of July 3, the first of a series of eight rituals of “sacrificeworship” (ya¯gapu¯ja¯) began (although only four were done for minor deities in the fourth hall). On the following three days, this ritual (lasting about one and one-half to two hours) was performed in the morning and evening and then for the last time in the early morning of July 7. Each sacrificial fire—one in each pit—was the responsibility of a single priest, although two men, the pradha¯na a¯ca¯ryas or “principal priests” of Minakshi and Sundareshwara, had particularly important roles. During the course of the fire sacrifice, each priest spent most of his time spooning ghee into the fire, periodically adding more wood and dropping in different items (grains, legumes, cooked rice, fruits, etc.) as oblations. These priests, the acharyas physically performing the rituals, were directed by other priests, sa¯dhakas, who also chanted the mantras that must accompany the ritual action.10 Toward the end of the sacrifice, the pradhana acharyas lowered silk saris and waistcloths (vest i) offered to Minakshi and Sundareshwara into their fires, before all the priests made the final oblation. Flowers from some fire pits were then carried to the pradhana acharyas, who threw them over the altars to unite and transfer to the water pots all the power generated in the fires. The ritual concluded with the display of lamps that ends any act of worship in the Temple. Compared with even the Temple’s grandest festivals, the kumbhabhisheka saw sacrificial destruction by fire practiced on an awesome scale, and in the series of fire sacrifices, the divine power in the water pots was progressively augmented; this process—compared with recharging a battery by practically minded priests—is crucial in the renovation ritual. After the deities’ power had been moved into the water pots, worship inside the Temple stopped. The “empty” images could then be repaired by artisans and refastened to their bases with special cement. This work was regarded by Temple officiants as an equally crucial part of the renovation ritual, even though it was carried out quietly and unobserved in the now closed Temple buildings. After the last sacrifice-worship on July 7, groups of priests wearing their finery carried the water pots in procession into the Temple and up to the narrow roofs of the twelve gateway towers. For about an hour, important guests arrived on the roof of Minakshi’s temple to watch from near the gilded tower (vima¯na) over her main shrine. Around 9 A.M., at an auspicious time, a priest poured the first pot of water over this tower. A green flag was waved to tell the other priests to pour their pots over Sundareshwara’s shrine tower and the finials on the roofs of all the gateway towers; at the same time, the priests inside the Temple poured their pots over the ••

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images. This vast simultaneous affusion, the concluding climax of the renovation ritual, was greeted by excited cheering from the crowds in the Temple and on the surrounding buildings, and those lucky enough to be near the towers tried to douse themselves in the water flowing down. By emptying the pots, all the increased power in the water was made to flow back into the Temple as a whole, both to the towers and the newly secured images housed within it. Inside the main shrines, worship then started. The kumbhabhisheka had come to an end; the deities and their Temple had been restored to normal, but the divine power contained within its restored fabric had been enhanced.11

Authority and Control over the Ritual Although not comparable with the huge numbers watching its climax, all the kumbhabhisheka rituals, which had not been seen in the Minakshi Temple for twenty-one years, attracted fairly large crowds of devotees. Most popular were the evening sacrifice-worship rituals, which were also the most dramatic and spectacular, as the flames and lamps lit up the gaudy colors and glittering decorations in the sacrifice halls, as well as the bright silk cloths and elaborate jewelry worn by the priests tending the fires. As always in major temple rituals, the sound of music and chanting, and the heavy odor of flowers, oils, and camphor (now of course mixed with copious smoke), reinforced the sensory impact on everyone who came to watch. At the end of the ritual, the elaborate performance of worship, especially the display of lamps and waving of the camphor flame, invariably attracted as many devotees as the limited space would permit. Every fire sacrifice is extremely hazardous. From time to time, inside the wood and paper pavilions, priests would feed their fires too enthusiastically, so that flames shot high into the air; few things, incidentally, burn more ferociously than silk saris smeared in ghee. To me it was little short of miraculous that only one priest was badly burned during the renovation ritual, and the fire engine parked in North Adi Street did not inspire much confidence, although nobody else seemed even slightly worried about the danger, which was horrifically demonstrated in June 1997, at the great temple in Thanjavur, when about forty people were killed in a blaze in a fire-sacrifice hall.12 Apart from the danger, however, all priests had to put up with the billowing smoke and roasting heat generated by so many fires burning close together when the ambient temperature was already around 100° Fahrenheit. Most of them frequently deserted their fires to wander out for some fresher air and cooling water, as well as to gossip with each other and

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anyone else who was standing around. For the many sports fans among the priests, the Wimbledon tennis tournament, watched live each night on Star TV, was a favorite conversational topic, and several of them certainly seemed more interested in the fate of Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf (the champions that year) than in the conduct of the kumbhabhisheka. Priests, it may be worth mentioning, are not necessarily in a particularly devoted or religious frame of mind when carrying out rituals, and like many other workers around the world, they quite often take a break to talk about sports, television, or any other topic of interest. Nonetheless, even when priests were concentrating on their tasks, none of the rituals proceeded impeccably, so that confused discussion about what to do next was common. Throughout the renovation ritual, too, as had been the case for months before, one preoccupying topic of conversation and intermittent argument was priestly politics. Most contentious was the issue of supervisory control over the ritual, which particularly came to the fore when confusion arose because it so sharply raised the question of authority and professional expertise: who really knows what should be done and who is entitled to issue instructions to others? As already mentioned, there was a division of labor among the priests between acharyas performing the rituals and sadhakas who directed them. On the whole, the sadhakas—in principle, learned experts—were priests from the Minakshi Temple or elsewhere who had had an Agamic education and were competent in pronouncing mantras, whereas many, though not all, acharyas were ordinary, uneducated priests. (Despite his greater authority, a sadhaka—unlike an acharya—may be an unmarried man who has not yet been consecrated as a priest.) The pradhana acharyas were, by hereditary right, two young priests, Kumar Bhattar (for Sundareshwara) and Ramesh Bhattar (for Minakshi), and accompanying them were two pradhana sadhakas. Kumar’s was Sivaraj, a young bachelor from a Minakshi Temple priestly family, who had graduated from an Agamic school, but Ramesh’s principal sadhaka was a learned priest and guru of Vazhuvur Agamic school in Nagapattinam District in the Kaveri delta region of eastern Tamilnadu; the pradhana bodhaka, “principal instructor” in charge of all the sadhakas, was the guru of the Agamic school attached to the famous Dharmapuram monastery, also in Nagapattinam District. Overall responsibility for the kumbhabhisheka belonged in theory to the sarva sadhaka, the “supreme sadhaka,” although this position was jointly held by Kumar Bhattar and another priest, Swaminatha Bhattar. To complicate the issue of supervisory control still further, there was also a separate organizing committee of Thangam Bhattar, Swaminatha Bhattar, and a third priest, Muthu Bhattar. Table 1 lists the leading priests in the ritual, and figure 3 shows the genealogical connections among some of them.

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Table 1 Leading Priests at the 1995 Renovation Ritual 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Kumar Bhattar: pradhana acharya for Sundareshwara; joint sarva sadhaka Ramesh Bhatter: pradhana acharya for Minakshi Sivaraj: pradhana sadhaka for Sundareshwara Guru from Vazhuvur Agamic school: pradhana sadhaka for Minakshi Guru from Dharmapuram Agamic school: pradhana bodhaka Swaminatha Bhatter: joint sarva sadhaka; member of organizing committee Thangam Bhattar: member of organizing committee Muthu Bhattar: member of organizing committee

Because the renovation ritual, unlike any other Minakshi Temple ritual, required a very large complement of priests, both insiders and outsiders, it was a collective demonstration of Brahman priestly power of a kind never otherwise seen. Priests with leading roles in this event therefore acquired unusual public prominence. More significantly, though, most of the Minakshi Temple priests were determined to show—to themselves and to the Temple’s trustees and officials, visiting dignitaries, sponsors of the ritual, devotees, and everyone else—that they could run the renovation ritual without having to rely on supervision by more expert outsiders, as had happened in 1963 and 1974, when the sarva sadhaka was a learned priest from Tiruvaduturai (Thanjavur District). The main reason for the priests’ determination was that the overall standard of Agamic education and their commitment to it had risen markedly since the mid-1970s, so that at the 1995 kumbhabhisheka, the Minakshi Temple priests had a real opportunity to prove themselves. The priests’ collective interests were, however, cross-cut by divisions between them, as well as by individual ambitions. The primary and oldest division in the Minakshi Temple priesthood—to which I return in chapter 2—is between the Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras. The Vikkira Pantiya group comprises six separate patrilineal clans, that of the chief priest (sta¯n_ikar) and five others, and the Kulacekara group consists of one large clan divided into two branches, each with its own chief priest. Within the Temple, the Vikkira Pantiyas have superior rights, notably because they alone can perform the daily worship, and between them and the Kulacekaras, there has been rivalry for at least four hundred years. In addition to the Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras, there is also a separate Tirucculi clan, which acquired some of the Kulacekara priests’ rights in the Temple in the 1930s, and friction has always existed between Kulacekara and Tirucculi priests.13 The single Vikkira Pantiya chief priest is C.M.S. Shanmugasundara Bhattar, father of Kumar and Umarani, Manikkasundara’s wife. By 1995, he was infirm and rarely worked in the Temple, so that Kumar assumed

Tirupparankundram

Kannakkankudi

Tiruvadavur

=

Vikkira Pantiya Stanikar CMS Shanmugasundara

Maduresa

=

Rajarathna

Thangam

(Stanikar)

Umarani

Kumar

Muthu

Shankara

(Kulacekara Stanikar)

=

Manikkasundara

Shanmugasundara

=

Raja- Gauri lakshmi

=

Raja

FIGURE 3. Partial Genealogy of Leading Priests in the 1995 Renovation Ritual

Sivakumar Madhuravani

=

= Ugrapandya

Minakshi

Ganesha

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his duties, including the role of Sundareshwara’s “principal priest,” the pradhana acharya, which belongs by right to the Vikkira Pantiya chief priest. Ramesh, who had returned from the temple in London where he had been working for a few years, took the role of Minakshi’s principal priest because it belongs to another Vikkira Pantiya family in which he is the sole adult male. Only these two positions, however, are filled by hereditary incumbents, and the crucial question was always about appointment of the sarva sadhaka. In February 1995, after Thangam Bhattar had returned from another long stay in America, a meeting was held in the Temple to discuss the renovation ritual, which was attended by a senior administrative official, several of the Temple’s trustees (who are political appointees), and about fifteen priests.14 By 1994–95, as I had been able to observe over several months, Manikkasundara Bhattar—mainly owing to his education and experience, as well as his self-confidence and ability to deal with the Temple’s officials and important visitors—had established himself as the leading priest in the Minakshi Temple, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, before he started to spend so much time abroad, Thangam had been preeminent. Manikkasundara took a prominent role at the meeting and persuaded everyone else to agree on a date in July for the renovation ritual. However, the meeting broke up in public quarreling among some of the priests, which was ostensibly about how the renovation ritual should be conducted, although everyone knew that the real bone of contention was the choice of the sarva sadhaka, the priest with overall responsibility for the ritual. Everyone agreed that if an outsider had been invited to be the sarva sadhaka, as in 1963 and 1974, it would have prevented disputes among the Minakshi Temple priests about appointing one of their own number. (The sarva sadhaka in 1963 and 1974 was dead by 1995.) But this possibility was rejected, even though the pradhana bodhaka and one of the pradhana sadhakas were outsiders, precisely because the priests wanted to demonstrate that they could now conduct a large-scale renovation ritual without ceding overall control to a more learned outsider. In the end, the outcome of four fractious meetings of the Minakshi Temple priests’ association (the Adishaiva Shivacharya Sangam) was the appointment of two sarva sadhakas, Kumar and Swaminatha, a Kulacekara priest and opponent of Thangam. Neither Kumar nor Swaminatha have had any significant Agamic education, however, and they were ostensibly selected because they were the acting chief priests of the Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara groups. On this basis, Kumar’s appointment was not controversial, but Swaminatha’s was. In 1995, the two Kulacekara chief priests were Shankara Bhattar and Swaminatha’s old and infirm father. Swaminatha’s appointment excluded Shankara, but it also provoked

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opposition from others because it looked inconsistent with the rule that the office of Kulacekara chief priest devolves to the eldest man in the clan branch, so that if Swaminatha’s father could not take on the position, it was not Swaminatha but his older cousin, next in the line of succession, who should have been appointed. All the same, Swaminatha got his way and he was also appointed to the organizing committee alongside Thangam and Muthu Bhattar, then president of the Minakshi Temple priests’ association. The main reason for setting up an otherwise redundant organizing committee was that Kumar and Swaminatha were unqualified to act as learned sarva sadhakas, so that in the end, Thangam, through his membership in the organizing committee, emerged as the man who really presided over the ritual; in fact, but not in name, he was the supreme sarva sadhaka, and he also took the leading role in negotiating with officials and dealing with press conferences in the Temple. The priestly politics that were played out in the appointment of the sarva sadhakas and the organizing committee in the months before the renovation ritual, and then provoked backbiting comments and occasional public rows during its course, had a lot to do with animosity among individuals. Much of the politicking, however, was plainly related to the division between the Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras. No Kulacekara priest could claim the right to be a pradhana acharya, but Kumar and Swaminatha’s appointment as joint sarva sadhakas in overall charge reflected Swaminatha’s success in ensuring that acting chief priests from both groups, notwithstanding the Vikkira Pantiyas’ superiority, would in principle have parity in leading the renovation ritual. Swaminatha’s appointment did provoke hostility from some Kulacekara priests, especially Shankara, the other Kulacekara chief priest, who ostentatiously absented himself from most of the renovation ritual; when he did come, he was openly critical about how the ritual was being conducted. For the majority of Kulacekara priests, who supported Swaminatha, however, his appointment as a sarva sadhaka was a notable achievement, given the fact that in all other major rituals in the Minakshi Temple, they occupy a subordinate position. More significantly, Shankara’s negative attitude to the renovation ritual, which was shared by some other elderly priests noticeable by their absence from it, also highlighted the schism within the Minakshi Temple priesthood that was most critical throughout. Thangam and the late Maduresa Bhattar, Manikkasundara’s father, were widely regarded as the most knowledgeable priests of their generation, whereas Shankara was seen as one of the least expert. Shankara, though, has never disguised his scorn for colleagues who pretend that education, religious or secular, can substitute for long practical experience in making a good priest. Twenty years earlier, Shankara had usually expressed his opinion by cracking

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jokes while also showing how good he was at dexterously performing rituals. By the 1990s, he could no longer do this. Thus, for example, in 1994, at an elaborate ritual known as the s´an˙kha¯bhiseka (“conch-shell bathing ritual”), Kumar—as acting Vikkira Pantiya chief priest—was leading the ritual, but Shankara—as Kulacekara chief priest—was also required to participate. During a long preparatory ritual, Kumar and Shankara were accompanied by Manikkasundara, seven other young men who had some Agamic education but were not yet all consecrated as priests, and two sa¯stris or chanters (Brahmans who utter mantras and recite other texts in the Temple).15 All these men were reciting in Sanskrit continuously, except for Kumar, who looked hesitant, and Shankara, who periodically mouthed a few words but mostly looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. For Shankara (much more than for younger Kumar), as well as for other older, uneducated priests obliged to attend major rituals of this kind, something close to public humiliation at the hands of educated junior men has become more and more common. By the 1990s, quite understandably, Shankara had become bitter about the growing influence of educated priests, although he was most openly resentful about those who spent much of their time overseas. Within the senior generation, Thangam (the overseas pioneer) and Shankara exemplified most plainly the cleavage between priests with the knowledge needed to exercise authority over the kumbhabhisheka and those without it. Yet among the former group, there was also a division between Thangam, as representative of the older generation, and Manikkasundara and other middle-aged or young men who have graduated from Agamic schools, achieved relatively high standards of secular education, or both. During the 1980s, Thangam’s reputation for religious knowledge—at least in his critics’ eyes—was progressively undermined by the emergence of younger priests who had had an Agamic education. Maduresa was in the same position, but he was more diffident than Thangam and did not exercise the same leadership role in the Temple. Before his death in 1994, Maduresa also became semiretired, and from the mid1980s, Manikkasundara took over much of his work in the Temple. The Agamic school graduates have made it obvious to everyone that Thangam, despite his eloquence and intelligence, has not learned much Sanskrit material by heart, so that he became more vulnerable to his rivals’ criticism. Somewhat surprisingly, given his position in the Temple and his leading role in the meeting in February 1995, Manikkasundara was allocated no formal responsibility in the renovation ritual. Nonetheless, Manikkasundara and several other young men who had all graduated from religious schools—including Ramesh, Sivaraj, Raja Bhattar (a priest who founded his own Agamic school near Madurai), and Sivakumar Bhattar (the second Agamic school graduate, who had returned from his post in •

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a Kuala Lumpur temple)—were still able to display their credentials and reinforce their claim to superior professional expertise. They could do so because operational control of much of the ritual action was in their hands. Thus Manikkasundara and his educated colleagues, some of whom had been appointed as sadhakas, mostly wandered around throughout the ritual to show that they were in charge. Apart from Ramesh, serving as Minakshi’s principal priest, they did not take part in any of the work of the ordinary priests acting as acharyas, except when they intervened, as they quite frequently did, to underline their mastery by reciting Sanskrit texts, directing other priests, and taking over the performance of particularly important or spectacular rituals. In practice, too, although he could give general directions, Thangam had to delegate considerable responsibility to the educated priests, because only they actually knew in any detail what had to be done. Normally, therefore, whenever confusion arose because priests were carrying out some of the rituals incorrectly or did not know exactly what to do, men from the group of educated priests intervened with corrective instructions. This does not mean that muddles were always sorted out; often they were unnoticed or ignored (as was periodically pointed out to me), and sometimes the experts disagreed among themselves about what ought to be done. For example, on the day before the fire sacrifices were due to begin, Thangam and Manikkasundara inspected the fire pits in the side pavilions and decided that some of them were the wrong shape for their respective deities. This was said to be because the workers making them had taken their instructions from ignorant officials in the Temple administration, not from priests. But Thangam was then joined by Raja, and it took them quite a long time to decide which deities’ and towers’ water pots were in fact meant to be located on which altars in the two pavilions, and their final list was not identical to that given to me earlier by another well-educated priest. Moreover, in the renovation ritual, as in every other ritual in the Minakshi Temple (even though the majority of devotees never notice), there were plenty of mistakes and shortcuts, and numerous people blamed each other for incompetence. Nevertheless, despite the muddles and mistakes, the priests who had had an Agamic education were repeatedly able to intervene to display their expertise, especially in pronouncing mantras and reciting texts, and they could often give orders to the rest of the priests who were actually carrying out most of the work at the fire sacrifices and other rituals. Because no other ritual in the Minakshi Temple requires so many priests to participate in such a complex event, the conduct of the renovation ritual highlighted to an unprecedented extent the distinction between the minority of mostly younger educated priests with “professional” expertise and the rest of the uneducated priests. It was this educational and generational

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divide that was played out so sharply and publicly during the ritual, even though the ancient division between Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras as well as dissension between individuals were significant features as well. By the end of the renovation ritual, whatever antipathy may have been raised among their fellow priests, the men who had had an Agamic education had been able to assert their expertise, professionalism, and authority over the rest more effectively than ever before. The 1995 kumbhabhisheka, in the way that major public events often are, was a “social drama” confirming the change in the structure of relationships among the priests that had been developing since the previous renovation in 1974. For Manikkasundara in particular, it also marked the start of a new life, because as soon as the ritual had finished, he and his family set off for America, where Thangam was also going, so that they could both take part a few days later in the Pearland temple’s own kumbhabhisheka. Yet it is also important that because all the priests in the Minakshi Temple acknowledge the ultimate authority of the Agamas as Shiva’s words, all of them, including uneducated men, recognize that those who have had an Agamic education are more expert and are entitled to a position of leadership, which they should indeed assume. Moreover, the vast majority of the priests did take an active part in the ritual, and leaving rivalry and animosity to one side, they were collectively able to congratulate themselves on the conduct of the 1995 renovation ritual. In more than a merely rhetorical sense, this grand event also marked the renewal of the Minakshi Temple priesthood that had been under way during the previous two decades.

Two Rights, Duties, and Work WORSHIP (pu¯ja¯) in Hindu temples may be divided into two main categories: public and private. Public worship (para¯rthapu¯ja¯), comprising daily worship and periodic festivals (utsava), is said to be performed “for the well-being of the world,” whereas private worship, whose commonest type is known in Tamil temples as arcana (archana), is performed by or for individual devotees and is intended to benefit them alone. By the Minakshi Temple priests, the public worship is naturally considered to be far more important, for its beneficiary is the population as a whole. Rights to perform the rituals of public worship in the Minakshi Temple, which are the priests’ hereditary monopoly, are supremely important to them, both collectively and individually. Priests are not paid for doing the public worship, although their rights in the latter entitle them to do private worship from which they earn money. The priests’ rights were described and analyzed at length in SG (ch. 4), and they have not altered significantly during the last two decades, whereas there have been major changes affecting the organization of private worship, which I discuss later in this chapter. The stability of the system of public worship rights— and the priests’ continuing preoccupation with them in ways that periodically give rise to serious disputes—contrast sharply with the changes in private worship and in many other aspects of the priests’ lives. Owing to these changes, however, the salience and meaning of public worship rights have also changed, because in the face of so much alteration, the priests’ hereditary rights embody even more firmly the just continuity of ancient tradition. As already explained briefly in chapter 1, the priests have become more traditionalist than they were a generation ago; to illustrate some important features of this growing traditionalism, but also because their public worship rights are so crucial to the priests’ position in the Temple, the first half of this chapter covers some material already presented in SG (mostly in ch. 4).

The Temple and Its Rituals The Minakshi Temple, as explained in chapter 1, is a double structure incorporating separate temples for Minakshi and Sundareshwara.1 The Temple is normally open daily from 4:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. and from

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4:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. (10:30 P.M. on Fridays, the day sacred to the goddess, when the largest crowds of devotees come). The daily worship comprises eight separate “periods of worship,” each taking about one hour to complete. At the first period, starting at 5:00 A.M., Minakshi and Sundareshwara are awakened in their bedchamber where they have spent the night together, and a special image of the god is then taken back from her temple (where the bedchamber is located) to his own. The next six periods of worship, four main and two supplementary ones, all have the same basic form; they consist of a series of rituals—bathing (abhiseka), decoration (alan˙ka¯ra), food offering (naivedya), and waving of lamps (dı¯pa¯ra¯dhana)—which are performed for Minakshi’s main image and Sundareshwara’s linga in their main shrines and, in reduced form, for a series of subsidiary images that varies between periods of worship. At the last period of worship, starting at 9:15 P.M. (9:45 P.M. on Fridays), Sundareshwara’s image is taken back to the bedchamber before the Temple is closed for the night. At the closing “bedchamber worship,” the god and goddess, explicitly seen as lovers, are brought together, and only at night are they united, for during the day they are in their separate shrines. The pattern of daily worship is thus predicated upon an endless oscillation between Minakshi and Sundareshwara’s separation by day and their unity by night.2 The same basic theme of movement between separation and unity runs through the festival cycle as well. The most important festivals in the Minakshi Temple are the six major annual festivals, which last ten or twelve days, together with six others lasting between six and ten days; these twelve are spaced so that one occurs in each Tamil month.3 The greatest festival of all is Chittirai, lasting twelve days in April-May, whose climax is the wedding of Minakshi, queen of the Pandyan kingdom and its capital Madurai, to Sundareshwara, lord of the universe. The characteristic feature of most festivals is the series of processions, held in both the morning and evening at major festivals, in which the deities’ movable, bronze images are transported on carts around the Temple or the streets of the city, accompanied by priests and preceded by elephants, musicians, and other personnel carrying their royal emblems. Each procession is always a circumambulation of the Temple in the auspicious, clockwise direction, but it is also a circuit by Madurai’s divine rulers of their Temple and city, and by symbolic equivalence their kingdom, the world, and the cosmos as well. The processional route is often diverted so that the deities’ images can visit a hall (man d apa) as its owners’ honored guests. The festival processions, especially the nocturnal ones when the resplendent god and goddess are lit up as they move along the streets, are Madurai’s greatest spectacle and people often come in their thousands to watch. •

• •

21

RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND WORK

The Priests’ Rights and Duties in the Temple The priests are the principal servants of Minakshi and Sundareshwara. Within the Temple the priests are closer to the deities than anyone else, and although they do not work alone, they have the primary responsibility for performing the public worship, as well as private worship. The priests are known in Tamil as pat t ar, normally anglicized as “bhattar” and employed as a caste “surname.” By devotees, and indeed by most people outside the Temple as well, the priests are always respectfully addressed as “sa¯mi” (ca¯mi, the Tamil form of sva¯mi, “lord”), like Sundareshwara himself. In common with priests in other Shaiva temples in Tamilnadu, they belong to the Adishaiva subcaste, generally considered to be Brahman but traditionally ranked below all the ordinary, nonpriestly Smarta Brahman subcastes. Although they often refer to themselves as Adishaivas (a¯dis´aiva; “first Shaiva”), in recent years the Minakshi Temple priests have increasingly used the term Shivacharya (s´iva¯ca¯rya), which denotes “priest of Shiva” but also implies mastery and knowledge, since acharya is a synonym of “guru.”4 Before a man can work in the Temple, he must marry and undergo the consecration ritual (aca¯rya¯bhiseka) alongside his wife; if he is widowed, he cannot continue to work unless he remarries. Without a living wife, say the priests, a man has no legitimate access to shakti, the female power required to worship Minakshi properly. In September 2000, ninety-one men were entitled to work as priests in the Minakshi Temple, but seven were working overseas, ten mainly worked in other nearby temples, and two with full-time jobs did not work in the Temple at all. A total of seventy-two men therefore worked regularly in the Temple, although some were part-time priests and a few old priests had virtually retired. (One other old priest who was widowed also had to retire.) In July 1980, fifty-six priests worked more or less regularly in the Temple, so the numbers have risen by about one-third since then. Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in the number of part-time priests with other jobs outside the Temple, although three older men have also come back to work in the Temple after retiring from posts in government service. As already indicated in chapter 1, the Minakshi Temple priests are divided into two main groups: the Vikkira Pantiyas and the Kulacekaras, who trace their origins in the Temple back to the fourteenth century, although some of the Kulacekaras’ rights now belong to a third, Tirucculi group. Of the ninety-one priests in 2000, sixty belonged to the Vikkira Pantiya group, fifteen to Kulacekara, and sixteen to Tirucculi. The Vikkira Pantiya group comprises the patrilineal clan of the chief priest (stanikar) and five others—Kannakkankudi, Manamadurai, Nettur, Tirupparan• •

•

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kundram, and Tiruvadavur—which are named after nearby villages in whose temples some clan members retain rights.5 At Tirupparankundram (on the outskirts of Madurai) is the great Subrahmanya temple, which is particularly closely connected to the Minakshi Temple, and several priests work regularly in both places. The Kulacekara group consists of one large clan divided into two branches—each with its own chief priest—with no traceable genealogical connection; the Tirucculi group is one large clan. The priests’ main work in the Temple is of course performing worship for the deities. Hence the four actions that they most frequently carry out are bathing the images in oil, milk, sandalpaste, water, and other liquids; decorating them with clothes, garlands, and jewelry; offering food to them; and displaying a series of oil lamps in front of them before concluding by waving a camphor flame. It is true that there are many other things that priests have to do as well, especially in more elaborate rituals during festivals, but on a day-to-day basis most of their work is fairly repetitious routine. In carrying out worship, the priests are assisted by Brahman temple servants (parica¯rakar), who prepare the food and provide them with general help. Also taking significant roles in the rituals are (or should be) the sastris or chanters, who pronounce mantras and recite other Sanskrit texts (although the Temple has had no chanters on its staff since 1998, when the last two men finally retired), as well as the non-Brahman devotional singers (otuva¯r), who sing Tamil devotional hymns, and the musicians.6 Inside the Temple, Vikkira Pantiya priests are superior: they alone can perform the daily worship, offer food, and wave the lamps during all forms of public worship, touch the main images of Minakshi and Sundareshwara, and take charge of the major annual festivals. The Kulacekaras’ principal task (now shared with Tirucculi priests) is bathing and decorating the movable images at festivals, although they may touch all the images except the two main ones. Although the Vikkira Pantiyas claim that the touch of the Kulacekaras would pollute the main images, no ritual distinctions between the two groups are actually observed. Outside the Temple, moreover, they are social equals and have regularly intermarried. The rights to perform the public worship in the Minakshi Temple— the hereditary monopoly of the Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras (now including Tirucculi priests)—are divisible into six different types, conceived of as shares allocated by different rotas (mur_ai). The most important types are the rights to perform the daily worship in the two temples of Minakshi and Sundareshwara held by Vikkira Pantiyas, and the rights to bathe and decorate the festival images held by Kulacekaras. Rights in the daily worship are defined by two thirty-day rotas beginning on the first day of each Tamil month; one Vikkira Pantiya priest might, for example, hold rights in Minakshi’s temple on the fifth day and in

RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND WORK

23

Sundareshwara’s on the twentieth day of each month. Rights to bathe and decorate are defined on the basis of a twelve-day festival; thus one Kulacekara priest might have rights on the first day, another might have the next one and one-half days, and so on. Unlike these Kulacekara rights, those in daily worship cannot be divided into fractions of a day. Also still regarded as important are the rights to open and close the doors of Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s main shrines, defined by two separate rotas that together are now known simply as murai. Each rota is based on a twenty-eight-day cycle, with rights on the first sixteen days divided among Vikkira Pantiyas and on the second twelve days among Kulacekaras. Like shares in the daily worship, one day’s murai rights cannot be subdivided. For many years, however, the work of opening and closing the doors has almost always been done by temple servants, who are paid by the priests.7 All the priests—individually or as coparceners in a joint family—possess rights of one or more types in the public worship; they are referred to as mirasu (mira¯cu) rights, which are regarded as property and always firmly designated as hereditary. Although the priests receive no payment for the public worship, they used to profit from tax-free in_a¯m lands linked to their rights in the Temple, until they were confiscated following land reform legislation in the 1950s. With some minor qualifications, the devolution and transfer of public worship rights are governed by South Indian Mitakshara joint-family law as administered by the courts. Until a partition occurs, patrilineal male descendants of a common ancestor, together with unmarried females and the wives (or widows) of males, constitute a joint family holding rights in common. Partition is frequent, however, and when it occurs, public worship rights and immovable property—mainly houses nowadays—have normally been divided at the same time, and equally between sons to the exclusion of daughters. In recent years, though, both sons and daughters have usually received property shares, but only sons inherit public worship rights. In the absence of sons, the rights of a priest who has separated from his agnatic kinsmen do devolve to his daughters and in the next generation to her sons. If a priest and his wife have no sons, they should adopt a boy from another Minakshi Temple priest’s family; when there are no children, adoption is common, but in practice it rarely if ever occurs when a couple has a daughter.8 Hence inheritance by daughters has not been unusual, and at least since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been several cases in which women have inherited rights in the public worship. Because priests and their wives now practice family planning like other middle-class South Indians and are no longer so anxious to have a son, small families with only a couple of daughters have become fairly common. Devolution to females is therefore likely to become more frequent

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in the future, although some young priests expect to limit it by avoiding partition if their coparceners have no sons. In any case, though, women can never perform the rituals and they must appoint qualified deputies— that is, priests who are fully entitled to do the work—and the same applies when rights are held by minors or men who have not been consecrated, by widowers, or by priests who cannot do their work because they have left Madurai.9 The latter category has expanded considerably owing to the number of priests working overseas, and hence by the 1990s several men were acting as deputies for these emigrants. In other respects, however, there have been no significant changes since the 1970s in how rights and duties in the public worship are organized.

Disputes over Rights Now as in the past, the priests sometimes become involved in disputes about their hereditary rights. These disputes, which can be lengthy and acrimonious, shed significant light on the priests’ attitudes toward their rights and duties in the Temple, as well as more general questions of heredity, legitimacy, and tradition. The only case, at least since the early nineteenth century, in which priests from another temple have gained the right to work in the Minakshi Temple concerns the Tirucculi group (SG, 86–8); see figure 4. In 1881, Chandrashekhara Bhattar, a Kulacekara priest (branch A) who had no issue, bequeathed his rights in the public worship to his sister’s son, Raja Bhattar, who worked in a temple in Kunnathur (outside Madurai); after Raja also died childless, the rights devolved to one of his paternal cousins, Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar. There was then a bitter and protracted dispute between Kulacekara priests (belonging to branches B and C) and Suppu Sokkaya, which started in 1886 and was finally settled in 1917 by the Madras High Court, which ruled in favor of Suppu Sokkaya.10 In 1934, he also died without issue and his rights were then inherited by his two sisters’ four sons: Saminatha Bhattar and his younger brother (who died without issue), belonging to the Manamadurai clan in the Vikkira Pantiya group, and two other brothers from the temple at Tirucculi. In the last twelve years of his life, Suppu Sokkaya’s deputy in the Minakshi Temple was Saminatha, and no Tirucculi priest was involved. After his death, however, members of the Tirucculi group, who had no ancestral rights in the Minakshi Temple, legally acquired some of the Kulacekara priests’ shares and are hence entitled to work in the Temple. Saminatha and his brother, like a few other priests in the Manamadurai clan, had murai rights to open and close the doors of Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s main shrines, but they did not possess rights to perform the daily worship

A

Kulacekara

B

Kunnathur

Chandrashekhara

=

(1826-81)

No issue

Raja

Suppu Sokkaya

(1848-82)

(1857-1934)

No issue

C

No issue

Muthu

No issue

=

=

No issue Transfer of puja rights

Chella (Nettur)

Saminatha (Tirupparankundram)

=

Muthusubramanya

Saminatha

No Issue

Daivisikamani 5 sons Tirucculi

Kalyanasundara

Subramanya

=

Sathasiva

(Adopted son)

Vikkira Pantiya Manamadurai

FIGURE 4. Partial Genealogy of Kulacekara Priests and Suppu Sokkaya Bhatter’s Heirs

Raja 6 sons

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in either temple. However, Saminatha acted as a deputy for the widow of a priest, Chella Bhattar, belonging to the Nettur clan, and Chella had handed over his rights to Saminatha Bhattar of Tirupparankundram (for reasons that are unclear). Saminatha of Tirupparankundram, who was married to the sister of Saminatha of Manamadurai and had adopted his eldest son, asked his brother-in-law working in Madurai to take over the rights because he had too much other work in Tirupparankundram. Even today, Chella’s rights in the daily worship are still retained by Sathasiva Bhattar, the youngest of Saminatha’s four sons and the only one to work in the Minakshi Temple, partly because Chella’s only daughter married one of Sathasiva’s brothers, who worked as a government officer and not as a priest. There is some resentment against Saminatha’s descendants on the grounds that no family should enjoy both Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara rights, especially when its daily worship rights do not, strictly speaking, belong to them because they were transferred from the Nettur clan through deputization. Periodically, according to Sathasiva, another priest picks a quarrel with him about his dual rights. The main source of resentment, however, lies elsewhere. Saminatha, who was also known as Santhu, defied his fellow priests by continuing to conduct rituals when they refused to do so during the six-year temple-entry dispute following the admission of Harijans in 1939, and as a result he and his family were boycotted for many years (SG, 116–22).11 Sathasiva believes that the temple-entry dispute and his father’s action have still not been forgotten, especially by the oldest priests, so that some bitterness lingers on. Yet despite such resentment, it is not Saminatha’s family but the Tirucculi priests who are widely criticized by the other priests as illegitimate outsiders who should not be allowed to serve Minakshi and Sundareshwara at all, irrespective of their legal entitlement. Thus in the eyes of the Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara priests, legality does not amount to legitimacy, even though they do regard the courts as important arenas for defending their hereditary rights in other circumstances. In the 1980s, there was an incident concerning a priest from another temple that slightly resembled Suppu Sokkaya’s case. Three elderly brothers (all now deceased) belonging to the Kulacekara group drew up a will to partition their joint family and divide their shares equally. Because the eldest brother had no sons, his share was inherited by his only daughter— who had married a priest from a temple near Madurai—and her son then claimed the right to work in the Minakshi Temple. In 1987, the Executive Officer granted the man permission to work in the Temple, but a protest was lodged by the son of the second Kulacekara brother, as well as by other men belonging to the group, complaining that they had not been consulted and that no outsider was entitled to perform rituals in the Mi-

RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND WORK

27

nakshi Temple. A petition was also signed by about thirty other priests, including a few from the Tirucculi group, objecting to having to work alongside the outsider. A few months later, the Temple’s trustee intervened to instruct the Officer to cancel his order and ensure that the man in question did not work in the Temple. His case was eventually dismissed on the ostensible grounds that when he was consecrated, the Temple administration had not afforded him the customary honors due to one of its own new priests. This case, which never went to court, is rather curious. Because the eldest Kulacekara brother had only one daughter, the will made it almost inevitable that his rights would devolve to her son. It is therefore odd that his two brothers agreed to the will, because they knew about Suppu Sokkaya’s case and the consequent risk of transferring rights to outsiders like the priests from Tirucculi. The explanation that I heard but could not confirm was that the eldest brother, who was extremely old, was persuaded to make the will by his daughter’s husband; the other two Kulacekara brothers, motivated by greed, consented to it in exchange for enhanced shares of the joint-family house, although one of them later joined the protesters. Yet the will was valid and, as the precedent of Suppu Sokkaya’s case shows, the Executive Officer’s original decision was correct. Whether or not he received honors at his consecration, the old Kulacekara priest’s grandson was and still is legally entitled to work in the Minakshi Temple, even though he has been prevented from doing so and has not appealed to the courts. What the outcome most obviously demonstrates is the strength of the priests’ collective opposition to outsiders and their ability in spite of the law to bring pressure to bear to protect their monopolistic rights in the Temple. Another illuminating case, even though it is not specifically about rights in the public worship, is actually the Tirucculi dispute erupting once again, itself a sign of how resentment against the Tirucculi group has persisted for six decades. In 1998, Sivaraj of Tirucculi, the Agamic graduate who was one of the pradhana sadhakas in the renovation ritual, got married and then wanted to have his consecration ritual. Vikkira Pantiya priests have their consecrations in front of Minakshi’s shrine and Kulacekaras have theirs in front of Sundareshwara’s. Tirucculi priests, even though they are entitled to work in the Minakshi Temple, have always been required to hold their consecration rituals in other temples, normally Tirucculi temple itself. Yet Sivaraj’s father (one of the sons of Raja in figure 4) decided to ask the Executive Officer for permission to hold the ritual in front of Sundareshwara’s shrine, and this was granted. As preparations for the ritual began, Kulacekara priests went to the trustees’ chairman, who overruled the Officer and ordered that it be stopped. Sivaraj’s family soon challenged the order in the District Court and filed a suit

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against the other priests; the Kulacekara and Vikkira Pantiya chief priests in turn filed a suit against the Tirucculi party. Bitterness between the two groups grew rapidly, and when an old Kulacekara priest died a few months later, some senior Tirucculi priests (though not Sivaraj’s father) showed their feelings by refusing to pay the customary visit to his house. Sivaraj, given his Agamic learning and experience in a temple in New Delhi, could expect to make a good living in Madurai if he agreed to have his consecration elsewhere and then started to work in the Minakshi Temple. Instead, in 2001, he and one of his younger brothers went to work in a temple in Singapore for two years. But the fight has not been abandoned; like their Kulacekara opponents, Sivaraj and his family have dug in their heels and are apparently prepared to spend a lot of time and money on a case that was making no headway by early 2002 and could drag on for many years. A retired lawyer who is himself a member of the priestly community predicted that the case might take ten years to proceed through the lower courts and another ten if appealed to the Madras High Court. But as he ruefully commented, fighting such protracted cases has long been a priestly custom.12 Not all Tirucculi priests are willing to follow Sivaraj’s example, however; in 2000, another young man from the group was consecrated in Tirucculi temple and began to work in the Minakshi Temple without any controversy. Disputes over consecration rituals between Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara priests probably date back to the seventeenth century. They arose again in the mid-nineteenth century when they were taken to court, but actually settled by the British Collector of Madurai, who decided on the current arrangement (SG, 73–4). This decision reflected the Vikkira Pantiyas’ higher rank, because Minakshi is the preeminent deity, although the ritual itself is identical for all priests. In the new dispute, the Kulacekaras and their Vikkira Pantiya allies insist that a Tirucculi consecration ritual inside the Minakshi Temple would violate its traditional customs and those of its priesthood. They also insist that Tirucculi priests have never been completely equal to Kulacekaras, because in particular they have never shared the Kulacekaras’ rights to act in the plays held during major annual festivals (SG, 77). The Tirucculi priests, by contrast, insist that no genuine tradition precludes their consecration, and argue that, in all other important respects, they are equal to the Kulacekaras and hence entitled to the same consecration ritual. In addition, they claim that previous consecrations have been held in Tirucculi temple only because they cost less than in the Minakshi Temple, where so many other priests and temple personnel have to be given food and presents afterwards, and they point out that several Kulacekara (and Vikkira Pantiya) priests have also been consecrated in other temples to save money. Overall though, it is patently clear that Sivaraj and the Tirucculi priests are trying to strengthen their

RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND WORK

29

position as the Kulacekaras’ equals in the Temple and the Kulacekaras are trying to prevent it, even though—or rather precisely because—they have had to share their public worship rights with the outsiders from Tirucculi for more than sixty years. In the past, when tax-free lands were attached to public worship rights, ceding them to others could involve an economic loss. Notwithstanding the confiscation of the lands, however, the transfer of rights to outsiders still has real economic implications, because only priests with rights in the public worship can earn money by carrying out private worship in the Minakshi Temple. The erosion of what would otherwise be their monopoly over remunerative work in the Temple is relevant to Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara hostility toward the Tirucculi priests, and fear of further loss was also a factor in the case of the Kulacekara heir who was excluded in the 1980s. By far the greatest threat to the priests’ position came in the 1970s, however, when the anti-Brahman Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party was in power in Tamilnadu. In 1970, the DMK government passed an act to abolish the hereditary rights of temple priests in the state; the act was challenged in the courts, and a ruling by the Indian Supreme Court made it largely ineffectual.13 In the late 1970s, although the DMK had lost power, most priests—as I recorded in SG (130)—felt that “the threat to their position, and to their monopolistic rights in particular, had been lifted rather than eliminated.” By the 1990s, owing to the decline of anti-Brahmanism in Tamil politics, which is further discussed in chapter 5, the priests were more relaxed and no longer seriously worried that the legal abolition of their hereditary rights would ever have any impact in practice, although they still recognized it as a possibility and were never slow to denounce abolition as totally illegitimate. In most respects, legislation by the state to abolish all priests’ hereditary rights obviously differs from specific cases of devolution to outsiders, but as far as the Minakshi Temple priests are concerned, the outcome is a comparable violation of their traditional rights, which would also endanger their livelihood by letting other men earn money in their locale. Yet material interests and earnings opportunities account for only part of the priests’ preoccupation, collectively or individually, with their hereditary rights. Thus, for example, the dispute over Sivaraj’s consecration is about status, not money, since nobody is arguing that the Tirucculi priests—including Sivaraj if he were consecrated somewhere else—could now be stopped from working in the Temple. The crucial point in this context is that the rights that priests possess or enjoy also define relations of equality or inequality among them. Within the hierarchical structure of the Temple, the priests as a whole are closer to Minakshi and Sundareshwara than any other group of people, so that they occupy the first rank after the deities themselves. They are therefore superior to the chanters,

30

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temple servants, singers, musicians, and other officiants, as well as to the devotees. The ranking of different groups within the Temple, as well as the Vikkira Pantiyas’ superiority over the Kulacekaras, matter as much today as they did in the 1970s, and most of the detailed discussion of them in SG remains valid. But I should also emphasize that it is not just relationships among groups that are salient, for an individual priest’s own status—which is of course interdependent with that of his group, clan, or family—is also vital to his self-esteem as a servant of Minakshi and Sundareshwara, and that is the main reason why Sivaraj is so determined not to give in. This point is further illustrated by another incident that arose in connection with a consecration ritual. A priest and his sons from a branch of the Manamadurai clan, who possess only murai rights to open and close the shrine doors, believe that their forebears were defrauded by other priests over a century ago and they would still like to recover their lost daily worship rights. (It is also possible that they lost their rights when they allowed other priests to enjoy them [SG, 90].) Knowing that I had looked at court and inam land records, these priests asked me in 1994 if they contained relevant evidence; the answer was no and I also advised the family that there was no realistic hope of winning a case in court. The issue came to the fore when one of the sons was being consecrated. After his consecration, it is a new Vikkira Pantiya priest’s privilege to perform the midday daily worship in Minakshi’s temple. On this occasion, however, the priest with the daily worship rights on that day made a point of insisting that the new Manamadurai priest’s privilege was indeed a mere privilege, which provided no basis for any claim to his family’s supposedly lost rights. His insistence sounded like a fuss about nothing—a mere restatement of what everybody already knew—but it mattered to the men involved because although it makes no material difference whether a priest possesses rights to perform the daily worship, it does significantly affect status and esteem. The Manamadurai family without these rights feel that they are not equal—or rather, that they are not seen as equal— to other Vikkira Pantiyas, who are conversely determined to prevent any erosion of their own position. On the other hand, members of this family also distinguish themselves from a second bereft Manamadurai family whose murai rights were inherited via the female line from Kulacekaras, so that its members would have to hold their consecration rituals in front of Sundareshwara’s shrine like Kulacekaras themselves, if they had not avoided the issue by holding them in Manamadurai temple. In the cases that I have described, as well as in countless conversations revealing an almost obsessive concern with rights, it is clear that what matters most to the priests is their very possession of hereditary rights in the public worship. Sometimes, indeed, they are unenthusiastic about

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carrying out the ritual duties entailed by their rights, as their delegation of the work of opening and closing the main shrines’ doors shows.14 Also vitally important is the priests’ right to an appropriate consecration ritual. These rights—whether collective or individual, settled or disputed— which matter so much because they are crucial to the priests’ status and esteem within the Temple, are also intimately connected with wider issues of tradition and legitimacy. In Sivaraj’s consecration case, as in so many other contexts, “tradition”—referred to in Tamil by the Sanskritic term paramparai or the phrase pal_akkam val_akkam, “custom and habit”—has been continually invoked by all parties as the fundamental legitimating principle. In SG, I explained that the priests do not recognize the modern government as the rightful successor to the precolonial Nayakas, the last Hindu kings of Madurai, who “were the last legitimate rulers and protectors of the Minakshi Temple.” Hence legitimate rights in the public worship “can only now be established by tracing hereditary descent from those whose rights were truly legitimate because they actually were royal appointees” (110).15 As I also explained, the emphasis on hereditary descent was probably reinforced during the colonial period, and there are inconsistencies in the priests’ notion of legitimacy that remain as blatant as ever. Thus Kulacekara objections to Vikkira Pantiya superiority rely on the argument that the latter is owed to ancient royal favoritism, not superior ritual qualifications. But since all three groups have the same ritual qualifications, Tirucculi priests can turn the argument against Kulacekaras by saying that no group should be superior to any other within the Temple. Yet the Tirucculi priests today are just as adamantly opposed to outsiders as the Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras, and they all defend their own rights and privileges, and sometimes make claims on those of others, by insisting on the principle of heredity and more generally on the sanctity of age-old rules and customs that have been putatively upheld in the Temple at least since Nayaka rule. They may and do disagree about what is a valid tradition, but not about the authority of tradition itself. In general terms, hereditary priests in other Shaiva temples in Tamilnadu express similar views, but there is some variation in emphasis. Anthony Good (1989: 250–1, 256–7) compares the Minakshi Temple priests with those in Kalugumalai temple, which is not under governmental control and where the local ruler and temple trustee was using his power to appoint and dismiss priests during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In litigation, Kalugumalai priests emphasized the intrinsic validity of their ancient, hereditary mirasu rights; since they were confronting a living king who was actually wielding his power, heredity detached from royal legitimacy was a notion more in tune with the Kalugumalai priests’ interests. In Tiruvannamalai temple, the priests do refer to the kings of the past to legitimate their hereditary rights, but more vaguely than their counter-

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parts in Madurai (Reiniche 1989: 81); like the Kalugumalai priests, they put most emphasis on hereditary mirasu rights, but do so, too, to stress their special status and identity as priests, given by the distinctive relationship with the deities that separates them from other temple personnel, even though they are all paid a monthly salary by the administration (ibid.: 93–4). Not being an ordinary salaried employee and not receiving cash payments for public worship, which are of course emphasized by the Minakshi Temple priests as well, are particularly strongly stressed by the Tiruvarur temple priests, “who maintain the special character of their office by keeping it strictly hereditary and ‘honorary.’ ” Yet these men are actually paid for doing the public worship in grain and cooked food, and it was when the administration wanted to change over to cash that the priests objected: “Cash payment, it was felt, lent a contractual colour to their office, which they wished to avoid” (Shankari 1984: 179). In the poorer Kumbeshwara temple, although the priests still uphold the hereditary principle, they are nowadays paid like other temple staff and have adapted to their inescapable economic circumstances (Selvam 1997: 39– 40). The Kumbeshwara case strongly suggests that the status of unpaid, hereditary servants to the deities is sustainable only if priests have adequate economic security. When they are fortunate in this respect, as they are in the Minakshi Temple and the others mentioned, how priests explain and justify their rights and privileges tends to vary according to their interests and circumstances, although for all of them “traditional” hereditary rights are axiomatically legitimate. In the Minakshi Temple, there is some indication—as illustrated, for instance, by the Manamadurai priests’ lost daily worship rights—that in the past priests were less concerned about holding on to all their rights in the Temple, perhaps especially if lands of little value were attached to them. After the lands had been taken away in the 1950s, no shares in the public worship were worth more economically than any others, but they all now mattered in relation to status, so that somewhat paradoxically priests may have become more insistent on retaining all their rights. This suggestion is speculative, however, whereas I am clear that in the last twenty years there has been a shift in how the Minakshi Temple priests defend their hereditary rights vis-a`-vis each other, as well as collectively in relation to their monopoly over the public worship. In the late 1970s, they tended to display a kind of obstinate conservatism that was often mixed in with trepidation about threats to their position from the Tamilnadu government and demoralization about the future of the Brahman temple priesthood. Many old men could remember the government’s takeover of the Temple in 1937, the priests’ defeat in the battle over Harijan temple entry between 1939 and 1945, as well as their loss of status, power, income, and property at that time, and many more easily recalled

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the 1948 act to abolish inam estates and the subsequent confiscation of their lands. Talk about hereditary rights was commonly mixed in with a lot of pessimistic regret about how much they had lost as things had changed, mostly for the worse; it was summed up by one senior priest’s remark in 1977 (noting my British nationality) that “our flag went down with yours in 1947” (SG, 128). By the mid-1990s, there was only a handful of survivors from the events of the late 1930s, less than half the priests were old enough to remember the loss of their lands, and for a lot of younger men even the DMK government of the early 1970s was before their time. Hence most priests today, unlike a generation ago, have not personally experienced any loss of hereditary rights and old privileges, or even any serious threat to them, and in addition—for reasons that this book explores—the priests’ self-confidence has generally improved. One effect of less pessimistic remembrance about the past and more optimism about the future has been a more forcefully articulate defense by the priests of their own position and rights, both individually and collectively, notably by insisting that their hereditary rights are themselves a vital part of the Temple’s tradition. There are still the usual complaints that things were better in the past of course, but more striking is that the priests in general are more traditionalist—more ideologically committed to traditional rights, authority, and legitimation—than they used to be. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss in more detail how this change is related to Agamic education and broader political developments, but at this point I wish to emphasize that the priests’ more optimistic self-confidence about the future and their more emphatic traditionalism—as exemplified by their defense of hereditary prerogatives—have been mutually reinforcing. Moreover, the priests’ improving morale is connected to changes in the organization of private worship and their economic opportunities during the last two decades, which have encouraged a more modern-minded outlook. I return to this apparently paradoxical combination of traditionalism and modernity at the end of this chapter, as well as later in the book.

Private Worship and the Priests’ Earnings As already mentioned, only men with rights in the public worship are allowed to carry out private worship, and although the priests consistently aver that public worship is far more important, only private worship is paid. There are no rotas for the organization of private worship in the Minakshi Temple (unlike many other temples), so that any priest can work wherever and whenever he wants, and the unequal distribution of

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individual men’s shares in the public worship has no bearing on their entitlement to earn money through private worship (SG, 98–101). Since 1939, a ticket system for private worship has operated in the Minakshi Temple. A devotee must first buy a ticket from an office run by the administration; tickets at different prices are sold for different types of private worship and offerings. The devotee gives the ticket to the priest before he carries out the worship; each priest retains all his tickets and is later repaid a fixed proportion of their face value by the administration. Usually, but not always, priests also receive an extra tip as daksin a¯ from devotees, or they may be given some of the foodstuffs (coconut and plantains) that have been offered to the deity. Nowadays, the priests are almost the only “self-employed” workers in the Temple, because nearly all the other staff are paid a salary or fees for their services by the administration. The simplest and by far the commonest type of private worship is the ordinary archana, the ast ottara s´ata or “108-name” worship, abbreviated in Tamil as ast ottiram, in which the priest offers a coconut, some plantains, and various other items before an image and recites a list of the deity’s 108 names. He concludes the ritual by waving a camphor flame, and then lets the devotee pass his or her hands through the flame, before returning the foodstuffs with some vibhu¯ti (white ash sacred to Shiva) or kun˙kuma (red powder sacred to the goddess). The food, ash, and powder are prasa¯da, substances imbued with divine grace, which the devotee symbolically absorbs (SG, 21; cf. Fuller 1992a: 72–5). Although the majority of archanas are performed for Minakshi and Sundareshwara at their main shrines, they are also done for numerous subsidiary images. The ordinary archana’s ticket price remained at Re 1 (with 30 paise payable to the priest) from 1974 until 1997, when it was raised to Rs 2 (60 paise to the priest).16 In SG (99), I used twenty-four months’ ticket sales figures between 1980 and 1982 (90% of them for ordinary archanas) to estimate the priests’ average per capita receipts at Rs 233 per month and their total income at around Rs 300 per month, although I also noted that priests’ incomes varied widely and that some of them earned extra money by working in other temples. In retrospect, I think my estimate was probably on the low side. In 1980, the very experienced Peshkar (Temple supervisor), who had recently retired, commented that a priest could earn up to Rs 1,000 per month, and his equally experienced deputy, the Maniyam, told me that a hard-working priest could earn Rs 800 per month, although most men—whom he was criticizing as too lazy—would have made a lot less. Over twenty-four months in 1992–94, according to figures provided by the administration, the average monthly sale of archana tickets was 21 percent higher than in 1980–82, itself 36 percent higher than in 1975– 77. However, the number of priests working regularly in the Temple had •

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risen by about one-third by 1994 compared with a decade earlier, so that their average per capita receipts from archana tickets fell slightly. Moreover, between 1981 and 1994, consumer prices in Madurai tripled, so that the priests’ average earnings from archana tickets in the mid-1990s were less than one-third of what they had been, in real terms, in the early 1980s; even doubling the price in 1997 did not restore earnings to their earlier level.17 Indeed, many priests now say that it is hardly worth bothering with tickets valued at only 30 paise (or even 60 paise), whereas in the early 1980s, 30 paise was not such a trivial amount; moreover, in those days, the coins put on priests’ plates (tat t ukka¯cu, “plate money”) as donations or tips in exchange for sacred ash and powder were usually very small and were worth less in total than the tickets, whereas by the mid-1990s, they were normally worth considerably more. In a couple of hours on an ordinary quiet morning, therefore, a priest might typically carry out ten archanas (worth Rs 3 and since 1997 Rs 6), but he might expect to collect between Rs 30 and Rs 50 in coins and small notes on his plate. At busier times, especially Friday evenings when the Temple is always very crowded, many more archanas are done, but they still represent only a small proportion of overall priestly earnings. Compared with the early 1980s, therefore, the income derived from carrying out archanas has fallen both in real terms and as a proportion of the total, so that the figures for archana ticket sales no longer provide a good basis for estimating the priests’ earnings. Because there are no rotas for the organization of private worship, the number of priests available to serve devotees depends on how many of them choose to come to the Temple.18 There are always some priests in attendance, especially at the two main shrines, and the priests responsible for daily worship or festivals on any one day must of course be present, so that they may be available to carry out some private worship while waiting for rituals to start. By the 1990s, however, it was increasingly uncommon for priests to spend much time in the Temple except when working, and compared with the past, fewer of them idled away their days there. That meant that fewer priests were inside the Temple available to answer an anthropologist’s questions than when I first started research in Madurai in 1976–77, but more importantly, for ordinary people a shortage of priests has become increasingly frequent during this period. Early in the morning, before 6:00, when quite a lot of devotees like to visit the Temple, there are often hardly any priests available to do private worship, but a shortage can occur at almost any time. Too many priests may have gone away to attend family weddings or other ceremonies, or may have stayed at home, either because they wanted to take it easy or mistakenly assumed that there would not be enough devotees to make attendance worthwhile; in addition (as we shall see shortly), too many • •

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priests may have decided to work outside the Temple instead. At Minakshi’s main shrine, although long queues build up at busy times, there is rarely a serious shortage of priests, but archanas are sometimes done as if on a production line, with priests doing several at once and too speedily to complete them properly. This can lead to complaints from devotees, although the priests say that much commoner are complaints that they do not work fast enough. Elsewhere in the Temple, though, the periodic shortages that occur are sometimes made worse because even men who are present may flatly refuse to do cheap, simple rituals if they are waiting to do more lucrative work; as a young priest once told me, he needs money for his family and cannot afford to waste time doing lots of ordinary archanas. Priests often grumble that a lot of devotees are mean as well as rude, but conversely, too, they sometimes wave people away or carry out small rituals with impatient bad grace because they cannot be bothered to make the effort for so little money. From time to time, all this leads to complaints to the Temple supervisors and arguments with the priests as irritated devotees try to find someone willing to work for them. The worst rows erupt when priests refuse to serve so-called VIPs (abundant in India)—especially politicians, government officials, and police officers—who then lodge a formal complaint with the Temple administration. Priests object that doing archanas for such people not only earns them very little but also wastes a lot of time, because VIPs and their entourages expect personal tours of the Temple and individual attention at each shrine, which additionally leads to arguments with other devotees who must wait until they have gone. From some prominent people, such as rich business executives or film stars, generous dakshina payments are anticipated, so that priests are more than willing to oblige them, but most run-of-the-mill VIPs are expected to be at least as stingy as ordinary people. These attitudes toward poorly paid work and wasting time reflect the fact that for most priests today, more so than in the past, the Temple is their workplace in which they try to maximize their earnings, even if that means that ordinary members of the public are sometimes aggrieved. Like many people, the priests are reluctant to give detailed information about their earnings, but they generally acknowledge that their average standard of living has risen over the last twenty years. The figures I do have show that by the late 1990s, an ordinary hard-working priest could earn around Rs 6,000 per month on average, although many earn much less because they do not work long hours. This is particularly true of older men who live with younger, active sons. A few priests are reputed to earn as much as Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 in a good month, but this is rare or, more probably, exaggerated. As mentioned above, the Temple supervisors claimed that a hard-working priest could earn Rs 800 to Rs 1,000 in

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1980, which—adjusted for inflation—is about half the estimated earnings (Rs 6,000) of a similar priest in the late 1990s. And even though the priests’ average monthly income was probably rather more than Rs 300 in 1980, their average earnings in the late 1990s were in real terms almost certainly twice as high as they had been at the beginning of the previous decade. The main sources for this rise in earnings, which I shall now discuss, are more expensive rituals inside the Temple and new forms of work outside it.

Temple Ritual and the Urban Middle Class In the mid-1970s, a big, new collection box was installed in the Temple to raise money for a “golden car” (tan˙ka ratam), which was eventually constructed in 1982. The car is about sixteen feet high and is made of a square, silver-plated base surmounted by an open-sided, gold-plated chamber in which an image of Minakshi is placed; it is elaborately and garishly decorated, and strewn with colored fairy lights. At the request of a sponsor, the car is taken in procession in the evening around the Adi Streets inside the Temple’s perimeter wall, led by elephants, musicians, and a priest walking just in front of the goddess. The procession lasts about half an hour and the sponsor’s party (and sometimes other devotees) pull the car along the streets with a long rope. Minakshi is worshiped in the car inside the Temple before the procession starts and again at the end, when the officiating priest honors the sponsor by tying a silk cloth (parivat t am) around his head and garlanding him and members of his party. The sponsor must meet all the costs, including dakshina for the priests and other officiants, and pay a fee to the administration, which was Rs 1,001 until it was raised to Rs 1,501 in 2001; in total, the cost is likely to be at least Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000, which means that sponsorship is restricted to people who are fairly well-off. Several large temples in South India have acquired golden cars since the 1980s, and in the Minakshi Temple, processions of the car have become steadily more popular.19 Sometimes the sponsors are businesses or voluntary associations of various kinds, but the majority are individuals, mostly residents of Madurai and its region, although some are pilgrims from elsewhere. There is no reason to doubt the devotion to Minakshi of these well-off sponsors and their family members, including their increasingly numerous Non-Resident Indian (NRI) relatives who participate in the processions (and videotape them) when on holiday from America or elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is also very clear that the popularity of the golden car—with its kitschy appearance—is linked to growing urban middle-class consumerism and • •

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its often ostentatious religious expression, even though plans for the car were first made in the 1970s, well before economic liberalization began. From the 1980s onward, the Temple administration sharply raised the ticket price for several types of expensive private worship and offering. The price for putting the diamond crown (vayirakkirı¯t am) and golden body plates (tan˙kakkavacam) on Minakshi’s main image went up from Rs 400 to Rs 500 around 1982 and reached Rs 2,001 by 2001, while the price for performing the “one hundred thousand-name worship” (laksa¯rcana) rose from Rs 200 to Rs 500, and then to Rs 1,000 in 1997. The price of the sandalpaste decoration (candana alan˙ka¯ra) for the images of Durga¯, Laksmı¯, Sarasvatı¯, and Daksin a¯mu¯rti was progressively increased between 1980 and 1991 from Rs 5 to Rs 215, and then to Rs 350 by 2001, as the ritual became more elaborate. Erecting a flower canopy around Siddha’s shrine (a variant of an offering that cost Rs 5 in 1980) was advertised for Rs 300 in 2001.20 In 1997, when the price of an archana and other cheaper tickets went up by a rupee or two, putting a new account book at Minakshi’s feet went up from Rs 125 to Rs 250, and worship of the goddess’s “nine powers” (navas´akti) from Rs 50 to Rs 100, while having silver body plates (ve˘llikkavacam) placed on various images rose tenfold from Rs 25 to Rs 250.21 In 1982, around the same time as the golden car was inaugurated, the administration also introduced another form of private worship: a simplified reenactment of the wedding ritual (tirukkalya¯n am) for Minakshi and Sundareshwara priced at Rs 501, raised to Rs 1,001 in 1997 and Rs 1,501 in 2001. Also capitalizing on the popular appeal of the divine couple’s wedding was the new image of Kalya¯n asundara, installed in 1985, which portrays Minakshi being married to Sundareshwara by Vishnu (Visn u). Worshipping Kalyanasundara, promises a notice, will help young women to find husbands. By 1995, the diamond crown display and the golden car procession were each being performed at the behest of devotees about fifteen times per month and the reenacted wedding about ten times per month; in 1992–94, these three—together with other expensive but less frequently performed rituals—already generated receipts worth more than half the total from the far more numerous ordinary archana tickets.22 (In 1997, however, displaying the diamond crown was restricted owing to fears about security and damage to the goddess’s image.) By 2001, a large notice advertised the golden car procession as a daily event (except on festival days) and it was being held on most days; for the wedding ritual, it had become common for two or three people to act as cosponsors of the same reenactment. For these two rituals and the diamond crown display, the sponsors’ names are announced on a notice board inside the Temple so that everyone can see who they are. •

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In the early 1980s, the Temple administration introduced a new scheme whereby for a sum of Rs 1,250 paid into a fixed deposit account, it would guarantee the performance of archanas at several major shrines once a year. This scheme was mainly designed for emigrants from Madurai who want to ensure, for example, that a birthday is blessed in absentia by Minakshi and Sundareshwara. Another innovation in the 1990s was the “food donation” (an_n_ata¯n_am) or “free prasada” scheme in which, for payment of Rs 5,000 invested by the Temple administration, an archana is done annually for Minakshi at the midday period of worship and food is offered to her; this food is then distributed as prasada in the donor’s name to around 300 needy individuals. In 2000, another new scheme was announced: for Rs 10,000 a permanent endowment (kat t alai) would be set up to pay all the costs of one period of daily worship on a chosen day every year, and for Rs 960 the costs would be met just once. This scheme was then supplemented by another in which for a fee varying between Rs 350 and Rs 750, for each of seven listed deities, the bathing ritual would be carried out at one of the daily worship periods. Notices were also put up around the Temple in 2001 seeking donations (between Rs 100 and Rs 10,000) to pay for new silver coating for the shrine of Ve˘lliyampalam Nat ara¯ja (the principal form of Shiva as “lord of the dance,” who dances on a “silver stage” in Madurai): “Donate liberally and get blessings of god,” bluntly announced the notice in English. In spite of problems of interpretation and definition, it is generally agreed that the size of the Indian urban middle class and its prosperity— or more accurately, its expenditure on consumer goods—grew markedly during the 1980s, when economic liberalization became the keystone of government policy. Further and more rapid growth took place after 1991, when liberalization was consolidated and accelerated by adoption of a wholesale policy of economic reform, epitomized by measures to dismantle the “permit raj” (Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 123–4, 143–72). How successful liberalization and reform have been continues to be much debated, but it is indisputable that the lifestyle of the “great Indian middle class,” to use Pavan K. Varma’s phrase (1999), has been transformed by their participation in a consumer boom marked by rapidly rising sales of cars and scooters, fans and refrigerators, televisions and recorded music, restaurant meals and branded drinks, cosmetics and sunglasses, and so on. The face of all larger urban centers, including Madurai, has changed enormously, as new shops, restaurants, and hotels have opened; traffic congestion has also become a widespread, chronic problem.23 For Madurai (like other Indian cities), there are no economic data that allow us to define the middle class and its membership with any precision. However, as Sara Dickey (2000: 465–6) explains with ethnographic evidence from Madurai, class is also a salient, indigenous category, and those • •

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who call themselves “middle-” or “upper-class” (normally using the English terms) “include merchants, shop owners, professionals (such as doctors or lawyers), teachers, government officials, large landowners, and the members of their households”; they share in common relative financial security and the ability “to purchase and display a variety of consumer goods,” and they are also generally well educated. These people tend to look down on the lower-class poor, who usually refer to the middle class as “rich” or “big people.” The growth of Madurai’s middle class has been one main cause of improvement in the Minakshi Temple priests’ economic circumstances; indeed, many if not all priests now call themselves “middle class” and share its lifestyle. Middle-class people in Madurai are almost certainly spending more on ritual, as well as consumer goods; Gilles Tarabout (1997: 140) reports the same situation in Kerala, where rising prosperity and consumerism are additionally fueled by Gulf migrants’ money, and it is probably similar throughout much of India.24 Tarabout observes that in Kerala, where local village rivalries stimulate expenditure, some non-Sanskritic sacrificial cults are experiencing growth, but in many cases, increased expenditure on Brahmanical, Sanskritic rituals is a significant form of consumption that is constitutive of respectable, middle-class status. This is also true in Madurai, and thus it is revealing that expenditure on costly rituals, rather than cheaper ones, has risen most markedly in the Minakshi Temple. Furthermore, there is some evidence that in Tamilnadu, rising expenditure on rituals, particularly expensive ones, is mainly confined to temples in larger towns and cities. It is also mostly concentrated in grand and famous temples, like the Minakshi Temple, although some of these temples—such as Palani or Tiruchendur, which are dedicated to Murugan and are major pilgrimage centers—are located outside populous areas. By contrast, small temples, especially in the countryside, are seeing little, if any, extra outlay on rituals, so that their priests remain poor. All Minakshi Temple priests know about relatives struggling to make a living in small temples and are aware that their own good fortune is not shared by all Tamilnadu’s temple priests.25 The rise in ritual expenditure in the Minakshi Temple must be seen against a background in which, so my evidence indicates, the average daily attendance has remained remarkably stable over more than twenty years.26 Furthermore, the Temple administration only doubled the price of ordinary archanas (and other cheaper tickets) in 1997 after keeping them constant since 1974, but in spite of this policy the rate of increase in archana ticket sales was actually slower during the 1980s than it had been in the late 1970s. (It is true of course that the price of the coconuts, plantains, and other items offered in an archana has steadily risen to around Rs 20 by 2002, so that they cost much more than the ticket, but

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this price rise simply reflects general inflation.) During the 1980s, there were some ritual innovations in the Temple—such as a new style of worship for Durga—which were brought about not by the administration but by ordinary devotees drawn from all social strata.27 Such demotic innovations help to keep the Minakshi Temple alive as a major center of popular religion, and they do contribute a little to the income of the Temple and its priests. On the other hand, the big money is in the expensive types of private worship, and as we have seen, the administration sharply raised their prices from the 1980s onwards, introduced new kinds of highvalue private worship, and saw the total income from these sources rise markedly. Not only did the Temple, which had more or less stable attendance levels, thereby profit from growing middle-class prosperity without taking more money from the “common people,” but its policy—most notably promotion of the golden car—also provided the better-off with new opportunities to distinguish themselves from the less fortunate through more splendid and more ostentatious expressions of devotion to Minakshi and Sundareshwara. As far as I can tell, the administration has not pursued a well-formulated plan to maximize revenue; instead, it has been raising prices and introducing new rituals and schemes in a fairly ad hoc way over the last twenty years or so. But its policy has been basically sound and the outcome strongly suggests that high ticket prices are probably stimulating demand, rather than reducing it, because they better separate the consumerist middle class—the modern Indian equivalent of Thorstein Veblen’s “leisure class”—from the often disparaged poor who can only afford a few rupees’ worth of private worship.28 As noted above, most people paying for costly private worship are residents of Madurai and its region, or emigrants from the city returning on holiday. The Minakshi Temple is still not a major pilgrimage site in its own right; nevertheless, even though they are only a small proportion of the devotees, the number of pilgrims and tourists has grown a lot since the early 1980s. Most pilgrims arrive on buses that are touring a range of temple towns in Tamilnadu. The majority are South Indians, but a significant minority are northerners, who have come on often battered vehicles driven from the Hindi heartland. Many people on bus tours of course are not well-to-do, and those with more money usually travel by more comfortable means in small family groups. Pilgrims and tourists, although they rarely choose an expensive form of private worship, often do want to offer an archana to Minakshi and Sundareshwara, so that their rising numbers may well account for much of the increase in archana ticket sales that has occurred. From the priests’ point of view, these visitors tend to be more worthwhile than local people, since it is often possible to do a large number of archanas for one party at once or earn a large gratuity from a wealthy pilgrim in a generous mood. For many years,

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indeed, one old priest had a policy of concentrating almost exclusively on North Indians because, he said, unlike local people, they would almost always give him a reasonable dakshina without being asked. The priests complain vehemently that their share of even the high-value ticket prices is only a few rupees, so that they do not gain very much compared with the Temple administration. They also complain that quite a lot of rich people, having spent a few thousand rupees on a ritual like the golden car procession, meanly give them next to nothing, and when this happens, they are likely to make a fuss and try to extract more. Yet it is also true that priests quite often receive sums of Rs 50 or even Rs 100 from devotees who have employed them for expensive rituals. In most cases, priests do not know the people they serve, but some wealthier devotees who worship in the Temple regularly have established relationships with particular priests on whom they always call. These people—often members of long-established Madurai business families with old money, rather than the new rich—reward their own priests well, and sometimes very generously indeed. But whether they are earning money from strangers or regular patrons, large payments are fairly common and no longer attract much attention, unlike twenty years ago, and most priests, when they add up their dakshina after work, are counting far more in notes than coins.

Endowments and Sponsorship In principle, all public worship in the Minakshi Temple—both the daily worship and the festivals—is paid for by independent endowments (kattalai), whose trustees and managers organize the particular rituals supported by them, although much of the ritual is actually paid for by the Sarkar (government) kattalai controlled by the administration (SG, 44– 7, 92–3). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various sections of the population benefiting from new economic opportunities opened up by colonial rule established endowments, either in the form of family trusts or trusts set up by voluntary caste associations. For the daily worship, I have two lists of endowments from different sources that only partly correspond with each other, although they do confirm that, in addition to support from the Sarkar kattalai, each period of worship is separately paid for by varying sets of endowments. For the festivals as a whole, my information about endowment support is even less complete, but for major festivals the principal endowments can be more accurately identified by using information printed in festival programs. Thus, for example, in the early 1980s, in addition to two endowments controlled by the rajas of Ramnad and Sivaganga and one by the Madurai

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Shaiva monastery, twenty-five family and caste association endowments were the principal supporters of important ritual events during the Temple’s two most elaborate annual festivals, Chittirai and Avani Mula.29 Following failure or mismanagement by trustees, however, some of these endowments are now controlled by the administration, which took them over in line with its policy of steadily consolidating its centralized power over the Temple (SG, 93). In practice, therefore, many formerly independent endowments have become part of the “government” endowment. In some cases, the Temple administration has taken over the management of an endowment’s resources and expenditure, although its trustees are still nominally in charge and receive the honors due to them, especially the silk headbands presented at the end of a ritual or other event supported by their endowment. Disputes are common in these cases; trustees tend to complain that the administration is not running the endowment properly and fails to give them proper respect, whereas administration officials complain that the trustees do not fulfill their responsibilities. (These disputes, often involving litigation, make accurate information about endowments sensitive and hard to collect, which is mainly why my lists are incomplete and inconsistent.) The supervisors inside the Temple, as well as the priests, temple servants, and other officiants, say that too often both the trustees and the administration mismanage the endowments, so that rituals cannot be done properly and payments due to them are not received. Each endowment has (or should have) its own priest who carries out specific rituals that it pays for, but in practice this system no longer operates. At the end of festival events supported by an endowment, ceremonial payments known as cutantaram are made to honor designated priests and other temple personnel, but the sums of money are tiny (mostly much less than Re 1), so that even the honor expressed by them has lost most of its value in recent years. Since the 1930s, the administration has hardly ever allowed any new endowment to be set up, except very occasionally to replace an old one that has ceased to function. Thus in the late 1980s, a new endowment controlled by a business family in Madurai took over support of rituals on the tenth day of Avani Mula to replace the raja of Pudukkottai’s endowment, which had become defunct some twenty years earlier. Through this tightly regulated policy, the administration ensures that no significant diminution of its control over the Temple’s rituals and their subvention can occur. The policy was not affected by the scheme introduced in 2000 to encourage people to pay for an endowment to support one period of daily worship per year, since this new type of endowment is fully under the administration’s control. Although the majority of rituals are paid for by endowments, the cost of some rituals—mainly minor festivals—is partly met by the administra-

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tion’s general funds, but mostly by money collected from the public, who also give donations in kind, such as foodstuffs or liquids used for bathing rituals. Notices requesting these donations are put up in the Temple, and they usually promise donors the “grace” (arul) of Minakshi and Sundareshwara. Two examples are an elaborate annual bathing ritual for Sundareshwara known as the maha¯rudra¯bhiseka (“great bathing ritual for Rudra”), which follows the Avani Mula festival and has long been run with donations in cash and kind, and the simpler mu¯ppal_am (“three fruits”) bathing ritual in Ani (June-July), when devotees give mangoes, plantains, and jackfruits to “bathe” the two main images. In addition to rituals dependent on donations from the public, there is also a system of sponsorship for individual ritual events that has been encouraged by the administration. By 1980, the diamond crown ritual, then costing Rs 400, was already being held weekly and paid for by a sponsor, and there were several ritual events for which sponsorship was regularly sought. For example, in Aippasi (October-November), Sundareshwara’s main linga is “bathed” in a huge quantity of boiled rice, which is afterwards distributed to the poor; this ritual is paid for by a wealthy individual or a voluntary association on application to the administration. At the annual festival of Maha¯s´ivara¯tri (“great Shiva’s night”), there are extra bathing rituals during the daily worship, for which devotees are asked to make donations in kind, as well as another elaborate bathing ritual called the shankhabhisheka (“conch shell bathing ritual”). In this ritual, 1,008 shells are used to bathe Sundareshwara’s linga and 108 to bathe Minakshi’s image; the costs for Minakshi have always been met by the priests themselves as a sign of their own devotion to the presiding goddess. Around 1992, another identical shankhabhisheka was started on Mondays in Karttigai (November-December); in 1994, the ritual was held on two Mondays, respectively sponsored at a cost of Rs 10,000 each by a textile mill owner who was also a Temple trustee and a textile merchant. Also in the early 1990s, at the lower cost of about Rs 500, a sponsored fire-sacrifice ritual started to be held monthly at a Vinayaka shrine in the Temple’s outer precincts to promote the success of its forthcoming renovation ritual. Furthermore, anyone at any time may decide to sponsor some kind of expensive ritual of worship for the deities, such as the annual offering to the Navagraha (“nine planets”) costing around Rs 4,000 in 1991, which is made by a wealthy businessman from Kerala, or the annual cooling ritual of sandalpaste anointment at Mahashivaratri for the fierce goddess Bhadra¯ka¯lı¯ and dancing Shiva (U¯rdhva Ta¯n d ava)—as well as two other goddesses in local temples—which cost Rs 35,000 in total in 1995, paid for by a Chettiyar association in Madurai. Offering devotees the opportunity to pay for the golden car procession was, however, an important step, which, alongside other expensive ritu•

•

• •

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als, significantly expanded the scope for attracting regular, high-fee sponsorship. In many respects, today’s mainly middle-class sponsors are the contemporary counterparts of those who came into the Temple by founding endowments during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because paying for particular expensive rituals is now the only way of buying a slice of the ritual action, to use an apposite commercial cliche´. But sponsorship (except for the new daily worship endowment) cannot be made permanent like the endowments of the past, and whereas in principle endowment trustees enjoy an autonomous relationship with the Temple’s presiding deities, today’s sponsors merely buy a short-lived share in a competitive ritual market entirely managed by the administration. Although it was probably not designed to conform with India’s economic liberalization and the relaxation of government controls, ritual sponsorship is in practice a form of partial privatization within a nationalized religious institution, and it is therefore well attuned to the spirit of the times.

Education and Secular Employment outside the Temple One important change since the 1980s has been an increase in the number of priests who also have jobs outside the Temple. This change is in turn related to rising standards of education in the priestly community (cf. SG, 27). In 1980, one priest had a job with the state electricity board; in the mid-1990s, he was still working there, and there were also seven other part-time priests, mostly with white-collar jobs in public administration (one recently retired) or banking, as well as one lawyer and one shop cashier. Three men had also started to work as priests after retiring from government jobs. Several other men who formerly combined work in the Temple with outside jobs have now decided to be full-time priests. By contrast, there are, too, a number of men in the community who have or had professional jobs, as well as one farmer; they have never worked as priests and are unlikely to do so. The highest achiever is probably Umapathi, Thangam Bhattar’s younger son, who was working as an engineer in Chicago by the time he was 30. Following in his footsteps is Sukumar, who studied in the elite Indian Institutes of Technology in both Chennai and Delhi in the early 1990s and became an industrial chemist working in Maharashtra. Rajarathna Bhattar’s son has become a software engineer in America, but he was brought up and educated there. Tables 2 and 3 show the educational standards for all men and women within the priestly community on the basis of data collected in a household survey completed in early 1995, excluding a small number of people for whom I lack details. For young people still in education, the standard

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Table 2 Men’s Educational Standards by Age 1st–5th std 6th–10th PUC/12th std BA/BSc/ MA/MSc/ std/SSLC Diploma MTech 16–29 0 22 9 11 5 30–39 1 16 6 4 2 40–49 0 6 2 4 0 50–59 1 10 2 2 0 60–69 0 7 1 4 0 70 & over 6 5 0 0 0 All 8 66 20 25 7

All 47 29 12 15 12 11 126

Table 3 Women’s Educational Standards by Age 1st–5th std 6th–10th PUC/12th std BA/BSc/ MA/MSc/ std/SSLC Diploma MTech 16–29 0 25 13 7 1 30–39 1 15 1 3 0 40–49 1 16 0 0 0 50–59 7 7 0 0 0 60–69 10 4 0 1 0 70 & over 4 0 0 0 0 All 23 67 14 11 1

All 46 20 17 14 15 4 116

completed at the time of the census was recorded, so that the tables should slightly understate final achieved standards. As table 2 shows, out of 126 men, 52 (41%) had been educated above tenth standard or the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC), of which 32 (25%) had a diploma or degree. If these figures are broken down by age, they show that among men aged under forty, 37 out of 76 (49%) continued their education beyond secondary schooling, whereas among those aged forty or over, the equivalent ratio is 15 out of 50 (30%). The figures show that overall educational standards among men in the community are rising, but do not fully reveal the big change in the proportion of priests who are well educated. In 1980, only one priest had a degree and two had reached the Pre-University Certificate (PUC) standard, whereas in 2000, among the ninety-one men entitled to work as priests (excluding three for whom I lack information), twenty-one (24%) had degrees or diplomas and a further twelve (14%) had reached PUC or the equivalent twelfth standard. Except for the men who joined the Temple after retirement, the vast majority of priests with higher education are men under forty, and one major reason is that in 1980, the priest with the degree was the only one out of seven men in the community with a degree or diploma who had not stayed in professional employment outside the Temple.

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Just like other Tamil Brahmans, the priests continually complain about discrimination against them caused by the Tamilnadu government’s reservations policy. As they correctly point out, this policy has now made it very difficult for Brahmans to win places in the state’s higher educational institutions—especially the extremely competitive medical and engineering colleges—or to secure posts in government service and public sector undertakings, because since 1980, 68 percent of these places and posts have been reserved for lower castes (see chapter 5). The men from the priestly community who had government jobs twenty years ago had all started work when the reservations policy was far less extensive in scope. The experience of men who have more recently tried to escape the priesthood for other employment, but failed to do so, is regularly cited as evidence of the iniquitous discrimination now faced by Tamil Brahmans. Exclusion from alternative employment is indeed one important reason why so many well-educated men are working as priests, and the notable exceptions that prove the rule are Umapathi and Sukumar, who, like so many Tamil Brahmans, succeeded by leaving the state to escape the reservations policy. Yet it is also significant that, partly because the priests’ earnings are rising, working in the Minakshi Temple is seen as a much more attractive prospect for young men than it was twenty years ago; it also contrasts, of course, with the gloomier prospect faced by priests and their sons in Tamilnadu’s numerous small, poor temples. But in the Minakshi Temple, many young men—though not of course all—positively want to work as priests and have no desire for another job; others have had jobs outside the Temple but have given them up so that they could become full-time priests. The attraction of the priesthood is also why some men in full-time jobs have returned to work as part-time priests and a few retired men have become priests; more generally, it is why most men no longer hope—as they did in the late 1970s—that their sons will not follow them into the Temple (SG, 162). The figures for women’s education (covering the priests’ wives and unmarried daughters) reveal a more dramatic rise in overall standards than among men. Table 3 shows that out of 116 women, 26 (22%) had been educated above tenth standard or the SSLC, of which 12 (10%) had a diploma or degree. With one exception, however, all these women were under forty and most were under thirty. Conversely, of those aged forty or over, 22 out of 50 (44%) had not been educated beyond the primary school level (fifth standard), whereas only one woman under forty had such limited schooling. Unlike in the past—and despite some lingering concern that it is hard to find husbands for highly educated women— most priestly families now wish to educate their girls as well as their boys. The result has been a sharp rise in the standards of female education, which are now converging with those of the men.30

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Yet it is also worth mentioning here that in spite of these rising standards, no woman in the Minakshi Temple priests’ community—not even an unmarried daughter—has ever had paid employment outside the home, except for Jayashree, Ramesh Bhattar’s wife, who has a degree and a civil service job in London, and one older graduate, a woman born in the 1920s who worked in Madurai as a schoolteacher and never married. Leaving aside these two, who are both exceptional in their different ways, the complete absence of employed women in the priests’ families is very unusual when compared with other educated, urban, middle-class families, either in Madurai or elsewhere in Tamilnadu and the rest of India. In some respects, as this case shows, the priestly community can be extremely conservative—an issue discussed in more detail in the next chapter—but pressure for change is growing among educated young women, and some younger priests are also in favor of women working and earning money for their families. It therefore seems unlikely that the priests’ wives and daughters will all stay at home for very much longer.

Priestly Work outside the Temple One notable change since the 1980s is that the Minakshi Temple priests have been taking over work that was formerly the monopoly of Smarta Brahman sastris serving as chanters in the Temple. In SG (37–9), I explained that all Vedic recitation in the Temple was carried out by chanters, not priests. In 1980, three chanters worked permanently in the Temple, of whom one—the “Veda priest” (attiya¯n_a pat t ar)—had a special role because he had to utter both Agamic mantras and Vedic verses, as well as guide a priest through the more complex rituals. One of the chanters then left, and in 1998, both the Veda priest and the other chanter finally retired, so that the Temple no longer has any chanters on its staff. For special festivals, the two retired men or other sastris mainly working in Madurai as domestic priests are hired on an ad hoc basis (which has always been common practice), but the Veda is no longer being recited during the daily worship and there is no Veda priest to pronounce the mantras and assist the other priests.31 Yet the absence of chanters is not the serious problem that it would have been twenty years ago owing to the number of priests who have graduated from Agamic schools. These men know how to carry out the more complex rituals and, most importantly, they can pronounce mantras and recite both Vedic and Agamic texts competently during rituals. In practical terms, therefore, the Temple no longer needs chanters, as it did when hardly any priests had learned the Sanskrit texts. Many priests acknowledge, however, that the division of labor between them and chanters is in principle an important feature of the organization of temple • •

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ritual, and they deplore the administration’s failure to recruit a new Veda priest and other chanters. Before the early 1980s, with very few exceptions, the Minakshi Temple priests worked only in their own Temple and a few others in which some of them had rights, such as Tirupparankundram. Unlike today, they never performed rituals for private clients in their homes or business premises, which was exclusively the work of domestic priests, so that in this area, too, the latters’ monopoly has been encroached upon by temple priests. An important reason for this development is a shortage of skilled domestic priests, which in turn partly explains why the Temple has not recruited a new Veda priest and chanters. In addition, though, for appointment to the Temple’s staff, a “donation” is allegedly demanded by the administration, but the amount is so high that nobody is willing to hand over cash for a job that will actually pay less than a sastri could earn by carrying out domestic rituals outside the Temple.32 In its impact on how the priests organize their working lives, as well as on their earnings, the growing amount of activity outside the Temple has marked a radical change. For private clients, the majority of the work is Ganapati homa rituals, which consist of the deity’s worship together with a fire sacrifice carried out by a group of priests, normally two to four, but sometimes more. Sastris may also take part alongside the priests to recite the appropriate texts. Ganapati homas—in the god’s temples and shrines, as well as in houses, shops, and workplaces—started to be done on a significant scale in Madurai in the early 1980s, and they are immensely popular throughout South India today. The ritual, which lasts about one to two hours, is done in the early morning and is normally held on an auspicious day to inaugurate a new building or venture, such as a new business or job. One day in 1995, a couple of Minakshi Temple priests even participated in a Ganapati homa for new turbines on a wind farm in southern Tamilnadu, and this kind of event is not unusual. More recently, similar Lakshmi homa rituals to worship the goddess of good fortune and Navagraha homas to propitiate malevolent Saturn (often on an astrologer’s recommendation) have started to be held. Moreover, twenty years ago, few Minakshi Temple priests had ever been employed at another temple’s kumbhabhisheka, its renovation or consecration ritual, whereas many of them now have. Throughout the 1990s, the number of temple renovations throughout Tamilnadu rose considerably, and the Minakshi Temple’s own renovation ritual was part of this trend, but there have also been more and more rituals to consecrate the numerous new temples being built in the ever-expanding suburbs of all the state’s towns and cities. Opportunities to participate in kumbhabhishekas have therefore grown steadily in recent years.

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By the 1990s, more and more priests, especially graduates of Agamic schools who can recite Sanskrit well, were earning a sizable proportion of their income from rituals done outside their own temple. Some of this work can also be done by young unmarried men from the community who have not yet been consecrated. For outside work, priests are paid fairly well; for example, the rate was typically Rs 100 for a Ganapati homa in the mid-1990s. At the Minakshi Temple’s own renovation ritual, the pradhana acharyas and sadhakas were paid Rs 2,000 and the rest of the priests Rs 1,200; for a five-day kumbhabhisheka at a smaller temple, the fee was about Rs 600 to Rs 700, although the leading priests at such a ritual may be paid at least twice as much, and significant payments in kind (grain, cloth, etc.) are often made as well. A priest carrying out these special rituals can therefore expect to earn considerably more than he would by waiting around inside the Temple, doing whatever private worship came his way. Some priests are regularly employed outside the Temple—for example, a young priest who often does rituals at the Ramakrishna Mission’s center in Madurai—and others who regularly serve wealthy devotees in the Temple may also be called to work in their houses or business premises. On particularly auspicious mornings, quite a lot of priests are usually rushing around the city and its suburbs performing Ganapati homas instead of attending the Minakshi Temple. Overnight bus journeys to places farther away from Madurai to carry out well-paid homa rituals are fairly common, too. And sometimes a dozen priests are absent for a few days at another temple’s renovation ritual. The handful of priests with high reputations for religious learning and skill—men like Manikkasundara Bhattar before he went to America or Raja Bhattar, the guru of the Agamic school he founded in Tirupparankundram—are called on most frequently and naturally command the highest fees. They often need assistance and are sometimes invited to too many rituals simultaneously, so that they subcontract some of the (less well-paid) work to their colleagues, who may be their own relatives, friends, or former pupils (in Raja’s case), but are also likely to be competent in Sanskrit recitation. In addition, these same well-reputed priests are the men most likely to be invited to participate in renovation rituals throughout Tamilnadu or even farther afield, sometimes in other parts of India and sometimes abroad.

Work in Overseas Temples Working abroad is undoubtedly one of the most important developments of the 1980s and 1990s. As already mentioned in chapter 1, Thangam Bhattar (then in his mid-forties) was the first Minakshi Temple priest to travel abroad when he went to Malaysia to conduct a renovation ritual

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in 1973. In 1976 he worked in a Singapore temple for a short while, and in 1982–83 and again in 1986–88, he worked in Texas in Pearland’s Minakshi temple for periods of about one year. But after his first stay in America, Thangam decided to return to India, and his post was taken by his younger brother, Rajarathna Bhattar, who had already worked in Singapore for eighteen months in 1979–80; he served as a priest in Pearland from 1983 until retirement in 1995. Rajarathna has stayed on in Pearland, but Thangam has also been spending much of his time in America, sometimes with his younger son in Chicago and sometimes working for short periods in temples in Chicago, San Antonio, New Orleans, and elsewhere. By 2001, in the wake of these two pioneers, fifteen other men from the Minakshi Temple had worked as priests in overseas temples for periods of six months or more. Bhairavasundara Bhattar, who was married and consecrated in Madurai in 1994, has worked in a temple near Boston since 1990. Ramesh Bhattar has worked in temples in London since 1994, and in the same year, Sivakumar Bhattar started in a temple in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he was joined by his younger brother Sivanandan Bhattar in 1997; Manikkasundara Bhattar went to Pearland in 1995. Sivaraj, whose consecration dispute was discussed above, worked in a temple in New Delhi for about three years before returning to Madurai, and in 2001 he and his younger brother went to work for two years in Singapore. Eight others, including three men who started before they were consecrated, have worked on shorter contracts of six to twelve months in temples in Kuala Lumpur; Singapore; Hamilton, Canada; Lenasia, near Johannesburg, South Africa; Mauritius; and Canberra, Australia; in 2001, four of these eight were still abroad and some of them have had their contracts extended. Most of these priests, as well as a number of others, have also made other, short visits abroad to work for just a month or two or to participate in renovation and consecration rituals. Overseas Hindu populations commonly have mixed regional origins (Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, and so on), and they therefore establish inclusive, “ecumenical” or “syncretic” temples containing images of deities popular with their various devotees’ constituencies.33 A large proportion of temples in America, Britain, and some other parts of the world are ecumenical in this sense, including the Pearland temple, whose central hall houses Minakshi in the center, flanked by Sundareshwara and Vishnu in the form of Tirupati Venkateshwara, especially popular with the many people from Andhra Pradesh who visit the temple. Manikkasundara works alongside colleagues who are Vaishnava priests (one from Tirupati temple) and often performs worship for Vishnu; a similar working pattern exists in all ecumenical temples. In addition, overseas priests commonly work as domestic priests as well, not only doing rituals such as Ganapati

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homas but also taking part in weddings in particular (Williams 1988: 44– 6). When working abroad, therefore, all temple priests have to be much more flexible about their work than they are, or indeed could be, in India. By the standards of the countries where they work, the priests are often badly paid and accommodated in poor housing provided by the temple trustees; they can rarely complain effectively because their legal right to work abroad normally depends on the trustees’ support and sponsorship. Moreover, the priests tend to remain in a rather marginal and encapsulated social position, and at least in America, temple trustees and other laypeople commonly become the intermediaries between the priests and the wider public (Rajagopal 2001: 247). Partly because of their marginality, as well as loneliness away from a network of family and friends, and boredom due to lack of much activity during the secular working week, living overseas can be hard for priests and even worse for their wives. Yet they can also make a success of it, as I have seen in Pearland, and although I have no firsthand knowledge about the priests’ lives in other foreign places (except for a little about London), it is clear that several of them have settled down well, and have also earned and saved relatively large amounts of money by Indian standards, so that they have accumulated enough to make substantial property investments in Madurai. For Manikkasundara and a few others, working abroad has also allowed them to give their children improved educational opportunities, which they regard as especially valuable. To obtain long- or short-term work overseas (or in far-flung parts of India), a man must usually have good connections with a handful of influential priests and other religious personages who operate as “brokers” through their contacts with the relevant temples’ trustees. The gurus of Agamic schools, who are often contacted by temple trustees, sometimes act as brokers for their graduates; thus the guru of Allur school, which is financially supported by the Kanchipuram S´an˙kara¯ca¯rya’s monastery, recommended his pupil Sivaraj for a post in the monastery’s Ka¯ma¯ksı¯ temple in New Delhi. For many years, one of the most influential brokers has been Sambamurti Shivacharya, a priest in the Kali temple in George Town in Chennai. He has established close links with a wide range of influential people (including politicians) in his home city and overseas Tamil communities, and has taken part in renovation and consecration rituals on every continent; when I met him at the Minakshi Temple renovation, he had just flown in from Hawaii, and told me about recent visits to other parts of America, Japan, and Thailand. As the father-in-law of both Bhairavasundara and Ramesh, he was able to help them find posts abroad.34 Over the years, too, Thangam Bhattar has himself become a broker whose recommendations carry weight with temple trustees. •

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Personal ties with brokers—or sometimes directly with temple trustees—may be enough to obtain a post, especially a short-term one. In many cases, however, temple trustees prefer to interview priests in India or appraise their qualifications before recruiting them, and they try to find men who are demonstrably competent, especially in verbatim Sanskrit recitation. Thangam and Rajarathna did not graduate from Agamic schools, but in the younger generation, five of the seven priests who have been working for fairly long periods in overseas temples (Manikkasundara, Ramesh, Sivakumar, Sivanandan, and Sivaraj) are Agamic school graduates, and Bhairavasundara has a master’s degree in Sanskrit from Madras Sanskrit College. The qualifications of the eight priests who are or were working overseas for shorter periods are lower; two have attended Agamic schools for a few years and several have followed a “refresher course” or a short course in the Agamas. For long-term posts in foreign temples, however, graduation from an Agamic school is accurately perceived as a potential passport abroad, and getting “brain-drained” overseas is now the goal of quite a lot of young, ambitious priests.35

Prosperity, Inequality, and the Priests’ Work Ethic In 2002, one of the priest’s wives (in her early forties) was describing life in the early 1980s, shortly after she married and moved from her natal home to her new husband’s house in the adjoining street. Today she lives in this fairly spacious house with her husband and their two youngest children, but twenty years ago it had forty people living in it, some of them poor relatives, who were mostly supported by her father-in-law’s income from his priestly work. Such overcrowding was not exceptional, and compared with twenty years ago, she said, life had greatly improved for the priests and their now smaller families. Her next-door neighbor, an older priest’s wife, wholeheartedly concurred. The conversation then turned to the miserable years of the temple-entry dispute between 1939 and 1945, when the striking priests earned nothing in the Temple and spent large sums on ultimately futile legal battles. Actually, they were fortunate not to have been deprived of their tax-free lands as well, but they certainly suffered economically and many of them amassed large debts (cf. SG, 121), although I did not know when writing earlier that these debts were often settled by selling property, including houses that the priests owned in the streets near the Temple’s north tower; some priests also appear to have used sizeable sums later received in compensation for their tax-free lands to settle debts. Moreover, the two women told me (repeating stories I had heard before), several priests in those earlier times squandered vast amounts of money on extravagant

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weddings, excessive generosity toward poor relatives, or entertainment of their mistresses. In one notorious case, a libertine priest who inherited some fifteen houses from a childless relative in the 1930s was forced to sell all but one of them within twenty years, and in the late 1970s, his only son (now deceased) lived frugally in the sole remaining house. By contrast, this reckless priest’s cousin, who had inherited the same amount of property, was able to retain much more of it; his son, who died in 1978, was the wealthiest priest of his day, and the latter’s adopted son still owns several houses in Madurai. Reconstructing the priests’ economic history is extremely difficult, because my information is incomplete and—as I now realize better than I did at the time—the priests in 1976–77 and 1980 always spoke hazily about how much poorer their community had become. They complained a great deal about their lost rights and privileges in the Temple since 1937, as well as about the confiscation of their tax-free lands, but their selfrespect meant that they never dwelt on economic privation and never openly bemoaned their poverty. Nevertheless, it is clear to me now (although I did not report it in SG) that the priestly community’s overall economic position deteriorated sharply, especially between the late 1930s and late 1950s. Some priests (and their families) had been richer than others, but some fell much further and faster than their fellows, so that in the ensuing years, inequality among them, especially in relation to property ownership, may have increased as well, although this is uncertain. Particularly important, though, now as in the past, is that priests who own their own homes are normally better off than those who do not, and the most fortunate of all are priests who own several houses that they can rent out, often to other priests.36 A few priests are collecting at least as much in rent as they earn from private worship, whereas a considerable number of others are spending much of their income on paying rent for often cramped accommodation. In between are priests who own their own homes, but no other property.37 The number of priests who have bought their own houses (or additional property) has risen considerably in recent years and is itself an obvious indication of their growing prosperity, which has unmistakably reversed the decline that began during the temple-entry dispute. It is unclear whether overall economic inequality in the priestly community has altered significantly since the late 1970s, although inequality in individual men’s earnings has certainly been growing. Priests with a high reputation for learning and skill can earn more than most of their colleagues, especially by working outside the Temple, and priests working abroad may also be able to accumulate significant sums. Part-time priests who draw much of their income from a professional job outside the Temple are also likely to have more money than the majority. The growth in

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income inequality has contributed to the animosities referred to in chapter 1, notably between the mostly younger educated priests and the mostly older uneducated ones, because in general the former have better opportunities to work outside the Temple and overseas. Of course, many young men are close to their fathers, with whom they live in joint families. Nonetheless, the mostly younger priests who are active outside the Temple, especially those who are abroad, are quite often accused of exploiting their status as priests in the famous Minakshi Temple by using it to earn money anywhere and everywhere, rather than staying in the Temple to perform rituals that now have to be done by those unfortunate enough to be left behind. Talking to me in the street where he could easily be overheard, one elderly priest, who particularly resents some of the younger men, loudly and bitterly denounced priests who work overseas because, he said, they just do it for the money and neglect their hereditary duties in the Temple. The Temple’s traditions, he repeatedly insisted, must not be abandoned, and he told me that he and some other priests had written to the Temple administration to complain about the men who work abroad, arguing that after three months they should be forced to cede their rights in the public worship to their heirs. It is very unlikely that the administration will take any notice of this complaint. Moreover, the problems caused by overseas priests mainly affect those who have to deputize for them, rather than the priesthood as a whole, and the deputies are normally brothers or other close relatives who are likely to derive some benefit from the emigrants’ higher earnings. In some cases, however, new strains have emerged and a few priests—especially Vikkira Pantiyas with rights in the daily worship—do now protest that they are unable to maximize their income, or seek out opportunities to work abroad, because they are forced to stay in Madurai and have to spend too much time carrying out worship inside the Temple. For these men, albeit ambivalently, superior rights in the public worship are seen as a liability, and at least one young priest, who would like to work overseas but has no brothers, has vainly tried to persuade his cousin to take over his responsibilities. Nevertheless, irrespective of complaints, all the priests continue to regard the public worship as more important than private worship, and they all recognize that the core of their work is serving Minakshi and Sundareshwara, whose power and grace they continually emphasize. The priests also proclaim their personal devotion to Minakshi and Sundareshwara—especially Minakshi—and all my experience in Madurai has convinced me that their devotion is real and deeply felt. Hence the priests’ devoted service to the deities in the Temple is neither undermined nor compromised by their preoccupation with rights, earnings, and other “secular” considerations.

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Yet they are indeed preoccupied by these matters, and, as we have seen, the priests defend their hereditary rights even more forcefully than they used to by insisting that they are themselves a vital part of the Temple’s tradition. At one and the same time, however, many priests have also developed a more market-oriented, instrumentalist attitude toward their work and earnings. This attitude is linked to their growing “professionalism”— a theme I return to when discussing Agamic education in chapter 4—but it is also a response to enhanced economic opportunities, and maybe even to the climate of economic liberalization. Of course, not all priests work equally hard, and they can all choose when to earn money in the Temple or elsewhere, so that many of them still evince a distinctively precapitalist attitude to satisfying accustomed needs. On the other hand, opportunities to maximize income both inside and outside the Minakshi Temple are considerably greater than they were. They also exist in an expanding ritual economy, in which some alternative strategies have opened up, so that more money can be made by working more effectively: for example, by avoiding too many poorly paid archanas inside the Temple, going farther afield to conduct well-paid special rituals, or combining the priesthood with an ordinary job. Furthermore, higher earnings from ritual work, especially outside the Temple, tend to vary according to a man’s reputation for skill and learning, so that a meritocratic dimension has developed more clearly. Yet younger, educated priests—whose work ethic is characterized by the rational, market-minded pursuit of economic opportunities more than their older, less-educated colleagues’ is—are just as ideologically traditionalist as the latter, if not more so. Modern capitalistic acquisitiveness, as Max Weber described it (1930: 17–22, ch. 2), has markedly grown among the Minakshi Temple priests since the 1970s; but in an apparently contradictory combination, to which I periodically return later in this book, it has nevertheless done so alongside their increasingly emphatic commitment to hereditary rights and the Temple’s traditions.

Three Family and Domestic Life Daily Routine in the Temple and the Home1 The rhythm of the day for the Minakshi Temple priests and their families is shaped by the Temple’s ritual cycle, especially the schedule for the daily worship. Thus Minakshi and Sundareshwara, like all good Hindus according to classical Brahmanical norms, wake up before dawn, when their worship in the bedchamber begins at 5:00 A.M.2 Each day, the Vikkira Pantiya priest responsible for the daily worship in Sundareshwara’s temple must rise very early in order to bathe and arrive in time to perform the early morning worship, and the same man must also perform the last period of worship, the bedchamber worship, so that his working day ends around 10:00 or 10:30 P.M. The priest in charge of the daily worship in Minakshi’s temple has a shorter day; his duties start with the second period of worship at 6:30 A.M. and end after the penultimate period around 8:30 P.M. On an ordinary day, all the other priests are free to come to the Temple whenever they want, and as explained in chapter 2, they vary considerably in how much time they spend there, although young men mostly tend to work longer hours, both morning and evening, than older men. Those who labor longest normally go to the Temple fairly early in the morning every day and leave when it shuts at 12:30 P.M., having completed four or five hours of work, and they return around 5:00 P.M. to work until the final period of worship is under way. On Friday evenings, as well as on other auspicious days when particularly large numbers of devotees are expected, a lot of priests are usually in the Temple, although there are still not always enough to meet the demand for their services. On festival days, some Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara priests will have particular duties defined by the rotas of shares, but they will often be assisted by colleagues, especially at elaborate rituals and on the long processions along the city streets that take place during major festivals. At festivals, therefore, except for the most minor ones, more priests than usual have responsibilities for the public worship. Moreover, at the big festivals, the priests’ working day is extended because some events begin very early or end very late, and the daily worship—which cannot be continued when the festival images of Minakshi and Sundareshwara are outside the Temple—has to be done even earlier or later by completing several periods of worship one after the other, before the deities leave in

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procession or after they return. On a few days each year, the Temple remains open all night. Although a lot of priestly work is undemanding activity, some of it, especially on hot and crowded days and during major festivals, is grueling, and many older priests find that their aching legs can no longer tolerate hours of standing at the shrines or miles of walking on the streets. The Temple’s opening hours and the priests’ routines ensure that their families are used to men rising long before dawn breaks, returning to eat and sleep at unpredictable hours during the day, and coming home very late. But they are also used to some men staying at home when others have gone to work, and in households with several priests, different men may work quite different hours. The main rice meal of the day is often eaten around 12:30 P.M., when the Temple shuts, but often, too, it is eaten two or three hours earlier by a man who started work at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, and sometimes it may be eaten much later in the afternoon if he has been delayed by a festival or has been working away from the Temple. In any case, though, the women of the house are expected to be able to serve the main meal (or other food) whenever it is required, even if it has had to stand for some hours. During the afternoon, when the Temple is closed, especially during the hot season, a lot of men and women sleep for an hour or two. However, children and many young people are attending school and college, and a significant minority of men from priestly families have ordinary jobs, which they may combine with evening or weekend work in the Temple, so that their daily lives are more or less fixed by the conventional hours of education and work. Hence it is common enough to visit a house at any time from early morning to late evening to find some people away at work and others variously sleeping, eating, relaxing, chatting, studying, or doing housework. In priestly families, therefore, different members follow different routines, but domestic life—although modified during the week by ordinary school or working hours—is in general structured by the Temple’s day, which may last longer during important festivals but is always defined by the unceasing cycle of daily worship. In its own way, the Temple’s temporal cycle is just as rigid and artificial as the modern clock-based systems of the workplace or school. Indeed, even though it closes in the afternoon and at night, the Temple’s relentless routine almost amounts to a system of continual ritual production, and it could certainly be argued that the work discipline imposed on the priests who are responsible for public worship is more rigorous than that suffered by many employees in capitalist factories or bureaucratic offices. The timetable for daily worship is adhered to fairly strictly, and particularly important rituals during festivals must often be held at specified auspicious times, although other festival events may be delayed and long processions

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often run hours late. Necessarily, however, all public worship—both daily worship and festivals—has to follow fixed schedules more or less closely. In carrying out private worship, by contrast, priests can freely go to work to earn money as and when they choose, although during the last two decades (as discussed in chapter 2), more and more of them have sought to maximize their earnings systematically. This change in the priests’ attitude is linked to an increasing tendency to regard the Temple as primarily a place to work and earn a living that is, like the workplace in a modern economy, properly separate from the home and domestic domain.

The Priests’ Style of Dress When the priests are working in the Temple, they are easily identified by their distinctive clothing and adornment. They must always wear the white cotton waistcloth of the Tamil male tied between their legs in the traditional Brahman style, and over the cloth they wrap a colored silk sash. Tucked into the sash is a little bag holding a supply of white ash (vibhuti) for giving to devotees. They wear no shirt but carry a cloth towel over the shoulder, and like other “orthodox” male Brahmans, they all wear a sacred thread. They are invested with the thread’s first three strands at their upanayana, the rite of passage classically said to confer true Brahman status, which, say the priests, should be held when a boy is about seven, although it is often postponed until later; a priest acquires the thread’s next three strands at his wedding, another three at his consecration, and a final three when his wife is bearing their first child. In the Temple, priests also normally wear a necklace threaded with rudra¯ksa beads, which are sacred to Shiva, and a few of them regularly wear earrings, but the majority do not. On their foreheads, the priests have a roundel of red powder (kunkuma), sacred to the goddess; smeared above the roundel, as well as on their chest and forearms, are three stripes of white ash, sacred to Shiva. All the priests carry a metal plate with some ash, powder, and camphor on it; devotees put their dakshina on the plate as well. In the late 1970s, all the priests—except for a couple of younger men— wore their hair long and tied in a knot (kut umi) at the back of their head; they also shaved the front of their head above the forehead.3 By the mid1990s, about half the priests still had long hair and shaved above the forehead, but the rest had short hair, just like other Tamil men. If present trends continue, the priests with short hair will be in a clear majority fairly soon. The traditional rule is undisputed: priests should not cut their long hair, which symbolizes their status as sexually active householders in contrast to tonsured ascetic monks. By the 1990s, the question of hairstyles had become a bone of contention and was often raised, especially by men •

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with long hair who typically condemned those with short hair for abandoning a vitally important tradition. Influential critics of the priests in their own ranks, such as the guru of Allur Agamic school (see chapter 4), as well as conservatively minded devotees and other people with an interest in the temples, repeatedly single out short hair as evidence that too many priests throughout Tamilnadu are discarding important traditions and breaking rules that ought to govern the priesthood. Men with short hair have no proper defense against such criticism; they merely say it is easier, they prefer it, and it does not matter that much anyway. Today, many older priests, as well as younger ones, cut their hair, and it is often the younger men who have graduated from Agamic schools who most insistently defend long hair on traditionalist grounds. Unlike many other changes in the priests’ style of life that are discussed in this chapter, hairstyles have proved provocatively contentious; this, I think, is not primarily because long hair symbolizes the priests’ sexuality, but because it signifies their special status in society. Long and short hair therefore divide the priests into two groups: men who still wear a distinctive sign of the priesthood and men who do not. For those who keep it long, but not of course for those who cut it, long hair has emerged as one vital traditional custom that none of them should be giving up. To return to their clothing: some mainly elderly priests dress in the same way inside and outside the Temple, but most men no longer do. As soon as they get home, they retie their waistcloth in the conventional Tamil men’s style, so that it hangs straight down; they also remove their necklaces and younger men commonly put on a shirt, although older men usually do not. On the streets of the city and away from the house, however, all priests wear shirts—which of course also hide their Brahman sacred threads—and many of them wear sandals; a few younger men also put on trousers instead of waistcloths. Although those with long hair cannot disguise themselves easily, the priests consistently say that they prefer to dress like other Tamil men because they fear abuse as old-fashioned Brahmans, identified by cloths tied between the legs, as well as the rest of their garb. Stories circulate among them about priests who have been teased, insulted, or even assaulted and robbed of their jewelry in Madurai. Since priests dressing for work are going through a habitual routine, they presumably do not consciously reflect on it any more than office workers putting on their suits, but some elements tend to be done with extra care, especially application of the red roundel and white stripes on the forehead, which prominently symbolize their devoted service to Minakshi and Sundareshwara. Obviously, going to work in a temple can never be exactly the same as going to work in a secular job. Every priest knows that his work is divine service and that he must bathe and be in a ritually pure state before starting it. Not all priests interpret this to mean that they must put on clean clothes, however, and a few of them habitually

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wear waistcloths and sashes so dirty that even their colleagues pass comment. The majority, however, take more care and a few are always impeccably dressed in newly laundered clothes. A priest responsible for a very important ritual should always start it wearing new (and hence completely pure) clothes, and this rule is particularly important for the nampiya¯r in charge of a major festival. On entering and leaving the Temple, every priest shows respect to the deities—especially Ganesha, who is always worshipped at the start of any ritual—by putting his hands together in the namaska¯ra gesture. He usually performs other small rituals of entry and exit as well, such as a brief rotation on the spot (equivalent to circumambulating the whole site) when passing through the gateways into or out of the Temple. Such rituals have always marked the pure and sacred Temple apart from the space around it. Even so, it is significant that compared with twenty years ago, more and more priests (with or without long hair) now change as soon as they get home. Inasmuch as clothing symbolically modifies the body and partially constitutes someone’s role, identity, and sense of self, the priests’ alternative styles of dress increasingly tend to distinguish between their persona at work and at home, and they are another sign of the sharper separation that now prevails between Temple and home.4 Here it is worth noting that women’s dress has changed as well. A few of the oldest women in the priestly community, as was the norm twenty years ago, continue to wear nine-yard saris tied between the legs in the traditional Brahman style, and every married woman owns at least one nine-yard sari, given by her father-in-law and worn on her wedding day. The vast majority of the women, however, now always wear six-yard saris tied in the conventional modern style, so that their dress does not distinguish them from other Tamil women. At home, the sari is often worn quite casually, hitched up into the petticoat with the end tucked away to make domestic work easier, but a woman almost always reties it neatly before going outside. A handful of young women, mostly unmarried, frequently wear long gowns or churidars inside the house, although not until 2002 did I see a young woman wearing a shalwar kamiz, the tunic with trousers that has become increasingly popular throughout urban India. Boys almost always wear shorts, with or without shirts, and girls wear dresses or skirts and blouses, although schoolchildren often stay in their uniform after returning home.

Household Structure In 1995, the priests and their families lived in fifty-five separate households, of which thirty-three were nuclear family units (some supplemented by extra relatives) and nineteen were joint families. There were

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also three exceptional cases of subnuclear groups with no married couple. The mean household size was 5.4. Nearly all the larger units were lineal joint families, which included one or more married sons of the household head, together with their wives and children. For the priests, in common with Indians in general, joint families are ones in which all members share a single hearth for cooking, and they are also economic units in which income is mostly pooled to meet common expenses. Junior members thus hand over their earnings to the senior male head of the household, who is responsible for its common budget, although he also distributes money to individual members for their own expenses, such as clothing or children’s school fees. Sooner or later, in the normal course of the developmental cycle, joint families divide into nuclear families with separate hearths and budgets, and there is no evidence that large joint families were commoner in the past. Division into nuclear families is often detached from and precedes partition of public worship rights and immovable property. Thus brothers who have split up and now head separate nuclear family units may continue to share their public worship rights and jointly own one or more houses. In several cases, a set of separated nuclear families continues to occupy one building, mainly because they cannot afford their own accommodation. Although there is a stereotypical tendency to blame the breakup of joint families on women quarreling in the kitchen, priests do recognize that tension between father and sons, and between brothers, is an important factor, and friction among children when they grow up is also cited as a common reason why their parents eventually want to live as a nuclear family. Four of the nineteen joint families in 1995 were particularly large and had remained together for longer than usual: one with four married sons had seventeen members, and three with three married sons had nine, eleven, and thirteen members respectively. The last of these families, which I knew fairly well, had expanded to sixteen members by 2002, so that by then the father (in late middle age) and his three sons expected partition to occur fairly soon when the sons’ six young children reached their teenage years, even though they all emphasized the advantages of joint family life. In the priestly community, marriage is almost always virilocal, so that wives, whether they come from other Minakshi Temple priests’ families or from elsewhere, move into their husbands’ homes. The only exception in 1995 was a household in which a priest had married one of the three daughters of another Minakshi Temple priest and lived with his parents-in-law. Of the fifty-five households, thirty-eight occupied dwellings within two or three minutes’ walk of the Temple’s north tower on East and West Bhattamar Streets, North Tower Street, and North Avani Moola Street, which links the other three.5 Most of the other households were scattered around the central city area, although two were located in new housing

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colonies in Madurai’s suburbs; there were also three households in Tirupparankundram and one in Tirucculi, whose members mainly work in those two temples. Apart from the men residing in the suburbs (and Tirupparankundram and Tirucculi), all the Minakshi Temple priests can walk to work in ten minutes or less, so that they have not dispersed very far. Nevertheless, in 1980, virtually all priests still lived under the shadow of the north tower, cheek by jowl with everyone else in the community, whereas within the foreseeable future, they will almost certainly become more dispersed, mainly because cheaper housing in quieter areas with, most importantly, a better water supply is more available outside the city center.

Houses and Domestic Organization Many of the buildings occupied by the priests’ families near the Temple’s north tower, as well as elsewhere in central Madurai, were built more than a hundred years ago and still retain the basic design of a traditional, urban joint-family house. Some houses, however, have been partitioned, rebuilt, or refurbished so extensively that not many old features remain, and a few of the priests’ houses actually are newer buildings. A traditional house is commonly long and narrow; it has a relatively small frontage on the street, but behind the front door it stretches a long way, sometimes an entire block, so that the back door opens onto another street or lane behind. In houses of this type, the axis of the house is a corridor, sometimes partly open to the air, with a series of small rooms off it along one side, and this design tends to be clearest in single-story buildings, although most of the priests’ houses have two stories. In some of these houses, poorer households occupy only a limited set of rooms. Some more spacious houses have a wider frontage and contain a large main room; in a few houses, the main room is on the upper floor, and in a few others it is two stories high, with vents just below the ceiling to create a draught, so that it stays cool even on a hot day. In most houses, the kitchen is behind the main room and next to it is an open space with a well or tap; at the very back are the latrine and bathing area. As already mentioned in chapter 2, some priests live in houses that they own and some richer men own several houses, whereas other poorer priests are tenants, often renting accommodation from their wealthier colleagues. Tenants in particular often live in very cramped conditions, although some large families, even though they own their houses, do not enjoy much more space. Overall, though, there is considerable variation in the quality of the priests’ housing, and some families are a lot more comfortable than others.

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In every dwelling there is a small shrine where daily worship is performed, which is normally located in either the main room or a smaller adjacent room. Each shrine usually has pictures of Minakshi and Sundareshwara and other deities, as well as a small linga, a standing oil lamp, and other items for performing worship. The main room generally contains some chairs and sometimes a table or desk, but amounts of furniture vary considerably from house to house. Even when there is plenty of furniture, it is not always used very much; everyone invariably eats sitting on the floor, but many people prefer to sit there anyway, whether they are cooking or looking after children, reading or watching television, chatting or doing nothing much. In the vast majority of priests’ houses, since the 1980s, the main room has housed the television set. As far as I know, no priestly household is without a television; most are color sets and most are connected to satellite and cable channels by unreliable wiring strung across the roofs by contractors who charge for the connections. In many homes, the television is more or less permanently switched on, whether or not it is being watched. Many men in the priestly community are fans of sport, especially cricket, and the Star TV sports channel is watched a great deal. Very popular with everyone is Sun TV, which shows a lot of Tamil films; Tamil and other Indian films are also watched on other channels, such as Jain TV and Asianet. The Indian state network Doordarshan is rarely watched except when it shows sport or Tamil films; BBC World is sometimes switched on for world news and some of its popular feature programs. To some extent, television may be contributing to the privatization of leisure, but only in a very limited way; priests have never gone to watch major sporting events, which do not come to Madurai anyway, and cinema-going, except among young men, has never been a common habit of priests and their family members. Apart from televisions, other consumer goods that are now extremely common are videocassette players, compact disc players, and other audio equipment, and in the kitchen, refrigerators, electric mixers and grinders, and gas cooking rings. Most houses now have fans in every room. Some households have invested in their own bore wells or electric pump sets to try to secure a supply of water more reliable and convenient than the corporation’s pipes and tankers. By the late 1990s, a lot of telephones were being installed, and by 2002, there was at least one computer, regularly used for e-mail messages to overseas relatives. The first (secondhand) car to be acquired by a priest was bought in 2001, although the owner usually used his powerful motorbike, and many younger priests now have motorbikes or scooters. A few of the big, old buildings contain some beautiful interior woodwork and tiled floors, but a lot of houses are quite crudely decorated and not in very good repair. Nonetheless, in the late

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1970s, the majority of houses were probably in worse condition, and then—when handheld, wickerwork fans were still common items—they were not even properly equipped with electric fans, let alone any other consumer durables, so that for the priests and their families (in common with so many other urban, middle-class Indians), the material standard of living has risen markedly. Although I have not investigated the issue of consumerism in depth, I see no signs of the ostentatious consumption now prevalent in some sections of the Indian middle class. On the other hand, in priests’ families, there is certainly no ascetic disdain for material comforts and consumer goods, and a higher standard of living is appreciated by everyone. When not at work, most older priests tend to stay at home inside their houses, at least during the heat of the day, although some of them like to spend the evenings sitting on their front steps conversing with each other and passersby. But this habit has become much less attractive over the years because of noise, fumes, and dust from lorries, cars, motorbikes, scooters, and other vehicles, including pilgrim and tourist buses that park nearby and cause traffic jams. On North Avani Moola Street, trains of bullock carts used to rattle along, accompanied by the tinkling sound of the animals’ bells, but the street now suffers from noisy, round-the-clock lorry traffic to the nearby wholesale vegetable market; East and West Bhattamar and North Tower Streets are less badly affected, but everywhere in the vicinity, tranquil evenings have become a distant memory. In central Madurai, as in so many other Indian cities, the air has become extremely polluted as well. The streets have become dirtier, too; all residents, including priestly families, still throw out food and kitchen waste to be eaten by cows and crows, but nowadays there is also a lot of plastic and other imperishable rubbish that is never properly swept up and removed. While older men mostly stay put at home, young men, especially the unmarried, wander around a lot from house to house. Sometimes they congregate outside to converse, sometimes they walk along the streets or go to drink coffee at a stall together, and sometimes they search for their friends or relatives in each others’ houses. Except at night, most men happily march into other people’s houses to ask where someone is, and if the sleeping residents have to be woken up to get an answer, nobody thinks twice about it. Women also wander in and out of each others’ houses, and some older women also sit on the steps in the evening, but on the whole they do so less than men, and they rarely stand around chatting in public on the streets. Young children roam freely in and out of houses and along the streets, and some older boys play scratch games of cricket for hours in the Bhattamar Streets. Among the members of the priestly community living near the north tower, there is therefore continual social interaction, which is augmented by the frequent arrival and departure of

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relatives from elsewhere. As often as not, on visiting a priest’s house, I was introduced to a relative who had arrived, often without warning, to stay for a few days or just a few hours en route to somewhere else to attend a wedding or take part in a special ritual. Thus even priests who prefer to spend more time at home keeping to themselves are part of a constant chain of conversation and gossip, in which little can remain private for long. This is slowly changing, however, as more priestly families move away from the area, so that day-to-day interaction is lessened, especially for the women who stay at home. By 2000 it was also noticeable that priests with telephones were using them to contact each other, so that sooner or later they may reduce the constant movement in and out of priestly houses. Within priests’ houses, there is a typical gendered division of space, inasmuch as the main room—and the front of the house—are more the men’s space, and the inner rooms and kitchen—and the back—are more the women’s. Adult men, whether household members or visitors, usually sit and talk in the main room or the area near the entrance, whereas women and their female visitors usually go farther into the house, almost always sitting on the floor. Men may also lie down to sleep during the day on the floor of the main room—even while other people are awake and talking—and wandering young men sometimes lie down in other people’s houses, whereas women almost always sleep in the inner rooms of their own house. (Often, though, among both male and female sleepers, some people are likely to be visitors from elsewhere.) The interior and kitchen area are not, however, restricted solely to women, and the main room is certainly not the men’s exclusive space; babies and infants sleep in it because it is cool, young children play in it, older children sometimes do their schoolwork in it, women enter it whenever they want to, and everybody uses it to watch television.6 The sexual division of labor within priestly households is generally clear-cut. Cooking, cleaning, and other domestic tasks are female responsibilities (sometimes partly done by servants), although men as well as women go to the market and shops. Child care is overwhelmingly the responsibility of women, although men do spend quite a lot of time with their young children, and most adults indulgently allow children to play freely around them in the main room. Men always eat separately from women who serve them, and in principle they always eat first, although this may be modified when priests are eating at unusual hours, and older men are sometimes served by their sons or younger male relatives. Young children generally eat with the women, but sometimes they are allowed to join the men. If men are sitting together in a room, women—except for very senior women—normally stand in their presence, and when they move around, they often try to avoid crossing in front of the men. Women

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are never veiled, although some women, who tend to pull the end of their saris over their shoulders and bow their heads, are noticeably reluctant to enter a room containing many men. But such humble shyness is unusual, and inside the house, many women—especially younger ones, as well as the most senior—nowadays participate fairly freely in conversations with men whom they know. The vast majority of women, however, are willing to converse with unfamiliar or unrelated men only if their own menfolk are present, so that I was rarely able to talk to them alone and know sadly little about how they see their own lives.7 The pattern of gender (and age) relationships does vary among families. Yet women’s deferential subordination to men is usually plain enough, as it normally is in India, and it is taken for granted that men take precedence over women and can issue orders to them, as seniors can also do to juniors. A few priestly families headed by stern patriarchs certainly appear to be rather authoritarian. In the majority of families, however, as far as I can judge, even though their relationships are unequal, husbands and wives, and parents and children, treat each other in a fairly relaxed manner.

Purity and Pollution Rules The anteroom near the front door or the area next to it provide space in which visitors can be received without allowing them into the rest of the house. When I first worked in Madurai in the 1970s, the majority of the priests received me at their houses only in this space near the entrance. There were some exceptions, and my closest friend among the priests has always welcomed me inside his home, but in general—like other low-caste visitors—I was kept out so that I would not pollute the pure interior of a Brahman home. I still recall the excruciating embarrassment suffered by me and my (Brahman) assistant in 1977 when one overenthusiastic priest decided to show us around his large house, to the obvious amazement of some of his fellow family members, especially the older women, whose jaws dropped in horror as we passed through their home. By the 1990s, these restrictions were much less strictly observed. Just like other non-Brahman visitors who were commonly present, I was frequently received in the main central room, where men’s conversation normally takes place, or in one of the smaller rooms, depending on convenience. At a festive meal in the main room of a priest’s house in 1994, I asked for water to wash my hands, expecting that a vessel might be brought so that I could go to the street at the front, but after the man I asked had had a quick muttered conversation with the elderly mother of the house, I was just waved through to the tap in the courtyard next to the kitchen. On one occasion in 1995, I even ate lunch with a priest in

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his kitchen, served by the women in the house who showed no concern about it. This is the only time this has happened, and in the majority of priests’ houses, I have still never eaten a meal, as opposed to snacks or tiffin that do not include boiled rice, although this is partly because I habitually ate the midday meal at my close friend’s house (in the main room). Nevertheless, my easy admission into priests’ houses along with other non-Brahmans testifies to the marked relaxation of purity rules that has taken place, not only among younger people but also members of the older generation who were themselves observing stricter rules twenty years ago. A parallel change is apparent in relation to eating outside the home. Thus many priests nowadays eat meals and snacks quite regularly in “hotels” (the city’s many small restaurants), despite some conservatives’ objection that eating in them can seriously compromise ritual purity because the food may have been prepared by non-Brahmans. It may also be noted that before eating a meal, many priests no longer bother to carry out the Brahmans’ parisecana ritual of sprinkling water around the food as an act of purification and consecration. Jokes about this kind of slackness are quite common, and priests compare themselves disparagingly with Vaishnava temple priests, who are rightly regarded as more rigorous about purity rules and Brahmanical observances, although Vaishnava strictness is often mocked as excessive as well. Despite some relaxation in rules about eating, however, all priests and other members of their families remain strictly vegetarian. A minority of older men and a very few old women chew pan (betel and areca) regularly, but younger people do so only occasionally, usually when it is distributed at the end of a festive meal. As far as I know, no priests smoke or drink. Tales that some men eat meat and drink alcohol in hotels are quite common, but I have no idea whether they are true; in any case, the stories are often about very old or now deceased men who lived it up with wine, women, and song many years ago. A barber belonging to a family linked hereditarily with the priests still has some of his old rights and duties. Before a major festival, the nambiyar who will take charge has to be clean-shaven, and he must pay the barber even if his services are declined. At all domestic rituals when a man must be shaved, the same barber must be called. His presence is especially crucial at priestly funerals, when he must come to the burning ground (near the river) at the time of cremation to shave the male relatives (pan˙ka¯il_i) of the deceased who will observe death pollution. Complete tonsure is no longer done, however; mourners have only their facial hair and often the hair above the forehead removed. For his services at domestic rituals and funerals, the priests’ barber is usually given a waistcloth and some food to take home. A few mainly elderly priests still employ the hereditary •

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barber, who visits every few days, to shave them and trim their hair, and he is paid for each job in cash. Unlike twenty years ago, however, the vast majority of priests now shave themselves and go to a barber’s shop if they want to get their hair cut. Nearly all priests are clean-shaven (although many do not shave every day), but a few have a full beard; none of them sports a moustache only, which is practically universal among non-Brahman men but not so common among Brahmans. The barber’s wife used to act as midwife to women in the priests’ families, but nowadays she has no role at all. The priests have not had a hereditary washerman for a long time, and they pay for any laundry services in cash in the normal way. On some special ritual occasions, both men and women dip their clothes in water to purify them after they have been washed, but today only a minority of priests—mostly older men but also some graduates of Agamic schools—do so regularly. A Brahman domestic priest or sastri is hereditarily linked to all the Minakshi Temple priests’ families, and he is expected to serve them at both auspicious rituals and inauspicious ones connected with funerals. By 1980, the domestic priest was already an old man, and I was told that there were plans to find a replacement for him; by the mid-1990s, he was too old to do his job, but he had not been replaced and the priests had started to employ any domestic priest in Madurai who could work for them. In practice, therefore, the Temple priests no longer have a hereditary domestic priest, exactly like most other people in the city today. In common with other Brahmans and consistently with the Agamic rules for initiated Shaivas, death pollution in priestly families is observed for ten days by close agnates of the deceased and for three days or only one by more distant relatives. The complexities of death pollution rules are checked if necessary with a domestic priest. On the eleventh day, two Brahmans embodying the ghost of the deceased are fed and on the twelfth day the closing sapin d ı¯karan a ritual is held to complete the ghost’s transformation into an ancestor. On the thirteenth day, mourning ends and a priest can start to perform rituals in the Temple again. During the period of pollution, a priest should not wear auspicious red kunkuma on his forehead, and of course he cannot work in the Temple; he is allowed to enter the Temple buildings, but he cannot go beyond the “sacrifice stones” (balipı¯t ha) near the entrances to Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s temples, which define the boundary of the pure interior zone around each sanctum (SG, 43).8 Women in the priestly families uniformly observe menstrual pollution. After menstruation begins, a woman stays in a separate room or an area that is partitioned off, and even in small houses she remains apart from the rest of the household. On the fourth day, she bathes and rejoins her family; on the fifth, after taking an oil bath, she can start to cook again • •

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and normality is restored. When a woman is polluted, all food preparation is done by other, unaffected women or by men (or ironically food is brought from a hotel). In their observance of menstrual pollution, the priestly women are stricter than most other Brahmans in Tamilnadu today, and priests themselves insist that this is necessary because of their special duties in the Temple. Yet menstrual pollution does not actually affect a woman’s husband and his work, except that he cannot be appointed as nambiyar in charge of a major festival at this time, although some priests say that they should never see a polluted woman before going to the Temple. Within the priestly community, it is worth noting here, an elaborate coming-of-age ritual is publicly celebrated, which is known as tiran t akkul_i (“puberty-bathing”) or more formally as irutu man˙kal_asna¯na (“puberty auspicious bath”) or pu¯ppun_ita nı¯ra¯t al (“menstruation purity bathing”). On the fourth day after her first menses begins, a girl is bathed and then beautifully dressed and adorned, typically as Minakshi and a few other deities in succession. Seated on a decorated stage, she is given presents of clothes, jewelry, food items, and money, with a special gift from her mother’s brother. An oil lamp placed on a container of paddy is then circled in front of her, just as it is for Minakshi at her first menstruation ritual at the Pu¯ram festival (Fuller 1980: 334–5). Although even more will probably come to her wedding, several hundred guests are typically invited to the celebration, which is a much bigger event than the comingof-age ritual for other Brahman girls in contemporary Tamilnadu (cf. Good 1991: 174; Kapadia 1995: 92–3, 115–6). After childbirth, the mother observes pollution exactly as at menstruation, and she is particularly excluded from the kitchen for ten days, although a longer period may have been observed in the past. The father and other close agnates also observe pollution for ten days. In the seventh month of her pregnancy, after the sı¯manta (“hair-parting”) ritual has been held to protect the unborn child, a woman normally returns to her parental home for the first baby and sometimes for subsequent ones as well. On the eleventh day after the birth, the father has to perform a purification ritual at the birthplace, and shaves for the first time since the simanta; this marks the end of the pollution period and he can then start to work in the Temple again. Looking at changes in the observance of purity and pollution rules during the last two decades, the overall picture is mixed. Priests have become more relaxed about admitting non-Brahmans into their houses, but the rules relating to the bodily pollution (tı¯t tu) of death, birth, and menstruation are mostly still as strictly observed as they used to be, and priests tend to emphasize their importance by insisting that they must ensure their own bodily purity when serving Minakshi and Sundareshwara. On the other • •

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hand, as some of them wryly acknowledge, to eat in hotels, wear clothes that have not been dipped in purifying water, or shave oneself is also polluting behavior, and priests who do so are castigated by conservative critics for transgressing orthodox Brahmanical norms. In many respects, the priests’ observance of pollution rules is plainly weakening in much the same way as among other Brahmans in Tamilnadu today, albeit more slowly, so that the priests, too, are being affected by “secularization” as described by M. N. Srinivas (1966: 119–25). In other respects, however, they adhere to the traditional rules—insisting that they must because they are priests—so that the secularization process is uneven. All in all, therefore, the priests’ attitudes toward purity and pollution tend to be rather selective, and I return to some implications of this point in conclusion.

Patterns of Marriage Because all Minakshi Temple priests belong to the patrilineal clans that make up the Vikkira Pantiya, Kulacekara, and Tirucculi groups, many of them are related to each other as consanguineal kin. But many of them are also related affinally. Adishaivas, like other Tamil groups with a Dravidian kinship system, have traditionally practiced preferential “cross-cousin marriage,” whereby a man’s ideal marriage partner—who must be younger than him—is a mother’s brother’s daughter or father’s sister’s daughter, or (as is common in much of South India) an elder sister’s daughter. In fact, only a small minority of the priests have ever married their actual cross-cousins or other genealogically close relatives, but in line with the normative preference for marriage to an affinal “cross” relative, there has been a fairly high rate of intermarriage among the priestly clans.9 This rate, however, is now declining, and unlike twenty years ago, most men and women in the priestly families no longer favor marriage to cross-cousins or other close kin. A handful of people within the community have remained single—and single men cannot of course work as priests—but as in most other Indian social groups, the overwhelming majority have always married. In 1980, out of fifty-six priests and seven other married men in their families, twenty-nine (46%) had married women who belonged to one of their own clans and thirty-two (51%) had taken wives from outside; for two cases I have no information (cf. SG, 185, n. 3). The marriages inside the Minakshi Temple priests’ community were not always between partners with any traceable relationship; conversely, in a few instances, wives from outside actually were affinal relatives. Nevertheless, owing to their historically high rate of intermarriage, priests have always treated unions with other Minakshi Temple priests’ families as if they were all marriages

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between relatives, so that the inside-outside dichotomy tends to be taken as more or less equivalent to that between marriages to relatives as opposed to nonrelatives. In 1995, my household survey included eighty-nine priests and other married or widowed men (plus one for whom I lack information). Of these eighty-nine, twenty-six (29%) had married women from inside their own community and sixty-three (71%) women from outside it. If the data are broken down into three age cohorts, for men aged sixty and over, forty to fifty-nine, and sixteen to thirty-nine, the proportion of insider marriages falls from 42 percent (10/24) to 35 percent (9/26) to 18 percent (7/39). Of course, the numbers are small and the statistical correlation is therefore not very strong, but it certainly suggests that the proportion of intermarriages among the Minakshi Temple priests’ families has halved from around two-fifths to one-fifth, and this decline is consistent with how priests themselves perceive the trend. Shanmugasundara Bhattar of the Manamadurai clan, who is now in late middle age, has a wife from the Kulacekara clan, and he told me that he still favored marriage with close kin because it was a priestly tradition that should be sustained. His first son was married in 1987 to his mother’s brother’s daughter (Kulacekara clan) and his third son in 1993 to his mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter (Kannakkankudi clan). His second son married an outsider, but his only daughter also married a Minakshi Temple priest (Tiruvadavur clan) around 1990. Shanmugasundara’s opinion—like the cross-cousin partners chosen for his two sons—is now unusual. In one marriage in 1999, a brother of the Tiruvadavur priest just referred to married his second cross-cousin, who is Ugrapandya Bhattar’s daughter (Tirupparankundram clan), but other recent unions between Minakshi Temple priests’ families have joined partners who were very distantly related or had no known genealogical connection. Such was the case, for instance, when Raja Bhattar (the guru of the Tirupparankundram Agamic school) and later his younger brother both married women from other priests’ families. Moreover, consistently with how they have given up preferential close-kin marriage, the vast majority of priests today say that they have no preference at all for unions within their own community in Madurai. Indeed one young priest told me that there was now a feeling that those who have grown up next door to each other like brothers and sisters should not marry; he was thereby implicitly acknowledging and then rejecting the possibility that sibling and spouse could be emotionally interchangeable through the cross-cousin marriage system (cf. Trawick 1990: 182–3). Some people also express a more general disquiet about “inbreeding” and the alleged risk of congenital illness in the children of closely related parents.

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Notwithstanding Ugrapandya’s daughter’s recent marriage, the kind of close-knit affinal network that made Ugrapandya Manikkasundara’s brother-in-law, and Manikkasundara the Vikkira Pantiya chief priest’s son-in-law (see figure 3), will almost certainly never be reproduced in future. Given the historical importance of preferential close-kin marriage in the social organization of the priests, in common with other South Indian groups, its virtual abandonment within one generation represents a major change, both in their attitude to appropriate conjugal unions and in the production of a more open, dispersed pattern of affinity that is particularly linked, as in other groups, to educational change.10 For men, the median age of marriage has probably always lain in the late twenties. Few men marry before they are twenty, and quite a lot wait until they reach their thirties, but there is no trend toward even later marriage. For women, the median age of marriage lies in the late teens, ten years less than for men. In the past, however, especially in unions between Minakshi Temple priests’ families, child marriage was not uncommon for girls; in 1994, there were six women alive, all aged sixty or over, who had been married when they were eight, nine, or ten to husbands who were about ten years older. Since the 1940s, child marriage has come to an end, although even in recent years a few girls have been married when only fourteen or fifteen years old. On the other hand, a slowly rising proportion of women, now about one-third, are not getting married until they are in their twenties, often because they are completing higher education.11 Priests say that the preference for marriage to close relatives has largely disappeared because most people now think that marriage arrangement should be guided not by old rules but by the choices and interests of young men and women and their families. They also assume that partners with similar backgrounds are nowadays most likely to become congenial couples, whereas in previous generations there was no expectation that husbands and wives should share much in common. When discussing congeniality in couples, members of the priestly community strongly emphasize the point that well-educated people normally want partners with a similar scholastic background, although grooms generally prefer brides whose educational standards are slightly lower than their own. On the part of parents, there is, too, a genuine desire to ensure that their daughters have happy marriages, which means, among other things, that they should only be sent away to new homes in which they will be comfortably provided for. Ideally, prospective partners, both brides and grooms, should belong to small families as well, so that they can expect large shares of their parents’ property. Satisfying all these criteria may lead parents and other senior relatives to look for partners for young people within the Minakshi Temple priests’ community, but more often it will take them outside it. In fact, since couples with similar backgrounds are just as likely to be found

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inside the community as outside it, the argument about education in particular looks like a rationalization for the declining desire to marry close relatives and insiders, although well-educated women are always said to prefer husbands who are not working priests, and some young men complain that this in itself causes a shortage of suitable brides in Madurai. This alleged shortage, on the other hand, is partly compensated for by brides coming from poorer priestly families, especially in the regions south of Madurai, which tend to favor marriage with the better-off Minakshi Temple priests. In some cases, what look like plainly strategic marriages into richer or more influential families have been made. For example (as mentioned in chapter 2), two Minakshi Temple priests have married daughters of Sambamurti Shivacharya of Chennai, which has helped them obtain posts overseas, and a brother of one of these priests, who practices as a lawyer in Madras High Court, has married yet another of Sambamurti’s daughters. A few more ambitious priestly families have also looked further afield than in the past to seek out possible partners from families of similar or higher standing, and there are connections to Chennai and northeast Tamilnadu, although the majority of marriages are to spouses from the southern half of the state. The outcome of these choices produces a distinctive spread of marital alliances. Out of sixty-seven priests’ wives from outside their own community, thirty-one (46%) came from Madurai District and the other districts to the south, twenty-seven (40%) from the east and near northeast, seven (10%) from Chennai and the far northeast, and two (3%) from the northwest. My information on the destinations of priests’ daughters is incomplete, but for nineteen women I know about, ten (53%) married to the east and near northeast, and nine (47%) to Chennai and the far northeast.12 The difference between the two geographical distributions is striking, and shows that parents are unwilling to send their daughters to a region where priestly families are assumed to be poorer, whereas sons are readily married to women coming from south Tamilnadu; indeed, one older woman explained that brides from poorer, southern families may even be preferred, because they supposedly work harder in the house than those who come from richer families. Wherever their husbands live, however, assuming that it is not too far away, married daughters can and do visit their parents’ homes fairly often, and for the birth of their first child (and sometimes subsequent ones, too) they return home for an extended stay. A daughter occasionally goes home to effect a de facto separation from her husband, but divorce—as in other high-caste groups—never occurs. Although child marriage vanished half a century ago and close-kin marriage has now become rarer, marriage arrangement remains conservative in most other respects. Thus it is firmly in the hands of the prospective

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partners’ parents or other senior kin, even if some older people complain, rather unconvincingly, that young men and women no longer accept advice and get their own way in the end. Soundings and investigations are made about possible spouses, usually through networks of relatives and friends, and they sometimes continue for months or even years. If and when the prospects look favorable and the horoscopes match, a meeting attended by the young man and his close family relatives is held at the potential bride’s house. Assuming both sides at the meeting agree to the match, they fix the date of the betrothal ceremony (niccayata¯rttam) and the wedding, which is normally held on the following day. The couple have no opportunity to talk to each other at the meeting, let alone in private; one priest, explaining how successfully he had arranged his daughter’s marriage in 2001, told me that she never even met her husband-to-be when he came to the families’ meeting, which was very short because everything was agreed so quickly. In principle, either party can decline the proposed match, but refusals are uncommon and cannot easily be made repeatedly, especially by young women, although there is one middle-aged bachelor in the priestly community who is said to have rejected about twenty-five possible partners, until nobody else would take any interest in him, and another who produced a similar reaction by rejecting a bride at the betrothal. As the priests always insist, they do not demand dowries for their sons and only occasionally pay small dowries for their daughters. By this they mean that “groomprice”—in the form of cash or consumer goods—is never demanded and rarely paid, despite its increasing prevalence among other social groups throughout India, including some Adishaivas who want to marry their daughters into Minakshi Temple priests’ families. Thangam Bhattar, for example, told me that he had refused several munificent offers of money and jewelry from prospective partners for his two sons, including (of course) his younger son who became an engineer in America. On the other hand, parents do give the traditional dowry (strı¯dhana) to a daughter; she receives some gold—by tradition, ten po˘n_s or gold sovereigns (80 grams), but sometimes more in richer families and less in poorer ones—as well as saris and other clothes, cooking vessels, sleeping mats, and so on.13 In the mid-1990s, ten sovereigns cost a little more than Rs 30,000. The bride’s family pay all the wedding expenses, which were unlikely to be less than Rs 30,000 for the food alone in the mid-1990s, since in Madurai one thousand to two thousand guests are commonly invited to the wedding hall—including all the priests, other officiants, and administrative staff from the Temple with their wives and children, plus relatives, friends, and colleagues of members of both families. Afterwards, the groom’s family may also host a reception at his home or in a nearby wedding hall. By the norms now prevalent in some circles

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in India, the priests’ marriages remain fairly modest affairs not marred by ostentatious expenditure and cynical greed. After the wedding, usually without much delay, the new couple undergo the consecration ritual together, so that the husband can start work as a priest in the Temple.

Subcaste Endogamy and Priestly Rights The Minakshi Temple priests remain rigidly conservative about subcaste endogamy, and the only marriage involving a partner who was not an Adishaiva has had very serious repercussions. In 1989, when he was about twenty-five years old, a young man from a priest’s family and a young Smarta Brahman woman, the daughter of a domestic priest, made a love marriage. This marriage took place without the knowledge of the man’s parents, who then objected to it, although after about a year (probably when the first child was born), they changed their minds, and now all his close family members and most of his other relatives are on good terms with him. Before his marriage, the man was working as a priest in Tirupparankundram temple, where, unlike the Minakshi Temple, unmarried men are allowed to perform some rituals, but as soon as he had married his Brahman bride, more than seventy priests signed petitions to the two temples’ executive officers insisting that he could not undergo the consecration ritual and must be dismissed from Tirupparankundram. The petitions asserted that his cross-subcaste marriage breached Adishaiva traditions and therefore disqualified him from service in the two temples. Since his dismissal, this man has been working as a priest in a small temple in Madurai, where he earns much less than he would in the Minakshi Temple. He has contemplated legal action to recover his right to work, but fears that even if he won his case, the rest of the priests would find some other way to exclude him; he also told me that the Minakshi Temple priests’ association had advised him to take a second, Adishaiva wife so that he could undergo the consecration ritual, but he does not intend to do so. The hostility is confined to him alone and has not spread to his family, for his younger brother (who has since died) had an Adishaiva wife, and he was consecrated and worked without any trouble in the Minakshi Temple. Not surprisingly, the excluded priest is very bitter about how he has been treated, and in the mid-1990s he complained vehemently about the other priests’ hypocritical attitudes toward him and his marriage; he particularly contrasted his own treatment with that of another priest, whose position in the Temple was unaffected by a scandalous alleged affair with a non-Adishaiva woman that had just been exposed. He also claimed that elsewhere Adishaivas have married outside their sub-

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caste without losing their temple rights. Whether this claim is true, I do not know, but the Minakshi Temple priests’ insistence on endogamy, as shown by their implacable opposition toward a marriage to a Brahman, is certainly very conservative in comparison with the more liberal attitudes to marriage across subcaste boundaries that are now fairly common in Tamilnadu. Although nobody made the connection in so many words, it seems clear that the priests’ insistence on subcaste endogamy is linked with their strenuous defense of hereditary rights in the Minakshi Temple. Thus, for example, a Vikkira Pantiya priest condemned this marriage when he was expostulating about the Tirucculi priests’ attempt to hold Sivaraj’s consecration inside the Temple, which I discussed in chapter 2; in both these cases, he said, the traditions of the Temple and its priesthood were being violated. This assertion is not without substance, for marrying outside the subcaste is a breach of traditional norms, including Agamic rules that specify that only true Adishaivas can act as Shiva’s priests. Indeed, when the Supreme Court ruled on the Tamilnadu government’s bill to abolish the hereditary temple priesthood in the 1970s, it also took the view that an Adishaiva priest must be born of Adishaiva parents (SG, 158–9). Thus unlike the movement away from cross-cousin marriage, which has no direct bearing on hereditary rights, marriages to non-Adishaivas do have significant implications. First, if such a couple had no sons, it is conceivable that a priest’s public worship rights could devolve to a non-Adishaiva; secondly, and just as importantly, any sons born to the couple would raise the question of whether they were true Adishaivas qualified to conduct Shiva’s worship in his temples. However obscurantist it might appear to some people, the priests’ determination to exclude the man who married a Smarta Brahman is entirely consistent with their defense of hereditary rights as a vital part of the Minakshi Temple’s tradition.

Conclusion Reviewing the material presented in this chapter, we can see that in the family and domestic domain, broadly defined, the Minakshi Temple priests are not uniformly conservative, so that during the last two decades, and indeed over a longer period, they have abandoned or modified some of their old attitudes and practices while rigidly maintaining others. Their unbending opposition to marriage outside the Adishaiva subcaste, as I have just explained, is fully consistent with their traditionalist defense of hereditary rights. Furthermore, given their ideological commitment to tradition, they are readily able to justify almost any aspect of their own conservatism, such as their strict observation of bodily pollution rules.

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The minority of priests who still prefer cross-cousin marriage similarly defend it as a traditional custom that should not be abandoned. On the other hand, as they readily admit, lots of old customs pertaining to purity and pollution have been given up. Most priests now shave themselves or eat meals in restaurants, for instance, and they easily let nonBrahmans into their homes; in these and other respects, they are considerably less orthodox or more liberal than they were when I first went to Madurai. Of course, gender inequality is still pervasive, as it is in most Indian social groups, and the priests are unusually conservative about women working, although this is likely to change fairly soon, and nowadays girls are mostly given the same educational opportunities as boys, so that female educational standards have risen markedly. Child marriage, a particularly extreme manifestation of female inequality, also ended more than fifty years ago, and the priests’ daughters have not been degraded by competitive dowry demands. Arguably, though, the most radical social change in the last two or three decades, affecting both sexes equally, has been the near disappearance of the preferential close-kin marriage system. When taxed about all these changes and how they fail to fit in with their own commitment to tradition, the priests often just shrug their shoulders. They easily acknowledge that life has changed, that many habits no longer comply with orthodox Brahmanical norms, and point out—with more or less regret—that they, like everyone else, must live in today’s world and adapt to it. Moreover, quite a lot of changes are generally seen in a favorable light, notably better education for girls as well as boys, and of course an improved standard of living. And despite grumbles about ordinary people’s lack of respect for them in the Temple or about anti-Brahman discrimination by the government, the priests today are realists who recognize that they are citizens of a modern, democratic Indian state. In this postcolonial India—now the only one in which most priests have ever lived—old Brahman privileges have gone forever, and I have never heard anyone seriously suggesting that they could or should be brought back. The material in this chapter may appear to show that the Minakshi Temple priests are rather inconsistent in how they lead their lives (though probably not more than most other people). Certainly, the priests have now become more insistent about tradition and their traditional rights, even though they have selectively discarded many purity and pollution rules and other old precepts and practices; in general, as we have seen, they have also become more modern-minded in their outlook on education and various other aspects of their lives, both at work and at home. It is also noticeable that the priests forcefully uphold tradition as legitimate and legitimating, whereas modern change is rarely valued positively, even if it is pragmatically accepted or actually even preferred—as is so

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with improved living conditions, better education for both boys and girls, or enhanced opportunities to earn money and work abroad. The traditionalist priests therefore stand in sharp contrast with the modernist, upwardly mobile, low-caste Izhavas of Kerala, who have embraced the modern and changed their social practices “for the sake of progress” (Osella and Osella 2000b: 8–9). Yet from the priests’ point of view, old rules and customs that have been abandoned or modified are those that were not vital elements of their tradition, so that—at least after the fact—it was never particularly important whether they were retained or not. The singular exception to this generalization is the priests’ hairstyle and the controversy about it. Of course, until more than a couple of young men started to cut it, nobody needed to defend long, knotted hair impassionately, and in the 1970s nobody did. Today, though, priests with short hair speak up for themselves only on practical grounds or not at all, whereas those with long hair often vehemently defend it as authentically traditional. They thereby contribute to the further reinforcement of ideological traditionalism within the Minakshi Temple priesthood, despite the fact that more and more men are actually cutting their hair. Only time can tell whether the controversy will persist or whether all priests will eventually have short hair and all will then agree that long hair never really had been essential.

Four The Agamas and Priestly Education In the Minakshi Temple, like all other Shaiva temples in Tamilnadu, the rituals should in theory be performed according to the prescriptions of the Agamas, the Sanskrit texts believed to contain Shiva’s own directions for his proper worship, because they originally came from the mouth of Shiva himself. Since the first half of the twentieth century, Tamil temple priests have been criticized for their ignorance of the Agamas, and Hindu reformists have campaigned to improve the standard of ritual by providing Agamic education and training for priests. The reformist premise is ostensibly simple and reasonable: if priests learn the Agamic texts, they will know how to carry out rituals properly according to Shiva’s directions, whereas at present most of them do not. In fact, the idea of exact adherence to Agamic instruction—as if the texts provided a theoretical or discursive model to be put into practice—is illusory. Nevertheless, the Minakshi Temple priests themselves largely subscribe to the reformist premise and have internalized the criticisms directed at them. Most priests therefore agree that the best solution to the problem of ritual misperformance is Agamic education, and at least in principle, they favor it for themselves and their sons. Agamic education, its significance for temple reform, and its impact on the Minakshi Temple priests are the main topics of this chapter, but I begin with the general relation between the Agamas and temple ritual and then look at the history of modern reformism and the publication of Agamic texts. Some of this material was discussed in SG (ch. 6), but the analysis needs modification in the light of later research. In particular, despite criticizing the reformist premise as flawed, I still reproduced one of its central misconceptions by writing as if Agamic education—like conventional book-based education—is about mastering the content of authoritative texts so that priests learn how to perform rituals correctly. As we shall see, looking at it in this way is seriously misleading. Since SG was written, further work on the Agamas—especially by He´le`ne Brunner—has also clarified various issues that are important for my subject matter.

The Agamas and Temple Ritual Brunner has published a translation of an Agamic text as a supplement to a monograph on Tiruvannamalai temple’s ritual (L’Hernault and Reiniche 1999); her introduction (Brunner 1999: 263–8) is a concise discus-

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sion of the relation between the Agamas and temple ritual, which I partly summarize here. The Agamic corpus comprises twenty-eight fundamental Agamas (mu¯la¯gama) and over two hundred secondary Agamas (upa¯gama). The earliest Agamas date from the seventh or eighth centuries, but many of them are considerably later, including the Ka¯mika¯gama and Ka¯ran a¯gama, which are said to be authoritative in the Minakshi Temple, as in many other Tamil temples. In reality, though, the Agamas are rarely the main source for temple rituals; in particular, the daily worship in Shaiva temples primarily corresponds to the ritual manuals (paddhati), several of which are actually older than the Agamas as known today. The most famous manual is Aghoras´iva’s, dating from the twelfth century, which is regarded as authoritative throughout Tamilnadu; it is in turn heavily dependent on an eleventh-century manual by Somas´ambhu.1 Both these manuals, like other early Agamic texts, provide a formal description of how rituals should be done, but they do not contain any theoretical apparatus. As Brunner puts it elsewhere, “[T]he authors of our texts were concerned primarily with ritual techniques, and it is this body of techniques that they meant to preserve by writing the A¯gamas. The concern with doctrine came later” (1992: 25). Moreover, although the manuals set out norms for ritual practice, they were not in the past elevated into models that must be followed prescriptively. The manuals were also composed for initiated Shaivas carrying out their own private, personal worship of Shiva, not for priests performing public worship in temples. Thus when priests and other temple officiants insist, as they do, that Aghorashiva’s manual is authoritative for temple worship, it is because it has been used in this way by extending to the temple instructions that were not designed for it. It is also striking that even in texts such as the Kamikagama, the description of daily worship differs only slightly from that given for personal worship by Somashambhu and Aghorashiva, and no mention is made of the sequence of daily periods of worship, a key feature of temple ritual. This latter absence well illustrates the gap between temple practice and the texts theoretically governing it. Hence the insistent claim made in the Minakshi Temple and other Shaiva temples, such as Kalugumalai (Good 2001: 493) or Tiruvannamalai (L’Hernault and Reiniche 1999: 36), that all the ritual derives from and must comply with the prescriptions of the Agamas is an ideological fiction. Most readers, even if they know nothing of the Agamas, will not be surprised to learn that the texts deemed authoritative for Shaiva temple ritual are not necessarily very old and do not contain all the instructions that they are assumed to do. In these respects, there is nothing very unusual about the discrepancy between empirical, historical fact and the Agamic ritual tradition’s own ideological claim to be based on ancient texts and divine authority. For the analysis of Agamic education, however, •

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the gap between precept and practice is important because it impinges directly on what temple priests should and do learn. In brief, the key points (cf. SG, 139–45; Fuller 1993: 175–83) are that neither the Agamas nor the manuals contain explicit, detailed instructions about how to perform all the rituals in every particular temple, as they are widely thought to do. The length and complexity of the instructions— for example, about preparatory rituals—means that any attempt to conform fully to all of them would often impose completely impractical demands on the priests’ time and patience as well. Furthermore, because the Agamas are as concerned with immaterial transformations achieved through mental and spiritual means as they are with physical ritual acts, nobody could deduce from observation of the priests at work whether Agamic directions were completely adhered to or not. The crucial transformation is that “one must become Shiva to worship Shiva” because “only Shiva can worship Shiva,” to cite two notable Agamic precepts (cf. Brunner-Lachaux 1963: xxxviii, 130, n. 3) that are well known to the Minakshi Temple priests. Before carrying out worship, therefore, a priest must become a form of Shiva by invoking the god within himself. Yet the notion that only Shiva can worship Shiva also implies—as is patently obvious to the priests—that men like themselves with ordinary human failings cannot worship Shiva perfectly, partly because the god’s own instructions in the Agamas are too difficult to understand. Education may improve the situation, but it cannot eliminate misunderstanding and fallibility, so that complete compliance with Agamic rules is unattainable. Thus when priests insist that they must comply with these rules, they also accept—as their critics seem not to—that such an insistence is in the end incompatible with their own human imperfection.

Temple Reform and Agamic Education Modern temple reform in Tamilnadu began in the late nineteenth century with the activities of the social and political elite in Madras city. Many leading members of this elite were Brahman lawyers and administrators belonging to the so-called Mylapore group, who were actively involved in the early nationalist movement led by the recently formed Indian National Congress, as well as in the Theosophical Society, whose leader in Madras was Annie Besant. From the outset, therefore, temple reformism was always closely connected with politics. At first, corruption and mismanagement in the temples were the reformers’ main preoccupations (SG, 112–3, 149–53). One of the most prominent figures in the Mylapore group, Sir S. Subramania Aiyar, a Madras High Court judge, founded the Dharma Rakshana Sabha (Dharma [or

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Religion] Protection Association) in 1908 to take legal action against corrupt and incompetent temple committees.2 The Sabha also sought to persuade the colonial government to legislate for better administration of the temples. Eventually, in 1926, the Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Act was passed by the newly established Legislative Council in Madras, and the HRE Board was set up, giving the government unprecedented powers over temple committees (Presler 1987: 28). A further Act of 1935 allowed the Board to “notify” a temple and appoint an Executive Officer in charge of it; this was the procedure used to bring the Minakshi Temple under governmental control in 1937. In its day, the Dharma Rakshana Sabha was bitterly opposed by the Mylapore group’s political opponents, especially the men who endorsed the “Non-Brahman Manifesto” in 1916 and became the leaders of the Justice Party. The opposition between Brahmans and non-Brahmans, which dominated Tamil politics for most of the twentieth century, has inevitably been a critical element in temple reformism as well. Yet in spite of non-Brahman opposition to the Mylapore group Brahmans, and later the Justice Party’s hostility to Congress, the HRE Act was actually passed by a Legislative Council dominated by the Justice Party. Since then, indeed, no government of Madras or Tamilnadu, irrespective of its political color, has ever been willing to relinquish its grip over the temples, and at various times control has been tightened, notably when the HRE Board was replaced by the more powerful Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department in 1952. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the reformists’ attention turned to the priests and ritual misperformance, as well as temple mismanagement (SG, 147–9). Because the greatest obstacle to improving temple ritual was consistently identified as priestly incompetence, the demand grew that priests should be properly educated and trained before they started to work in the temples. In the long debate preceding the HRE Act, a controversial issue (which actually dated from the mid-nineteenth century) was the possible diversion of temple funds for “secular” purposes; in 1923, a Brahman lawyer insisted that only an extension for religious purposes would be legitimate, and gave as examples “courses on religious education such as agamas . . . or to provide instructions for archakas” (qu. in Geetha and Rajadurai 1998: 214), which strongly suggests that the idea of priestly education had begun to appear on the reformists’ agenda. In 1931, a Madurai judge proposed that the Minakshi Temple priests should receive Agamic education, and at least by 1941, the HRE Board was conscious of the problem. It noted that measures would soon be needed “to preclude persons not properly equipped from officiating as priests,” and “so as to ensure priests to acquire the required knowledge the Board has been desirous of establishing institutions for imparting in-

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struction in rituals and agamas” (qu. in Presler 1987: 113, n. 6); whether the Board took any action on the matter is however unclear. After Independence and the establishment of the HR&CE Department, the same concerns have repeatedly resurfaced, and they have also been voiced by the South Indian Archakar Association (or Sangam) of temple priests in Tamilnadu. The Association has published a number of Agamic texts.3 Its conference has also petitioned the government “to establish agama colleges in every district” and agreed that “it should distribute agamic scriptures and pamphlets to the archakas.” In 1953, the Association even resolved that once Agamic schools had been established, no priest—even one with hereditary rights—should be allowed to start working in a temple without a certificate confirming that he had been instructed in such a school (Presler 1987: 145), although the Association, a weak organization, could not have had most priests’ support on this matter. The need for Agamic education and qualification certificates was similarly emphasized by witnesses appearing before the Indian government’s HRE Commission, which endorsed their testimony; these witnesses included the Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram and Sringeri, the preeminent Brahman Shaiva monks in South India, who are discussed in more detail in chapter 5.4 In 1964, the HR&CE Department actually introduced new service rules stipulating that priests should not be appointed to temples in Tamilnadu unless they possessed a certificate of fitness issued by an Agamic religious school or its equivalent.5 These rules, however, appear never to have been enforced. The Maharajan committee of inquiry into the temple priesthood, which was set up by the Tamilnadu government and reported in 1982, also recommended (to no effect) that temple priests should undergo a five-year, “rigorous” training course before their consecration.6 Since the 1950s, the HR&CE Department has periodically organized short “refresher courses” for temple priests in Tamilnadu, which conclude with certificates of completion and have usually lasted forty-five days, although in 2001–02, even shorter fifteen-day courses were run. The Department has also been financially supporting five Agamic schools for priests, similar to those described later in this chapter.7 In 1992, a year after the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government led by J. Jayalalitha had come to power, the Department began a more elaborate program of one-year refresher courses intended to train five hundred temple priests throughout the state in the first year. According to the Department, 346 priests actually followed a course in 1992–93 and a further 380 did so in 1993–94.8 After a couple of years, however, the program lost much of its impetus and the government’s plans for a Veda Agama Academy that would also train priests came to naught. In chapter 5, the AIADMK government’s initiative is discussed in relation

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to its overall religious policy and the politics of Hinduism in contemporary Tamilnadu. Here, though, it is important to stress that all the main political parties have endorsed the reformist agenda, and this was even true in the 1970s, when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government was militantly anti-Brahman. For more than sixty years, therefore, all governments in Tamilnadu have been trying, with mixed results, to improve the education and training of temple priests. Another body concerned with Agamic scholarship and temple priests’ education is the Indian Institute of Indology, which was inaugurated in January 1995 at a ceremony in the Madras Sanskrit College attended by the Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram. This Institute is the brainchild of C. Nachiappan Swamigal, a wealthy publisher who later that year became a renouncer and head of the non-Brahman Koviloor monastery (near Karaikkudi in Chettinad, Sivaganga District). Nachiappan, who is a Nagarattar (Nattukkottai Chettiyar), has a very unusual combination of qualities: he is devout and highly respected in Shaiva religious circles, as well as knowledgeable about how temples, monasteries, Agamic schools, and other religious institutions actually work; in addition, he has been a successful book designer and publisher, he has worked in America, and has acquired a personal fortune of several million U.S. dollars, which he wants to use for religious purposes, and he deploys his business skills effectively so that his money is not wasted on unproductive gestures. Nachiappan’s strategy for promoting Agamic education for temple priests—as well as training for devotional singers, temple musicians, and temple sculptors and craftsmen—is to give support to schools that are already functioning and to find good teachers around whom new schools can be set up in their local areas. In other words, using his knowledge and contacts, he identifies people and institutions that already have a good track record and uses his resources to aid them; this strategy is surely the key to the success he has achieved. By late 1998, Nachiappan’s Institute was supporting around one hundred teachers and four hundred students in Agamic schools in Tamilnadu (as well as Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), and five new schools had been started. Among the students were twenty-four in the Tirupparankundram school described below. Teachers were paid monthly stipends of Rs 3,000 and students Rs 500. At that time, he told me that he hoped to increase the total number of students to one thousand within a few years. It is already clear that the Institute has achieved a lot, and if its program of support can be expanded and sustained, it will do more to raise the number of educated priests in Tamilnadu than any program ever run by the HR&CE Department.9 Some of Nachiappan’s other plans seem less likely to succeed. For many years, he has supported annual conferences on the Agamas and temple worship, but much more ambitious academic plans have now been

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drafted for an extensive series of Agamic publications and translations, linked to a systematic research program at the Institute’s proposed Sanatana Dharma World University in Koviloor.10 Nachiappan believes that the University can continue the work already undertaken at the French Institute of Pondicherry, which I shall discuss shortly. He is also determined to publish Agamic texts in the Grantha script traditionally used to write Sanskrit in Tamilnadu, so that the books can be more easily read by priests unfamiliar with Devanagari, the script normally used for Sanskrit, in which, for example, all the French Institute’s texts are published. New software for printing Grantha has been devised that can replace the old fonts that nobody, apparently, still knows how to set properly. Almost certainly, though, Nachiappan has underestimated the difficulty of combining speedy publication in Grantha with textual scholarship; his Institute’s scheme to publish all the fundamental Agamas, some of the secondary ones, and various other important texts, as well as English and Tamil translations of them, is unlikely to be realized. As a first step, however, the Institute can reprint already published works, and Nachiappan once showed me the Koviloor monastery’s copy of the first part of the Kamikagama, published in Grantha in 1901, which he planned to reissue.11 It is to the important question of printing and publishing Agamic texts that I now turn.

Printing and Publishing the Agamic Texts Priestly education in the Agamic schools, as we will see below, is primarily about the oral transmission and rote memorization of textual passages whose utterance forms part of ritual practice. It is not about studying the Agamas to acquire a body of knowledge that an educated priest can draw upon to ensure the “correct” performance of ritual, even though this appears to be how most reformists and HR&CE Department officials have always understood the matter. In general terms, however, for both priests and their reformist critics, Agamic education as it operates in the modern era is predicated upon the existence of texts that are the accessible, standardized source of authoritative knowledge. In producing such texts, printing and publication have played a crucial role.12 Agamic literature was first published in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until then, the texts existed only in the form of manuscripts—mostly written on palm leaves in Grantha script—and very little was known about them outside priestly circles. Work in the French Institute of Pondicherry has shown that the majority of these manuscripts contain parts of several different Agamic texts, so that they are in effect handbooks that were prepared for the use of priests, rather than complete

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redactions of specific Agamas or manuals (Bhatt 1986: v, xx). Moreover, the manuscripts are often defective or incomplete, and for the Kamikagama and Karanagama, variant versions have been found (ibid.: xi). When the Agamic literature was being stored and transmitted by scribal means, therefore, the manuscripts normally did not comprise the complete text of any specific Agama or manual. Starting in 1900, the Shaiva Siddhanta magazine The Light of Truth or Siddhanta Deepika published the Devanagari text and an English translation of part of the Mr gendra¯gama; the translator’s introductory note graphically indicates how the Agamas “have long been things unknown to the Sanskrit-reading public and they only very gradually come to be recognised as at all existent” (Narayanaswami Aiyar 1900: 80). In 1891– 92, the Pauskara¯gama had appeared as a book and then, between 1900 and the 1930s, several Agamas—including the Kamika and Karana—as well as various Agamic compilations and the manuals of Aghorashiva and Somashambhu, were published for the first time, mostly in the Grantha script, although some were in Devanagari. The Kamikagama actually consists only of a very long ritual section (kriya¯pa¯da) in two parts; the text of the first part—which Nachiappan showed me—was published with a Tamil translation, although this was exceptional (Bhatt 1986: viii; cf. Arunachalam 1983: sect. 2). Most of these early publications were reproductions, in printed form, of extant manuscripts whose errors were reproduced (Bhatt 1986: v). In her analysis of the Suprabheda¯gama published in 1928, Brunner observes that “The portions which describe a ritual that is still current are in general fairly good. . . . By contrast, the chapters which are about an exceptional ritual or theoretical questions are the worst. . . . Yet it is really the forgotten rituals and philosophical explanations on which we would most like to have precise information” (1967: 32–3). At first sight, it may seem entirely reasonable to want to be informed about the forgotten rituals. Yet from the point of view of Shaivas mainly concerned with ritual performance, the forgotten rituals by definition do not matter much, and the fact that the text is reasonably good when referring to extant rituals is surely adequate.13 Indeed, as already mentioned, Brunner herself later showed that the authors of Agamic texts were concerned primarily with ritual techniques. Furthermore, partly because of the priority accorded to ritual practice, we can legitimately infer that the meaning of texts, for the copyists and users of the manuscripts, was mainly a function of their knowledge of the rituals described by them, rather than the other way round. Thus early publications like the Suprabhedagama, which reproduced the defects of the manuscripts, still reflected the approach of earlier generations of Shaivas within the scribal tradition, who had been copying and recopying texts in variant and often •

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erroneous versions, frequently cutting and pasting them together to make handbooks. These men probably believed that because Shiva himself had uttered the texts, no alteration (even of faulty passages) was permitted (Colas 1999: 38), but in practice they were guided in their work by their perception of what was relevant to ritual as they practiced it (or thought that they should practice it), rather than by a notion of the canonical text.14 Yet to print and publish a manuscript does more than just modify the technology of reproduction. Most early Agamic publications were produced in Madras by the Sivajnanabodham Press run by Shanmukhasundara Mudaliyar and later Alagappa Mudaliyar, both Shaiva devotees, and in Devakottai by the Sivagama Siddhanta Paripalana Sangam, a Nagarattar association (Arunachalam 1983: 96–7; Bhatt 1986: viii). Both the Press and the Sangam were linked to the renaissance of Shaiva Siddhanta religion and philosophy, which began in Tamilnadu at the end of the nineteenth century and was mainly led by non-Brahmans (Arooran 1980: 20–3). This movement has been called “neo-Shaivism” by Sumathi Ramaswamy, because it was “primarily centered around a reworking of Shaivism, declared the most ancient and authentic religion of those Tamilians who were not Aryan Brahmans” (1997: 25). Neo-Shaivism contributed to the eventual growth of a strong polarization between Sanskrit and Tamil; it was also crucial to the development of the non-Brahman Dravidian movement and “Dravidianism” as a political ideology, and hence to the foundation of the Justice Party (Ramaswamy 1997: ch. 2; cf. Irschick 1969: ch. 8). Who read or even noticed the early Agamic publications (in their unclassical Sanskrit) is uncertain, although N. R. Bhatt’s claim that they “were just distributed to the temple priests and their existence was not known to scholars” (1986: v) is an overstatement. One person who did notice them was J. M. Nallaswami Pillai, a principal figure in the neoShaivist movement and the founding editor of Siddhanta Deepika. Nallaswami Pillai was a Vellala who shared the aims of the early Justice Party (Arooran 1980: 23; Irschick 1969: 292–3), but he was not himself antiBrahman. Introducing a book published in 1913, Nallaswami Pillai (1913: v) observed that the vast Agamic literature had hardly been noticed by European scholars and complained that “owing to the ignorance of the priestly class . . . its study has been altogether neglected in South India.” He then praised the Sivajnanabodham Press’s owners for publishing “all the available Agamas and Upagamas,” but regretted that because they were printed in Grantha, they were neglected by scholars in Europe and elsewhere in India.15 Nallaswami Pillai insisted upon the importance of the Sanskrit Agamas for the Tamil religious philosophy of Shaiva Siddhanta (Balasubramaniam 1965: 61–2; Ishimatsu 1999: 572–3); he exem-

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plified “moderate” neo-Shaivism (Ramaswamy 1997: 30), believing that Tamil religion was part of the greater Hindu complex, and his love for Tamil was not anti-Sanskrit (Balasubramaniam 1965: 64). Nallaswami Pillai was by profession a lawyer, who had been trained and recommended for a post in Madurai by S. Subramania Aiyar, and he “always had the greatest regard and love” for him; he also allied himself with Subramania Aiyar in an important debate about Tamil and Sanskrit in Madras University (ibid.: 10, 64, 80; cf. Arooran 1980: ch. 4). Nallaswami Pillai was friendly, too, with other influential Brahmans, including T. Sadasiva Aiyar and T. V. Seshagiri Aiyar (Balasubramaniam 1965: 80), which is significant because these two men—both High Court judges and members of the Mylapore group like Subramania Aiyar—were also in the forefront of the Dharma Rakshana Sabha’s campaign for temple reform. The Sabha, as we have seen, was preoccupied with temple mismanagement, and I have found no definite evidence that it was also worried about ritual misperformance and priestly “ignorance” as lamented by Nallaswami Pillai. If only through contact with him, however, it seems very likely that Subramania Aiyar and other leading reformists in Madras would have known about publication of the Agamas, the importance claimed for them in Siddhanta Deepika or elsewhere, and the temple priests’ alleged ignorance of them. Moreover, in the Madras High Court in 1914, Sadasiva Aiyar delivered a judgment on a temple-entry case that has since been cited several times as a precedent for the authority of the Agamas. In his judgment, he referred to the Kamika as “the Agama most quoted in these matters” and mentioned three other Agamic works. It is unclear whether Sadasiva Aiyar had consulted the recently published Kamikagama and Sakala¯gamasa¯ra, one of the other works mentioned, and since the other two are unknown and were never published, his expertise was questionable.16 Yet Sadasiva Aiyar’s judgment appears to have been the first one in which particular texts themselves were treated by the courts as evidence, as opposed to witnesses’ assertions that the Agamas were “authoritative,” which were accepted as decisive in the famous Kamudi temple case.17 This development was plainly dependent on the Agamas’ emergence from their obscure scribal past, and it provides admittedly indirect evidence that publication made the texts into authoritative statements of rules available for scrutiny by anyone able to read them. In general terms, Agamic publication was clearly part of the “print revolution,” which occurred in Tamilnadu from the late nineteenth century and had a deep impact on all aspects of society and culture. Two aspects of this revolution are particularly significant: first, the identity of those who can claim authoritative religious knowledge, and second, the conceptualization of the texts themselves.

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When religious texts are transmitted orally, authoritative knowledge of them can only be passed on from teacher to student; “a text without a teacher to teach it directly and orally to a pupil is only so many useless leaves and pages” (Graham 1987: 74). This remains true in the Agamic schools attended by priests and their sons today. Nonetheless, publication potentially shifted the location of authority. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Agamic manuscripts were produced and read only by priests and a small number of other initiated Shaivas, but once the material was printed and published, anybody might consult it. Francis Robinson has shown that publication of the Quran and other Islamic texts in nineteenth-century India radically undermined the authority of traditional Muslim teachers, because “their monopoly over the transmission of knowledge was broken” (1996: 75). Exactly the same has been reported from Morocco (Eickelman 1985: 168–9), Egypt (Starrett 1998: 231–2), and as a widespread process across the Muslim world (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 43–4). Compared with the impact on Islam, the effect of publishing the Agamas—which unlike the Quran were certainly not widely read—was far less democratic, because it did not give rise to the idea that anyone of any social status could become a priest. Moreover, temple priests came to be criticized by Madras’s elite, not by ordinary people from all walks of life. Yet Agamic publication was still a necessary if not a sufficient condition for radical change, because—comparably with Quranic publication—it broke a religious group’s near monopoly, allowing non-Brahman scholars like Nallaswami Pillai and Smarta Brahman judges like Sadasiva Aiyar to insist on their own competent understanding of texts formerly in the hands of priests. In principle, the social and political elite preoccupied with temple reform could now begin to consult Shiva’s authoritative directions for temple ritual and could criticize the priests for deviating from the Agamas, even if in practice they merely tended to complain about priestly ignorance. Another important modification brought about by publication concerns the way in which the Agamas are conceptualized as sacred texts. Manuscripts, as we have seen, normally did not contain the complete text of any one Agama or manual, and early publications like the Suprabhedagama reproduced manuscripts whose very defects are evidence that the meaning of the text was mainly determined by ritual practice, not the other way round. The reformist elite, however, was made up of administrators, scholars, lawyers, and other professionals who were almost all highly educated in English and often well read in Tamil and sometimes Sanskrit, too. They inhabited a modern conceptual world in which books are the primary source of discursive knowledge, and many of them were obviously influenced, as lawyers, by “plain-fact” legal positivism. For these men, it therefore followed that, first, each Agama is (or should be)

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an established text that is authoritatively meaningful and, second, that the right meaning can be determined, even if it is in fact hard to do so. From this perspective, one should no longer need to know how to perform a ritual in order to understand what a text says about it; on the contrary, one must understand the text in order to know how to perform the ritual. This principle of textual priority crucially underpins the reformist program for improving the quality of the priesthood, and it is a product of the Agamas’ transformation into canonical sacred texts or “holy books,” which are also viewed in a positivist fashion as compendia of explicit instructions for ritual practice.18 It should be emphasized here that the premise that textual understanding logically precedes correct ritual performance is also central in much of the ancient Hindu “theory of practice” (Pollock 1985). Thus throughout the s´a¯stra (defined broadly as the “cultural code” of the Sanskritic tradition), Sheldon Pollock argues that “the dominant ideology is that which ascribes clear priority and absolute competence to shastric codification,” so that theory is accorded priority over practice in an inversion of Ryle’s much-quoted observation that “efficient practice precedes the theory of it” (ibid.: 510). Hence reformist criticism of priests ignorant of the Agamas also reasserts the rightness of an indigenous orthodox theory of practice; at least among the Brahman elite in early twentieth-century Madras, it is likely that this theory influenced their thinking in combination with originally Western, modern ideas, as expressed, for instance, in their commitment to English education, positivist thinking, legal rationality, and sociopolitical reform.19 Thus the impact of the Agamas’ publication and, more generally, of their reconceptualization as canonical “holy books,” can be understood—despite its ostensible novelty—as an extension of classical orthodoxy into the Shaiva ritual domain, powerfully aided by print culture and modern reformism. An ancient dialectic between theoretical and practical knowledge has been reshaped to the disadvantage of the latter. Once the Agamas had become holy books, they were subject to a further transformation effected by modern Agamic scholarship, which is above all associated with the French Institute of Pondicherry and its leading scholar, N. R. Bhatt.20 Although Agamic manuscripts pose some peculiar problems, the French Institute’s scholars have always followed standard, modern techniques for preparing critical editions of texts. At first sight, the editing process may appear to be no more than rectification of the corrupt, incomplete, and mixed texts found in the manuscripts, and in theory it is always provisional because further improvements can be made, especially if more manuscripts come to light. In reality, though, the process tends to be more definitive, and it is also much more radical, because the Institute’s project—in addition to publishing critical editions of some of

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the Agamas—has also shown that accurate, complete, standard versions of the texts comparable to these scholarly editions did not exist in manuscript form for centuries, if ever. Only now, probably for the first time in history, can anyone read an “authoritative” version of an Agama. The effect of critical scholarship on Agamic texts is similar to that on other, more famous scriptures, notably the Vedas. Thus Peter van der Veer (2001: 117) points out that despite the near-universal authority of the Veda among Hindus, “there was no central text nor central authority to whom one might refer” until the publication in 1875 of the German Sanskritist Friedrich Max Mu¨ller’s “pioneering edition” of the Rig Veda, followed by editions of other Vedas by European scholars. In later years, critical editions of other major works, such as the Maha¯bha¯rata epic, were produced by Indian scholars. The publication of these editions of the Vedas and other texts, as has long been recognized, played a crucial role in modern Hindu reform; van der Veer shows that these “monumental texts” contributed, too, to the development of Hindu nationalism and its “discursive framework” (ibid.: ch. 5). In the case of the Agamas, the wider impact of critical scholarship has of course been relatively slight. These “sectarian” ritual texts lack the pan-Hindu significance of the Rig Veda or the Mahabharata; moreover, exegeses and translations in French can be read by very few Indians. Nevertheless, the French Institute’s project has had a considerable impact in Shaiva religious circles in contemporary Tamilnadu. Thus the gurus of Agamic schools know about the Institute’s work, and in a typical instance, I heard it mentioned favorably by the junior Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram in a speech delivered at the inauguration of the Indian Institute of Indology in 1995. As already mentioned, Nachiappan hopes to build on the French Institute’s work at his own Institute. Moreover, ever since I began research among the Minakshi Temple priests, I have been advised to go to Pondicherry whenever my enquiries have turned to the Agamas and their relationship to ritual practice. The French Institute, so priests have informed me, possesses complete texts of all the Agamas, which the renowned Pandit Bhatt and his colleagues have translated into English or French so that people like myself can read them. I have repeatedly told the priests that they are mistaken, but I do not think that I have dented what may be called the “myth of Pondicherry” among them.21 The Institute’s project is important to the priests partly because it proves that all the Agamas actually exist, which was uncertain when the project began because some Agamas were known only by name and “their existence was considered as legendary” (Bhatt 1986: v). More significantly, though, the myth of Pondicherry reflects the idea that the Agamas as a whole—the totality of Shiva’s revelation—make up one authoritative corpus. In fact, research has progressively shown that the Agamas are not

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a unified corpus, so that Brunner has recently referred to “differences among the texts important enough to forbid speaking of the Agamic doctrine” (1992: 10). Nonetheless, according to the Agamas themselves, they collectively contain an originally unitary knowledge that emanated from Shiva, even though it was first revealed by different forms of the god as a series of different versions—that is, different Agamas—to its divine auditors and then to the human sages from whom the texts have been transmitted down the generations (Davis 1991: 10–14; cf. Bhatt 1986: vii). In principle, however, the different Agamas were originally both complete and self-consistent, so that any corruption in extant texts must have been caused by later inaccurate transmission by human beings. From this perspective, a critical edition is the best way to correct the mistakes so as to rediscover what the sages first heard. This is admittedly not a line of reasoning that I have ever heard from the Minakshi Temple priests. Nevertheless, it seems to me, the priests— partly because they have internalized reformist thinking—have grasped an essential ideological implication of the Institute’s project, which is consistent with their modernist belief that the Agamas must exist, in the form of books, as authoritative, meaningful, instructional sacred texts. For the priests, therefore, the canonical version of what Shiva actually uttered can be found in the French Institute, and its putative existence there ostensibly sets the seal of both traditional Brahmanical and modern European scholarship on the Shaivas’ holy books; Nachiappan’s Institute, albeit wholly Indian, is designed to continue the same scholarly tradition. Moreover, the French Institute’s project is the evolutionary extension, in the Agamic context, of the general transformation from a scribal, oral culture to a typographic culture of the book, but paradoxically the myth of Pondicherry also helps to confirm the priests in their renewed commitment to the value of Agamic education, which is still based on oral transmission and rote memorization. It is to this education that I now turn.

The Minakshi Temple Priests’ Agamic Education In 1976, Manikkasundara Bhattar became the first priest in the Minakshi Temple to graduate from an Agamic religious school, and ten years later, Sivakumar Bhattar became the second. In SG, after referring to these two and the scanty training of some of the other men, I concluded that it was very unlikely that the priests’ overall standard of Agamic education could really be improved (138–9) and that the main effect of reformist campaigning had been the progressive demoralization of the priests (161). By the 1990s, this conclusion had been overtaken by events, because there had been a small but significant increase in the number of priests with an

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Agamic education. This increase, which reflects a more determined attempt to deal with reformist criticism than I had expected, has been one of the most important changes in the Minakshi Temple priesthood since the late 1970s. Of the ninety-one men entitled to work as priests in the Minakshi Temple in 2000, ten had graduated from Agamic schools, although Raja Bhattar mainly worked in his own Agamic school and, with his younger brother, in Tirupparankundram temple, while three others (Manikkasundara, Sivakumar, and Ramesh) were working overseas. Another three priests had studied at a school for several years but had not completed the full course.22 In 1995, when I completed my household survey, there were thirty-four unmarried men (aged sixteen or over) in the priestly community. Of these, eleven had completed or were continuing their studies in an Agamic school; by 2000, two of them had become priests in the Temple (so that they are included in the ten graduates just mentioned), and in 2001, a third, Sivanandan (working in Malaysia), was also consecrated. The twenty-two individuals just referred to attended four different Agamic schools. Six were students in Allur, a Brahman village on the banks of the river Kaveri in Tiruchchirappalli District; twelve (including the three priests who did not graduate) went to Pillaiyarpatti, a village near Karaikkudi in Chettinad (Sivaganga District); two (including Raja’s younger brother) studied in Tirupparankundram; and two went to Palani (Dindigul District), where the school is attached to the Murugan temple.23 My own data have been collected in the first three schools, and I do not have much information about the Palani school, which, unlike the other three, is financially supported by the Tamilnadu government. Following a government order opening the school to non-Brahmans in the late 1980s, Palani’s guru resigned and the school closed from 1988 to 1991. It then reopened, but for most Adishaiva priests the presence of non-Brahmans means that it is no longer a proper Agamic school and they are unwilling to use it. A further nineteen priests (plus one who also studied at an Agamic school), together with two unmarried men, completed a one-year refresher course in the Minakshi Temple in 1992–93 or 1993–94; in 1992– 93, the course’s principal teacher was Manikkasundara. As mentioned above, these refresher courses were started by the HR&CE Department in 1992; they were held for only two consecutive years in the Minakshi Temple, although they were run again for one year in 1999–2000, when twenty men, mostly serving priests, registered for the course and were taught by Chandrashekhara Bhattar, a graduate of Allur. In practice, however, many priests did not attend regularly in 1999–2000, partly because the promised monthly stipend of Rs 400 was never paid. Nonetheless, many priests who took the one-year courses, especially the first one,

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learned a significant amount, albeit far less than on a full-time course over several years in a school.24 Several priests have been on short, forty-five-day refresher courses in the past, and some of them have had some form of part-time religious education, about which I lack accurate details. If these men are excluded, the data show that, by 2000, thirteen out of the ninety-one priests (or eight out of the seventy-two who worked regularly in the Temple) had studied in the established schools, compared with only one out of fiftysix in 1980, and rather more had completed a one-year refresher course. Given the number of other unmarried men who have also been to the schools, the proportion of educated priests should rise further in the future. It is also important to note here that almost all those who studied in Agamic schools enrolled after they had completed at least eighth standard in the secular school system, but a few had continued for another year or two, and five had actually completed their college education (three bachelor’s and two master’s degrees).

Agamic Religious Schools In two previous articles (Fuller 1997; 2001a), I have described and analyzed the organization of Agamic religious schools and their teaching system, as well as the impact of Agamic education on the priests’ ability to carry out temple ritual.25 The rest of this chapter, which covers much of the same material, looks at the aspects most relevant for evaluating both the reformist program to improve priestly education and ritual performance and the educated priests’ claim to be more professionally expert than their uneducated colleagues. The full Sanskrit title of an Agamic religious school is veda s´iva¯gama pa¯thas´a¯la¯, because they teach the Vedas as well as the Agamas. Except for a small amount of Tamil devotional literature, all texts taught in the schools are in Sanskrit. Passages from both Agamic and Vedic texts are uttered in temple rituals; the schools’ Adishaiva gurus always teach the Agamic texts and sometimes the Vedic ones as well, but the latter are often taught by Smarta Brahmans, usually also working as sastris, who have studied in Vedic pathashalas. The Tamil texts are taught by nonBrahmans, normally devotional singers (oduvar) who also sing Tamil hymns in the temples. The students’ principal task is to learn the texts by heart so that they can utter them accurately. Admission to Agamic schools is restricted to male Adishaivas who have undergone the upanayana, the rite of passage that makes them brahmaca¯ris, Brahman students. In all schools, the students are resident boarders, whose meals and basic living expenses are found for them. At school,

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students go to bed early and rise before dawn, and they have to perform the Brahmans’ daily prayers and observances (sandhya¯), as well as the daily personal worship of Shiva required of Adishaivas. When classes are in progress, a lamp burns before a small shrine of Dakshinamurti (Shiva as the guru), Saraswati (goddess of learning), or both, and worship and prayers are an essential part of a school’s daily routine. Teachers and students, invariably barefoot and without a shirt inside school, are always dressed in a white waistcloth; in addition to their sacred threads, they all wear rudraksha-bead necklaces, and on their forehead, arms, and chest are smeared three stripes of white ash (vibhuti). Food served in the schools is, of course, strictly vegetarian, and orthodox rules of purity for its preparation and consumption are rigorously observed. All in all, the school environment is thoroughly imbued with traditional Brahmanical religiosity, and much of the daily routine—especially teaching itself—takes a highly ritualized form. The school at Allur was founded in 1963 by its guru, A. Viswanatha Sivacharyar, a priest in the local temple. The guru enjoys a high reputation in Tamilnadu for his learning; he has edited an Agamic text for publication, as well as selections of material to be used as textbooks by students in Agamic schools. In the early 1990s, the guru also enjoyed considerable influence as a member of the Tamilnadu government’s Temple Administration Board; he has forthright views about uneducated and incompetent temple priests, and unlike many priests in the Minakshi Temple and elsewhere, he favors the abolition of the hereditary priesthood so that graduates of Agamic schools can apply for posts in all temples. The Allur school is in a house on the village’s Brahman street. Funds to run the school and provide the students with their subsistence needs mainly come from the Shankaracharya’s Kanchipuram monastery. The total number of students is consistently maintained at around thirty, and all of them enter the school when they are twelve or thirteen years old. The guru does most of the teaching in the school, although he is assisted by a Brahman who mainly teaches elementary Sanskrit and a non-Brahman responsible for the Tamil material. The full course lasts five years, although some students stay on for six; there are annual oral and written examinations, with a final examination to confer the title of S´iva¯gama S´iroman i, which describes a graduate as a “jewel” of the Agamas. All Agamic schools are based on the ancient, traditional gurukula system in which the pupil (s´isya) lives in his spiritual father’s house as his absolutely obedient disciple and servant, treating him “as if he were a god” (Gonda 1965: 230). Of the schools described here, Allur conforms to the classical model more completely than Pillaiyarpatti and Tirupparankundram. Viswanatha Sivacharyar is a severe, though paternalistic, disciplinarian, who places enormous emphasis on his students’ good conduct. •

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All students have to take part in running the school on a day-to-day basis, and they are also subject to strict rules; for example, to preserve their Brahman purity, they are forbidden to eat outside the school. All students must have long hair tied in a knot at the back, and the guru is totally opposed to any priests cutting their hair. In the guru’s presence—as is equally true in all schools—students display total obedience; for example, at the beginning and end of lessons they prostrate themselves before him, they never speak unless spoken to, they never sit down until told to do so, and they never demur for a second if asked to run an errand for him. Former students of Allur have told me that at first they were terrified of their guru, but later came to admire and respect him, and nobody ever doubts the quality of his teaching. It is noteworthy that all students from the Minakshi Temple who went to Allur completed at least five years’ study, and the school has a low dropout rate. Even an untrained ear can hear that the standard of recitation achieved by senior students at Allur is exceptionally high, and this is undoubtedly related to the guru’s insistence that accurate memorization of texts is the overriding priority. Although he does provide some explanation of the meaning and importance of texts, he firmly believes that memorization must precede understanding. Unlike students at Pillaiyarpatti and Tirupparankundram, who receive quite extensive “practical” training in ritual from an early stage, Allur students do not until they near the end of their studies, when they may assist the guru in the local temple or at special rituals held elsewhere, such as temple renovation and consecration rituals and Ganapati homas. Pillaiyarpatti village is the site of an important Vinayaka temple, where the school’s guru, K. Pitchai Gurukkal, is a priest. He started his school in 1978 with five students, and by 2002 it had over 250, which makes it by far the biggest Agamic school in Tamilnadu today. The land and money for the school buildings have mostly come from wealthy Hindu donors, but its running expenses are mainly met from the income earned by the guru and his students through performing special rituals in the Vinayaka temple (famous as a site for Ganapati homas) and elsewhere. The school has no age limits for admission; many students come when about thirteen, but many others arrive after completing their ordinary schooling (when they may be about sixteen) or even after finishing a university degree (like five graduates from Minakshi Temple priests’ families). The guru, assisted by two other teachers who graduated from his school, teaches the Agamic texts; one of the assistant teachers and a Brahman sastri teach the Vedic material; and a non-Brahman teaches Tamil scriptures. The full course is completed in four years; annual examinations are followed by a final one, which confers the title of S´iva¯gama Ratna, also describing a graduate as a “jewel.”

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Pitchai Gurukkal is a paternalistic disciplinarian, but he is less severe than Viswanatha Sivacharyar. Pillaiyarpatti students have to take part in the daily running of the school, but in comparison with Allur, they are subject to a more liberal regime. They are allowed to go to the village nearby where they can visit the small restaurants, so that they are not forced to comply with strict Brahman rules about food, and they can choose whether or not to cut their hair; they are also much less confined than Allur students because the school is on an open site. Approximately one-third of the students leave before the end of the four-year course, and several of those who have gone to Pillaiyarpatti from the Minakshi Temple have left early or interrupted their studies for extended periods. As already mentioned, Pillaiyarpatti students receive practical training in ritual from early on. Second- and third-year students work regularly in the Vinayaka temple, and more senior students frequently assist the guru in performing special rituals. Because the school depends on its guru’s earnings, there are economic reasons for this emphasis on training. Some of its graduates compare Pillaiyarpatti unfavorably with Allur, saying that they did not learn texts very well and were not taught enough about the meaning of rituals. Nonetheless, in addition to its freer atmosphere, the practical training—together with the four-year course—has made Pillaiyarpatti the more attractive school for many students who prefer a handson training that fairly quickly equips them for temple service. This means that even students who stay only a year or two learn enough to do a priest’s routine work, and many who do not finish the course leave because they decide to go to work in a temple instead. Raja Bhattar, a graduate of Allur, founded his school at Tirupparankundram in 1992. The students live in accommodation near the temple, and lessons are held inside the temple complex. Raja’s initial capital came from a bank loan and donations from wealthy devotees, but as in Pillaiyarpatti, running expenses are mainly met from his earnings. By 2002, the school had 150 students and it was hoped to expand still further. There are no age restrictions on admission; in 1995 the youngest first-year pupil was only nine and the oldest was twenty, but the majority were between fourteen and sixteen. The guru, who mainly teaches Agamic texts, has been assisted by various other teachers; in 2002, there were two other Agamic teachers, two Brahman Vedic and Sanskrit teachers, and a nonBrahman teaching Tamil material. The school’s curriculum and examination system follow the Allur model, but graduates take the title S´iva¯gama Bha¯skara, an epithet comparing them to the brilliance of the sun. In some respects, Raja Bhattar is an extremely strict disciplinarian, who uses a cane in his classes. As in Allur, students at Tirupparankundram are not allowed to eat outside the school, but they are allowed to cut their hair, and in practice, they can more easily move around and do what they

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want than students in Allur. Partly because Raja was only in his thirties when I was visiting his school, whereas the other two gurus were twice as old, his students were less in awe of him, and even though his strictness sometimes frightened them, some of them could joke with him quite freely as well. Like Pillaiyarpatti, and partly for the same economic reasons, students at Tirupparankundram receive practical ritual training from the beginning, by assisting in the temple and accompanying the guru to special rituals, so that although the teaching system is in principle modeled after Allur, it is actually more like Pillaiyarpatti’s in many respects. In each of the three schools, the daily timetable is similar; Pillaiyarpatti’s is presented in table 4. No teaching normally takes place on six to eight days per month, and there are also three ten-day holidays each year.26 Although the school day is very long, the teaching routine is not as intensive as the timetable suggests in any of the schools. Classes often start late and are shorter than the scheduled hours, and quite frequently, because their teachers are otherwise occupied, classes are postponed or canceled. Senior students regularly teach junior ones when the teachers are absent, however, and in all schools, senior students have acknowledged authority over their juniors. As a matter of course, though, all students spend a lot of time waiting for their teachers or listening to them while they are talking to visitors to the schools, but in a sense this is part of their tuition, because it is important that students learn absolute obedience to their guru, even if this means that they must just sit and wait until he tells them what to do. All in all, it is hard to estimate the average amount of time actually spent in lessons, but it is certainly less than the seven or eight hours scheduled in each school. When I made unannounced visits to Tirupparankundram (which I could not do at Allur and Pillaiyarpatti), I often found the students messing around when they were supposed to be practicing recitation; no doubt the same happens at the other two schools, though probably less at Allur. No doubt, too, there is “everyday resistance” by students in Agamic schools, as there is in schools everywhere. Nevertheless, as far as I can judge, the Agamic schools do effectively socialize their students into the values of the gurukula system, and I have never heard any student or exstudent referring to his guru except with profound deferential respect. Temple priests’ children are of course brought up within a home environment characterized by social hierarchy and religious devotion, but the schools undoubtedly reinforce the corresponding values in a particularly Brahmanical manner. They also instill in their students an unusual combination of self-confidence and deference that I found very striking; thus, for example, students are almost always neatly dressed and groomed, and carry themselves with dignity, and to all adults (including myself), they are effortlessly polite and respectful without ever groveling or giggling in

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Table 4 Pillaiyarpatti School Daily Timetable 5:00–5:30 A.M. 5:30–6:30 6:30–8:00 8:00–8:15 8:15–8:30 8:30–9:30 9:30–11:30 11:30–1:00 P.M. 1:00–2:00 2:00–4:00 4:00–6:00 6:00–8:00 8:00–8:30 8:30–930 9:30

Rising Tiruvai (repetition of texts by students) Bathing, morning prayers and personal worship of Shiva Prayers in school Guru announces day’s program of study Breakfast Chandai (teaching of texts by guru), usually from Vedas Midday prayers and free time for personal study Lunch Chandai, usually from Agamas Bathing, free time for senior students and games for junior students Evening prayers, followed by tiruvai or chandai Discussion with guru Evening meal and free time for personal study Bedtime

embarrassment, as is common among many other young males in Tamilnadu. Most students, indeed, appear to take genuine pride in their status as Brahman temple priests in the making. In the Minakshi Temple, too, Agamic school graduates are, on the whole, more self-confident about their role than other priests, and my impressionistic evidence is that the formative influence of the schools is discernible in all educated priests.

The Teaching System in Agamic Schools Each school has a similar curriculum itemizing the material to be learned each year. The books used in the schools, especially in the earlier years of the course, are in Grantha script, and the first item on the curriculum is learning Grantha, although the Devanagari script is also learned and used, especially in Allur.27 (On the one-year refresher courses, only Grantha is learned and used.) In each curriculum, the most vital sections are those devoted to the Agamas and Vedas. The Agamic section starts with the verses for meditation (dhya¯na) for different deities and a short series of specific rituals—such as the preparatory purification ritual of pun ya¯hava¯cana—for which particular texts have to be learned. These verses and rituals are regarded as basic to a priest’s Agamic knowledge, and they also make up the core of the curriculum for the one-year refresher courses. The Agamic section then lists the separate rituals that constitute the public worship in Shaiva temples, both daily worship and festivals; for each one, the students learn the •

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relevant textual passages, which describe the ritual and the manner of its performance, together with the mantras that must be pronounced. These passages derive from a variety of Agamas and manuals, although I was (predictably) informed that Aghorashiva’s manual is the principal source. Within the Agamic tradition, the Vedas are inferior sources of knowledge, but in Shaiva temples Vedic utterance is a vital, if subsidiary, component of Agamic ritual (SG, 37; cf. Brunner 1999: 267). In the Vedic section of each curriculum, the most important texts include a series of mantras from the Kr sna (Black) Yajur Veda required for the Agamic worship of Shiva, the principal hymns (su¯kta) for a range of deities, and two famous litanies from the Krishna Yajur Veda known as the S´rı¯rudra and Camaka.28 In addition to the Agamic and Vedic sections, there is also a Pura¯n ic section, which includes the lists of 108 names (astottara s´ata na¯ma¯vali) for the main deities worshipped in Shaiva temples, as well as other similar but longer texts, all deriving from the Puranas (or Epics). As we saw in chapter 2, the commonest type of private worship is the ordinary archana, in which the priest chants the deity’s 108 names, and every priest (whether educated or not) should know these names for the main gods and goddesses. The 108-name lists are taught at Pillaiyarpatti in the first year, but at Allur, the guru deliberately teaches them only at the end of the course, lest his students prematurely imagine that they could work as qualified priests. Another section of the curriculum consists of basic texts of classical Sanskrit literature and some instruction in grammar. Smaller sections are devoted to the calendar and astrology, and to Tamil devotional and classical literature. Only the Agamic, Vedic, and Puranic sections, however, are directly relevant to the performance of temple worship by priests, so that the rest of the curriculum is mostly supplementary. Two methods known in Tamil as cantai—chandai (or sandai)—and tiruvai are used for learning all types of text. Chandai is teaching by the guru, in which he speaks a passage and the students as a group recite it after him twice. Tiruvai is the repetition of texts by students, who repeat together in a group what they have been taught in the chandai the day before or on earlier occasions. During the chandai, the guru may split long and complicated words and lines. Indeed, it is normal practice when the chandai for a new text is done for the first time to break each word and line into as many short, simple segments as are necessary. On subsequent occasions, the guru lengthens the segments until, probably on about the sixth occasion, he enunciates each line in its entirety. He continues to do the chandai in this manner until he has completed it about ten times, and it is conventionally said that when the chandai and tiruvai for a text have each been completed ten times, it is retained in the mind forever. In practice, however, there is considerable variation. If lines are short, as they often are in lists of deities’ names, the guru may never break the lines, but if • • •

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they are long and difficult, he may continue to do so many times and repeat the chandai more than ten times. Students, too, may have to do the tiruvai more than ten times. Although students may supplement them by private study, chandai and tiruvai together are the sum total of the teaching system used to learn texts by heart. No special mnemonic techniques for facilitating memorization are employed (except for Vedic texts that are sometimes learned in variant word orders), and teachers and students always insist that sheer prolonged repetition is the true key to success. Especially when they first start school, students normally find it difficult to repeat their teacher’s utterances accurately. Because Tamil does not have Sanskrit’s breathy final h (h ) and aspirated consonants (kh, gh, etc.), all students find it particularly hard to sound them, and because the two sibilants pronounced “sha” (s´, s) are normally sounded as “sa” in colloquial Tamil, many students persistently do the same in Sanskrit. Not surprisingly, the innumerable lengthy words that can readily turn into tonguetwisters tend to become garbled, and in really difficult cases a string of syllables can be totally distorted on repetition. Even when individual syllables and words are pronounced correctly, most students find it hard to reproduce the elongated vowels, stress pattern, and pitch of their guru’s recitation, and at least initially hardly any of them can utter lines in the correct rhythm. Only by hearing and repeating them over and over again do they learn to reproduce the guru’s sound correctly, so that they can not only pronounce all the words accurately, but also have some control over the stress, pitch, and rhythm. It is thus the vocalization of texts, rather than recitation of the words themselves, that is hardest to learn. The texts learned in the Agamic schools vary considerably in length and hence in the amount of time needed to memorize them. Many are very short verses only four lines long, but at the other extreme are the Shrirudra, about sixty verses of variable length, and a series of Yajur Veda mantras for Shiva, which consists of 176 verses, also of variable length. Long texts are always taught by splitting them into manageable sections whose chandai lasts no more than about half an hour; by learning each section in turn, the whole text is eventually memorized. To avoid confusion, students are usually being taught only one Agamic and one Vedic text at any one time. Some texts, too, are just harder than others, and most priests say that they find Vedic texts harder than Agamic ones. Irrespective of length or complexity, however, teaching is always carried out in the same way and the tiruvai is indispensable to complete the learning begun in the chandai. For this reason, before and after the chandai, the guru often asks the students to recite texts that they have already learned, and to check that they know them properly, he may ask them to start at any point in a passage, not just at the beginning. •

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Every chandai session in the Agamic schools reenacts the hierarchical gurukula relationship between a guru and his pupil-disciples, and displays the guru’s authority as the “possessor” of scriptural knowledge. During the chandai, to encourage students to concentrate on listening to their teacher and repeating his utterances, they are normally not allowed to look at their books. Hence the chandai exemplifies the traditional Hindu system of purely oral transmission, in which students strive to memorize the guru’s sound, so that they can reproduce it in their own utterance. Yet in all Agamic schools, teachers and students alike take it for granted that the texts to be memorized accurately are to be found in printed books. During the tiruvai, unless they have virtually mastered the text already, students open their books (or photocopies) or the notebooks in which they have copied texts by hand, so that they can refer to the words on paper while learning them. In the schools, tuition in Sanskrit is very elementary and learning the language itself is not a primary aim. Nonetheless, all students have to learn to read and write Sanskrit, in the restricted sense that they master the Grantha (or Devanagari) script and can follow and copy material set out in it in their books. Until students have learned to read Sanskrit, they cannot do their tiruvai properly at all, because they cannot accurately distinguish the full range of Sanskrit letters and therefore cannot ensure that they are pronouncing each word and syllable correctly. Indeed, what is printed or written on the page is the most crucial mnemonic of all for accurate verbatim memorization of the texts first heard from the guru’s lips in the chandai. Thus priestly students—rather like actors learning their lines—systematically refer to the words on paper to help them memorize them. Once they are memorized verbatim, of course, the books should not be needed any more, just as they are not by actors who know their parts properly. In sum, the teaching system in Agamic schools does not depend solely on oral transmission in the chandai, because verbatim memorization is also perfected and tested by reference to books containing the authoritative texts. A traditional system of oral pedagogy also depends on the products of a literate print culture.

Memorization, Understanding, and Knowledge Above all else, verbatim memorization of texts is the principal objective of the Agamic schools’ teaching system. All the same, especially at Allur and Tirupparankundram, students are normally taught the basic meaning of the Agamic texts memorized by them, and they are able to explain them and translate or paraphrase them into Tamil. At Pillaiyarpatti, less explicit attention is given to the meaning, and greater reliance is placed on contextual understanding as acquired through practical performance

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of ritual. The meaning of Vedic texts, however, is hardly ever explained, and only some passages—such as those listing deities’ names—are comprehensible to the students. It is important, too, that the students learn a selection of Agamic, Vedic, and Puranic passages, but not the whole of an Agama or a work by Aghorashiva, for example. Hence the reformist idea that temple priests must be educated so that they have a sound knowledge of the Agamas rests on a misconception about what is taught in the schools, which I partly reproduced in my previous discussion (SG, ch. 6). Thus although I argued that the idea of exact adherence to Agamic prescription is misconceived, I still wrote as if religious education was in principle about mastering the Agamic corpus—or at least the Kamikagama and other crucial works—so that priests would know how to conduct rituals by drawing on their knowledge of the authoritative texts. To look at it in this way is a mistake. The key point is that students in Agamic schools are mainly concentrating on memorizing material that should be uttered as part of the rituals. Many Agamic texts governing ritual include a description of what must be done, but more crucial are the mantras, and the students’ most vital task is to learn how to pronounce the mantras and recite other textual material (such as the Shrirudra) properly during rituals. Only in an indirect sense does education produce priests who could in principle draw from the texts they have memorized a body of knowledge about correct ritual. In other words, learning what to utter does not primarily teach a priest how to perform a ritual; rather, it enables him to make complete a ritual whose spoken component would otherwise be omitted. In practice, in the Minakshi Temple as elsewhere, many rituals are frequently conducted without any accompanying utterance. Furthermore, especially in important rituals, even educated priests are normally assisted by a chanter or another priest who can recite, so that there is a division of labor between the priest performing the physical ritual action, who may remain silent, and the man who speaks the words. This, though, does not affect the crucial point that a priest able to perform both tasks has a competency lacking in a priest who has not memorized the texts. In their practical training at the schools—early on at Pillaiyarpatti and Tirupparankundram and later at Allur—students receive some instruction on how to perform physical ritual. They learn specific techniques, such as how to make the mudra¯s, the prescribed hand gestures that should be performed during rituals, and they also become knowledgeable about the myriad details of ritual enactment: how pots of water should be prepared so that the deities can be invoked within them, which materials are needed for oblations into a sacrificial fire, what is the correct sequence in complex

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rituals made up of many sections, and so on. Such knowledge is no doubt easier to acquire and retain for students who also understand something of the meaning of the relevant Agamic texts. Nonetheless, practical training is mostly practice rather than training, and there is no real difference between how students in the schools learn the basic skills of physical ritual performance and how priests who start working in temples without attending schools do so. In fact, competent performance of the great majority of physical ritual action, which involves no esoteric complexities, is dependent on techniques of the body. These techniques, to which I come shortly, are not primarily acquired through formal instruction, and there is actually no consistent difference between educated and uneducated priests in their ability to carry out most physical rituals. Hence the key distinction between educated and uneducated priests is not that the former can physically do rituals better than the latter but that they know what to say as well. Educated priests, of course, are not all alike, and how much they have memorized, or how well they can utter it, depends on the length of their education, their commitment to their studies, and other personal factors. Most importantly though, their competence in pronouncing mantras and reciting texts, which distinguishes them from uneducated priests, does not indicate that educated priests are drawing upon a discursive knowledge about how to conduct ritual in conformity with Agamic rules, because when they utter texts verbatim from memory, they are not in fact recalling them to guide their action. In this context, the belief that the Vedas and Agamas were divinely uttered and that mantras in particular embody and transmit divine power is also germane. Thus in Agamic thought, “all rites are accomplished with mantras. In consequence, . . . there is no ritual without mantras” (Brunner-Lachaux 1963: xxxi; cf. Davis 1991: 33). Strictly, therefore, when as is common a priest fails to pronounce the mantras while physically doing a ritual, no ritual has truly been performed at all. Mantras are understood to be “powerful divine beings or forces that exist independently of any human usage” (Davis 1991: 33); they are words or sounds of power rather than ordinary semantic units or speech acts. The special properties of mantras therefore distinguish them from other kinds of textual material, even if the latter are attributed a divine authorship. Nonetheless, the texts as a whole have acquired some of the aura of the mantras, and the priests’ general attitude to their utterance reflects the fact that the power of speech has always remained central in Hindu culture (cf. Padoux 1989: 297). Thus priests unable to pronounce and recite are mere technicians doing only the less important parts of rituals, which they cannot properly complete, even vicariously, unless others speak for them.

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Because educated priests know what to say in ritual, as well as what to do, Agamic education does produce men who are more proficient than their uneducated colleagues who know only what to do. Education still cannot overcome the obstacles to full and verifiable compliance with Agamic rules, which I outlined near the beginning of this chapter. On the other hand, graduates of the Agamic schools certainly can perform rituals to a higher standard by accepted criteria than their uneducated colleagues, not least because the Agamas themselves insist that ritual cannot be accomplished without pronouncing mantras. To that extent anyway, the reformist argument, advanced by the priests as well, that priests must be educated so that they can perform ritual “correctly” is vindicated in spite of its misconceptions.

Ritual Performance and Techniques of the Body Discussing the priests in Tamil Vaishnava temples, Ge´rard Colas (1995: 125) defends them against the charge of “generalised ignorance”: “The apprenticeship of the future officiant is above all practical: the memorization of mantras and ritual gestures transmitted by generations of priests, not those which are inscribed in the canonical works of an ancient past but those which have been inherited and applied.” In fact, in the Minakshi Temple, most uneducated priests have little memorized knowledge of mantras. Nonetheless, Colas’s defense tellingly addresses the question of what contemporary priests know and how they learn it, rather than what they do not know, by focusing on the memorization of gestures (as well as words) and on their practical knowledge. When a priest starts to work in a temple, he has to learn a repertoire of ritual acts, but all of them will be completely familiar inasmuch as he has been watching them being done by his father and others since childhood. Of course, novice priests sometimes nervously blunder and find that they cannot coordinate their physical movements; one priest, for instance, told me that when he first performed worship in Sundareshwara’s main shrine, he was so overawed by his closeness to the god’s power that he nearly became paralyzed. Nevertheless, most ritual gestures are quite easy to learn, even if some need a bit of practice, for example: waving a heavy lamp held in the right hand with the arm outstretched while continuously ringing a bell held in the left hand, or cracking a coconut on a stone wall so that it breaks into even halves before it is presented as a food offering. (If a coconut does not break properly and fragments into several pieces, it is said to be an inauspicious omen for the success of the ritual.) Graduates of Agamic schools practice their ritual skills before

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starting work, and it is also common nowadays (though less so in the past) for young men to gain some experience as priests in small temples before coming to the Minakshi Temple. But however they start, all priests mainly learn how to carry out ritual gestures and maneuvers through practice, not formal instruction. Once learned, they possess a set of habitual skills, which are techniques of the body forming part of the priests’ collective “habitus” (Mauss 1950: 368), and competent priests do not need to deliberate about how to perform a ritual act in order to do it, any more than I have to think about how to use a pen or keyboard to write these words (cf. Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 134–6 on Jain worship). As a form of physical labor, as we saw in chapter 2, the majority of ritual work in the Temple is very routinized, so that priests can do it over and over again without any hesitation or deliberation. Even so, there are noticeable variations in style, which are mainly related to the importance of the ritual. Thus at one extreme, the Minakshi Temple priests—like good actors commanding their audience—sometimes perform rituals in a dramatic style that expresses their superior status within the Temple as well as their self-conscious knowledge that nothing significant can happen there without them. Particularly at key rituals during major festivals attended by large numbers of devotees, the priest in charge usually dresses impeccably in new clothes and he may wear his best gold jewelry. He typically moves with an unhurried and confident authority, allowing others to scurry around to make everything ready, and he normally performs the rituals carefully and impressively, particularly when displaying the lamps at the concluding climax of each ritual. The lamps—especially the large “decorated” oil lamps with 51 or 108 wicks, and the final camphor candelabra of seven flames—are lifted high in the air and circled through it slowly and elegantly to maximize their visual impact. The impressiveness of the lamp display, which most completely captures the devotees’ attention, as well as the rest of the ritual, depend entirely on a priest’s ability to deploy the techniques of the body with maximal skill and artistry. There are slight individual variations among the priests, and some tend to be more stylish than others, but on the whole, the most important rituals are performed skillfully and elegantly. By their performance, the priests are able to display a mastery of physical ritual in which many of them take conscious pride. At the other extreme are the many minor, day-to-day rituals watched by hardly anyone. On these occasions, ritual acts are often done fairly quickly and unimpressively, without any utterance at all, and sometimes priests are plainly paying little attention to what they are doing. Between the dramatic enactment of major rituals and the casual performance of the most minor ones, there is of course a complete scale of variation, and

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a lot of ritual action falls somewhere between the two extremes. In every case, however, the physical performance of ritual is a product of the same priestly techniques of the body, and the priests’ skill is actually demonstrated as much by their ability to conduct rituals rapidly and effortlessly while thinking about something else as it is by their virtuosity on grand festival occasions. Yet the variation is important, partly because it is directly commented on by the priests themselves. In general, they tend to assert that the careful, stylish performance of ritual seen on great occasions is the right way to do it and is therefore consistent with Agamic prescription, whereas they admit that the hasty performance of routine ritual actions is not. It is not really as simple as this, because Agamic rules themselves permit the abbreviation of ritual. Furthermore, as priests have often pointed out to me, mistakes are also made in stylishly performed, grand rituals—as they were during the renovation ritual described in chapter 1. Nevertheless, the visible, as well as audible, evidence of how a ritual is being done is crucial to the priests’ own assessment of its correctness, and a ritual carried out sloppily is almost invariably assumed to be incorrectly performed. All priests know of course that a large proportion of temple ritual is done badly, and they have plenty of explanations and excuses for it. But some ritual is done well, and then a priest can show his colleagues— and indeed himself—that he knows what to do. In other words, how well a priest uses his body is interpreted as an index of how correctly he can perform ritual. From an outside observer’s point of view, poorly performed rituals are just as much rituals as well-performed ones. What exercises the Minakshi Temple priests, however, is not the definition or identification of rituals but appraisal of their quality and concern that they and their colleagues are all too likely to get it wrong—or more wrong than need be, given that errorless ritual can be performed by no one except Shiva.29 Yet my own observations have convinced me that there is no consistent correlation between the standard of performance and the level of a priest’s education or presumptive Agamic knowledge. All priests, educated or not, often carry out rituals perfunctorily, and all priests—or at least most of them— can put on a dramatic and elegant performance when the occasion demands. The best-educated priests seem to produce the most elegant performances of all, but this is probably because they are most self-confident about their role. It does not alter the fact that the ability to perform physical ritual depends on practical experience, not instruction received in the schools, despite the tendency of priests, especially educated ones, to suggest otherwise. Agamic education produces priests who can do ritual better because they know how to pronounce mantras and recite texts, but it has no real impact on how well they perform the physical gestures.

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Agamic Education, Modern Professionalism, and Brahmanical Traditionalism As we have seen, even though the gurus and some students can expound on the structure of rituals and Shaiva theology in a more or less academic way, students in Agamic schools do not study the texts as sources of formal knowledge that would enable them to perform rituals in accordance with Agamic rules; they do not learn Agamic “theory” so that they can do the “practical” work of rituals correctly. Nevertheless, in reformist thinking and HR&CE Department policy, the schools are commonly described as if they provided a “professional” training for the priesthood, and priests themselves, as well as the gurus, often liken Agamic education to the medical or legal training needed to produce qualified doctors or lawyers.30 In fact, of course, Agamic school students engage in a very different task from the one undertaken by medical or law students, who do not memorize their textbooks as a worthwhile end in itself, because they are (or should be) acquiring a body of knowledge that they can apply to a range of different cases. Yet gurus and educated priests, despite the stress on verbatim memorization, consistently tend to portray the Agamas as difficult but definitive technical texts that can be put into practice if they are learned properly. And when they are discussing professional training, they assume a positivist attitude toward the texts that is clearly a product of modern ideas about instruction, education, and examination in book-based systems of knowledge within a literate print culture. In Agamic schools, it is assumed that the texts to be learned are set out in correct form in books, and textbooks containing some of the most important material have been published by Allur and Pillaiyarpatti schools. All entrants to Agamic schools have already attended ordinary schools (and sometimes colleges as well), so that they are literate in Tamil (and sometimes English) and are familiar with secular pedagogy.31 Indeed, it is striking that priests, even college graduates in science or commerce, commonly insist that there is not much difference between Agamic and secular education. In their own eyes, learning orally with extensive rote memorization, in a language not properly understood, does not radically distinguish Agamic education from education based on the literate mode of communication and ideally oriented toward intellectual understanding. Admittedly, this is partly because school pupils and even college students in India spend so much time learning lessons by rote, sometimes in improperly understood English. All the same, at least in the modern world, education is in the end primarily about acquiring knowledge mostly stored in books, even if the means to do so varies, and this is the world in which contemporary Agamic education exists.

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Certainly, the notion of Agamic education as professional training is attractive to the priests and makes sense to them, for, as they recognize, a principal explicit function of book-based education today is to train people for employment in a modern society and economy, which demand professional qualifications and pay people accordingly. Indeed, even though it is not explicitly taught, a professional outlook is imparted to Agamic school students by the example of their gurus, who have pursued careers based on their knowledge and skill. Their expertise is publicly recognized by regular invitations to take the leading role at temple renovations and other elaborate rituals, and when students assist at these rituals, they see their teachers deploying their professional expertise, for which they are rewarded by both high regard and substantial fees. At Tirupparankundram school in 2002, I specifically asked a group of final-year students about future careers and found them uniformly confident—even if they came from small, poor temples—that their education would guarantee them respect and good earnings opportunities, so that their prospects were much brighter than their fathers’ had been. Partly because they are a kind of semiclosed institution in which peer group pressure is bound to be strong, the Agamic schools’ implicit lesson about honorable, well-paid professionalism is probably internalized by almost all their students. In the Minakshi Temple, educated priests in particular openly share an ambition to “professionalize” the temple priesthood to improve their status. In the long run, some of them optimistically believe, their education and professionalism will mean that their often powerful critics, as well as the general public, will no longer regard them as unlearned and incompetent and will treat them more respectfully. For the same reasons, other nonpriestly Brahmans should no longer be able to look down on them. As I explained in SG (59–62, ch. 3 passim), Adishaiva temple priests have traditionally been regarded as inferior in the caste hierarchy to Smarta Brahmans or Aiyars mainly because they are ignorant ritual technicians; hence they are neither learned nor “orthodox”—that is, vaidika, “Vedic”—unlike in particular the Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram, the preeminent Brahman ascetics in Tamilnadu, who are ideally the gurus of all the Smarta Brahmans. Educated priests, however, insist that this negative evaluation is unjust, for they are not ignorant technicians, and they especially note that because they can utter mantras and recite both Agamic and Vedic texts, Smarta Brahman sastris are no longer better than Adishaiva priests, even though they tend to think that they are. In Madurai in 1995, Manikkasundara Bhattar once told me that Adishaiva priests were regarded as inferior to other Brahmans because they actually were so ignorant. For example, he said, they did not even know how to pronounce the san˙kalpa (statement of intention) or make

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the darbha pavitra (protective ring of darbha grass), which must be done at the start of a ritual, so that they had to rely on a more knowledgeable sastri for guidance—as indeed many priests normally did when chanters were still working in the Temple. Today, however, the position has changed completely. Yet in reality, as the priests know, old attitudes die hard, and many if not most nonpriestly Brahmans still regard them as socially and ritually inferior, although it is hard to separate this from the disdain shown toward priests by people in general. Tellingly, Manikkasundara later told me in Pearland that priests were not shown enough respect in India but were treated better in America; from my limited observations, I think this is probably true, not least because middle-class, professional NonResident Indians (NRIs) are too Americanized and too polite to be contemptuous toward priests who have recognizable expertise. Obviously, most priests have not worked in America—or other Western countries— and they never will, but for all those who can now claim to belong to an educated, professional temple priesthood, their qualifications entitle them to respect, even if they still do not receive it, and they are also a sign of their own participation in the modern world. In concluding a study of schools in Banaras that sought to provide Hindu religious education to their pupils, Nita Kumar explains that they were unsuccessful. “All the rituals tried in our new Hindu/Indian schools . . . failed before the changing evaluation of the prestige of English education, the image of an educated, modern person, and the need for selfquestioning and reform,” and more generally the schools failed in the face of all the educational innovations “being bestowed by a new, modern authority according to new criteria” (Kumar 1996: 150–1). But whereas these Banaras schools tried to graft Hinduism onto modern education in a way that rendered Hindu ritualism empty and old-fashioned, Agamic schools, in contrast, have actually incorporated many of the modern features mentioned by Kumar into their traditional pedagogy, so that an education largely dedicated to ritualism does indeed produce educated, modern people aware of “the need for self-questioning and reform.” Yet Agamic schools achieve these modernist goals in spite of themselves, for they are intensely traditionalist institutions. The Agamas are not just instruction books about ritual, but the words of Shiva, the ultimate divine authority, and, as I have explained, Agamic schools reinforce Brahmanical values and socialize their exclusively male, Adishaiva students into their future role as Shiva’s Brahman temple priests. It is my impression, too, that priests with some knowledge of Sanskrit treat it as a sign of their Brahmanical refinement, and at least ideally, men who can recite Sanskrit embody the Brahmans’ traditional commitment to the “re-

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fined,” classical language of the gods. Indeed, the priests have now emerged as more Brahmanical than the rest of the Tamil Brahmans, who have mostly abandoned any pretension to Sanskrit, and this fits in with the priests’ claim that there is no longer any justification for regarding them as inferior to nonpriestly Smarta Brahmans (Fuller 1999a: 43–7). In an almost literal sense, therefore, Agamic education has “Sanskritized” the priests. In her perceptive discussion of education and nationalism in colonial Cyprus, Rebecca Bryant proposes that education, within a world still constituted by tradition and hierarchy, may best be understood “as an aesthetic enterprise in which the student attempts to mold himself after an ethnic type represented as ‘cultured,’ ‘civilized,’ and therefore morally better” (2001: 605). Substituting “Brahmanical” for “ethnic,” this proposition holds good for priestly students, too, so that much of what is learned in Agamic schools is actually about how to make oneself into a better exemplar of Shiva’s Brahman priesthood. Instilling unquestioned respect for the supreme authority of Shiva, the texts that contain his words, and the gurus who teach them is an explicit and crucial objective of Agamic education, which also testifies to the efficacy of traditional oral transmission and rote memorization. This system of education has therefore played a vital role in producing a cohort of mainly younger educated priests who are simultaneously “guardians of tradition” and modern “experts”—two roles that Anthony Giddens (1994: 65, 84) sees as completely different—for they are both more Brahmanical and traditionalist, as well as more professional and modernist, than their fathers mostly were. It is still true, of course, that only a minority of priests have graduated from Agamic schools and only slightly more have completed a one-year refresher course. The working priests who followed the refresher course did so, though, because they recognized the worth of a training in which they would improve their professional standing by learning by heart a selection of the most important mantras and other textual passages. Moreover, because the Agamas’ veracity and authority are undisputed, even uneducated priests defer to the greater knowledge and professional expertise of their educated colleagues. Thus in spite of some resentment and jealousy, as well as complaints that Agamic graduates do not always practice what they preach, there can be no serious opposition to the status and leadership of the educated priests, who form an elite reference group within the Minakshi Temple. As we saw in chapter 1, one of the most important changes in the Temple during the last twenty years has been the growing division between educated and uneducated priests, which was played out so plainly in the renovation ritual in 1995. Yet the emergence of the educated elite group also proves that reformist criticism of priestly incompetence can be countered. The rising standard of Agamic

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education has therefore contributed significantly to improving the collective self-confidence and morale of the Minakshi Temple priests as a whole, so that they no longer see their traditional role as incompatible with the modern world, as they were prone to do in the late 1970s when contemplating their uncertain future.

Five Religious Politics and the Priests

IN 1971, at about the same time as it was legislating to abolish the hereditary temple priesthood, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government of Tamilnadu began to urge temples to introduce Tamil archanas, so that priests would utter the deities’ names (namavali) in Tamil instead of Sanskrit when performing the ritual of private worship for devotees. The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department issued circulars ordering temples to provide for the Tamil rituals, and in some places (apparently including Madurai), temple officiants were instructed to use Tamil only. The legality of the circulars was challenged in court, and in 1974, the Supreme Court passed an order staying the introduction of Tamil archanas and requiring all temples to continue their traditional practices, after which any policy to enforce Tamil appears to have been abandoned (SG, 129–30; Presler 1987: 114–8). In 1976–77, the Minakshi Temple priests vividly recalled the Tamil archana controversy, and even though it was far less serious in its implications than the act to abolish their hereditary rights, both initiatives were seen—with good reason—as attacks on Brahman priests and Sanskritic religion by the anti-Brahman DMK party. The DMK leader and Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, claimed that the Tamil archana policy “is born more out of love and attachment to Tamil than ill will or hatred towards any other language,” but he is also reported to have said that if the gods in South India could not tolerate rituals in Tamil, they should move to North India (Presler 1987: 118, 130). As Ramaswamy explains (1997: 137–44), the issue of language in temple ritual has a long history, and from the early twentieth century, as part of the neo-Shaivist movement, demands for the use of Tamil became increasingly common. Even leaders of the Dravidian movement who claimed to be atheists joined in the debate, most notoriously E. V. Ramasami (also known as Periyar), because they saw the Tamil archana issue as just one of “several fronts on which to conduct [the] war against Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism” (ibid.: 139). Although the arguments in favor of using Tamil as the liturgical language often depended on the premise that ordinary worshipers should understand it, both supporters and opponents repeatedly referred, too, to the deities’ putative linguistic preferences. For politicians like Karunanidhi, remarks about the deities were presumably just rhetorical, but

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for the priests it was a more serious matter. Thus the late Dakshinamoorthy Bhattar—a priest in the Manamadurai Shiva temple who was closely related to many Minakshi Temple priests—argued in a court affidavit that the efficacy of the ritual depended on particular Sanskrit sounds and that “disaster” would follow if he “dared to perform the archanai in Tamil” (qu. in Presler 1987: 117; cf. Mudaliar 1974: 223). Dakshinamoorthy was a conservative man, and like many other priests, he was vitriolically critical about all governments and politicians, especially from the DMK. He also enjoyed a high reputation for his Agamic knowledge, although his opinion about the Tamil archanas plainly stretches a point, because Agamic texts do not lay down explicit rules for private worship in the form of archanas. Nevertheless, other priests have always shared Dakshinamoorthy’s view, and they all take it for granted that Minakshi, Sundareshwara, and the other deities in the Temple should be praised in Sanskrit, except when Tamil devotional hymns are sung to them. Priests, as they generally admit, only ever memorize the series of deities’ names in Sanskrit, although they are supposed to utter them in Tamil if asked to by devotees. At some point after the Tamil archana controversy, the Temple administration made it clear that people are entitled to request Tamil, but apart from some politicians and their aides, the vast majority never do. Notwithstanding the pro-Tamil campaigning by several generations of Dravidian politicians, almost all ordinary Hindus still take it for granted that deities who have always been praised in Sanskrit should continue to have a Sanskrit liturgy, just as Tamil should be retained for deities who have always been worshiped in Tamil.1 Moreover, among the priests, the furor that surrounded the issue in the 1970s has almost completely faded away, and this became particularly obvious in late 1998. The DMK, still led by Karunanidhi, was reelected to power in 1996, and in the next year the Tamil archana issue came to the surface again. An organization called the Hindu Temples Protection Committee opposed the use of Tamil and petitioned the courts, but in early 1997, the government made it clear that it favored Tamil archanas and that devotees who preferred Tamil should insist on it.2 Further reports on the matter appeared in the press periodically, and a few months later, M. Tamizhkudimagan, the Minister for Tamil Culture and Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments, announced that whereas Tamil archanas were now being done only on request, the government would ensure that in future Tamil would always be used unless Sanskrit were requested.3 Quite suddenly, in October 1998, the issue turned into a much more lively controversy. At first sight, the polemics suggested that nothing had changed in twenty-five years, because Tamizhkudimagan reportedly denounced people who opposed Tamil archanas and said that only gods who listened to

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Tamil were needed in the state. In the next few weeks, numerous politicians and religious leaders expressed their views, the courts were asked to intervene, and the debate was reported regularly in the press until the end of the year.5 Yet it was never entirely clear why Tamizhkudimagan made his inflammatory comments about the issue, because it was widely recognized that devotees had long been entitled to ask for the deities’ names in either Tamil or Sanskrit in temples throughout Tamilnadu. Karunanidhi insisted that the government was not trying to stop Sanskrit archanas, and on one occasion he sought to calm the controversy stirred up by his minister by reminding people that they had the right to request either language.6 Karunanidhi’s attitude was consistent with his earlier statement clarifying the policy on temples, in which he declared that he remained loyal to the principles of earlier Dravidian leaders—including E. V. Ramasami and C. V. Annadurai, founder of the DMK—but that his government “would not interfere in the matters held dear by others.”7 When I visited the Minakshi Temple at the end of December 1998, I found the priests to be utterly unconcerned about the Tamil archana controversy, which they casually dismissed as politicians’ hot air and nothing to worry about. More generally, unlike in the 1970s, the priests expressed no fear about Karunanidhi and his DMK government. Why this complete reversal in attitudes has occurred is explored in this chapter. The first and longer part of my discussion is about politics— especially religious politics—at the regional and national levels, for the wider developments in Tamilnadu and India are salient to the priests, who have broadly benefited from them. On the other hand, as the second part shows, the priests remain as antagonistic toward the HR&CE Department and the Minakshi Temple administration as they were in the 1970s, and particularly in the mid-1990s they also became very hostile toward local politicians and their allies who were allegedly exploiting the Temple for their own financial ends. In analyzing the priests’ relationship to politics, government, and the state, we must therefore draw a distinction between the wider political arena and the local level.

Religious Politics in Tamilnadu, 1977–91 The DMK first took power in Tamilnadu in 1967 and it continued to rule until 1976, when the government was dismissed during Indira Gandhi’s “emergency rule.” In the 1977 elections, after the emergency ended, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) party, led by the film star M. G. Ramachandran, was elected to power. MGR, as he was universally known, had split the DMK and founded his new party in 1972. Except for a brief interruption in 1980, the AIADMK stayed in

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power until early 1988, and although MGR became seriously ill in 1984, he remained Chief Minister until his death in December 1987. The government was dismissed not long afterwards, and the next elections in January 1989 were won by the DMK, which formed Tamilnadu’s new government with Karunanidhi as Chief Minister once again. But the DMK remained in power for only two years, and in July 1991, the AIADMK was reelected under the leadership of J. Jayalalitha, another film star. After MGR’s death, Jayalalitha, who was his mistress, emerged as the AIADMK’s leader in a power struggle with his widow, V. N. Janaki. Jayalalitha’s government lasted five years until it lost power to Karunanidhi and the DMK in the May 1996 elections; the DMK in turn lost the elections in May 2001 to the AIADMK, and after several months delay Jayalalitha once again became Chief Minister.8 The DMK had actually modified its hostility to Brahmans by the late 1960s, as Marguerite Ross Barnett (1976: 265–7) shows, but MGR made it clear in 1972 that he had never supported anti-Brahmanism and other divisive DMK policies (Subramanian 1999: 264–6). It is true that the AIADMK government in 1980, following its DMK predecessor’s action in 1971, considerably extended the scope of the reservations policy favoring the lower castes, so that since 1980—despite much political and legal dispute—68 percent of posts in government services and places in professional colleges have been reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBC) (50%) and Scheduled Castes and Tribes (18%) (P. Radhakrishnan 1996: 124–5). Almost all Brahmans (including the priests) continually complain about the Dravidian parties’ reservations policy and discrimination against them in public-sector employment and education. Nonetheless, as a guiding political ideology, anti-Brahmanism started to weaken visibly after the AIADMK replaced the DMK as the ruling party in Tamilnadu in 1977. The weakening became particularly apparent in religious contexts from the early years of MGR’s regime. “In place of the earlier rationalism, religious revivalism now reigned supreme” (Pandian 1992: 12), and MGR’s populist government readily exploited people’s religious sentiments, as was particularly well illustrated by the case of Bangaru Adigalar, the resident “god-man” of the goddess Parashakti’s temple in Melmaruvathur, a village in Kanchipuram District. In the 1980s, the cult of Bangaru Adigalar and Parashakti grew very rapidly, and formerly obscure Melmaruvathur became a major pilgrimage center for Tamil Hindus. (At the same time, the previously neglected shrine of Parashakti in an outer corridor of the Minakshi Temple also began to attract lots of devotees.) MGR’s wife, Janaki, reportedly became a firm devotee, as did various politicians and other prominent people close to the center of power, and Bangaru Adigalar was described in one magazine as the “pa-

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tron saint of most AIADMK politicians” (Sunil 1986: 54). The same report plausibly suggested that support for Bangaru Adigalar was partly designed to counter the influence of the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, the preeminent Brahman monk in Tamilnadu, to whom I return below. Nevertheless, the AIADMK government also abandoned any divisive policies potentially antagonistic to Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism. MGR himself was always “open to Sanskritic culture and Brahminical religiosity,” and his government, whose “ministers patronized both established and newly risen religious figures” (Subramanian 1999: 307), enjoyed closer contacts with Brahman religious institutions than the earlier DMK regime had done. Nothing much changed when the DMK did return to power for a short while in the late 1980s. Addressing a gathering of religious leaders, both Brahman and non-Brahman, in 1989, Karunanidhi insisted that his party had never been against temples, and clearly sought to appeal to the whole of his audience.9 At a DMK conference in 1990, there was “a revival of iconoclastic rationalism and anti-Brahminism, which, one thought, the DMK had long back consigned to its archives” (Pandian 1990: 1938), but there was no real force behind it, and it made no difference to the government’s policies. By the end of the 1980s, the Dravidian parties’ approving attitudes toward Brahmanical Sanskritic religion was not motivated solely by all-embracing populism. It was also a more specific response to the power and prosperity of a growing non-Brahman middleclass elite, whose members were the beneficiaries of over two decades of DMK and AIADMK rule, partly through the reservations policy, although many of them belonged to “forward” non-Brahman castes. In addition, this elite was benefiting from the Indian government’s new policy of economic liberalization. These “winners” in the “march of Dravidian politics” were in a sense “collaborating” with Brahmanism, as M.S.S. Pandian (1994: 221) puts it, but they have also been adopting Brahmanical cultural values as part of a process of upward social mobility, because even today elite culture in Tamilnadu is predominantly identified as Brahmanical and Sanskritic (Fuller 1999a: 36). Hence it was partly in response to the growth of a non-Brahman elite, for whom the old Dravidian ideology no longer had much attraction, that a significant decline of anti-Brahmanism and hostility to Sanskritic Hinduism occurred in religious politics during the 1980s. For the Minakshi Temple priests, the changing political climate was of course very welcome, and although none of them ever seemed enthusiastic about MGR, let alone Karunanidhi, in the 1980s they no longer feared the Dravidian parties and leaders as they had done in the 1970s.

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Religious Politics and Hindu Revivalism in Tamilnadu, 1991–2002 When Jayalalitha became Chief Minister in 1991, she instituted a regime that was even more populist than its predecessors, although it was also more dependent on systematic corruption and repression (Geetha and Rajadurai 1992; Subramanian 1999: 298–300). A personality cult of the leader that outshone even MGR’s also developed fairly quickly. Like MGR (Pandian 1992: 117), Jayalalitha acquired the title purat ci talaivi, “revolutionary leader”—as well as several honorary doctorates—and she was always formally referred to as “Puratchi Thalaivi Dr J. Jayalalitha.” Her birthday was semiofficially celebrated as a major event in the state, and giant posters, sometimes fifty feet tall, were erected on Chennai streets. These posters, often portraying the Chief Minister as a goddess, were a prominent feature of her personality cult and “Jayalalitha worship” in the early 1990s (Geetha and Jayanthi 1995: 262–4). Quite often, too, the posters represented Goddess Jayalalitha as a splendid queen bearing the symbols of the ancient Chera, Chola, and Pandyan kingdoms of South India (Assayag 2001: 190).10 More importantly for our discussion, in relation to policy on religion and associated matters, anti-Brahmanism was no longer in decline; it was being actively reversed. That Jayalalitha is herself a Brahman, unlike any other major figure in the Dravidian parties, and therefore personally symbolized the erasure of anti-Brahmanism, was of course widely seen as significant, not least by the Minakshi Temple priests, some of whom, at least initially, were enthusiastic about her and her government. Not long after coming to power, Jayalalitha issued a press release that was reproduced in newspaper advertisements soliciting contributions to the newly established “Chief Minister’s Temple Renovation and Maintenance Fund.” In it she stated that “I have been considering how best to help . . . temples [in poor condition].” The notice further explained: “The funds will be utilised for renovation and maintenance of deserving temples. The Authority for sanctioning funds on application will be the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu,” who also announced that “I have made the first contribution . . . towards this fund.”11 A notable feature of the fund is that the Chief Minister put herself in charge of it, not the HR&CE Minister, and she also undermined the authority of his Department by establishing a new Temple Administration Board, chaired by herself, to take overall control of temple policy in the state. (One member of the Board was A. Viswanatha Sivacharyar, the guru of Allur school described in chapter 4.) As P. Radhakrishnan (1991) notes, Jayalalitha’s decisions seemed in part to be “attempts at extricating temples from the stranglehold of the •

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state by handing them back to the people through the proposed Temple Administration Board.” Thus she reduced the power of bureaucrats and expanded direct political control from the top, which appears to have been partly motivated by a populist desire to identify the temples’ welfare with herself. Through her fund, Jayalalitha also portrayed herself as a donor to temples, rather than an extractor of resources as the HR&CE Department is often alleged to be; consistently with her pervasive representation on posters and elsewhere as a monarch (Price 1996: 196–7), Jayalalitha thereby made herself more akin to the precolonial Hindu kings who protected temples through their donative relationship with the presiding deities. As part of the program to renovate temples, the o˘ru ka¯la pu¯ja¯ (“one time worship”) scheme was introduced, designed to provide funds to poor temples so that at least one period of daily worship was always celebrated. The scheme demanded a contribution from local people as well as from the Chief Minister’s fund; eventually, after the required local contribution was reduced, the government announced that over 2,000 temples in the state had started to perform daily worship, and plans to expand the program to another 2,500 temples were in train.12 By March 1996, not long before the state elections, Jayalalitha announced that as a result of the scheme, no less than 6,238 temples were holding at least one act of worship daily.13 Especially significant because they are so spectacular was the big rise in the number of temple renovation rituals (kumbhabhishekas) that started to be held, often because long-delayed approval by the HR&CE Department was now more readily given. The Department has considerable power in this area, because it must approve the committee set up to organize a renovation and it can control how much of a temple’s general funds may be spent on the work and the ritual. Many renovation projects were given some support by the Chief Minister’s fund, and although many others were wholly or largely paid for by private donations and money from other sources, the government’s supportive attitude clearly encouraged renovation rituals. One of these events was the Minakshi Temple’s renovation ritual (described in chapter 1) that took place in July 1995 after a decade of delay, partly caused by MGR’s indecision in the mid-1980s and then by politicking in the Temple following changes in government. Owing to the Minakshi Temple’s size and importance, the Chief Minister (not just HR&CE Department officials) had to approve the ritual, but MGR failed to do so. The renovation ritual should have taken place in 1985, but nothing had been arranged by then. Around 1986, a “temple works” (tiruppan i) committee was set up to organize the project, but apparently because of friction between the chairman and the Temple’s single trustee •

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or “fit person” (takka¯r) at the time, the committee was ineffectual. This committee was disbanded and replaced by a new one while the DMK was in office between 1989 and 1991, and some of the preparatory rituals and renovation work were then carried out. After the AIADMK returned in 1991, the DMK-appointed committee was in turn disbanded, but it was not replaced, so that responsibility for the renovation was put in the hands of the five trustees (ar_an˙ka¯valar) appointed by the new government. By late 1994, there was a big notice in the Temple listing the principal donors paying for restoring and repainting the towers, which were a mixture of local companies and wealthy individuals, together with a monastery and a Hindu minister in the Malaysian government; the total sum was given as Rs 6 million, although the overall cost of all the renovation work and the ritual itself was around Rs 20 million.14 In February 1995, it was decided to hold the kumbhabhisheka in July, although Jayalalitha finally gave permission only one month before it was due to start. In Madurai, people expected her to attend the ritual’s climax on the final day, but in the end she decided not to come, supposedly for reasons of security, although a plaque later mounted in the Temple recorded the attendance of the HR&CE Minister (as well as three other ministers who were actually not there) and stated that the event was done with the blessings of Puratchi Thalaivi Dr J. Jayalalitha. The Minakshi Temple’s ritual, it may be noted, was preceded in April 1995 by the renovation ritual for Madurai’s main Vishnu temple of Ku¯t al Al_akar, and a few days after the Minakshi Temple, it was the turn of the famous Vishnu temple of Kallal_akar at Alagarkoil outside the city. Throughout 1994, 1995, and 1996, numerous renovation rituals—including some at very large temples—were held throughout the state, although official figures for the total number continually fluctuated. In 1992, Jayalalitha said that in her first year of office, eleven temples had been renovated, but the number rose quickly; in March 1996, she announced that 315 temples had held a renovation ritual in 1995, and plans were in hand for another 702.15 Despite the absence of verifiable statistics, it is plain—and universally agreed among priests and others with whom I have discussed the matter—that the number of kumbhabhishekas rose markedly after Jayalalitha came to power. Franklin Presler (1987: 70) notes that there was also a sharp rise in proposed renovation projects in 1977 when the AIADMK was elected (although he gives no figures), and after the emergency, “construction contracts” again became a way for trustees to enhance prestige and reward friends and allies. Opportunities for prestige and profit—which undoubtedly fueled the renovation committee politicking in the Minakshi Temple—have always been important. But in the 1990s, the state’s active encouragement of renovation rituals was a much more prominent feature. Occasionally, the Chief Minister •

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herself attended a renovation ritual; thus in June 1995, she went to the Ra¯jagopa¯lasva¯mi temple, a major Vaishnava temple in Mannargudi (Thiruvarur District) being renovated after an interval of 322 years. A government press release joyfully explained that an inscription in the temple prophesied that the next renovation would happen after 322 years and that a woman would be instrumental in organizing it!16 Priests often cynically commented on the flood of “political kumbhabhisekas,” but they were of course happy to take advantage of the extra work provided by them. More generally, they also strongly approved of the government’s support for temples and religion, which Jayalalitha proclaimed as a “religious renaissance” that had taken place in Tamilnadu during her five years in office.17 One major reason for the rising number of temple renovations is undoubtedly the growing prosperity resulting from economic liberalization, which means that more and more money to pay for restoring and extending temples can be raised. Joanne Punzo Waghorne (1999: 657) notes that in Chennai, the new middle class has “initiated a new boom in temple building and temple renovation,” and Tarabout (1997: 138) reports the same phenomenon in Kerala. Indeed, in Chennai in 2002, while we were sitting in the hall recently added on to a small but prosperous temple, a senior official in the HR&CE Department told me that there was now a veritable “craze” for temple renovation and extension everywhere in Tamilnadu. In addition to general middle-class prosperity, a sizeable source of funds for temple renovations is peculation. During Jayalalitha’s regime, increasing amounts of public money were “swallowed” (ca¯ppit u) by politicians, government officials, and private contractors (some no doubt profiting from renovation projects), and corruption itself encouraged renovations. As David Mosse’s research on southern Tamilnadu shows, through expenditure on temples, local contractors and others consistently seek to convert their personal profits and illicit gains into “morally valued acts of public giving,” so that they become “religious donors in ways which win public esteem and honour” (2000: 184). The same strategy was also used at a higher level, notably by the Minister for Public Works in Jayalalitha’s government, who acted in kingly style as “a generous religious donor in his native Sivagangai district” (ibid.: 184). In February 1995, I attended a temple renovation ritual at a village in this district because it was being led by Manikkasundara Bhattar and Muthu Bhattar, who were assisted by several other Minakshi Temple and Tirupparankundram temple priests, as well as pupils from Tirupparankundram Agamic school. The renovation and extension of this temple dedicated to the village god Aiyan_a¯r was mainly paid for by Chettiyar jewelers from Madurai, but one plaque recorded the gift from S. Kannappan, Minister for Public Works. •

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Kannappan delivered a speech to the political meeting following the climax of the four-day ritual, which finally turned out to be a particularly blatant example of the “political kumbhabhisheka.”18 In September 1991, a few weeks after inaugurating her new temple fund, Jayalalitha also announced that the government planned to establish the “Tamil Nadu Institute of Vedic Science,” later renamed as the “Veda Agama Education and Research Academy,” whose main objectives would include training temple priests in the Vedas and Agamas and translation of these Sanskrit texts into Tamil.19 Later, in conjunction with further announcements about the Institute, the HR&CE Department announced the inauguration of the first one-year refresher courses to train temple priests throughout the state, which were described in chapter 4.20 As I indicated, these courses were a genuine innovation and represented a more serious attempt to impart Agamic and Vedic training to temple priests than previous programs run by the Department. The Institute of Vedic Science was, however, a much more novel proposal than the new refresher courses, and, not surprisingly, the DMK criticized it as a complete abandonment of Dravidian principles. In reply, the Chief Minister argued that because the reservations policy would apply to the Institute, so that places would be reserved for members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it would actually promote the DMK’s old policy of opening up the temple priesthood—one ostensible reason for legislating to abolish the hereditary priesthood in the 1970s—since Dalits or Harijans could not become priests unless they were properly trained. Moreover, the plan to translate Sanskrit scriptures into Tamil would benefit ordinary Tamils because it would allow more of them to understand and learn these texts.21 Hence an institute to promote Sanskritic religious learning, which plainly negated the Dravidian movement’s ideological opposition to Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism, was presented as a logical continuation of it. The DMK, however, was not persuaded, and when Jayalalitha said in 1994 that the Institute would also be a Veda and Agama pathashala, the opposition condemned her plan as a “challenge to the basic principles of the Dravidian movement.”22 In the months that followed, optimistic announcements were repeatedly made about progress in establishing the Institute or Academy, and land was allocated for its buildings near Tiruchchirappalli. In January 1996, Jayalalitha announced that the Academy would open shortly, and in “the first phase,” a six-week refresher course for temple priests would be held. In March, she said that the Academy had recently started work, probably referring to the refresher course.23 But these announcements were misleading, because the Academy was never built and its ambitious programs never began. Indeed, the plans were always unworkable because no government-run college open to non-Brahmans and subject to

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the reservations policy could operate as a kind of pathashala teaching Vedic and Agamic texts like those described in chapter 4. As every knowledgeable Brahman with whom I discussed the matter agreed, the Academy could never have recruited enough competent teachers or willing students. Furthermore, no non-Brahman could be expected to attend such an institution when there were no concrete proposals to open the Brahman temple priesthood to outsiders, a change that would anyway contravene the Supreme Court’s judgment on the act abolishing the hereditary priesthood.24 Nonetheless, the very proposal to found the Academy was important symbolically; however Jayalalitha chose to defend it by talking about Harijan priests, the Academy was unambiguously designed to support and promote Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism in a complete reversal of long-standing Dravidian opposition to it. DMK criticism was clearly well founded, and this was implicitly acknowledged by a journalist with obvious sympathy for Jayalalitha, who was described as “undaunted by criticism that she is brahminising Dravidianism.”25 In many respects, the Jayalalitha regime’s religious policy, especially toward temples, actually continued that of its predecessors since the early twentieth century, although more of course was promised than delivered. On the other hand, one new feature was the vigorously personal way in which Jayalalitha pursued the policy, so that both the state and its regal Chief Minister were involved in promoting temple-based ritual Hinduism as a central component of the “religious renaissance” she proclaimed. Moreover, although most of the temples that benefited from the Chief Minister’s fund were probably small, poorer ones—some of them Sanskritic temples with Brahman priests and some served by non-Brahman priests using a Tamil liturgy—her patronage and support were dispensed to the entire range of temples, including grand and rich ones like the Minakshi Temple. All in all, therefore, even if the stillborn Veda Agama Academy is discounted, Jayalalitha’s regime—unlike earlier DMK and AIADMK regimes, including MGR’s—actively promoted Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism, almost as if it were the official religion of Tamilnadu (cf. Geetha and Jayanthi 1995: 258–66). When the DMK formed the new government after the 1996 elections, it abandoned the Veda Agama Academy. It also abolished the Temple Administration Board chaired by the Chief Minister on the grounds that it had undermined senior HR&CE officials, and in principle the old system was restored so that the Department regained its power and authority.26 As we saw above, the Tamil archana issue was pursued by DMK ministers, whereas (as far as I know) it was never raised by their AIADMK predecessors. Thus some aspects of religious policy altered when the DMK came to power, and Karunanidhi never openly involved himself

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personally to the same extent as Jayalalitha (even if he actually continued to take the important decisions). Equally telling, though, was what did not change. The oru kala puja scheme was continued and so, too, was the promotion of kumbhabhishekas, sometimes with financial assistance from the HR&CE Department.27 In 1997, the HR&CE Minister said that nearly five hundred temples were currently under renovation.28 In 1999, he announced that orders had been issued to proceed with every renovation that had been pending for twelve years, and that kumbhabhishekas would be held in all these temples; a further five hundred temples would also benefit from the oru kala puja scheme.29 When the state election of 2001 was imminent, Karunanidhi addressed a conference of village temple priests and even quoted figures to show that his government had looked after the temples better than Jayalalitha’s; during her period in office, an average of 164 temple renovation projects were taken up per year, whereas under his the figure had risen to 595, and 828 temples had been renovated during her regime but no less than 2,669 under his. Once again he insisted that the allegation that he and his party were opposed to temples was “wrong propaganda.”30 But the DMK lost the election to the AIADMK, and not long afterwards (predictably enough) the new HR&CE Minister announced a further extension of the oru kala puja scheme—together with an offer from Jayalalitha to cover the costs in temples that could not afford to contribute anything—as well as plans to renovate between 250 and 500 temples in untouchable Adi Dravida settlements, which was presumably motivated by the AIADMK’s particularly low share of the vote among Dalit Adi Dravidas.31 Some new initiatives were also announced shortly after Jayalalitha was finally sworn in as Chief Minister in March 2002.32 In particular, a scheme to provide free meals for devotees and “spiritual classes” for children in sixty-three major temples was started, inaugurated by Jayalalitha herself in Chennai’s principal Shaiva temple of Kapa¯lı¯s´vara.33 On the other hand, the government did not try to reintroduce some of its earlier policies; no more was heard about a Veda Agama Academy, for instance, and a Temple Administration Board chaired by the Chief Minister has not been revived. Yet these changes are relatively minor matters compared with the striking fact that a religious policy heavily focused on supporting and promoting temple-centered Sanskritic Hinduism, which Jayalalitha had begun in 1991, was still in full flow a decade later, despite the intervening five years of DMK rule. Jayalalitha’s religious renaissance, which is more accurately described as “Hindu revivalism,” was indeed one of the most visible and profound developments of the 1990s in Tamilnadu.

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The Government and the Shankaracharyas When Jayalalitha set up the Temple Administration Board, the most virulent criticism came not from her political enemies but sometime later from Tamilnadu’s most prominent religious personage, Jayendra Saraswati, the senior Shankaracharya and head of the Kanchipuram monastery, whose blessings Jayalalitha had sought shortly after her election victory. The Shankaracharya condemned her failure to push reform far enough and argued in favor of an autonomous board for temple administration, free from political and governmental control. Jayalalitha replied to the Shankaracharya, criticizing him in turn, but she still desired his support and asked him to bless the government’s efforts so as to help it carry on its “sacred mission.”34 The Shankaracharya’s demand for temple autonomy was not new, for he and others have repeated it many times before and since, and his attack on Jayalalitha was plainly affected, too, by the Kanchipuram monastery’s long-standing ambition to establish greater influence over the state’s temples, which is widely opposed by priests as well as the government (cf. SG, 56–7). The sometimes tense and sometimes supportive relationship between Kanchipuram and the government has been an important feature of religious politics in Tamilnadu for many years. The Shankaracharyas are the spiritual descendants of S´an˙kara, the great eighth-century Hindu philosopher, although the authority of the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram and his claim to be Shankara’s true heir in South India is disputed by the Shankaracharya of Sringeri in Karnataka. Even in Tamilnadu, some people support Sringeri, but Kanchipuram undoubtedly commands more allegiance in the state, especially among Smarta Brahmans, who conventionally acknowledge him as the guru of their community. Sri Vaishnava Brahmans normally recognize the authority of their own ascetic monks, such as the Jir of Ahobila monastery. To most people, however, the Shankaracharyas are the most Brahmanical Brahmans of all, for they represent the vaidika (“Vedic”) Brahmanical ideal, notably through their ascetic renunciation combined with orthodox religious learning. In Tamilnadu, there are also numerous non-Brahman ascetic monks and other religious figures (such as Bangaru Adigalar) who often play a role in the politics of religion. None of the Vaishnavas or non-Brahmans, however, is as prominent as the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram.35 There are actually two incumbents at Kanchipuram, the senior Shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswati, who was installed in 1954, and his junior heir, Vijayendra Saraswati, installed in 1983. Jayendra’s predecessor, Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, who became dignified as the “supreme” Parama¯ca¯rya, was installed in 1908; he died in 1994, in his one hundredth

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year, and in the line of succession from Shankara, he was the sixty-eighth Shankaracharya. The Shankaracharyas are chosen, when still boys, from Smarta Brahman families, but they are of course sannyasis who mark their renunciation of the world by tonsuring the head and discarding the Brahman’s sacred thread before donning ochre robes. During the twentieth century, mainly owing to Chandrasekharendra’s leadership, Kanchipuram’s power and influence steadily grew. Since Independence, as Presler comments, successive governments of Tamilnadu have “always been sensitive to the views on public policy” of Brahman monastic heads, particularly the Shankaracharyas. This was so even in the 1970s, when the DMK government actively promoted the head of a non-Brahman monastery, Kunrakudi Adigalar, and the Deviga Peravai religious association that he led; after the DMK lost power in 1976, the Deviga Peravai quickly collapsed (Presler 1987: 131). After the DMK returned in 1996, the monastery’s new head, Kunrakudi Ponnambala Adigalar, became an active figure who involved himself in the Tamil archana controversy by arguing, like his predecessor in the 1970s, that “it is better to pray to God in one’s mother tongue.”36 Influential religious leaders in Tamilnadu also resuscitated the Deviga Peravai to help their relationship with the government, although it was always a rather weak body. However difficult the Tamilnadu government’s relationship with Kanchipuram may be, and irrespective of how much influence the Deviga Peravai and other religious figures may sometimes have, politicians in Chennai, and even New Delhi, cannot afford to ignore the Shankaracharyas, so that they have regularly and publicly expressed respectful homage toward them.37 Jayendra (and Vijayendra) certainly do not command the extraordinary veneration given to Chandrasekharendra, who was widely regarded as divine. Nevertheless, the Shankaracharyas collectively did and do enjoy strong support within the Tamilnadu elite, which is one important reason why politicians show so much deference toward them. Jayendra, more than Chandrasekharendra, has actively expanded support among non-Brahmans (Mines and Gourishankar 1990: 770–1). Smarta Brahmans, however, especially in and around Chennai, still “form his original constituency core” (ibid.: 777), and Smartas manage the monastery’s affairs, many of them being volunteer devotees who “have held influential positions in government service, the armed forces, or banking”; these people enable the monastery to deal with the government and to handle its financial and legal business, and they also “provide links with influential civic institutions” (ibid.: 778; cf. Hancock 1995: 909– 10). Although the evidence is not comprehensive, it consistently suggests that members of the professional, middle-class urban elite, especially Smarta Brahmans, are the Shankaracharyas’ strongest supporters and

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most faithful devotees in Chennai and, in lesser numbers, in other centers in Tamilnadu and elsewhere in India where Tamils have settled.38 hankaracharyas have repeatedly emphasized the importance of temple Hinduism, and numerous temple renovation rituals, including the Minakshi Temple’s, have been graced by their presence. Thus, for example, in June–July 1995, the two Shankaracharyas attended the renovation ritual in Mannargudi (alongside Jayalalitha), followed by the one at their own Kamakshi temple in Kanchipuram; they then went to the ritual at the S´an˙karana¯ra¯yan a temple in Sankarankoil (Tirunelveli District) before proceeding to the Minakshi Temple and afterwards to Subrahmanya’s famous seashore temple at Tiruchendur (Tuticorin District).39 The Shankaracharyas have never shown any intellectualist disdain for “idol-worship”; on the contrary, they have always insisted on its value. In an address in 1957, Chandrasekharendra said that “it is necessary for the community to see that worship at the temples is conducted properly,” and that ordinary people should go to the temple, recite god’s names, and sing hymns at least once a week, so that they “will derive real and lasting benefit.”40 Much the same has been said repeatedly over the years; for instance, addressing a conference of non-Brahman priests, in whom the Shankaracharyas have also pointedly shown interest recently, Vijayendra identified temples as the pivotal axis of spirituality and reiterated the need for daily worship in all of them.41 The Minakshi Temple priests welcome the Shankaracharyas’ support for temples and recognize its usefulness in moderating political interference in them. They also respect the Shankaracharyas as learned ascetics, but there is still a lot of ambivalence and some severe criticism. Thus although some priests approvingly refer to the wealthy monastery’s support for the Allur Agamic school, others comment that many other schools have received nothing, not even the Tirupparankundram school that was blessed by the Paramacharya and is named after him.42 The priests are most concerned, however, about what the Shankaracharyas do when visiting the Temple, and today as in the past, they try to ensure that no Shankaracharya performs temple worship for himself.43 They also insist that when a Shankaracharya (like any other ascetic) takes his own prasada directly from a priest’s plate, it is because priests refuse to give it, not because the monk refuses to accept it from their hands. This apparently trivial point is crucial to the priests, because in their eyes it proves that within the Temple they are superior to the Shankaracharyas, not the other way round (SG, 58–9). More generally, the priests’ main complaint is always about the Shankaracharyas’ alleged attempts to undermine priestly rights and privileges and to increase their overall control over Tamilnadu’s temples. •

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In broader terms, leaving aside specific issues relating to temples, the Shankaracharyas uphold a conservative form of modern reformist Hinduism. Thus, for instance, they have frequently condemned the practice of untouchability and offered assistance to Harijans, but they have not attacked the caste system itself, which Chandrasekharendra once defended to Milton Singer (1972: 88) and often described “solely in terms of duties it imposes and not in terms of rank or of superiority” (Cenkner 1983: 143). In relation to the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement, the Shankaracharyas’ position has been rather changeable. On some issues and at some times, they have openly supported it, but less crudely than Mary Hancock (1999: 221–4) suggests; for example, at one stage, they were involved as mediators in negotiations between Hindu nationalists and their opponents, as I note below, and—most importantly and consistently—they have repeatedly called for religious tolerance as well (Fuller 1999a: 49–50). Yet it is crucial that when the Kanchipuram Shankaracharyas preach the values of religious tolerance, they do so by insisting on the glory of an Indian culture unambiguously identified with the Sanskritic tradition and on the eternal, universal truths of Brahmanical, Vedic Hinduism, which incorporates all other religious truths within itself (Cenkner 1983: 136–8). Chandrasekharendra taught that “a universal sanatana dharma [eternal religion] existed throughout the world before the present historical period, and that in recorded history it emerged in India as eternal truth in Hindu religion and in other places as the other religions” (ibid.: 146).44 In a typical speech in 1995, Jayendra also insisted that Vedic religion was originally the only religion; he deplored the decline of Vedic study and recitation, and said that everybody’s peace and happiness depended on leading life according to the teachings of the Vedas.45 Naturally enough, the Shankaracharyas place great emphasis on the Sanskrit language as well (ibid.: 129). Their outlook is well expressed in a speech delivered in 1995 by the junior Shankaracharya about the new university founded by the Kanchipuram monastery: “The university will foster the growth of Sanskrit together with science. . . . It will strive to protect our culture and heritage by emphasising the glory of Sanskrit, the importance of our mother tongues and the role Indian culture can play in world peace. Solutions to all present-day problems are found in our dharma.”46 The glorification of Sanskrit, obviously outshining other “important” languages, together with the eulogization of Hindu dharma, as well as the emphasis on the value of modern science, are not confined to recent speeches by the Shankaracharyas; much the same has been said by countless other advocates of modern, reformist Hinduism for at least a hundred years. In contemporary Tamilnadu, though, the glorification of Sanskrit polemically implies, too, a reaffirmation of traditional Brahmanical val-

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ues in their totality. Indeed, through their speeches and other multifarious activities—supporting Vedic studies, involving themselves in temple affairs, promoting religious and other welfare associations, establishing the monastery’s university, and much more besides—the Shankaracharyas patently were and are vigorously combating the ideology of the Tamil non-Brahman, Dravidian movement. Furthermore, during the early 1990s, they were doing so within the context of Sanskritic Hindu revivalism as actively promoted by Jayalalitha’s government. Despite their equivocal relationships with all Tamilnadu governments including hers, the Shankaracharyas were also leading agents of that revivalism, and they have continued to be so until the present day.

Hindu Nationalism in Tamilnadu The politics of religion in Tamilnadu during the 1990s were closely connected with the rise of Hindu nationalism and its ideology of Hindutva (“Hinduness”) in India, as well as with the antecedent decline of antiBrahmanism within the state. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that during Jayalalitha’s regime, Dravidian ideology was effectively abandoned in favor of what can be described as Tamil-style Hindutva. In brief, because the story is now well known, the controversy over the mosque known as the Babri Masjid in the North Indian town of Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) started to dominate Indian politics, especially in the north of the country, from the mid-1980s. Many Hindus believe the mosque stood over the site of the god Ra¯ma’s birth, and in 1985 a campaign to erect a new temple for Rama on the site was begun by the Hindu nationalist movement, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and supported by its powerful parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 1986, following a court judgment, the mosque was opened after being locked for many years, so that Hindus could enter it to worship Rama, and this was followed by a campaign in which the VHP collected bricks from all over India to build the temple, whose foundation stone was laid in 1989. In the 1989 general election, the BJP gained many parliamentary seats, and in late 1990, one of the party’s most powerful leaders, L. K. Advani, launched his “chariot procession” across eight states of northern India, starting in Gujarat and designed to end in Ayodhya. Advani was arrested before he reached Ayodhya, however, and the BJP then withdrew its support from the National Front coalition government, which fell shortly afterwards. At Ayodhya itself, the agitation by militant Hindu volunteers (kar sevak) became increasingly violent, and some of them were killed by the security forces, giving rise to a potent cult of martyrs. Benefiting directly from these

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events, the Hindu nationalist movement gained yet more momentum, and in the 1991 general election, the BJP won still more seats and became the second largest party after Congress in the national parliament; it also took power in Uttar Pradesh. The VHP, expecting the BJP’s full support, kept up the pressure in Ayodhya, but the BJP state government of Uttar Pradesh was now responsible for maintaining law and order. It lost control of events and the central government vacillated; as a result, on December 6, 1992, a mob of thousands of militant volunteers managed to demolish the mosque within a few hours. Not long afterwards, Hindu-Muslim communal riots broke out in several parts of India, with the worst violence occurring in Mumbai (Bombay), but the consequences of the mosque’s destruction lasted far longer and penetrated the body politic much more deeply. A decade later, it is very clear that December 6, 1992, marked a dramatic turning point in the history of the secular, democratic republic that is the Indian nation-state. Since then, the Hindu nationalists have continued to gain ground. In the 1996 general election, the BJP became the largest single party but could not form a stable government; in the 1998 election, it won more seats and formed a coalition government that was brought down in 1999 when Jayalalitha, in her own interests, withdrew AIADMK support, so that the DMK formed an alliance with the BJP instead. The BJP was returned to power in the 1999 general election as the leading party in a more stable coalition, although conflicting pressures within the Hindu nationalist movement remain visible. Thus in January–February 2002, the VHP exerted pressure on the BJP-led central government by mobilizing support for its plan to move the already carved stones and pillars of Rama’s temple-to-be to the site of the demolished mosque, so that the long-delayed construction could actually begin. This crisis eventually subsided, partly owing to negotiations in which Jayendra Saraswati, acting on the national stage, served as a mediator between the VHP and both the government and Muslim leaders. But in the end, the negotiations produced no solution, and by February 2003, Jayendra was firmly aligning himself with the VHP.47 Moreover, in February 2002, after an argument in Gujarat between some Muslims and VHP activists returning from Ayodhya, serious communal violence erupted in which Muslims were the main victims. Partly because the BJP state government did little to stop the violence and even encouraged it during the following months, it was the worst outbreak since 1992–93 and confirmed yet again that the Ayodhya crisis is far from over. Before the Ayodhya mosque was demolished, Hindu nationalism’s impact in Tamilnadu was deceptively slight, notwithstanding the furor over Muslim conversions at Meenakshipuram village in Tirunelveli District in 1981, which actually seems to have had a more substantial impact outside

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the state, despite some frenetic Hindu propagandizing within it (cf. Jaffrelot 1996: 340–2, 349–50; McKean 1996: 107–8). During the 1980s, the RSS and VHP had little visible presence in Tamilnadu, the BJP had no electoral base, and the murderous passions erupting in parts of the North were largely absent among Tamils. Yet the Hindu nationalist movement and its ideology of Hindutva were making headway in Tamilnadu at that time, as became more apparent in retrospect after December 1992, and from 1991 onwards Jayalalitha’s AIADMK government was both responding to and further promoting their advance. One of Hindu nationalism’s main vehicles in Tamilnadu is the Hindu Munnani (“Hindu Front”), a militant movement founded in the early 1980s that rose to prominence later in the decade. The Hindu Munnani is openly hostile to Muslims and Christians, and its declared objectives are to unite Hindus and to build a strong and assertive Hindu nation (Pandian 1990). The Munnani is part of the Sangh Parivar, the “family” of RSS organizations, and it cooperates closely with the RSS and BJP; it plays a politico-religious role similar to that of the VHP in North India, although the VHP itself is also fairly active in Tamilnadu. Like the RSS, the Munnani is a semiunderground organization, although both of them were operating much more overtly by the end of the 1990s than they were ten or even five years earlier, which itself reflects how much progress Hindu nationalism has made. The Munnani also has fairly close connections with Tambras, the Tamilnadu Brahmans Association, a caste association that tries to represent and lobby for Brahman interests (Hancock 1999: 39–42). Detailed sociological data about the Munnani’s activists and sympathizers are fairly sparse; nonetheless, it certainly enjoys considerable support among Brahmans, but also draws support, albeit unevenly, from across the whole caste and class spectrum, and it is active in many though not all parts of Tamilnadu. Among the most successful of the Hindu Munnani’s ventures is its promotion of Vinayaka Chaturthi (caturthı¯, “fourth [lunar day]”) as a public festival, which I have described in more detail elsewhere (Fuller 2001b). Vinayaka Chaturthi, the god’s principal annual festival in August-September, is very widely celebrated in Tamilnadu in people’s homes as well as at Vinayaka’s temples and shrines. Until the 1980s, though, there were no large-scale public ceremonies and processions at the festival as there have been at Ganesha Chaturthi in Maharashtra since the late nineteenth century. In a Chennai suburb on Chaturthi day in 1983, a little group of activists belonging to the Hindu Munnani, RSS, and BJP installed an image of Vinayaka in a public place near a temple. A few days later, they took their image in a procession for immersion in a temple tank. One year later, images were set up in several other localities, including Triplicane in the center of the city, and from this tiny beginning, the scale of public

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Vinayaka Chaturthi celebrations expanded fairly rapidly in Chennai. In 1990, for the first but not the last time, a procession of many tall images accompanied by thousands of Hindus led to a bloody riot with Muslims near the Ice House mosque in Triplicane. Vinayaka Chaturthi remains a major public festival in Chennai, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its celebration spread across Tamilnadu, to both urban and rural areas; in Madurai it was first held in 1990. Before the 1995 festival, the Hindu Munnani’s president plausibly claimed that immersion processions would take place in every local government district in Tamilnadu. The public Vinayaka Chaturthi festival in Tamilnadu was copied from its Maharashtrian counterpart by the Munnani and promoted as a vehicle to disseminate Hindutva ideology. It is another successful example of the Sangh Parivar’s “appropriation of traditional Hindu rituals” in a dual process that aims to “nationalise” Hinduism and “Hinduise” the nation (Basu et al. 1993: 39–40); furthermore, by recasting ritual into “a symbolic affirmation of a Hindu public,” the Hindu nationalists established a connection “between religious identity and a long-denied participation in the polity, so that the exercise of faith could become not only an act of consumption but an assertion of political will” (Rajagopal 2001: 61).48 For Munnani leaders and supporters, the public celebration of Vinayaka Chaturthi is first of all a means to unite Hindus by overcoming internal divisions among them. The Munnani claims high levels of support among the poor, but it most strenuously promotes its anticaste credentials and actively encourages Dalit participation in the festival. Not surprisingly, the organization is often unsuccessful in dealing with caste, class, or factional divisions on the ground, but in any case for the Munnani and its Sangh Parivar allies, Hindu unity is primarily a political and ideological project to persuade people to become conscious of themselves as Hindus belonging to a single, assertive, majority “community” on which a strong Hindu nation can be built. Promoting the public Vinayaka Chaturthi festival throughout Tamilnadu has been a major achievement by the Munnani and its allies, although there are areas, especially in the north of the state, where they have not been very successful. Since the mid-1990s, the festival has also undergone a partial evolution. On the whole, partly owing to more effective policing and negotiated agreements between the Munnani and the government, the festival has become less overtly anti-Muslim or antiChristian than it used to be in many places. Deliberate attempts to provoke Muslims when passing mosques have mostly stopped as well, although protests about the government’s refusal to let a procession pass the Ice House mosque in Triplicane have occurred regularly. Especially in Chennai, apart from Triplicane, Vinayaka’s festival has also become a more religious-cum-cultural celebration that is less nakedly “communal”

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and political than it was earlier, although this is not so in the major industrial city of Coimbatore (northwest Tamilnadu), where Hindu-Muslim tension has remained high. Yet it is also notable that many independent celebrations of Vinayaka Chaturthi, which are not organized by the Munnani or its allies, have sprung up in Chennai and Madurai (and probably some other major urban centers). Paradoxical though it may seem, because there are so many non-Munnani, “nonpolitical” events, they can all be claimed by Munnani spokesmen and Hindu nationalist supporters as evidence of ever-increasing Hindu pride, assertiveness, self-consciousness, and unity as a “community” joined together in worshiping their god. The Vinayaka Chaturthi public festival has become a major event in the Hindu calendar, and its promotion has played a significant part in helping to “normalize” Hindu nationalism within Tamilnadu, so that Hindutva ideas can “percolate into the commonsense of the people” (Geetha and Jayanthi 1995: 265). Hindu nationalism’s influence in Tamilnadu is also evident in the domain of party politics. By 1991, notably through its promotion of Vinayaka Chaturthi, the Hindu Munnani was a prominent force, and between 1991 and 1996, it gave general support to Jayalalitha’s government, especially its policy on temples and religion. Jayalalitha, like Karunanidhi, condemned the demolition of the Ayodhya mosque, but the DMK had also denounced the Chief Minister for her closeness to the Munnani and RSS a few days earlier.49 Jayalalitha, indeed, seemed content to accept the Munnani’s periodic statements of support for her. At a public meeting at the 1993 Vinayaka Chaturthi, for example, one of its leaders declared that his organization would thwart any attempt to destabilize the AIADMK government and that the people were no longer prepared to vote for “antiHindus.”50 In February 1995, on Jayalalitha’s birthday—which, as mentioned above, had become a public celebration of her personality cult— huge posters depicting her as the goddess Parashakti and the Virgin Mary appeared on Chennai streets. Portraying her as a Hindu goddess was not new, but as the Virgin Mary it was. Christian leaders angrily condemned the Virgin Mary posters, and eventually they were taken down, but Rama Gopalan, the Munnani’s state president, announced that the agitation merely revealed the religious intolerance of some Christians, since Hindus did not object when “pictures of their deities were wrapped around firecrackers or printed on lottery tickets”; nevertheless, he warned, Hindus “would not forgive anyone who belittled their faith,” and he accused Christians of threatening the AIADMK government for their own ends.51 As the 1996 elections approached, the Munnani’s president said that it would support the BJP; he apparently did not endorse the AIADMK but did announce a campaign against the DMK and other parties with “antiHindu” policies.52 After the DMK’s victory, skirmishes between the gov-

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ernment and the Hindu Munnani became fairly frequent. Thus, for example, during the controversy over Tamil archanas, Rama Gopalan denounced the government for trying to “hoodwink” the people, “meddling” in temple affairs, and seeking “to break the unity among Hindus.”53 The most regular hostilities occurred at the Vinayaka Chaturthi festival, however. In 1996, after a procession past the Ice House mosque was banned, the Munnani became involved in a protracted dispute; Rama Gopalan denounced the DMK government for its “dictatorial attitude,” a common Munnani refrain, and criticized the city’s Police Commissioner, who was told that he could not “overcome the might of Vinayaka” and was “appeasing” the minorities under “the cover of secularism.”54 At the festival in the following years, protests about banning any procession near the Ice House mosque, accompanied by token arrests of Munnani leaders and activists, became an annual ritual in itself, and in 2001, despite the AIADMK’s return to power, Rama Gopalan “courted arrest” beside the mosque yet again.55 In 1999, after the DMK replaced the AIADMK as the BJP’s electoral ally, the Munnani’s relations with the BJP sometimes became strained when the party tried to impose discipline on Munnani activists and would not support them in provoking the government during Vinayaka Chaturthi. Yet in the reshaping of alliances, it was clearly the DMK—which unlike the AIADMK always counted on considerable Muslim support—that had to subject itself to the greatest ideological contortions. Thus in Madurai in 1999, when I was investigating the Vinayaka Chaturthi festival (which coincided with the general election), it was noticeable that Munnani and BJP activists contentedly referred to the DMK’s movement toward the BJP; like other Hindus, they often pointed out, too, that Karunanidhi, who always used to wear a black shawl, had changed to a yellow one, which was taken as a clear sign of his growing sympathy for Hinduism. In contrast, the DMK city councillor who tried to persuade me that his party had never been against Hinduism, so that its alliance with the BJP was not at all strange, probably did not convince himself; he certainly did not convince the small crowd of people listening to him, who eventually dissolved into mocking laughter. Notwithstanding the obvious electoral pragmatism behind the DMK-BJP alliance, it was feasible only because the DMK’s stance on religion, now similar to the AIADMK’s, really had changed and moved toward the Hindu nationalists’. Before the 2001 election, when Karunanidhi insisted that the DMK looked after temples better than the AIADMK, he was addressing a priests’ conference that was actually sponsored by the VHP.56 After the AIADMK won the election, the DMK was still the BJP’s ally in Tamilnadu, but Jayalalitha openly started to move her party closer to the BJP. Thus her scheme to provide free meals and to start children’s “spiritual

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classes” in temples, which I mentioned above, was predictably praised by the BJP, VHP, and Hindu Munnani.57 A few months later, the government passed an ordinance to prohibit “forcible” religious conversions, a blatant move against Muslims and especially Christians, which fulfilled one of the most strident demands of the Munnani and the Sangh Parivar as a whole. The ordinance was of course lauded by the BJP and the rest of the Hindu nationalist movement and denounced by the churches, as well as by the opposition parties, including the DMK. The Kanchipuram Shankaracharya, whose support for Hindu nationalism was becoming increasingly partisan, also expressed his support for banning conversions—claiming that it would actually foster “peace, harmony and unity”—which provoked Karunanidhi into the sarcastic comment that “he will ask for a worldwide ban too.” Not long afterwards, the Shankaracharya addressed a “Dalit-Hindu unity festival” in support of the ban, although he also predictably insisted that if everyone loved their own religion and did not hate other religions, everyone would be happy. At the time of writing, it is too soon to predict the ordinance’s effects, but it is clear that Jayalalitha’s government was moving decisively toward the Hindu nationalists by adopting their stance on the sensitive and even inflammatory issue of banning religious conversions, so that the VHP’s general secretary in Tamilnadu could contentedly announce that “Jayalalitha is definitely proHindu.”58 None of this means that Hindu nationalism has triumphantly captured all of Tamilnadu; it is opposed or just ignored by many people in the state and in many areas other types of political struggle—especially those involving Dalits or other caste-based groups—are more prominent. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, in contrast with ten years before, Hindu nationalism and its dreams had become part of the normal religious and political discourse in Tamilnadu. This development has not occurred solely because of Vinayaka Chaturthi and other activity by the Hindu Munnani and the Sangh Parivar, even though this has been extensive and diverse, for much of this Hindu nationalist activity also forms part of the broader current of Hindu revivalism that has been so closely connected with the state’s promotion of Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism, especially during Jayalalitha’s regime in 1991–96. In this context, it is crucial that in Tamilnadu, an inescapable affinity exists between Hindu nationalist ideology and Brahmanical Sanskritic religion, because pan-Indian “Hinduness” is necessarily constructed in opposition to Tamil regionalism and its ideology of non-Brahman, Dravidian distinctiveness. After all, to cite a small but telling example, in the light of the Ayodhya campaign, support for Hindu nationalism in Tamilnadu must implicitly reverse E. V. Ramasami’s reading of the Ra¯ma¯yan a, which portrayed the demon-king Ra¯van a as a Dravidian hero and Rama as an Aryan oppressor (cf. Rich•

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man 1994). Hence the promotion of Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism as something very close to the official state religion of Tamilnadu, at the expense of an increasingly discarded Dravidianism, inevitably favored the promotion of Hindutva as well. Yet Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism is not simply equatable with politically inflected Hindutva in Tamilnadu, and many people who look favorably on Hindu revivalism neither are nor were Munnani activists or committed Hindu nationalists. Thomas Blom Hansen correctly makes the point that the “saffron wave” of Hindu nationalism cannot be understood in narrowly political or religious terms, for it has grown up in “the public space in which a society and its constituent individuals and communities imagine, represent, and recognize themselves” in various discursive and institutional ways (1999: 4). Discussing the nationalists’ Ayodhya campaign, he also suggests that its impact was “at the level of indirect transformation of the entire ‘public atmosphere’ ” (ibid.: 161). That phraseology may sound vague, but it is apposite, because the crux of the issue is often intangible change in the public space, sphere, or “atmosphere,” which enables or encourages Hindus to become more conscious, demonstrative, and assertive about their religion. It is also particularly important that the Hindu revivalism so prominent in Tamilnadu since the early 1990s—which emerged out of the mutual combination of declining antiBrahman Dravidianism and the impact of Hindu nationalism, originally coming from outside the state—has reshaped the public space in a way that more and more people take for granted as normality.

The Hindu Munnani President’s Assassination in Madurai Although I return to Hinduism and the public space in the conclusion, it is now time to move away from religious politics at the wider state level to the local setting of Madurai and the Minakshi Temple, where events inevitably had a more direct impact on the priests. As we have seen, the Hindu Munnani broadly supported Jayalalitha’s government in the early 1990s, but its relationship with the ruling party in Madurai was not so smooth. It was particularly soured by the assassination of the Munnani’s leader, a crime linked to accusations about corruption in the Minakshi Temple. Early in the morning on October 10, 1994, P. Rajagopalan, who was then the Hindu Munnani’s state president, left his house on North Avani Moola Street and was stabbed to death in the road by five men, who apparently escaped in autorickshaws. According to the Hindu (normally a very sober newspaper), this assassination renewed Madurai’s reputation as a “killer city,” and witnesses were reportedly afraid to come forward

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with evidence. When I arrived in Madurai one month later, the Minakshi Temple priests, most of whom live near Rajagopalan’s house, were still discussing his death. Although lurid comparisons with prohibition-era Chicago were absurdly exaggerated, it was widely assumed by the priests and other people in the city that Rajagopalan’s assassins were the hirelings of V. Rajan Chellappa, Madurai’s AIADMK Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha (upper house), and “Omar,” a prominent businessman, who generously donated toward the construction of an elegant new mosque in Madurai but also reputedly doubled as the city’s leading gangster.60 So powerful were these two men, it was said, that they were able to ensure that the police took no action against the killers. Why else, asked priests, were men riding in autorickshaws in blood-stained clothing in broad daylight never arrested, and why had no detectives been to interview the many people who said that they had seen the murder? Despite the lengthy investigation eventually undertaken by a senior detective from Chennai, this crime was not solved and nobody has been convicted for it. A high-ranking government official, who knew as much as anyone about the case, told me that he thought Rajagopalan’s murder may have been linked to events in Kilakkarai, a coastal town in Ramanathapuram District, which has been an important Muslim trading center for centuries. At the Vinayaka Chaturthi festival in 1992, Rajagopalan led the procession of images for immersion in the sea through the center of Kilakkarai, where, despite being asked to refrain, the Hindu marchers played drums and shouted slogans in front of a mosque. In 1993, when Rajagopalan again led the noisy procession past the mosque, Muslims attacked the Hindus and a riot broke out.61 In subsequent years, Vinayaka Chaturthi was not celebrated in Kilakkarai, but Rajagopalan may have been killed in revenge for his activity there. But whatever the truth may have been about Kilakkarai or some other pretext for Rajagopalan’s murder, the allegations against Rajan Chellappa and Omar appeared plausible to people in Madurai because these two men ostensibly had a motive for arranging the crime. Under Jayalalitha’s rule, Rajan Chellappa was said to be flourishing as the most successfully corrupt politician in Madurai, and Omar the gangster allegedly supplied arms to Dalit men fighting against Maravars and Tevars in the “caste wars” that plagued the countryside south of Madurai, from where he recruited thugs for jobs like Rajagopalan’s murder. Rajan Chellappa’s career, like that of all leading members of the ruling party, depended heavily on his closeness to Jayalalitha. Thus, for example, he took steps to impress Jayalalitha—and everyone else—with his loyalty to her, and to celebrate her birthday in 1994 and 1995, he sponsored the golden car procession in the Minakshi Temple. (A few days later in 1995, the procession was repeated, sponsored by S. Kannappan, the Public Works Minis-

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ter, who was mentioned above in connection with “political” renovation rituals.) Actually, so a well-informed source told me, Rajan Chellappa fell out of favor with the Chief Minister not long after her birthday in 1995, but at least until then, under the AIADMK regime, he and Omar were seemingly able to manipulate the Minakshi Temple administration so that their many sources of income, it was widely claimed, included several lucrative contracts with the Temple. The Temple administration was supposed to hold a public auction for contracts to supply materials needed for rituals, to administer the rental of Temple property, and to run the stalls where people leave their footwear and the vehicle parking facilities. Nevertheless, Rajan Chellappa and Omar allegedly obtained all these contracts—or almost all of them, for some people said that an ally of the M.P., a Madurai businessman who was also a nephew of the HR&CE Minister at the time, had obtained a share. These men secured the contracts through their influence with the Temple’s trustees and officials without any proper auction being held, under the so-called benami system, whereby some of their relatives were declared to be the successful bidders.62 In addition to the contracts, Rajan Chellappa was apparently collecting money from shops illegally built around the Minakshi Temple, and Omar was profiting from a protection racket in the city’s wholesale vegetable market, which is located nearby. Money from the shops also went to the chairman of the District Milk Board, who owed his post to generous donations to AIADMK party funds; he celebrated Jayalalitha’s birthday in 1995 with an elaborate bathing ritual in Tirupparankundram temple, for which his access to plenty of milk was surely helpful. His post was renewed shortly afterwards, to the disappointment of the HR&CE Minister’s nephew, who had also shown generosity to the party. For some time, the Hindu Munnani had been protesting about dishonest tendering for Temple contracts, and wanted all non-Hindus removed from any position of profit or power within the Minakshi Temple. Shortly before the assassination, the Munnani had also started a campaign to clean up the Minakshi Temple and its surroundings, which would involve removing the illegal shops. There were suggestions, too, that as part of this campaign, the Munnani was supporting long-delayed plans to move the city’s vegetable market to new premises on the outskirts. Because Rajan Chellappa and Omar were worried that the Munnani’s campaign might be successful and damage their interests, especially in the Temple (and market), they allegedly decided to murder Rajagopalan. In February 1995, to the great surprise of everyone connected with the Minakshi Temple, the illegal shops actually were demolished by Madurai corporation workmen, shortly after the Munnani had again called for their removal.63 This episode clearly showed that Rajan Chellappa, the

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Milk Board chairman, and a few other local magnates were not wholly immune from official action against them, because the local government could sometimes act effectively against corrupt politicians. Yet the demolition of the shops was a minor matter compared with the Munnani president’s assassination, which suggested that the government could not or would not prevent an M.P. and a gangster from getting away not only with corruption but with murder as well. Jayalalitha’s religious policy was generally popular among the Minakshi Temple priests, as we have seen, but like so many other citizens of Tamilnadu, they deplored the increasing levels of politically motivated violence in the state, some of it perpetrated by the ruling party and some by other organizations, including the Munnani, which periodically uses strong-arm tactics itself. But when the priests contemplated conditions in their own city and Temple in 1994–95, they sided with the Munnani against the AIADMK politicians and their allies, including a Muslim gangster, who were allegedly running rackets and had killed one of their most vocal critics.

The Hindu Munnani and the Tirupparankundram Controversy Despite the priests’ support for the Hindu Munnani’s campaign over the Minakshi Temple, they disapproved of its agitation at nearby Tirupparankundram. In November 1994, about one month after Rajagopalan’s death, the Munnani fomented a controversy in Tirupparankundram, where Subrahmanya’s temple is built against the face of an imposing rocky hill. During the annual Karttigai festival in November-December, a big lamp burning oil and ghee is lit on top of the hill, which has two peaks. On one peak there is a Muslim shrine, the tomb of Sikandar, which has always attracted Hindu as well as Muslim worshippers, and the Munnani demanded that the lamp be lit next to the tomb, instead of on the other peak beside a small Pillaiya¯r (Ganesha) temple, where it had been lit for many years before. After intervention by the Collector, the HR& CE Department, and the Madras High Court, which ordered the lamp to be lit in the usual place, the Munnani was forced to back down, and a large police presence in Tirupparankundram prevented any disturbance, although Rama Gopalan (who replaced Rajagopalan as the Munnani’s state president) still claimed a victory for “Hindus” against “anti-Hindu” forces. Every year at Karttigai, the Munnani has fruitlessly reiterated its demand, and in 1998, a newspaper report stated that the festival “used to draw good crowds in the past” but is now a “police festival.”64 At Tirupparankundram, there is a historical dispute about ownership of the hill, and the Munnani tried to argue that an old court judgment supported its position.65 But this was a diversionary tactic, and its cam••

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paign to move the lamp next to the tomb was plainly an attempt to replicate the Ayodhya dispute on a smaller scale, by claiming that a Hindu ritual site should be restored because it had been displaced by a Muslim holy place. The Tirupparankundram campaign also resembled one pursued by the Shiv Sena, the leading Hindu nationalist organization in Mumbai and much of Maharashtra. Near Thane, north of Mumbai, there is a hill with a Muslim tomb on top that, like Sikandar’s at Tirupparankundram, attracts many Hindu worshippers, especially at the annual festival. In 1988, the Shiv Sena began to claim that the tomb was built over a destroyed Hindu shrine, demanded the “liberation” of the hill, and deliberately attacked the site’s eclectic appeal by portraying it as purely Muslim and hence definitively non-Hindu (Hansen 2001: 107–9). In Tirupparankundram, the Munnani did not claim that Sikandar’s tomb lay on a Hindu site, but its campaign clearly implied, as in Thane, that the tomb was purely Muslim, so that Hindus should not want to visit it. The message as always was that Hindus and Muslims form two completely different groups, and any mixed devotion or worship should end in order to strengthen Hindu unity.66 Compared with Thane, let alone Ayodhya, Tirupparankundram has never excited large numbers of Hindus, even in the local area, probably because the lamp’s position makes no real difference to the Karttigai festival. Unlike its promotion of Vinayaka Chaturthi, therefore, the Munnani’s Tirupparankundram campaign has mostly been a failure, even though the organization insists that it will not give up until it has won. The Tirupparankundram temple priests (and their relatives and colleagues in Madurai) were strongly opposed to the Munnani’s campaign in 1994, and as far as I know they have never altered their view. The priests were angry that fear of violence and the police presence kept many devotees away, so that their normally high earnings at the festival were reduced, but they also objected strongly to outsiders telling them to alter a ritual. In negotiations with government officials and Munnani representatives, the priests argued that a traditional ritual should not be changed and that there were no Agamic rules about the lamp that would support any change. The Munnani’s elderly Brahman lawyer in Madurai, who attended these meetings, was dismissive about the priests and later told me that they were not Agamic experts, although the priests’ claim was no falser than his own inaccurate assertion that relevant Agamic rules about the Karttigai lamp exist, owing to its importance at the Tiruvannamalai festival (cf. L’Hernault and Reiniche 1999: 108, 114–5). In my interview with the lawyer, he combined coolly rational argument with fiery denunciation of Muslims, but only when I referred to the Tirupparankundram priests did he become angry, saying that a quarrel between “brothers” should not be investigated by a foreigner. This outburst obvi-

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ously reflected distaste for my probing, but behind it, I think, there was also some scorn for Hindu priests who aligned themselves with government agencies that were not defending “Hindu” interests. From the priests’ point of view, though, the Munnani in Tirupparankundram was trying to interfere with a temple tradition just like so many other political and bureaucratic meddlers. At the local level, therefore, in both Madurai and Tirupparankundram, the priests’ attitude toward AIADMK politicians and Hindu Munnani activists varied. This is not at all surprising, but it is worth stressing that in this case, as in others, people’s general sympathy for Hindu nationalism is strongly affected by their own interests in their own locality, and is not driven by unqualified enthusiasm, let alone religious fanaticism. For the most part, Hindu nationalists (like other political activists) succeed when they align their campaigns with local interests and exploit local divisions, and they fail when they do not.

The Priests and the Minakshi Temple Administration Let me now return to the Minakshi Temple, and specifically to the priests’ relationship with the Temple administration, the Devasthanam, the agency of the state with which they have the closest connection. The priests have always been opposed to governmental control of the Minakshi Temple, and particularly to what they regard as the administration’s illegitimate interference in their affairs. I have previously discussed these matters at some length (SG, ch. 5 and passim), and none of the priests’ complaints and objections as I heard them in 1976–77 and 1980 have diminished. In those years, though, several senior priests could remember the days before the government took over the Temple in 1937, as well as their humiliation during the temple-entry dispute in 1939–45. By the mid1990s, almost all these older men were dead and the vast majority of priests had never known a time when the Temple was independent of the government and they actually enjoyed more rights and privileges. Hence in the 1990s, unlike the earlier period, when complaining about the Tamilnadu government, the HR&CE Department, and the Temple administration—and sometimes about the politically appointed Temple trustees as well—the priests much less frequently referred to the “good old days” before 1937.67 Whenever I have been in Madurai, I have heard repeated complaints that the Executive Officer and other officials interfere with the conduct of rituals, and this is often said to be due to pressure from trustees, politicians, and other rich or influential people. Frequently, there are complaints that VIPs, supported by Temple officials, can get private worship

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done inside Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s shrines when public worship is in progress, even though this is not allowed for anyone else. Sometimes, too, such people are allowed to delay periods of daily worship because they say they want to attend and then turn up late. From time to time, there are specific incidents that are regarded as more serious because they break the rules governing public worship, like one in 1988 when an insistent devotee wanted to present a colored sari to Minakshi at arttaja¯mam, the penultimate period of daily worship, even though she always wears a white sari then, so that a priest was ordered to cover the white sari with the donated colored one. There are also incidents that priests cite as evidence of ignorant incompetence by officials, like one occasion in 1991 when a water pot dripping to cool Sundareshwara’s linga was left in place on the wrong day. One priest said that a senior HR&CE official had come to the conclusion that the government’s difficulties were caused by overheated lingas, and that is why he wrongly ordered extra cooling of Sundareshwara.68 Sometimes, those in charge appear to ignore the Temple’s rules entirely; thus in 2002, some priests told me with particular annoyance that policewomen on duty in the Temple were often ordered by their superior officers into the innermost areas where nobody suffering bodily pollution should go. But some of these policewomen are Muslims and Christians who probably never observe menstrual pollution, and in any case it is impossible for the priests to check whether the rule is being broken. Commonly, too, especially during elaborate festival rituals, supervisors appointed by the administration clearly do not know what is meant to be happening. In addition, there are complaints that most supervisors never care whether a ritual is done properly anyway, so that unacceptable errors and shortcuts are readily tolerated, while some temple workers are allowed to neglect their duties. Although frequent, these incidents and complaints about them may look fairly trivial, and it is true that very few devotees would ever notice that anything was wrong. In the priests’ eyes, however, such incidents are cumulatively important, because official meddling trespasses on their prerogatives and, most crucially, it prevents rituals from being performed in accordance with the Temple’s traditions and Agamic rules. Yet the priests endlessly criticize themselves as well for their own failure to stand up to officials and to insist that rituals must always be carried out properly. Repeatedly, priests say that it is their own fault that they have let politicians, bureaucrats, and other influential people get away with meddling because they have not protested vigorously enough. Sometimes priests do tell officials and VIPs that they cannot have what they want, but this does not happen very often. Usually the priests put the blame for these failures on their own internal divisions, which means that

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they cannot rely on each other’s support, and the chief priests and other senior men cannot effectively represent them as a united group to the administration. They also acknowledge that their own association, the Adishaiva Shivacharya Sangam, which was founded in 1971, has been ineffective in representing them to the Temple administration. Most priests have never shown any active interest in the association, and its office holders have never overcome their colleagues’ apathy. Individual priests, especially more senior or knowledgeable ones, are able to discuss issues of concern with administration officials, but as a group the priesthood is weak when facing the Executive Officer and his staff. In the Temple, the priests are almost always extremely deferential toward the trustees and senior officials, and I was often struck by the contrast between their respectful and sometimes obsequious behavior in public and their vitriolic complaints in private. Often, priests avoid interaction with those in charge of the Temple by simply keeping out of their way. But active resistance is rare. In the mid-1980s, one younger priest did show some dissent in an incident that is still remembered well. During Minakshi’s marriage in the Chittirai festival, the Temple trustee was making a speech and the priest got bored, so he shouted the command that tells the musicians to start playing during a ritual; they duly did so and the trustee was forced to stop speaking. The trustee was so angry that he then tried to have the priest suspended from duty, although this was prevented by senior priests who intervened to plead on his behalf. When I first heard this story, I expressed my admiration for the rebellious priest, but I soon realized that my opinion was not shared by his colleagues, who regarded his behavior as crazy, because it could only cause trouble to both him and the rest of them. This is of course a realistic attitude toward the realities of power in the Temple among men who earn their livelihood in it, and like other Indians who have to deal with the state and its political or bureaucratic institutions (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 25), almost all Minakshi Temple priests are pragmatic realists, not romantic resisters.

Corruption in the Temple In addition to complaints about interference, the priests regularly make allegations about corruption against both the Temple’s trustees and officials. In 1976–77, some priests alleged that during the previous DMK regime, officials were stealing from the Temple, but throughout the emergency, corruption was probably much reduced, and I heard little about it. Admittedly, this may have been partly because nobody wanted to discuss such sensitive matters during the emergency and partly because I was concentrating on collecting data about other things. From 1980 onward,

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however, whenever I visited Madurai, I was usually told a few stories about pecuniary corruption in the administration. Yet all these tales were about routine, low-level “retail” corruption by staff who “swallow” money belonging to the Temple. Thus, I was told, they have taken kickbacks from contractors, pocketed income from Temple lands and other property, fiddled auctions in the Temple, taken cuts from offerings to the deities, run swindles with private worship tickets, and so on. The Minakshi Temple, one priest told me in 1984, is like a “gold mine,” so that a supervisor who paid a lot of money to secure a transfer to the Temple probably recouped his investment quickly. By 1991, the priests’ complaints about corruption and demands for bribes (lan˜cam) seemed to have become more vociferous, probably because it was starting to affect them more closely. It was then I learned that for some time they had been required to pay Rs 2,000 to Rs 3,000 for authorization of a new priest’s consecration ritual. For the first time then I also heard about “donations” for jobs, because a Brahman temple servant had recently paid Rs 10,000 to the administration to obtain a vacant post. It is impossible to measure either the extent or growth of retail corruption in the Temple, but I do not doubt its existence, even though—as Jonathan Parry argues (2000: 30)—the most solid fact about corruption all over India is the belief that it has worsened. But in any case, this belief is shared by the priests, who also, like other Indians, see corruption as a more or less inevitable fact of public life.69 Thus despite their grumbling about payments for consecration rituals, the priests have always handed over the money. When I was in Madurai in 1994–95, however, complaints about accrescent corruption reached a new pitch. In the first place, it was said, routine corruption had greatly increased and spread everywhere. Nobody could procure a post without handing over a substantial “donation” to the administration, allegedly up to Rs 25,000 for a chanter or temple servant, who were each paid Rs 1,600 per month in 1994–95; by 2000, the amount was Rs 30,000, which is one key reason why there are no longer any chanters in the Temple (see chapter 2). The priests were still paying for their consecrations, but now had to pay Rs 1,000 to have their names entered on the official service register kept by clerks to record their income from private worship. Actually, missing names in the register have never seemed to matter very much, but priests had started to complain that the clerks were fiddling the books or demanding bribes. Devotees, it was also said, were forced to pay extra for high-value private worship tickets, so that clerks could pocket the difference. Some priests even complained that some other priests were defrauding them in various ways, for example, by swallowing money belonging to the priests’ association. In a perverse but maybe logical trickle-down development, the Temple’s guards and

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watchmen were said to have started a new protection racket, whereby they took a cut from the beggars’ earnings; beggars who did not pay were thrown out of the Temple and those who did were allowed to stay, even though the administration was insisting that all beggars would be evicted to stop them from pestering devotees. To my particular surprise, a longserving hereditary supervisor responsible for overseeing rituals had also been forced to retire, after he was accused of stealing jewels from the Temple in 1992. Some priests believed that the supervisor was framed by officials in the administration who were actually guilty of the theft, and others thought that he might have been culpable. (This supervisor had long been one of my most helpful and reliable informants, but he understandably avoided the depressing subject of his retirement when I went to talk to him.) Whatever the truth may be, the significant feature of this case is that an accusation of wrongdoing had been leveled against a man whose ancestors had served the Temple for centuries, not just another clerk or bureaucrat who had never understood the difference between the Minakshi Temple and, say, the Public Works Department. Let me stress again that I have no evidence to confirm any of the allegations above and that I am actually describing the “popular discourse” of corruption, which may seriously exaggerate its extent, as Parry (2000) suggests. This qualification applies equally to the alleged racketeering of Rajan Chellappa and Omar described earlier, which was of course far more serious than any of the relatively smaller-scale corruption inside the Temple. In general terms, one could argue—as the priests and many people in Madurai did—that malfeasance in the Temple in the 1990s, especially corrupt seizure of its most important and valuable contracts, was all of a piece with what was happening throughout Tamilnadu and much of the rest of India as well. As Sunil Khilnani (1997: 98) observes, “[L]iberalization seemed to nourish still more magnificent scales of corruption,” and when so many top politicians and government officials were apparently pillaging public assets to amass huge illegal fortunes, nobody could expect a great institution like the Minakshi Temple to remain immune. This straightforward conclusion is certainly plausible, but peculation in the Temple was probably exacerbated by Jayalalitha’s personal politicization of temple administration. Although I have no direct evidence to confirm a link, it seems likely that her assumption of greater political control at the expense of the HR&CE Department encouraged other politicians— as well as trustees who are political appointees—to make parallel moves against local temple administrations. The DMK government in 1996 formally restored the Department’s old powers, although it would be naı¨ve to suggest that this automatically improved matters; in 2002, a senior HR&CE official in Chennai (citing some huge rackets under investigation) told me that corruption remained widespread, and that politicians

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and trustees of all parties were constantly interfering in the administration of temples.70 Nevertheless, I was informed, restoring the Department’s powers in 1996 did improve the position to some extent, and at this time contractual racketeering was brought to an end in the Minakshi Temple, so that Rajan Chellappa and Omar could no longer profit from it. From a longer-term historical perspective, events in the early 1990s resembled those in the 1920s and the years before, when corrupt and feuding politicians, merchants, and assorted magnates (including one prominent Muslim) controlled the Minakshi Temple (Baker 1975: 76; 1976: 129). One of the politicians was the ruthless R. S. Naidu, who eventually defeated his rivals by becoming the Temple’s sole Manager in 1934 and its first Executive Officer in 1937 (Baker 1976: 267, 271). At that time, a strong Temple administration headed by Naidu finally ousted the politicians and their associates, but in the 1990s they regained part of their power and something like the old racketeering resurfaced. Thus despite their complaints about Devasthanam officials, the increased corruption during Jayalalitha’s regime, which the priests so deplored, probably was partly caused by the administration’s weakness in the face of a powerful politician and his allies. In the early twentieth century, when Muslims and Christians commonly sat on temple management committees throughout the region, protests about corruption in the Minakshi Temple may not have paid much attention to the Muslim faith of one of the men involved. In the 1990s, on the other hand, complaints about the Temple contracts also focused explicitly on the fact that one of the racketeers, Omar, was a Muslim. This was a key element in the Hindu Munnani’s protests; similarly, no priest ever spoke about Omar without objecting to him as a Muslim as well, although as far as I can tell, the vehemence of the priests’ complaints also reflected the general hardening of attitudes toward Muslims apparent in Tamilnadu after the demolition of the Ayodhya mosque. Thus in 1991, when I interviewed a number of priests about the Hindu nationalists’ Ayodhya campaign, there was lukewarm support for it and no serious antipathy toward Muslims. Three years later, attitudes had altered markedly, so that in 1994–95, despite claims that they enjoyed good relationships with Muslims who worship in the Temple (as many still do), numerous priests recited the standard litany of complaint about Muslims: they are violent, fanatical, polygamous, have too many children, are favored by the pseudosecular state, and so on. The transformation was similar to that noticed by Hansen among Hindus in Mumbai following the mosque’s demolition and ensuing communal riots in 1992–93: “[A]fter those events took place it was though an entire layer of moderation and civility were removed, and a more brutal language and sentiment appeared” (2001: 119). Most Minakshi Temple priests expressed their views

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fairly calmly, although some ranted and raved, but no priest to whom I spoke ever dismissed anti-Muslim complaints as unfounded. In their eyes, even though he was allied to a Hindu politician, Omar’s alleged involvement in the Munnani leader’s assassination proved their point about Muslim violence, as well as the justice behind the Munnani’s campaign to cleanse the temple of Muslim involvement, even if it did nothing much to rectify the fundamental iniquity of governmental control.

Conclusion: Hindu Revivalism and the Public Sphere The priests have never accepted the rightfulness of the Tamilnadu government’s control over the Minakshi Temple, because, in the final analysis, they do not recognize the modern state and its agencies, in the shape of the HR&CE Department and the Temple administration, as legitimate successors to the Hindu kings of the past (SG, 134). The invocation of kingship—which is also salient to the priests’ emphasis on their hereditary rights in the Temple, as we saw in chapter 2—always lies behind their denial that politicians and bureaucrats have any legitimate authority within the Minakshi Temple. The priests’ attitude to governmental control is reinforced by what they see as persistent interference, especially in the performance of ritual, by people who neither know nor care about it. As a result of all this meddling, say the priests, rituals are often not done properly in accordance with Temple tradition and Agamic rules, so that Shiva’s directions are flouted. (For HR&CE officials in particular, as chapter 4 showed, the problem is primarily priestly ignorance, not outsiders’ attempts to correct it.) Matters are said to be made worse by the greedy attitude of too many people involved in running the Temple, and complaints about corruption have intensified since the late 1970s, reaching their peak in the mid-1990s. Obviously, as they usually admit, the priests’ objections to the government’s control of the Temple are directly related to their own interests and are not selflessly motivated by a concern with principles of legitimacy. Furthermore, the priests do not absolve themselves of all blame for malpractice in the Temple, and they mostly accommodate themselves to the reality of political and bureaucratic power, rather than vainly trying to resist it. Overall, though, for reasons of both ideology and interest, the priests’ view of the HR&CE Department and the Temple administration—the state institutions that they have to deal with on an everyday basis—is consistently negative. On the other hand, because its policies toward temples and religion have become much less anti-Brahman than they were during DMK rule in the 1970s, the priests no longer feel seriously threatened by the Tamilnadu government. In particular, there is little concern today about any real

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threat to their monopolistic hereditary rights over public worship in the Temple. Moreover, during the last two decades, especially since Jayalalitha’s AIADMK government was installed in 1991, the Minakshi Temple priests have benefited in several ways from Hindu revivalism and the state’s promotion of Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism, particularly because it has been strongly focused on ritualistic temple religion. Most obviously, as explained in chapter 2, the priests have gained economically from the extra work made available not only by many more temple renovation rituals but also by the increasing frequency of consecration rituals for newly built temples, the growing popularity of the golden car procession, and other expensive rituals inside the Minakshi Temple, and the rising demand for Ganapati (or Lakshmi and Navagraha) homas. The homa rituals are mainly done in homes and business premises, not temples, but they are a notable part of the expansion in ritual activity characterizing the Hindu revivalism of recent years. Accompanying the rise of contemporary Hindu nationalism, the character of the public sphere has changed in India, including Tamilnadu, so that it has become increasingly occupied by the practice and expression of religion. Hansen argues that “the public spheres in secular India remained full of religious signs and practices” (1999: 53), so that when the internal contradictions of the secular state and Indian democracy intensified, the public sphere became ever more permeated by a progressively politicized religion. Tanika Sarkar, on the other hand, sees the development as a longer-term one, the outcome of a process whereby “modern Hinduism, over 200 colonial and post-colonial years, has systematically tried to absorb the public and political spheres within its fold” (2001: 414). But however far back we place the origin of changes now under way, both Hansen and Sarkar, like other scholars, agree that while Hindu nationalism has been strengthening, the public sphere has been transformed so that it is increasingly religious. In identifying the changes, the comparison with Islam is illuminating, partly because politicized religion in some Muslim countries has become so powerful that the effects are more evident. A distinction is commonly drawn between the religious traditions of Islam and politicized, ideological “Islamism,” which has developed through “objectification,” to use Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori’s term; in this process, “basic questions”—such as “What is my religion?” or “Why is it important to my life?”—“come to the fore in the consciousness of large numbers of believers” (1996: 38). In much of the Muslim world by the closing decades of the twentieth century, the outcome of objectification has been the emergence of very large numbers of self-conscious Islamists, “who are committed to implementing their vision of Islam as a corrective to ‘un-Islamic’ practices” (ibid.: 44). Yet none of these developments should be under-

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stood in narrowly political terms, a point well illustrated by the case of Egypt. In that country, as Lila Abu-Lughod emphasizes (like Eickelman and Piscatori), Islamism “highlights self-consciousness about Islamic identity and the very deliberate way that people who adopt this identity want society to conform to Muslim values”; for many Islamists themselves, too, “what is so central . . . [is] becoming pious” (1999: xiii). Furthermore, as Gregory Starrett explains, Islamism (or the “Islamic Trend”), “far from being an essentially violent fringe political movement, is pervasive, persistent, and normal,” so that it is “an immense counterculture,” especially among educated Egyptians (1998: 90). And a crucial result of Islamism, as well as its most visible manifestation, is that “[m]ore people are praying, more people are reading about Islam and listening to its preachers, more people are discovering consciously the salience of religious ideas and practices to their private and public lives, than did a generation ago” (ibid.: 91). The ideology of Hindutva is also a product of a growing self-consciousness about Hinduism and Hindu identity coming to the fore, even though there are obviously major contrasts with Islamism in any Muslim country. Thus among Muslims, a key development was popular access to the Quran and textual sources as the traditional scholars’ monopoly was broken (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 43); this demotic development has no true parallel among Hindus, even though the Bhagavad Gı¯ta¯ in particular (but not, of course, texts like the Agamas) has sometimes been represented as the “Hindu Bible.” Obviously, too, the basic questions about what religion is and why it matters actually signify something very different for Hindus and Muslims. Nonetheless, if the neologism may be permitted, it is useful to make a similar distinction between Hinduism and “Hindutvaism” and then to insist that the latter—even if less fully than Islamism in Egypt—is also acquiring a pervasive, persistent, and normal cultural presence. Furthermore, if Islam is replaced by Hinduism and praying by performing rituals (especially elaborate ones), Starrett’s sentence as quoted above quite accurately describes the changes that have accompanied the Hindu revivalism so prominent in Tamilnadu since the early 1990s. In the final analysis, this revivalism is about Hindus in contemporary India discovering religion’s salience in their own lives, both private and public. Some priests said that Hindu Munnani campaigning and its promotion of Vinayaka Chaturthi as a public festival have encouraged more people to conduct rituals, especially Ganapati homas, but whether such a direct link really exists scarcely matters. What does matter is the reciprocal connection between ideological Hindutvaism and the complex of beliefs and practices that is Hinduism; this means that the strengthening of Hindutvaism is coupled with heightened consciousness about Hinduism and con-

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viction about its salience among Hindus, as well as growing certainty that Hinduism is and should be filling the public sphere. Thus Hindus ought to celebrate their religion publicly and collectively as well as privately and individually, and Hinduism should be a major strand in the fabric of civil society as well as central to the nation-state, even if (like the priests) many Hindus object to how the government actually intervenes in temples and other religious institutions. It is in the context of the changing relationship between Hinduism and the public sphere that state support for Hindu revivalism finds favor among the Minakshi Temple priests, even though the state as institutionally represented by the HR&CE Department and the Temple administration is overwhelmingly regarded with hostility. In the religious politics of the last two decades, the priests have been winners rather than losers, because Hindu revivalism and the Tamilnadu government’s promotion of Brahmanical Sanskritic Hinduism have enhanced their role in society. Almost certainly, Brahman priests are no more popular than they ever were, but they are now seen as more important. Or more exactly, the priests believe that they are seen as more important and this has improved the selfesteem and self-confidence of many Minakshi Temple priests, especially the younger, educated men who emphasize their own professionalism. In 1991, Thangam Bhattar insisted that during the previous decade, ordinary people progressively realized that their lives would never be improved by governments and politicians, but only by God. That is why people have turned back to religion and why anti-Brahmanism has declined. This in itself is scarcely convincing as a sociological explanation, but it is an intelligent man’s comment about how the public and political sphere has been remade by Hinduism, and it is revealing about the priests’ own view of the world and how it changed in the 1980s. Compared with the past, the priests are better able to reassert themselves as the guardians and servants of the ultimate sources of power: not governments and political leaders, but Minakshi, Sundareshwara, and the other great deities. Thus when they dismissed the Tamil archana controversy in 1998 as mere politicking, it was partly because they were no longer worried about the DMK, but it also stemmed from their reading of religious politics and their confidence that in the late 1990s, unlike the 1970s, their status as Brahman priests who praise the deities in Sanskrit was no longer a liability, but a valuable asset.

Six Modernity, Traditionalism, and the State

IN THIS BOOK, I have discussed the renewal of the Minakshi Temple priests’ fortunes since the late 1970s, which has reversed their decline during the previous four decades. One of the most significant developments during the last twenty years has been the priests’ growing traditionalism, for they now more forcefully and articulately express their ideological commitment to the authority and legitimacy of tradition, especially as embodied in the Agamas, which are believed to contain Shiva’s own words, but also in the ancient customs of the Temple and its priesthood. Yet priestly traditionalism accompanies the adoption of increasingly modernist values and attitudes, as the examination of Agamic education in chapter 4 particularly shows, and this apparently paradoxical amalgam is now discussed in the light of some of the relevant literature. Throughout this book, as we have also seen, the priests’ position has been perpetually affected, more or less directly, by political ideology, government policies, court judgments, and bureaucratic regulation. The state, in other words, has always been a potent force in the priests’ lives, and I begin by recapitulating the history.

The Minakshi Temple Priests and the State: A Brief History1 In the Tamil country, more extensively than elsewhere in India, temples have been crucial institutions for the state for fifteen hundred years. In the precolonial Hindu kingdoms, the king’s relationship with temples in his realm was vital to the constitution of sovereignty itself; this was particularly clear in Madurai, the Nayaka capital from the early sixteenth century, where the king—who ruled as the regent of Minakshi and Sundareshwara, divine monarchs of the ancient Pandyan kingdom—was also the principal patron and protector of their Temple. After two centuries, the Nayaka dynasty collapsed, and from 1736 Madurai was under the intermittent control of Muslim chieftains until it was ceded to the East India Company in 1801. In the early colonial period, the Company government assumed the former rulers’ duty to protect the temples, so that in Madurai as elsewhere it became involved in temple affairs. In 1833, however, the Company’s directors in London ordered the government in India to withdraw from “pagan” institutions, and eventually the 1863 Religious En-

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dowments Act stipulated that Hindu temples were to be handed over to local management committees. In the Madras Presidency, though, the government never completely disentangled itself from the temples, and defects in the 1863 Act quickly appeared as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, complaints about mismanagement became louder, and pressure for legislation to control temple trustees steadily grew, especially from the social and political elite in Madras. In 1926, following legislation, the Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Board was set up, giving the government new powers over temple management. By then, allegations about the corruption and incompetence of the Minakshi Temple’s trustees and managers, which were exacerbated by their constant factionalism, politicking, and lawsuits, were as persistent as anywhere in the region; the final outcome was that the Board assumed control of the Temple in 1937, and R. S. Naidu, a powerful local politician who had become the Temple’s manager, was appointed as its first Executive Officer. The rights and privileges of the Minakshi Temple priests, most especially the chief priests, probably grew after the end of Nayaka rule and with it any effective, direct royal control over the Temple. There is some evidence that Nayaka kings and ministers actively intervened in the priests’ affairs, but British officials did not; there is also documentary evidence from the nineteenth century that the British acknowledged the authority of the chief priests, whose ceremonial precedence within the Temple was not in doubt. The most important single change affecting the priests during the colonial era was the simultaneous regulation of their public-worship rights and tax-free inam lands by the newly developing Anglo-Indian legal system, which probably encouraged the priests to conceptualize their rights as hereditary property in a way they had not done before. The law also eventually led to outcomes—most notably the Tirucculi priests’ acquisition of Kulacekara rights—that were and still are highly contentious. Yet it remains very hard to evaluate how much was really changed by the legal system; long ago, the Vikkira Pantiyas were outsiders given rights then belonging to the Kulacekaras by the ruler of Madurai, so that the entry of new priestly groups is not unprecedented, and it is likely that the modern law modified the language of priestly rights at least as much as their substance. All in all, though, in the two centuries from the 1730s to the 1930s, the best assessment is that after Nayaka rule ended, the priests became less subject to external interference by Madurai’s rulers; their rights and privileges within the Minakshi Temple were also enhanced, or at least consolidated, and they were then left largely untouched by the colonial government. Some disputes among priests themselves, notably that between Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras over their consecration rituals, were arbitrated by British officials, and others were settled by the courts, but none of these decisions diminished the

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priests’ prerogatives overall. Until 1937, moreover, the priests were largely insulated from the disputes that enveloped the Minakshi Temple’s trustees and managers. In 1932, the Viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, made an official tour of the Madras Presidency. A photograph kept in a priest’s house records his visit to the Minakshi Temple; it shows the Viceroy in the center of the front row, with Lady Willingdon to his left, and to his right (apparently in order of seniority) the one Vikkira Pantiya and two Kulacekara chief priests, with another senior Vikkira Pantiya priest. To Lady Willingdon’s left stands a British official and then one of the Temple’s trustees.2 The priests all wore the colored turbans that they still put on at particularly important rituals and other ceremonial events. It is inconceivable that the rank order preserved in this photograph, in which the chief priests stood next to India’s supreme ruler, on his superior right side, could have been unintentional. It also represents an order that has completely disappeared. An equivalent photograph today would show the trustees and the Executive Officer beside an important representative of the government, and any priest who was present would be relegated to the sidelines. Five years after Willingdon’s visit to Madurai, in 1937, but more especially during their strike over temple entry between 1939 and 1945, the Minakshi Temple priests were confronted by the power of the state and its agencies, as personified by Naidu, and they mostly misunderstood what was happening, because they failed to realize that the Executive Officer, backed by the Congress ministry in Madras, was determined to enforce Harijan admission. During the six years when the priests were absent, the administration greatly expanded its control over the Temple’s internal organization, so that a massive and irreversible alteration in the balance of power occurred. By 1945, although the priests were not deprived of their hereditary rights in the public worship, they had lost a lot of money and many were heavily in debt. Furthermore, they had been forced to accept the authority of the Executive Officer and his tightened supervision of their work in the Temple. The chief priests had also lost the ceremonial privileges symbolizing their preeminence, especially their right to greet important visitors such as the Viceroy and their right to carry the scepter at the coronation rituals of Minakshi and Sundareshwara in the Chittirai and Avani Mula festivals, a role that they probably assumed at the end of the Nayaka period. When Naidu decided to carry the scepter in 1941, he was asserting that the Executive Officer, as the government’s representative, was now the Nayaka king’s successor in the Temple, and this change was still bitterly resented by older priests in the 1970s. After Independence, the priests’ tax-free lands were confiscated, the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department grew steadily more interventionist, criticism of priestly incompetence was

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persistent, anti-Brahmanism became more intensive, and in 1970 the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government legislated to abolish the hereditary priesthood. By 1976–77, the Minakshi Temple priests had suffered forty years of loss, retreat, and decline, including a recent threat to their very existence. It is therefore understandable that demoralization was widespread among the priests, so that most of them said that they hoped their sons would find better jobs outside the Temple. Their community’s best prospect, it seemed, was to come to terms with the contemporary world by trying to give up their traditional vocation and find alternative employment. The modern state, especially as it had developed since the final years of British rule, had plainly harmed the priesthood and there was no reason to expect any improvement. The priests looked like casualties of modernity, for their status and role in the Temple and society seemingly derived anachronistically from a previous era, in which sovereignty was vested in Hindu kings conceptualized as the deities’ regents, and Adishaiva priests (notwithstanding their relative inferiority to other Brahmans) enjoyed their prerogatives within a more stable, hierarchical social and religious order. As it turned out, though, the priests were not casualties at all, and since the late 1970s, their position in the Minakshi Temple—and hence their morale—has considerably improved. As this book has sought to show, underlying that improvement is a particular conjuncture of economic liberalization and, in the politico-religious domain, declining anti-Brahmanism in Tamilnadu coupled with a wave of Hindu revivalism that is closely connected with rising Hindu nationalism across much of India. In addition, the priests’ growing commitment to Agamic education has made a crucial contribution to their renewal, and here, too, the state’s role is important. Promoting priestly education, as advocated by Hindu reformists, has long been official policy in Tamilnadu, and despite their antagonism toward governmental control of temples, the priests’ growing commitment to Agamic education partly reflects their recognition that the reformist elite’s long-standing criticism of their ignorance is valid and the HR&CE Department’s policy is justified. To sum up, from the period of Nayaka rule to the present day, the state has always had a vital bearing on the position of the Minakshi Temple priests. This has been true not only when rulers, governments, and officials have directly intervened in the Temple, but also when they appeared to be leaving it alone, as in most of the colonial period. It remains true today as well, even when, for instance, the priests decide for themselves to send their sons to privately run Agamic schools or choose to earn money by performing rituals outside their own Temple.

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The State and Modernity According to Sudipta Kaviraj, “The state is utterly central to the story of modernity in India” (2000: 141). His view is widely shared, and there are many reasons why so much recent intellectual attention has been paid to the question of the state and modernity in India, but one of the most salient is the rise of Hindu nationalism and the “crisis of secularism,” coupled with the resurgent politics of caste accompanying the growing mobilization of the backward classes. These developments have disturbed complacent assumptions about the decline of traditional religion and caste in a modern or modernizing state, although it is worth emphasizing that those assumptions were being contested by perceptive scholars such as M. N. Srinivas (1966), even when the Nehruvian state looked much more firmly established. Moreover, the “crisis of the state” in contemporary India is arguably more a “crisis of theory,” because the state, while becoming increasingly important in society, is “doing things for which no precedents are found in Western history or theory” (Kaviraj 2001: 316– 7). The problem of theoretical translation is a critical one for the debate about the state and modernity, and we return to it below. Long before latter-day Hindu nationalists turned the attack on “pseudo-secularism” into a call to arms, the apparently troublesome paradox of the secular state’s intervention in religious affairs was under scrutiny. One prime example of intervention is obviously the regulation of Hindu temples and other religious endowments as pursued most vigorously in Tamilnadu. The regulation of religious endowments was prominent in J. Duncan M. Derrett’s particularly subtle discussion (1968: chs. 13, 14, 16), written in the 1960s, in which he argued that the protection of religion is an ancient obligation of the Indian state, and that the modern state and its judicial system have discharged this function with relative efficiency and rationality. As it affects the public practice or expression of religion, insisted Derrett, “neither Indian history in general nor Hinduism itself denies the validity of the state’s jurisdiction” (ibid.: 512); hence the secular state’s involvement in the Hindu religious domain is justified, if not imperative, and viewed from a properly Indian perspective there is nothing truly objectionable or paradoxical about it. Not everyone agreed with Derrett of course, but in analyzing governmental control of temples in Tamilnadu, Franklin Presler (1987) and myself in SG adopted a broadly similar line. Thus we both argued that there was a clear continuity between the precolonial rulers’ “protection” of Hindu temples and their regulation by modern governments, despite some significant discontinuities; in particular, as Arjun Appadurai argued in his study of a major temple in Madras in the colonial period, “temples were,

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at no time, fundamental, in a normative sense, for the establishment or expansion of British authority in South India” (1981: 105; cf. SG, 109). Appadurai pointed out (1981: 220–3) that questions of ideology and culture were salient here, not just competition between local political and economic elites, as Christopher Baker (1975; 1976) and D. A. Washbrook (1976) had implied. Washbrook (ibid.: 190), for instance, referred to the Dharma Rakshana Sabha’s campaign to “purge the temples of sin” (a questionable biblical term) in early twentieth-century Madras. But since he paid little attention to religion in its own right, he said nothing about why mainly Brahman Congressmen were so concerned about “sinful” temple mismanagement and why their mainly non-Brahman Justice Party rivals came to share the same view, despite their ceaseless factional fighting on temple committees. Nevertheless, although Appadurai, Presler, myself, and others did pay considerable attention to religion and its ideological or cultural importance for the state in relation to political legitimacy, our focus on the role of rulers, governments, courts, and bureaucracies may have been too narrow.3 In addition, we probably underplayed the impact of Indian nationalism, cross-cut in colonial Madras by the opposition between Brahmanism and Dravidianism; certainly, this issue can be fruitfully reexamined in the light of more recent literature. In a book that has been widely cited, Partha Chatterjee contends that anticolonial nationalism made a division between the outer material and inner spiritual domains; the colonial state was kept out of the inner domain, yet it was here that “nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western” (1993: 6). Chatterjee’s book is mainly based on Bengali textual evidence, but the control of temples in Tamilnadu is discussed briefly in an article about secularism that repeats the thesis about outer and inner domains (1997: 235). Chatterjee describes the establishment of the HR&CE Department in 1951 as a particularly intrusive intervention in religious affairs, but he overlooks the literature that discusses continuities with the past. He mentions in passing that governmental control over temples began in Madras in the 1920s: “It is interesting to note that there was nationalist opposition to the move at the time” (ibid.: 238, n. 8). Yet that is a significant misreading; much Congress opposition to the HRE Act in 1926 was politicking against the Justice Party, and far more important was that the non-Brahman Justicites had adopted the Brahman Congress agenda for reform, which supporters of Subramania Aiyar’s Dharma Rakshana Sabha had been trying to press on the colonial government for several decades. Hence in Madras, far from trying to keep the colonial state out, Brahman nationalists had been actively demanding its intervention in the religious domain in order to pursue their reformist objectives, even though the first legislation to per-

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mit state intervention was brought forward by their non-Brahman, antinationalist opponents after limited self-government had been introduced. Thus the historical course of events is more accurately characterized by Kaviraj, who argues that early nationalism’s exclusionary claim over the inner religious domain acted in combination with the colonial regime’s attempted policy of noninterference or withdrawal from religious affairs, so that the eventual outcome was the creation of “a sphere of subsidiary quasi-sovereignty over society within a colonial order” (2000: 148). It was within this sphere, to which the nationalists laid claim, that the 1926 Act was passed in Madras. Chatterjee’s postulated division between the inner and outer domains has in fact been criticized by various writers. Peter van der Veer, for example, shows that the “spirituality” of the inner domain was not represented as antiscientific and antirational; indeed, concepts of “scientific” spirituality actually played a vital part in nationalism’s development. This point is well illustrated by the case of Theosophy, which played a major role in the early nationalist movement in Madras (2001: 66–77).4 Nonetheless, although the argument about inner and outer domains is defective, Chatterjee’s proposition that nationalism’s project of modernity is particularly concentrated in and on the religious domain is a powerful one, not least for the case of Tamilnadu. At the same time, any campaign over religion in early twentieth-century Madras was inseparable from the sharpening divide between Brahmanism and non-Brahmanism. Thus the Dharma Rakshana Sabha, campaigning for temple reform, was set up by Brahman nationalists, so that when non-Brahman Justicites eventually supported their program for reform and legislated in 1926, “the net effect was to broaden Brahman control and further establish the hegemonic authority of certain textual traditions and interpretations that could only be described as Brahmanic” (Dirks 2001: 256–7). Or, as V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai conclude, in the final analysis the Justicites could only challenge Brahman “temporal and spiritual” power in the temples, not Brahman authority, and the legislation to regulate temples effectively “rendered Brahminism a consensual ideology” (1998: 216). Throughout India, as Nicholas Dirks explains, the development of reformist, Brahmanical, Sanskritic Hinduism as the “authentic” tradition formed part of a colonial discourse in which caste occupied a central place, but in the Tamil region there was also a particularly acute development of the opposition between Brahman and non-Brahman castes, and hence between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical religious cults and traditions, which were invariably ranked hierarchically (Dirks 2001: ch. 8). Thus in Tamilnadu, the cultural modernity developed by Indian nationalism was not only built on compromising colonial foundations; it was also shaped by a distinctively Brah-

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manical, Sanskritic form of Hinduism emerging as dominant in policy and discourse governing the state’s regulation of temples. It is true that the long debate about temple regulation that preceded the 1926 Act was mainly couched in old and familiar terms—namely, that the state should protect temples as earlier rulers had done (Presler 1987: 29–34)—and there is nothing particularly novel about tackling corrupt and incompetent trustees. The method of regulation, however, was properly modern; in the late nineteenth century, reformists were already trying to use the Anglo-Indian legal system against fraud in the temples, and from the 1920s, the HRE Board would progressively develop into a fully fledged modern bureaucracy. Within a relatively short time, too, the new Board started (albeit mostly ineffectively) to try to develop a “professional” priesthood able to perform rituals in accordance with the Agamas. The publication of Agamic texts necessary for this program was largely the work of men in the non-Brahman neo-Shaivist movement, but the insistence on Agamic prescription plainly tended to sharpen the hierarchical distinction between Brahmanical, Sanskritic temple Hinduism and its non-Brahman, vernacular counterpart in which Sanskrit texts are not authoritative. At the same time, though, the program to reform ritual is a clear case of Weberian rationalization, whereby the universal authority of Agamic texts—now printed and increasingly conceptualized as canonical “holy books”—is made superior to the traditional practices (or malpractices) of local priestly groups. As time went on, the state further intervened to promote social reform in the temples, notably Harijan temple entry, although this reform had a long, tortuous history marked by compromises and delays intended to allay “orthodox” Hindu concerns. Nonetheless, especially after 1926, a major reformulation of temple Hinduism was under way, and it formed an important element in the nationalist modernity emerging in Tamilnadu during the late colonial period. Temples, reformed so that they are managed well and staffed by diligent priests competent in ritual performance, could never be relics of the past in Tamilnadu; instead, they were and are institutions central to the modern nationalist imagination.5 It was therefore inevitable that priests—especially those in grand Sanskritic temples—were caught up in the multidimensional process of modernization, which was pursued through temple reform in Tamilnadu. Actually, the Minakshi Temple priests were mostly insulated from this process until 1937. And two years later, when they began their disastrous six-year strike over temple entry, all but one of the priests fought against the powerful state forces mobilized against them. In a very real sense, as they vainly tried to defend a traditional, hierarchical order whose time had passed, the priests were resisting the hegemonic, nationalist modernity that was so suddenly overtaking them. Indeed, were they not reac-

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tionary Brahmans denying civil rights to the more deserving and authentic subalterns excluded from the Temple, the priests themselves would appear eminently qualified for the “subaltern” sobriquet.6 Following their defeat in the 1940s, complaint, more than resistance, probably defined the predominant attitude of the priests, as it certainly did in the late 1970s. During the 1980s, however, their position started to improve, and one important factor has been their growing commitment to Agamic education. The outcome is that by the end of the twentieth century, the priests themselves were embracing, more fully than before, a key part of the state’s program of religious reform that had started many years earlier, before Indian Independence. How the Minakshi Temple priests are today is therefore shaped not only by relatively recent circumstances, such as economic liberalization and Hindu revivalism, but also by the long-term unfolding of an earlier project of nationalist modernity, built on its colonial precursor, whose roots lie in the late nineteenth century.

Modernity and Traditionalism Let me finally turn to some implications of the story of the Minakshi Temple priests for the general relationship between modernity and traditionalism. The modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s, with its convergence postulate that all traditional societies would eventually become modern by the same route and in the same way, is now widely discredited. Nevertheless, misconceptions about modernity, tradition, and traditionalism that are characteristically Western and indeed modernist are still commonplace in social science. Neither have they been fully dispelled by recent scholarship on “multiple” or “alternative” modernities.7 In an earlier discussion of “post-traditional” societies, which recognized the flaws of modernization theory, S. N. Eisenstadt argued that modernization stimulates traditionalism as an ideology that must be distinguished from mere adherence to tradition. In his words: “Traditionalism is not to be confused with a ‘simple’ or ‘natural’ upkeep of a given tradition. Rather, it denotes an ideological mode and stance oriented against the new symbols; it espouses certain parts of the older tradition as the only legitimate symbols of the traditional order and upholds them against ‘new’ trends” (1973: 22). In general terms, Eisenstadt’s argument is surely correct, and Bjo¨rn Wittrock extends it in his recent analysis of “multiple modernities.” Wittrock argues that modernity involves a set of institutional projects grounded in conceptual changes and “premised on new assumptions about human beings, their rights and agency” (2000: 37). Exactly what all these assumptions are and what they imply, for example, about eco-

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nomic organization and capitalism, the state and democracy, individualism and equality, rationality and reflexivity, and so on, has been endlessly debated, and I shall not pursue the matter in any detail here. Instead, I want to highlight Wittrock’s point that, irrespective of its variability, the key premises of modernity are “a set of promissory notes” that have “provided reference points that have become globally relevant” (ibid.: 55). It is these notes that underpin the democratic nation-state or the liberal market economy, for example, and although the choice of words may be coincidental, it is interesting that Sunil Khilnani, who insists that “contemporary India is unequivocally a creation of the modern world” (1997: 5), describes independent India’s wordy democratic Constitution as “a baroque legal promissory note” that “has had a commanding influence over India’s subsequent history” (ibid.: 35). The state, to reiterate, is central to Indian modernity, and the question of equality provides us with an apt illustration. The Indian Constitution’s design, according to Andre´ Be´teille (1986: 123), “may be said to put equality in the place of hierarchy and the individual in the place of caste.” “Hierarchical values are repudiated,” although “the repudiation of collective identities” is less clear-cut, because the individual’s rights are qualified and limited, especially by the policy of positive discrimination favoring the backward classes that is also written into the Constitution. Although the meaning of “equality” is variable, particularly in relation to whether it attaches to individuals or groups, Be´teille convincingly argues that the Constitution is important for modern Indian society and is not a merely rhetorical document without relevance to ordinary Indians. Thus it is certainly important for the huge numbers of educated people seeking employment in the modern sector, who increasingly recognize that, under normal conditions, equality of opportunity irrespective of caste and community ought to prevail, even if it often does not (ibid.: 124). In modern India, therefore, equality is not just a secondary or residual social fact; it is progressively displacing traditional hierarchy as a compelling value. In the case of public temples, the Constitution states that they must be open to all classes of Hindus, including ex-untouchables, and in the Minakshi Temple of course this reform had already taken place in 1939. On the other hand, the Constitution does not say that the Brahman priesthood must be thrown open to everyone, and what evidence there is suggests that few Hindus, irrespective of their social status, believe that it should. So far, too, Brahman temple priests in Tamilnadu enjoying hereditary, monopolistic rights have retained them, in spite of the DMK government’s legislation in the 1970s, and the Minakshi Temple priests are no longer very worried about any real threat to their rights. On the other hand, although they denounce any suggestion of abolition as totally ille-

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gitimate, they are well aware that hereditary rights are inconsistent with the norms of equality of opportunity that they, like other educated Indians, recognize as increasingly prevalent today. Indeed, the priests strongly support these norms when protesting about anti-Brahman discrimination in education and employment. With more or less cogency, articulacy, and consistency, therefore, hereditary rights now have to be defended as traditionally legitimate in the face of a premise of equality that has progressively become more and more central in Indian modernity, much as it is in, say, European or American modernity. This brief discussion of equality illustrates Wittrock’s general argument that modernity is “an age when certain structuring principles have come to define a common global condition” (2000: 55). One of these principles pertains to equality in society. None of this means that distinctive cultural traditions disappear, nor that multiple modernities are illusory, but it does mean that the interpretation and transformation of traditional concepts and institutions “cannot but take account of the commonality of the global condition of modernity” (ibid.: 55–6). Traditionalism, as exemplified by the contemporary defense of priestly hereditary rights, is therefore a product of modernity and a characteristically modern ideological orientation toward tradition and traditions. Wittrock’s argument about the “interpretation and transformation” of tradition is more nuanced than Anthony Giddens’s, which places greater emphasis on a single, “high modernity.” Thus Giddens claims that under conditions of modernity, “tradition can be justified, but only in the light of knowledge which is not itself authenticated by tradition,” and, as he bluntly puts it, “justified tradition is tradition in sham clothing and receives its identity only from the reflexivity of the modern” (1991: 38, cf. 109). Elsewhere, Giddens develops this argument by distinguishing between an earlier stage of modernization in which, typically, new traditions were invented (1994: 93), and a later, “post-traditional” order of high, global modernity in which traditions either persist as “discursively articulated and defended” or become fundamentalisms that are just asserted as “formulaic truth” (ibid.: 100). In general, therefore, unless they degenerate into fundamentalism, “traditions only persist in so far as they are made available to discursive justification” (ibid.: 105).8 Giddens has of course been widely criticized; Roland Robertson, for example, concludes that his overall argument is no more than an updated version of the old convergence theory of unitary modernization (1992: 145), and Paul Heelas emphasizes that the evidence shows that “detraditionalization” under modernity is commonly accompanied by the maintenance, rejuvenation, or construction of old or new traditions (1996: 2–3). We might add, too, that flat statements about a unitary phenomenon labeled “fundamentalism” are belied by the data on its diversity, which has actu-

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ally led many writers to conclude that the term obscures more than it reveals, even when it is not just being used as a bogey word. Yet even though these criticisms of Giddens are valid, they do not go far enough. As Ulf Hannerz (1996: 55) points out, “where theorists [of modernity] are really at home is still the West: western Europe, North America. Possibly Japan has now been added, but on the whole theorists are still Occidentalists.” This inattention to “people at the margins of the global ecumene” (Hannerz’s phrase for the globally interconnected world) is one reason why theories of modernity tend to be ethnocentrically blind to the diversity of cultures, for they often do not take seriously even the fairly obvious point that cultural difference “crucially conditions the way in which [other cultures] integrate the truly universal features of modernity” (Taylor 1999: 161). As Charles Taylor also comments, ethnocentrism is one reason for the “implicit Whiggism of the acultural theory, whereby moderns have ‘come to see’ the kernel truths” (ibid.: 171), but others of course have not. The modernist bias in theories of modernity, which means that they partly depend on unsubstantiated generalizations about premodernity, is further exacerbated by an almost total neglect of premodern history. Thus Sheldon Pollock (2000: 595) rightly complains about this deficiency in an article describing the vast Sanskrit “cosmopolis” and its Latin counterpart, whose great cultural dynamism and territorial expansion during the first millennium utterly belie the image of static, constrained, premodern society. A concomitant of this neglect of the premodern in Giddens’s writings is that he patently underestimates the ideological and even intellectual strength of traditionalism. To assert that when tradition is justified, it exists in “sham clothing” is little more than a prejudicial version of the concept of the “invented” tradition, which has itself been extended too readily and too far. Even an invented tradition, if it is to have some resonance, must connect with a “collective memory,” so that it cannot be entirely new and discontinuous (Assayag 1999: 26). Evidence about the long-term preservation of traditions, such as the oral transmission of Sanskrit religious texts, also shows that traditions can be more stable than the mutating social or political contexts that promote their invention (ibid.: 27). It is additionally misleading, if less rhetorically dismissive, to describe tradition as being based only on “formulaic truth,” “a kind of truth antithetical to ordinary ‘rational enquiry’ ” (Giddens 1994: 66), just as it is to say that tradition is in the hands of “guardians” who have privileged access to this truth and can merely supply interpretations of it, in complete contrast with modern experts capable of critical, rational enquiry (ibid.: 79–85). Still more clearly, it is simply untrue that “in premodern civilisations reflexivity is still largely limited to the reinterpretation and clarification of tradition” (Giddens 1991: 37). This misconcep-

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tion should have been laid to rest in sociological writing by Weber’s voluminous exploration of intellectual rationalization in the world religions.9 The error has also been repeatedly exposed by religious scholars in particular, and it stems from a failure to see that although the new ideas of prophets or reformers may be presented as if they were old within a system of traditional authority, that does not preclude even radical innovations in thought. Yet even Wittrock’s argument about multiple modernities, despite its seeming distance from Giddens’s, is not so different. They both imply a markedly asymmetrical relationship between powerful, global modernity and traditionalism, which is always a feebler, secondary by-product. Neither Giddens nor his critics appears to recognize—as Eisenstadt implicitly did—that the interpretation, justification, and authentication of tradition could not only keep it alive, but that in some circumstances the discourse of traditionalism could match that of modernity in its power within society and could actually promote modernity through a dialectical reformulation of opposites, real or apparent. Thus in Tamilnadu, the nationalist modernity partly constituted by reformed religion, which came to define state policy, depended among other features on the divinely ordained Agamic tradition, which was in turn reformulated by modern ideas and rationalized institutions. Nationalist modernity and religious traditionalism mutually reconstructed and reinforced each other. In Gyan Prakash’s words, “Janus-faced” Indian modernity is not in fact about the victory of modernity over tradition, because “one does not negate the other . . . but rather, one enables the other’s reformulation” (2000: 234). The ethnocentric bias in theories of modernity, which contributes to the “crisis of theory” identified by Kaviraj, has already been mentioned. To put the point slightly differently, a major problem with the sociology of modernity is its failure to acknowledge that the “problem of capitalist modernity” is not just a “sociological problem of historical transition,” but a “problem of translation, as well” (Chakrabarty 2000: 17). Modernist, Whiggist theories of modernity, influenced far more by the experience of the West than by that of India or other “peripheral” societies, persistently misunderstand tradition and traditionalism, and hence they cannot “translate” apparently incoherent forms of modernity into their own categories. But these problems of translation cannot be solved only by theoretical reasoning and the interpretation of texts written by Gandhi and Nehru, or Theosophists and Bengali intellectuals, as much scholarship on Indian modernity seems to imply, for they must also be confronted ethnographically.10 Only then can we discover how, for ordinary fleshand-blood people, modernity “is elaborated, made sense of and experienced everywhere in a continual dialogue with local ideas and practices” (Osella and Osella 2000b: 260).

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Sympathetically but acutely criticizing writers such as Hannerz discussing global modernity, Anna Tsing (2002: 469) similarly insists that anthropologists in general should study “folk understandings of the global”—and a fortiori, the modern—“and the practices with which they are intertwined, rather than representing globalization as a transcultural historical process.” She also rightly warns against the temptation to think that new global “circulations” transcend old “local” places, so that fashionable anthropologists keen to investigate these “flows” can ignore the “imagined stagnant locals . . . excluded from the new circulating globality, which leaves them outside, just as progress and modernity were imagined as leaving so many behind” (ibid.: 471). As we have seen in this book, Tsing’s “stagnant locals,” the older uneducated priests in the Minakshi Temple who will never even have a chance of joining the global flow to overseas temples, are as much a part of modernity and its consequences as younger educated men. In anthropological writing on India, although there is a vast amount of information about modernity and tradition or traditionalism among ordinary people, most of it is not explicitly focused on these issues, and most of it does not explore “folk understandings” of them. One reason for this has arguably been the tendency among anthropologists of India to “find the contemporary reality difficult to come to terms with, intellectually and morally, and so [they] retreat into the past” (Be´teille 1986: 132), finding more of interest in the Sanskritic heritage than the presentday world. Be´teille’s accusation is probably less valid now than it was when he made it, however, because anthropologists—like the political scientists or historians cited in this chapter—have mostly been forced to deal with “contemporary reality” by the far-reaching impact on ordinary people of recent, radical changes in India. Hence it is almost certain that the fairly small body of ethnographic work on modernity and its correlates in India will soon expand. To try to anticipate this work would be foolish, though; let me therefore mention only a couple of recent studies and one older one to provide some concluding comparative remarks. In their study of the low-caste Izhavas of Kerala, Filippo and Caroline Osella (2000b) show that in pursuit of social mobility, the members of this caste have deliberately chosen to repudiate the past and to embrace the modern in a future-oriented present. It is true that modernity and progress for the Izhavas are not always about rejecting tradition; in the religious domain in particular, emulation through Sanskritization—which necessarily implies a certain acceptance of traditional Brahman or highcaste values—has been a salient component of their social mobility. More important overall, though, are the many social practices that the Izhavas “self-consciously undertake or avoid ‘for the sake of progress’ ” (ibid.: 8– 9). Particularly notable in the making of Izhava modernity is overseas

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migration, mainly to the Persian Gulf, so that “Gulf-style,” especially in patterns of consumption, epitomizes the “modern,” although the influence of Mumbai and other Indian metropolitan cities is also marked (ibid.: 128–31). In this context, the Osellas cite Katy Gardner’s ethnography of Sylheti Muslims in neighboring Bangladesh, whose society has been transformed by overseas migration. Gardner also addresses the question of modernity and traditionalism, and she similarly shows how “discourses . . . rooted in bidesh [overseas] . . . are presented as the source of progress, and the desh [home] as backward and in need of development” (1995: 235). For Sylhetis, though, especially in relation to gender and religion, modernity is consistently conceptualized as movement toward “correct” Islamic practices, which mainly come from abroad (especially Saudi Arabia), so that it is expressed through a traditionalism that is oriented against the new and seeks to represent it as if it were authentically old. Despite their very different circumstances, there are clear parallels between progressive, traditionalist Muslims in Sylhet and the Minakshi Temple priests, among whom emigration—at least so far—has not had a huge transformative role. But it is also worth citing a much earlier study, which deserves acknowledgment here. Milton Singer’s When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) focuses on modernity and the Sanskritic tradition in Madras city and was based on research mostly done between 1954 and 1964. Singer explicitly criticized the modernization theory of the time, although his own argument is rather rambling and he defines modernization weakly as incorporation of innovations into the indigenous culture (ibid.: 398). More incisively, though, he concludes that Indians “look on modernization as a cultural process of ‘traditionalization,’ in which the new is turned into something old, and not as a cultural process that makes something new out of that which is old” (ibid.: 399). A few pages earlier, he also advances the stronger argument that “the cultural ideology of ‘traditionalism’ [is] one of the major instruments of modernization” (ibid.: 384)—a proposition specially picked out in Srinivas’s foreword (ibid.: x)—so that traditionalism does more than translate modernization; it actually serves to promote it. Singer’s thesis is obviously too sweeping and generalizes too far from evidence mainly collected from high-caste members of the social elite in Madras. Srinivas (1966: 60–74), for instance, had already shown that how social groups in India adopt modern (or Western) ideas and practices is highly variable, and the Izhavas provide an unambiguous counterexample in which people are not turning the new into something old at all. On the other hand, Singer’s argument about traditionalism as an instrument of modernization does have some relevance for the Sylheti Muslim case, and it exactly captures how Agamic education in particular is working among the priests. Agamic education, as we saw in chapter 4, is simultane-

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ously inculcating values and attitudes that are professional and modernist, as well as Brahmanical and traditionalist, even though it overtly reinforces only the ideology of traditionalism. Hence younger educated priests in particular are saying, like modern progressives everywhere, that they do not have to be like their fathers, but they are doing so by insisting that they are conforming more exactly to “correct” traditional practices, as most authoritatively set out by Shiva in the Agamas. Moreover, in the priests’ eyes, Agamic education, as much as secular education, is about the “claims of reason” (to use Giddens’s modernist phrase). Traditionalism can therefore stimulate the reflexivity of modern social life, because “social practices are constantly examined and reformed” (Giddens 1991: 38) in the light of presumptively greater comprehension of Agamic texts, and old customary assumptions are increasingly questioned by modernminded traditionalist priests. Of course, the Minakshi Temple priests are an unusual group, so that their particular combination of modernity and traditionalism is no basis for reaching sweeping conclusions about modernity in India or elsewhere. Yet these priests are especially revealing and instructive because they show us how the project of social and cultural modernity, begun by a Brahmanically inflected nationalism in Madras at the turn of the nineteenth century, has worked itself out concretely among a group of people who progressively became both more modernist and more traditionalist at the end of the twentieth century. In the work and lives of the priests, we therefore have a case study of how the state has been central to modernity in India, but they illustrate, too, not only how modernity can engender traditionalism but also how traditionalism can constitute and promote modernity while simultaneously emphasizing the divine authority of tradition. Contrary to what might be predicted by the history of the modern West and its social theory, the Brahman temple priests of the Minakshi Temple, committed to upholding the authority of Shiva, whom they ideally personify, are far from being anachronisms destined to disappear; they are instead authentic representatives of modern Indian society, not only in their own country but even in the iconic land of modernity itself, the United States of America.

Notes

Notes to Chapter 1 1. The Sri Meenakshi Temple Society has a well-organized Web site: www. meenakshi.org. 2. On Indians in Houston (until the mid-1980s) and the foundation of the Pearland temple, see Williams (1988: 264–5, ch. 8 passim). For Indians at home and overseas—including temple priests—educated, affluent NRIs have become potent symbols of what “Indians” can achieve outside India; for a perceptive discussion, see Rajagopal (2001: 241, ch. 6 passim) on American NRIs and Hindu nationalism. 3. In general, the end date for data provided in this book is September 2000, although in some cases I have information up to early 2002; the priests’ household census data that I use were collected over a period of several weeks ending in February 1995. 4. The improving position was first discussed in Fuller (1992b). 5. The Census of India 2001 recorded the population of greater Madurai “urban agglomeration” as 1,194,665 (www.censusindia.net/results/UA). 6. In March 2002, the Temple opened a new Web site: www.maduraimeenakshi. org. 7. More information about the Minakshi Temple and its rituals is provided in SG (ch. 1). For detailed description and analysis of the rituals, see especially Fuller (1980; 1985a; 1985b; 1987; 1992a: 63–9, ch. 8; 1993; 1995); Fuller and Logan (1985); Harman (1989). 8. Indian Express, July 8, 1995. 9. For a more detailed description and analysis of the ritual, see Fuller (n.d.). 10. Acharya is a standard term for “priest,” but although it is a synonym of “guru” and implies that he is knowledgeable, in this context the sadhaka is the expert. These sadhakas, however, do not correspond to those described in Agamic texts, as Brunner (1975: 439–40) explains. 11. As discussed more fully in Fuller (n.d.), the general assumption is that divine power within a temple tends to decline, mainly owing to the effects of pollution and other noxious influences whose intrusion cannot be prevented entirely; the renovation ritual therefore reverses this decline. Some more theologically sophisticated priests argue, however, that divine power cannot decline, since it is illimitable. In either case, though, the logic of the ritual makes it plain that it is focused on enhancing power in the water pots and then transferring it to a temple and its images; in her summary of the kumbhabhisheka as described in Agamic sources, Brunner-Lachaux (1998: xxxiv–xxxv) specifically refers to the water pots as “charged” with power, which is then transferred by pouring them. 12. Hindu and Indian Express, June 8, 9, 1997.

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13. Vikkira Pa¯n• •t iya, correctly vikkirama (“valorous,” Skt. vikrama), and Kulacekara (“head of the tribe,” Skt. kulas´ekhara) are the names of two of the legendary Pandyan kings (SG, 25). Tirucculi (tiruccul_i) is the name of a village, usually spelled Tiruchuli, about thirty miles south of Madurai. 14. After a change of government, all temple trustees in Tamilnadu are usually dismissed, and new ones, who support the party in power, are appointed. Normally, there is a committee of five trustees (ar_an˙ka¯valar) in the Minakshi Temple, but for several years in the mid-1980s, they were replaced by a single “fit person” (takka¯r). 15. The term sastri (or ca¯stiri, from Skt. s´a¯stri) is the term used in Tamilnadu for a Brahman domestic priest, as well as a chanter, and many men carry out both types of work. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Briefly, but also to provide the technical terms, Minakshi’s and Sundareshwara’s temples are called (in Tamil) amman_ and cuva¯mi koyil (or can_n_ati) respectively; amman_ (cognate with amma, “mother”) and cuva¯mi (Skt. sva¯mi, “lord”) are the common appellations of the goddess and god, koyil is “temple,” and can_n_ati (Skt. sannidhi), usually translated as “shrine,” can also refer to the chambers housing deities’ images. Each of the main shrines of the two preeminent deities (pradha¯na mu¯rti) is equally a mu¯lastha¯na (“principal place”), where the immovable mu¯lamu¯rti (“principal image”) of Minakshi and the sva¯yambhuva (“selfexistent”) lin˙ga of Sundareshwara stand in their respective sancta, the garbhagr• ha (“womb-chamber”) at the heart of each temple. In front of each sanctum, which opens to the East, is an antechamber (ardhaman• d• apa, “half hall”) and then a “great hall” (maha¯man• d• apa). Surrounding the sancta in both temples are inner and outer corridors (pra¯ka¯ra). Throughout both temples and the outer precincts are many shrines containing different subsidiary images and lingas; when not in use, the movable, festival images (utsava murti) are housed in a shrine inside Sundareshwara’s temple. 2. In the list below, the names of the periods of daily worship (pu¯ja¯kka¯lam) are given in their Tamil forms and their translation has been corrected (cf. SG, 11) with reference to L’Hernault and Reiniche (1999: 46) and Brunner (1999: 267–8 & passim). The timings are those given on a notice board inside the Temple in 2002 (which vary slightly from those on notices in earlier years); for periods 2–7, the first timing is for worship in Minakshi’s temple and the second for Sundareshwara’s temple. The periods are (1) tiruvan_antal (“holy morning sleep”), begins 5:00 A.M.; (2/3) vil•a¯pu¯jai (probably “dawn worship” and equivalent to us• ahka¯lapu¯ja¯, a supplementary period), and ka¯lacanti (“period conjunction” [between dawn and daytime]), 6:30–7:10, 6:40–7:20 A.M.; (4/5) tirika¯lacanti (“three period conjunction,” equivalent to upasam• dhi, a supplementary period) and uccikka¯lam (“midday period”), 10:30–11:10, 10:40–11:20 A.M.; (6) ca¯yaraks• ai (“dusk protection”), 4:30–5:10, 4:40–5:20 P.M.; (7) arttaja¯mam (“half-midnight”), 7:30– 8:10, 7:40–8:20 P.M.; (8) pal•l•iyar_ai pu¯jai (“bedchamber worship”), procession begins 9:15 (or 9:45) P.M. For details of the series of images for each period, see SG, 168–70 (appendix 1); this remains accurate except that the image of Kalya¯n• a-

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sundara (portraying Sundareshwara being married to Minakshi by Vishnu), which was installed in a previously disused hall off the outer corridor of Sundareshwara’s temple in 1985, is worshiped at the third period (after Siddha) and at the sixth (after Durga¯). 3. See SG, 18, table 1. 4. In southern Tamilnadu, pat• •t ar (Skt. bhat• •t a) is the commonest term for Adishaiva temple priests; kurukkal (from Skt. guru) is commonest further north. In Shiva’s preeminent Tamil temple of Nat• ara¯ja in Chidambaram (Cuddalore District), the priests all belong to the exclusive, endogamous community of Dikshitars, who are distinct from and generally regarded as superior to Adishaivas serving in all other Shaiva temples. The standard term for Brahman priests in both Shaiva and Vaishnava temples is arcaka, or sometimes a¯ca¯rya; pu¯ca¯ri or pu¯ja¯ri denotes a non-Brahman priest. 5. The statement (SG, 192, n. 51) that Vikkira Pantiya priests have no “family deities” (kuladeva) of the usual kind is incorrect. The chief priests’ clan and the other five clans each has such a deity located in a specific village temple in the Madurai region: three are forms of Kar_uppan_, one of Aiyan_a¯r, one of Bhairava paired with Aiyanar, and one of another, unusual form of Bhairava. All six are prototypical, southern Tamilnadu village deities, served by non-Brahman priests. It is quite common for Tamil Brahmans to have ancestral family deities of this sort; nowadays it is also common, as among the Minakshi Temple priests, to pay next to no ritual attention to them. 6. Sastris are Smarta Brahmans (or Aiyars), members of the ordinary Shaiva Brahman subcastes, who outnumber the other great division of Tamil Brahmans, the Shri Vaishnavas (or Aiyangars). The temple servants are almost always Smarta Brahmans as well, although Adishaivas or Shri Vaishnavas can do the work. The devotional singers are Shaiva Pillais; the musicians Isai Vellalars. 7. Since SG was published, several other studies of major Tamil Shaiva temples and their priesthoods have appeared. The most comprehensive is the study of the An• n• a¯malaiya¯r temple at Tiruvannamalai (Reiniche 1989; cf. L’Hernault and Reiniche 1999 on the rituals). Other valuable accounts are Boulanger (1992) on Eka¯mrana¯tha temple in Kanchipuram, Good (1987; 1989; 2001) on the Murugan temple at Kalugumalai (Tuticorin District), Selvam (1995; 1997) on Kumbhes´vara temple in Kumbakonam (Thanjavur District), and Shankari (1982; 1984)—supplemented by a mainly historical study by Ghose (1996)—on Tya¯gara¯jasva¯mi temple in Tiruvarur (Thiruvarur District). On the Chidambaram Nataraja temple, see Younger (1995) supplemented by Tanaka (1993). For the Vaishnava temple of Ven˙kat• es´vara in Tirupati, southern Andhra Pradesh, which is by far the wealthiest temple in India today, some useful information is in Naidu (1993). Compared with the other Shaiva temples mentioned above (excluding Chidambaram), the Minakshi Temple has a larger complement of working priests. In each temple, however, public worship rights are the hereditary monopoly of patrilineal clans or groups of clans with historical rights in that specific temple. Among these clans or clan groups there are also ranked relationships comparable to those between Vikkira Pantiyas and Kulacekaras, and rights are similarly divided into shares allocated by calendrical rotas; on the other hand, the exact division of rights and duties between different groups of priests—and other personnel,

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notably temple servants (paricharakar)—is quite different in each temple, and key terms such as stanikar denote variable statuses (Boulanger 1992: 106–24; Good 1989; Reiniche 1989: 76–93; Selvam 1995: 111–30; Shankari 1984: 178–81). Generally applicable to all these cases and not just the two mentioned is MarieLouise Reiniche’s comparative comment that, despite some regional and historical differences, “there is nevertheless a parallelism in the form and organisation of the priesthood in Madurai and Tiruvannamalai” (1989: 100). The priesthood in Chidambaram is very different; there is an “enforced democracy” among the Dikshitars who have equal responsibilities in managing their temple (still not under governmental control) and equal shares in ritual duties (Younger 1995: 19–24). 8. Occasionally, instead of being adopted, a boy may stay in his own family but be made a “favorite son” (abhima¯napu¯tra) of a childless adult or couple; one young priest in the Temple is currently the favorite son of his widowed aunt, and he will inherit from both her and his own parents. 9. Deputies are not paid, whereas in the Kanchipuram Ekamranatha temple, a large proportion of men with rights in the public worship pay a relatively small cohort of working priests to carry out their duties (Boulanger 1992: 114, 121). 10. Suppa Bhattar v. Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar, A.I.R. 1916 Mad. 465; Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar v. Suppa Bhattar, A.I.R. 1918 Mad. 333. 11. Further details about the temple-entry dispute and the people involved in it, as well as about two songbooks written by Brahman women opposed to temple entry, are contained in an interesting article by Paramasivan (1997), who is critical of naı¨vely one-sided nationalist accounts like Kandasamy’s (1993: ch. 5), although the latter does contain some useful additional material. 12. The lawyer also explained that a priest’s consecration is only an “enabling ritual” and does not in itself give rise to a right in office or property that can be decided by the courts. Instead, it is the duty of the Temple administration to take a decision about Sivaraj’s consecration, but it has avoided doing so by saying that the matter is now before the courts. Eventually, however, the courts should refer the dispute back to the administration. The lawyer is surely right, but it is of course impossible to predict a court judgment ten or twenty years hence with certainty. 13. Seshammal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1972) 3 S.C.R. 815. The Supreme Court upheld the act, but ruled that if the priesthood were opened up to men not belonging to appropriate priestly groups—e.g., non-Adishaivas in a Shaiva temple—this would infringe on the Constitution’s “freedom of religion” clauses. In practice, therefore, the government’s plan to allow all social groups to enter the priesthood was thwarted (SG, 129, 158–60). 14. Another apposite illustration is a will drawn up in 1999 by the Vikkira Pantiya chief priest, which sets out shares in the rights to be in charge of festivals, either as the nampiya¯r—the man who assumes sole responsibility for the six major festivals and the Navara¯tri festival—or as the priest with the leading role at the other five important annual festivals. The will states that the right to be the nambiyar is divided between the chief priest himself and five other Vikkira Pantiya priests (or their heirs) belonging to four clans: Kannakkankudi, Manamadurai, Nettur, and Tiruvadavur. In addition, two more priests (or their heirs), from Ma-

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namadurai and Nettur, have shares in the other five festivals (correcting SG, 83). The will further states that the chief priest’s stanikam rights cannot be divided (SG, 75–81), only Vikkira Pantiyas should have shares in these festival duties, and shareholders may appoint qualified Vikkira Pantiya deputies to do their work. What is actually interesting about this will is that it just reaffirms a division of rights that already exists and reiterates rules that have been settled for a very long time. Furthermore, priests with rights to lead a festival frequently do not want to do the onerous work; a nambiyar in particular has to be on duty continuously throughout a ten- or twelve-day festival. For the elderly chief priest, as well as the other men who possess rights in the festivals, however, it mattered that these rights were again set out in his will, even though they have no economic value and carry potentially tiresome obligations. 15. Orr (2000: 152–3, 250–2, nn. 27–8) partly confuses the Adishaivas’ hereditary qualification (an Adishaiva priest must be born of Adishaiva parents) with the hereditary rights of particular priestly groups in particular temples. Nonetheless, mainly citing inscriptional evidence from the medieval Chola period, she reaches the interesting conclusion that the priesthood (and other temple service) “became hereditary relatively late in South Indian history” and is not in fact ancient, as often supposed. 16. To put these and other rupee (Re, Rs) figures in this book into comparative perspective, it may be helpful to know that the rupee is divided into 100 paise, and that between 1995 and 2000 its exchange rate moved (in round figures) from $1 = Rs 31 to $1 = Rs 44, and from £1 = Rs 49 to £1 = Rs 70. Adjusted for “purchasing power parity” according to World Bank figures for 2000, one “international dollar” was worth Rs 8.7; i.e., Rs 8.7 had the same purchasing power in India as $1 in the United States. Or to express it another way, $1 (or £1) converted into rupees bought around five times as much in India as it would have bought in the United States (or Britain), and this ratio can be taken as roughly valid for the period since the mid-1990s. 17. An average of 29,793 archana tickets were sold per month in 1975–77, 40,562 in 1980–82, and 49,192 in 1992–94. The consumer price index numbers for nonmanual employees in Madurai stood at 285 in 1976, 422 in 1981, and 1,279 in 1993–94 (1960 base = 100); see table 52 in Monthly Abstract of Statistics, Central Statistical Organisation, Government of India, New Delhi, vol. 41, March and April 1988, and vol. 47, December 1994. 18. Different temples have different systems for organizing private worship. For example, in Tiruvannamalai temple, all priests are equally responsible for it, and their share of the ticket income is divided between different categories of priests in fixed proportions, although individuals keep tips given by devotees (Reiniche 1989: 77, 95). In Kalugumalai temple, on a day on which a priest has public worship rights, he is also responsible for private worship; he may ask others to help him on busy days and together they decide how to divide the income (Good 1989: 236). In Kumbeshwara temple, priests work on their own as in the Minakshi Temple, but except on the busiest festival days, they earn very little from private worship (Selvam 1995: 130–1). 19. How many temples have golden cars is unclear. At the Kamakshi temple in Kanchipuram, a golden car was dedicated in 1984 (Sundararajan 1995: 64); the

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Beri Chettiyars’ Kandasami (Murugan) temple in Chennai also acquired one in 1984, paid for by its wealthy head trustee, and Mines (1994: 64) reports that there were then twelve golden cars in South India. 20. Durga is the fierce goddess who slayed the buffalo demon, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune, and Saraswati, the goddess of learning. Dakshinamurti is Shiva as an ascetic guru and Siddha is Shiva as an ascetic with magical powers. All five deities have prominent images inside Sundareshwara’s temple. 21. In 1997, when the price of the ordinary, 108-name archana went up from Re 1 to Rs 2, the tiricatai (308-name) and sahasrana¯mam (1,008-name) worship went up from Rs 2 to Rs 5 and Rs 5 to Rs 10 respectively; items that had cost Re 1 or less all went up to Rs 2 (e.g., offering a garland or silk headband); others that had cost about Rs 2 went up to Rs 5 (e.g., making a gift to a deity or having a bathing ritual carried out). For more details of the range of private worship and offerings, see SG, 171–3, appendix 2; after 1997, some of the items and their prices no longer appeared on the ticket office’s notice board (which was later taken down anyway), although the clerks would still sell tickets for them. Between 1980 and 1997, the cost of getting married in the Temple was raised in stages from Rs 10 to Rs 75, but unlike other costly forms of private worship, this increase affected the poor, for they are almost the only people who would consider getting married in a temple. 22. The average monthly receipts were Rs 28,965, equal to 59 percent of archana ticket sales. 23. One small but telling example: the number of registered two-wheelers in Madurai rose from 1,906 in 1985 to 32,368 in 1991; Hindu (Madurai edition), August 29, 1991. 24. No statistics are available, however, to prove that expenditure on ritual (as opposed to other consumer items) is increasing. Nonetheless, although the rise of Hindu nationalism is actually only part of the story, most evidence supports Varma’s claim that “the preoccupation with religion and religious concerns . . . has increased and not diminished in the urban middle class after the Babri Masjid vandalism” (1999: 142), by which he means the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. 25. Some details about poor temple priests are reported in a feature article in the Hindu, December 21, 1997 (Magazine section). 26. In 1980, extrapolating from data about the stalls where people leave footwear before entering the Temple, I estimated that average daily attendance was around 20,000 people (SG, 183, n. 12). In the year from July 2000 to June 2001, the Temple administration sold 2,953,000 tickets, and in February 2002, several brief surveys indicated that 37.5 percent of people arrived wearing footwear. Calculating from these figures gives an approximate daily average attendance of 21,500. Similar calculations in 1991, using a well-informed estimate of ticket sales by the private contractor then running the stalls, also gave an attendance figure of about 20,000. These results are consistent with my own impression that crowding in the Temple, whether at busy times like Friday evening or quiet times like Wednesday morning, has remained much the same since 1976. Even though Madurai has become a bigger city, the number of people living and working in its

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old, densely packed center has probably changed only slightly, and the Minakshi Temple is still predominantly a temple serving its local population. 27. The new worship for Durga, the most striking innovation, was first popularized in Chennai in the mid-1980s and reached Madurai within a few years; I saw it for the first time in the Minakshi Temple in 1988. By 1996 (but not 1991), it had spread to southern Kerala (Osella and Osella 2000b: 168). This ritual is exclusively done by women and consists of burning sets of little lamps, made from halved limes filled with oil and a wick, in front of Durga’s shrine. During the 1980s, Hanuma¯n’s worship also became much more popular, and a bas-relief image of the god on a pillar in Sundareshwara’s temple quite quickly began to attract a lot of attention from devotees. A few other deities, such as the goddess Para¯s´akti, also started to become more popular in the late 1980s, and devotees began to offer worship to a range of previously neglected images on pillars, mostly in the halls of Sundareshwara’s temple. Although the rate of innovation appeared to have leveled off in the 1990s, Durga and Hanuman in particular remain very popular deities. The reasons for these innovations are not entirely clear, but according to devotees, the most crucial attribute of Durga and Hanuman is their exceptional physical strength, which is thought to be vital in a deity supplicated for help with personal difficulties in today’s harsh and stressful world (Fuller 1992b: 212–3; cf. Tarabout 1997: 140–1). 28. Also noteworthy is that the money (and gold and silver) deposited in the Temple’s collection boxes quadrupled from Rs 1,400,000 per year in 1980–81 to Rs 5,711,000 per year in 1992–94. After adjusting for inflation, this represents a 35 percent increase in the value of the collections over twelve years, and it continues a long-standing trend (cf. SG, 206, n. 32), which suggests that many devotees prefer to give more money to the Temple rather than, or in addition to, spending more money on rituals. 29. Families had founded nineteen of these twenty-five endowments and caste associations had founded six. Of the twenty-five, three date from the seventeenth century, but twelve were established between circa 1830 and 1930, with one other as late as 1952; for nine others I lack information, but there are good reasons for thinking that the majority of them were also started between 1830 and 1930, although the two Nadar association endowments probably only became involved in the Temple after Nadars, alongside Harijans, were admitted in 1939 (Fuller 1985b: 33–6). 30. The priests’ children are invariably sent to private schools in Madurai; some girls used to attend a corporation girls’ school that was regarded favorably, but none does so now, and boys have never attended corporation schools. The private schools are all English-medium, and in 2002 they charged fees of around Rs 5,000 per annum. Priests, like other middle-class people in Madurai, strive hard to get their children admitted to the extremely competitive schools with the best reputations; some of these are Hindu schools, others are secular, and yet others are Christian. Unless they enter more competitive and prestigious institutions such as engineering colleges, most priests’ children proceeding to higher education attend one of the city’s private colleges, which are affiliated with Madurai Kamaraj University. Unfortunately for their career prospects, like the vast major-

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ity of Indian students in English-medium schools and colleges, most of the priests’ children do not learn English well. 31. Since the late 1990s, two students from the Agamic school at Tirupparankundram have visited the Minakshi Temple daily to recite Vedic verses at the midday period of daily worship, but this only partially replaces the work formerly done by the chanters. 32. In 1994–95, sastris were paid Rs 1,600 per month in the Temple, but it was generally assumed that they could earn at least twice as much by working as domestic priests. The “donation” demanded was said to be up to Rs 25,000 in 1994–95 and Rs 30,000 in 2000; on corruption in the Temple, see chapter 5. Other temples in Tamilnadu, not only the Minakshi Temple (and Tirupparankundram temple), are now without chanters for similar reasons (cf. Reiniche 1989: 75; Selvam 1995: 168–71; Shankari 1982: 83). The overall shortage of sastris in Tamilnadu is caused by several interrelated factors. In the past, domestic priests had stable, long-term, or even hereditary relationships with patron households, but these have now broken down, so that the priests all work in a competitive open market. This means that a new priest has to build up his own pool of patrons, and early in his career, he may have to struggle without the fairly secure sources of income on which a temple priest can rely. Hence the domestic priesthood is seen as a rather risky career. Moreover, the training is prolonged, for at least eight years of study in a Vedic school is generally regarded as necessary, compared with four to six years in an Agamic school. The result is declining numbers of graduates from Vedic schools throughout Tamilnadu. Given the shortage, competent domestic priests, especially if they know how to please affluent middle-class patrons, are busy men making a good living, irrespective of competition from temple priests. 33. See Eck (2000) and Narayanan (1992) for interesting discussions by two religious scholars of temples, Hinduism, and Hindu identity in America. 34. One of Ramesh’s first journeys abroad was to Sri Lanka, around 1991, accompanying Sambamurti. Their work included carrying out worship for Kali in the home of the then President Premadasa; like many Sinhala Buddhists, Premadasa was a fervent devotee of Kali, even though he was strongly pro-Sinhala and was later assassinated by militant Tamils. 35. Much the same appears true of priests trained in the equivalent Tantric schools in Kerala, who also find lucrative work among overseas Malayali Hindus (Freeman 1999: 74). 36. In 2002, the rent for a small house near the north tower was at least Rs 1,000 per month, although more could be charged if the premises were used for commercial purposes. 37. Two priestly joint families still own a significant amount of agricultural land from which they obtain rice for domestic use and derive some income; in one case, the land is farmed by a member of the family who does not work as a priest, and in the other it is overseen by a working priest. These lands are the priests’ former tax-free lands, which they bought back after confiscation using the money received in compensation. To the best of my knowledge, these two families alone still own agricultural land.

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Notes to Chapter 3 1. Not all the material in this chapter is specifically about change among the priests since the 1970s, because some of it is a response to the reasonable complaint, particularly expressed by Be´teille (1985), that SG (ch. 2) said too little about the priests’ social conditions. 2. “From very early times getting up before sunrise was prescribed specially for a [Brahman] student and generally for everyone” (Kane 1974: 647, and ch. 17 passim for the householder’s daily duties). 3. Strictly, the kut• umi (Skt. s´ı¯kha¯) is the knotted tuft of hair left on the head after the rest is shaved off; the priests, however, have never shaved more than a small area above the forehead. 4. By changing their dress, the priests are making the same distinction between home and workplace that many other Indians have been making for much longer, but in the opposite direction; priests change into less traditional clothing when they go home, whereas for most Indians, clothing at home is more traditional than the Westernized dress worn at work (cf. Singer 1972: 321). 5. The two Bhattamar Streets were wrongly labeled “North” and “South” in SG, 25. 6. Much of Reiniche’s description of “traditional” houses in Tirunelveli (1981: 22–9) is salient here; the sharper gendered division of space, correlated with stricter divisions relating to purity and pollution (see below), which Reiniche discusses, generally existed, too, in the Minakshi Temple priests’ houses as they still were in the late 1970s. 7. In 1994–95, I tried to recruit a female research assistant to work with the women but was unable to find anyone in Madurai willing and able to do the job. On the women in priestly communities, next to no data have been published by any ethnographer of either sex. I need hardly stress that this is a serious lacuna. 8. See Brunner-Lachaux (1977: 682–8) on Agamic death pollution rules; cf. Parry (1994: ch. 6) for details on the rules and structure of funeral rites in Banaras, which mainly comply with orthodox prescription. 9. Marrying within the same patrilineal gotra grouping is prohibited, so that intermarriages between some clans cannot take place (SG, 28, 75). 10. Among priests in Kanchipuram, Boulanger (1992: 173) reports that marriages between first cousins are increasingly regarded as causing congenital defects, as supposedly proved by a case of mental disability among the children of a couple who were first cousins. The decline or disappearance of preferential crosscousin and elder sister’s daughter marriage is also reported by Karin Kapadia for a range of castes studied in 1988–90 in a village near Tiruchchirappalli. Like her informants, she primarily attributes the change to the impact of education, urbanization, and new employment opportunities, which have encouraged people to seek partners of appropriate educational and economic status, rather than close kin who may not satisfy those criteria (Kapadia 1995: 57–67). Yuko Nishimura (1998: 78, 94, 126) states that among Nagarattars in the early 1990s, some (but not all) informants said that the preference for cross-cousin marriage had rapidly declined for similar reasons (cf. also Mines 1994: 120–1 on Chettiyars in Chen-

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nai). In Kerala among contemporary Izhavas, older people’s attitudes toward cross-cousin marriage are ambivalent, but for younger people it has “strong connotations of shame” because all cousins are increasingly regarded as siblings (Osella and Osella 2000b: 90). As yet, there is not enough comparative evidence to know whether preferential close-kin marriage is on the decline throughout South India, but it would be unfortunate if this key feature of the Dravidian kinship system, one of the most intensively studied institutions in all anthropology, disappeared without being properly investigated in the process. 11. For all age cohorts together, out of the total of eighty-nine married or widowed men in the survey (excluding three for whom I lack information), thirty (35%) married aged twenty-five or under, thirty-eight (44%) between twenty-six and thirty, and eighteen (21%) when thirty-one or over; out of the total of ninetythree married or widowed women, sixteen (17%) married aged fifteen or under, forty-nine (53%) between sixteen and twenty, and twenty-eight (30%) when twenty-one or over. 12. The sixty-seven wives include four widows. Marriages have been made to partners from the following districts: Madurai (including Theni); Virudhunagar, Ramanathapuram, Tirunelveli, Tuticorin, Kanyakumari (south); Sivaganga, Pudukkottai, Thanjavur, Tiruchchirappalli, Nagapattinam (east and near northeast); Cuddalore, Viluppuram, Kanchipuram, Pondicherry and Chennai city (far northeast); and Coimbatore (northwest). 13. Caplan (1984), discussing Christians in Chennai, was the first writer to explain clearly how “dowry” as groomprice—usually seen as a modern social evil—must be distinguished from the traditional stridhana. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Somashambhu’s manual has been translated with detailed analytical notes by Brunner-Lachaux (1963; 1968; 1977; 1998). Richard Davis’s book (1991) depends heavily on the latter, but it is more accessible; its main primary sources are Aghorashiva’s manual and the Kamikagama. 2. Subramania Aiyar was born in 1842, the son of Subbayar Aiyar, the legal agent of the raja of Ramnad’s zamindari (estate), whose connections with the Collector of Madurai were instrumental in the son’s early career, including his appointment as municipal vice-chairman in 1882. Subramania Aiyar moved his legal practice to Madras in 1884 (Washbrook 1976: 30–1, 220). In Madurai, according to his biographer, Subramania Aiyar “was vigilant in seeing that the temple funds were put to right uses” (Rao 1914: 13). Also in 1842, Subbayar Aiyar founded the Suravali Subbayar endowment (kattalai) in the Minakshi Temple, which still sponsors part of the ritual of Minakshi’s wedding during the Chittirai festival, as well as various other minor rituals in the Temple. The family trust also supported a Vedic school, the “Judge Mani [Subramania] Aiyar Yajur Veda Pathashala,” in the Temple, housed on North Adi Street, which still functioned intermittently in the 1980s but is now closed, and another Vedic school next to Tirupparankundram temple, which still had a handful of students in the 1980s,

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although none were left by the 1990s; the building was taken over by the new Agamic school founded in Tirupparankundram in 1992, which is described below. 3. For details, see bibliographies in Brunner-Lachaux (1998: 453–7) and Davis (1991: 189–92; cf. 165, n. 3, for his critical note on the quality of one of these published texts). 4. Report of the Hindu Religious Endowments Commission (1960–1962), pp. 45, 53, 57–8. 5. Referred to in the judgment in Seshammal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1972) 3 S.C.R. 815, p. 819. 6. Hindu, September 18, 1982. 7. Two schools attached to the great temples of Subrahmanya (Murugan) at Tiruchendur (Tuticorin District) and Palani (Dindigul District) were founded in 1958 and 1959 respectively; they are referred to in the Report of the Hindu Religious Endowments Commission (1960–1962), p. 48. The other three schools— at the famous Shaiva monastery in Dharmapuram (Nagapattinam District), and in Srivilliputtur (Virudhunagar District) and Thirupugalur (Thiruvarur District), founded in 1942, 1991, and 1992 respectively—were listed (with the first two) in a letter to me from the Commissioner of the HR&CE Department, dated February 2, 1995. 8. Figures supplied in a letter to me from the Commissioner of the HR&CE Department, dated February 2, 1995. 9. Nachiappan has also noticed the demand for trained temple priests in the United States; under the auspices of the Koviloor monastery, which has many American devotees, he plans to commit $1 million toward setting up a small temple and training center there, to which will be attached a cultural and religious center designed to fill what Nachiappan called the “cultural vacuum” among second-generation NRIs. 10. Around 2000, the Koviloor monastery published a glossy brochure in English to publicize all its institutes and activities and another brochure to advertise a planned new ashram in Rishikesh, the holy town in the Himalayan foothills that now contains several modern ashrams catering to middle-class Indians, NRIs, and foreigners. Sanatana dharma translates as “eternal religion,” and in the discourse of modern Hindu reformism, it refers to the religion of the Vedas as primarily manifested today in Hinduism, but also present in all other religions, which are said to have emerged from the one, original Vedic religion. The notion of sanatana dharma is central to the preaching of the Shankaracharyas, to which Nachiappan broadly subscribes, and its significance in relation to ideas of Hindu tolerance and Hindu nationalism is mentioned again in chapter 5. 11. The 1901 text of the Ka¯mika¯gama, Pu¯rvabha¯ga (first part), in Grantha, was reprinted by the South Indian Archakar Association in 1977; the Uttarabha¯ga (second part), in Grantha, has not been reprinted. 12. This section is a revised, shortened version of Fuller (1999b). 13. Discussing different factors affecting transmission of texts, Colas (1999: 38) comments: “According to whether or not the region practised a certain rite,

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manuscripts of the same text may or may not contain a chapter describing it.” For “region,” we may reasonably read “community” as well. 14. Unfortunately, Agamic scholars in Pondicherry or elsewhere have never studied these manuscript handbooks in their own right to give us a better picture of how priests might actually have used them in an earlier era. 15. An English scholar, R. W. Frazer, in entries in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, noted that the Agamas were “now gradually coming to light” (1912: 25); he later expanded on this and referred to an Agamic text published by Shanmukhasundara Mudaliyar in 1900 (1920: 95). 16. Gopala Muppanar v. Dharmakarta Subramania Aiyar, A.I.R. 1915 Mad. 363, p. 368. Sadasiva Aiyar refers to the Varun• apaddhati (a manual unknown to modern scholars; Brunner-Lachaux 1998: 459, list D) and the Nirvacanapaddhati (a text that modern scholars have never come across). 17. Sankaralinga Nadan v. Rajeswara Dorai, I.L.R. 31 (1908) Mad. 236. In this case, the exclusion of low-caste Nadars from a temple in southern Tamilnadu was upheld by the Privy Council in London, which took the same view as the Madurai District Court and Madras High Court and endorsed witnesses’ statements about “the Saiva Agamas adopted as authoritative and current in the Madura district” (p. 239). 18. M. Arunachalam, author of an uncritical study of the Agamas (1983), wrote an English introduction to the South Indian Archakar Association’s reissue of the Kamikagama, Purvabhaga (cf. n. 11), in which he claimed that “Sivacharyas say that its authority derives from the fact that it always prescribes the rules very definitely.” He continued: “Suffice it to say that an archaka who has not made every line in this book his own does not know his job. Archakas hereafter do not have any excuse to say that they do not know any ritual connected with Siva worship” (1977: x, xi). Arunachalam’s opinion is characteristic of reformists, including the priests themselves today. 19. For the Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram in particular, who have repeatedly insisted in recent decades that temple priests should be properly educated, the influence of the orthodox theory of practice has probably been proportionately much greater, notably because the modern revitalization of Mı¯m• a¯msa¯ philosophy—in which that theory is most systematically expounded—has been pioneered by Brahman scholars associated with the Kanchipuram monastery (Sheldon Pollock, personal communication). 20. The French Institute of Pondicherry and the E´cole Franc¸aise d’Extreˆme Orient have amassed the world’s largest Agamic collection. In the mid-1980s, it contained around 12,000 complete or partial manuscripts of all twenty-eight Agamas, some of the 207 secondary Agamas, most of the 18 manuals, and copious related material (Bhatt 1986: v–vi). 21. Marie-Louise Reiniche (personal communication) told me that she once asked a priest in Tiruvannamalai temple about the details of a ritual, and he then went to find his copy of Somashambhu’s manual edited by Brunner-Lachaux. In answering my questions, no Minakshi Temple priest has ever produced a book from Pondicherry, but even if some of them did own the books, I do not think it would make much difference to the currency of the “myth.”

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22. Two more priests, one working overseas, had M.A. degrees (validated by the University of Madras) from Madras Sanskrit College. Although the Agamas are not part of the College’s curriculum, their Sanskrit education helped these two priests to learn Agamic texts. Ginni Ishimatsu (personal communication) informed me that a growing number of temple priests’ sons are now studying in Madras Sanskrit College. 23. I do not have confirmed data on the total number of functioning Agamic schools in Tamilnadu, but people in the know have told me about the existence of twenty-two (by early 2002), although there may be a few others that they overlooked, especially in northern Tamilnadu. The twenty-two are Allur, Pillaiyarpatti, and Tirupparankundram; the five supported by the HR&CE Department: Palani, Tiruchendur, Dharmapuram, Srivilliputtur, and Thirupugalur (cf. n. 7 above); Kadamangalam (Thanjavur District [?]), Mayavaram, Tirukolaka, and Vazhuvur (Nagapattinam District); Karaikkal (adjoining Nagapattinam District); Tiruvanakkaval (Tiruchchirappalli District); Koviloor and Kundrakudi (Sivaganga District); Tuticorin; Ambasamudram (Tirunelveli District); Salem; Koonampatti (Coimbatore District); and two in Chennai. 24. Inside the Minakshi Temple there is also an Agamic school, which was established in 1977 and occupies a room on North Adi Street also used by the priests’ association. This school, however, has no stable institutional structure and in practice it is only a designated space where classes can be held. For several years until the mid-1980s, classes held in the school at weekends were attended by some of the priests’ sons. More recently, the school was used for the refresher courses run in 1992–93, 1993–94, and 1999–2000. 25. A similar school teaching the Tantras, which govern temple ritual in Kerala, is described by Freeman (1999), who briefly compares Tantric with Agamic education. 26. No teaching of Vedas and Agamas is normally done on the first, eighth, and fourteenth days of the lunar fortnight, plus full moon and new moon days, although this rule is sometimes relaxed, especially at Pillaiyarpatti. The three holidays are at the festivals of Po˘n˙kal (January), A¯van• i Avit• •t am (August-September), and Diva¯lı¯ (October-November). The school year begins on Vijaya¯das´amı¯, which is also the day of Saraswatı¯ Pu¯ja¯, the goddess’s festival in September-October. 27. For details about the books, see Fuller (1997: 12–13, nn. 8–10). 28. The Shrirudra (often just Rudram in Tamil) and Chamaka correspond to Krishna Yajur Veda 4.5 and 4.7, vv. 1–11 respectively, except for a few extra verses added to the Shrirudra. The Shrirudra is the famous S´atarudrı¯ya hymn; a version of it is analyzed and translated by Long (1983), and Peterson (1989: 26– 7) comments on its importance in Tamil worship of Shiva. 29. See Fuller (1993: 180) for critical comments on the tendency of the textual scholars, Brunner and Davis, to ignore the question of human fallibility in their analyses of Agamic material, and Fuller (1997: 22–4) for a brief critique of Humphrey and Laidlaw’s anthropological analysis of ritual (1994), which, in spite of many insights, sidesteps the problem of misperformance by focusing on the identification of the ritual act. 30. In contemporary Kerala, there is a similar emphasis on making the priesthood “an economically viable profession” (Freeman 1999: 71); the idea of a pro-

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fessional Hindu priesthood has actually been periodically discussed in Tamilnadu since the early twentieth century (cf. SG, 212, n. 45). 31. Compare the fascinating and exceptional case of the Vaidika Brahmans in Andhra Pradesh, who learn the Krishna Yajur Veda entirely through oral teaching and do not begin any book learning until later (Knipe 1997; cf. comparative discussion in Fuller 2001a: 20–30). Notes to Chapter 5 1. See Fuller (1992a: 104–5) for the story of a failed attempt to praise the goddess Ce˘llattamman_ , who guards Madurai and the Minakshi Temple to the North, in Sanskrit instead of Tamil. 2. Hindu, January 7, 1997. 3. Hindu, July 5, 1997; cf. December 22, 1997. 4. Hindu, October 30, 1998. 5. Indian Express, October 28, 29, 30, 1998; Hindu, October 30, 31, 1998, November 11, 1998; Indian Express, November 15, 1998; Hindu, November 18, 1998, December 6, 10, 15, 21, 1998; Indian Express, December 24, 1998. 6. Hindu, November 29, December 6, 1998. The archana controversy did become linked with the government’s proposal to grant approval only to Tamilmedium nursery and primary schools; this policy was unpopular with many people who favored English-medium education, and arguing about the gods’ languages, instead of children’s, probably helped to divert attention from it. 7. Hindu, March 5, 1997. 8. On Tamil politics since the 1960s, see especially Barnett (1976); Pandian (1992); Subramanian (1999); Washbrook (1989). 9. Hindu, March 11, 1989. 10. Another minor but very revealing and quite typical illustration of Jayalalitha’s personality cult is an advertisement covering four full pages in the Hindu, February 15, 1995. Inserted by the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board to announce the opening of a new power station by Jayalalitha, it is illustrated by four large pictures of her, and each page starts with a panegyric, for example: “Under the sagacious leadership of Puratchi Thalaivi Dr J. Jayalalitha, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, A Mega Project of the Magnetic Personality, the North Madras Thermal Power Station (Stage-1) is being dedicated to the people by the Golden hands of the Glorious Leader.” The panegyric recalls similar praise for the “glorious helmsman Chairman Mao” during the Chinese cultural revolution, as well as other parallel examples of monstrous personality cults. 11. Indian Express, August 2, 1991. 12. Hindu, August 9, 1994. 13. Hindu, March 10, 1996. 14. Total figure announced by Collector of Madurai; Hindu (Madurai edition), July 6, 1995. 15. Hindu, March 3, 1992, March 10, 1996. Higher figures had earlier been announced by successive HR&CE Ministers; Hindu, July 3, 1995, January 26, 1996.

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16. Hindu, June 9, 1995. In this case, as in other Vaishnava temples, the ritual was called a samproks• an• a, “besprinkling,” but it takes the same form as a kumbhabhisheka, except that water is sprinkled from pots instead of poured. 17. Hindu, March 10, 1996. 18. This village temple’s kumbhabhisheka also manifested a species of Sanskritization, which has become increasingly common in southern Tamilnadu, so well-informed observers have told me. The temple had been a typically small temple for Aiyanar served by non-Brahman Velar priests, but at the behest of the Chettiyars—for whom this Aiyanar was their “family deity”—it was almost completely rebuilt, with additional shrines for new deities, so that it was converted into a much grander complex in the style more usually seen for Sanskritic deities in towns. The Velar priests were not consulted about the renovation by the Chettiyars, so that they went to court and delayed the work; during the kumbhabhisheka ritual itself, the Velars were totally excluded, as the Brahman priests from Madurai assumed complete control. 19. Indian Express, September 27, 1991. 20. Hindu, December 7, 1992. 21. Indian Express, October 20, 1991; Hindu, October 21, 1991. 22. Hindu, January 23, 25, 1994. 23. Hindu, January 24, March 10, 1996. 24. The Supreme Court ruled that appointment of priests not qualified by birth would contravene the Agamas, which would in turn violate the “freedom of religion” guaranteed by the Constitution. Seshammal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1972) 3 S.C.R. 815, p. 826; cf. SG, 158–9; P. Radhakrishnan 1991. 25. India Today, November 30, 1992. 26. Hindu and Indian Express, August 20, 1996. 27. Indian Express, August 20, November 18, 1996. 28. Hindu, December 22, 1997. 29. New Indian Express, January 12, 1999; Hindu, May 7, 1999. 30. Hindu, March 12, 2001; cf. Hindu, October 9, November 24, 2000, for slightly different figures from the HR&CE Minister. 31. Hindu, June 6, 2001; statistics showing the caste breakdown of votes in the Tamilnadu election appeared in Frontline, June 8, 2001, pp. 113–7. 32. After the AIADMK victory in 2001, Jayalalitha became Chief Minister but had to step down because she had been disqualified from contesting elections, following her conviction for corruption. When she had won her appeal against this conviction, she was elected to the Legislative Assembly in February 2002 and sworn in as Chief Minister soon afterwards. 33. Hindu, March 25, 2002. 34. Hindu, March 10, 12, 14, 1992. 35. Formally, he is the Shankaracharya of Ka¯n˜cı¯ Ka¯makot• i pı¯•t ha (the goddess Ka¯ma¯ks• ı¯’s “seat”), and the monastery is attached to her temple in Kanchipuram. On the Shankaracharya, see especially Cenkner (1983); Hancock (1995; 1999: ch. 8); Mines and Gourishankar (1990); Singer (1972: 86–9, 341–2). 36. Indian Express, October 29, 1998.

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37. For instance, throughout Sundararajan’s hagiography (1995) of the Shankaracharyas, as well as in almost every newspaper report, countless prominent politicians, government officials, judges, businessmen, academics, and others who were in attendance at the Shankaracharyas’ public appearances are always listed. 38. Particularly since the Paramacharya’s death in 1994, there is evidence of a change in direction in Kanchipuram. Jayendra is now a more regal, less ascetic figure than he used to be—and far more so than Chandrasekharendra ever was— and he intervenes more publicly in politics. Responding, too, to the preferences of the affluent middle class and its NRI section, private audiences with the Shankaracharyas, which avoid waiting alongside everybody else, are now easier to obtain. The monastery is now more preoccupied with “customer”-oriented public relations, and devotees can also make use of its Web site (www.kamakoti.org). In spite of its great wealth and influence, Kanchipuram is facing more competition from new, alternative gurus than it did even one decade ago, and the Shankaracharyas appear to recognize this, although the changes that have been made have upset some older devotees who revered Chandrasekharendra. For drawing my attention to these changes, I thank Arvind Rajagopal (personal communication). 39. Indian Express, June 13, July 6, 10, 1995. The Shankaracharyas, Chandrasekharendra and Jayendra, had also attended the Minakshi Temple’s kumbhabhisheka in 1963. 40. “Temple worship,” in Aiyer (1995, pt. 2: 14–16). This collection of Chandrasekharendra’s addresses in 1957–60, which originally appeared in the Hindu, is representative of his thought on many topics. Its republication by the monastery with assistance from the Hindu typifies the dissemination of the Shankaracharyas’ teachings to the middle-class English-speaking elite, the core readership of the Hindu, a newspaper published by a leading Brahman business family. The Hindu is a fair-minded, secular newspaper, but it consistently gives a lot of space to reporting, most respectfully, the Shankaracharyas’ activities and speeches. 41. Hindu, February 13, 1995. 42. The Kanchipuram monastery has supported the Tantric school in Kerala discussed by Freeman (1999: 69). 43. In 1995, when the Shankaracharya of Badrinath (North India) visited the Temple with a group of disciples, an administration official asked the priests at Minakshi’s shrine to leave so that the monk could perform worship for himself, but a senior priest refused. I lack accurate information about what happened next, but the incident was reported to me by another priest as a typical occurrence when a Shankaracharya comes. 44. “Sanatana dharma: its unique features,” in Aiyer (1995, pt. 2: 1–6), encapsulates Chandrasekharendra’s views on the subject, including the peculiar opinion that “[e]ven when untouchability is observed, there is no hatred behind it, like the racial hatred of Africa.” 45. Hindu, March 24, 1995. 46. Frontline, March 24, 1995, p. 67. Tentative plans for joining the university with the government’s proposed Veda Agama Academy were mooted, but they

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came to nothing, partly because the government was wary of too close a connection with Kanchipuram. 47. Frontline, March 29, 2002, pp. 18–20; February 28, 2003, pp. 24–6. 48. See Rajagopal (2001), especially chapter 1, for a convincing analysis of the rise of Hindu nationalism, its connection with economic liberalization and consumerism, and its reworking of ritual and cultural themes. See also Assayag (1998b; 2001: ch. 7) on Hindu nationalist reworking of ritual processions. 49. Hindu, December 5, 7, 1992. 50. Hindu, September 27, 1993. 51. Hindu, February 25, 26, March 9, 1995. 52. Hindu, February 7, 1996. 53. Indian Express, November 15, 1998. 54. Hindu, September 20, 1996; Indian Express, September 22, 1996. 55. Fuller (2001b); Hindu, September 20, 1999; Hindu, September 11, 2000; Hindu, August 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 2001. 56. Hindu, March 12, 2001. 57. Hindu, March 25, 2002. 58. Hindu, October 6, 7, 8, 10, 2002; January 12, 2003. The VHP’s general secretary was quoted in an article by S. Anand about how the Hindutva “plague is now spreading south“ in Outlook, March 3, 2003. See also a perceptive report on the ordinance in the context of both Jayalalitha’s relationship with the BJP and the social conditions of Dalits in Tamilnadu in Frontline, November 8, 2002, pp. 33–6, as well as related articles in Frontline, December 6, 2002, pp. 98–9; January 31, 2003, pp. 42–4. 59. Hindu, October 11, 1994. 60. The M.P.’s real name is given, but Omar is a pseudonym. In the Rajagopalan murder case, as the press reported, Rajan Chellappa was detained for questioning, whereas Omar never was, which is the main reason why I do not use his real name. In May 1996, shortly after the DMK had returned to power, a small bomb exploded in the Minakshi Temple, in the outer corridor of Sundareshwara’s temple. Within a few days, a Muslim who was on bail after being accused of involvement in Rajagopalan’s murder was arrested for the bombing, and Karunanidhi announced that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) would be called in to investigate both the murder and the bombing, although he was not explicit about the supposed connection between the two cases. Months later, the CBI detained Rajan Chellappa for interrogation and announced that this was expected to throw light on Rajagopalan’s murder, but two years later, the CBI cleared the original Muslim suspect, Rajan Chellappa, and everyone else who had been under suspicion, except for one man who had escaped custody; as a news report said, the “temple blast case is getting curiouser and curiouser” and so, too, is the unsolved murder case. Hindu, May 20, 28, 29, 1996; Indian Express, November 9, 1996; Hindu, December 6, 1996; New Indian Express, December 30, 1998. 61. This information comes from a researcher who investigated Vinayaka Chaturthi in Ramanathapuram in 1999; he had intended to work in Kilakkarai, but found out that the festival would not be held, and friends in the town strongly advised him that he should not even mention the event to people there.

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62. In Indian law, benami transactions are fictitious purchases and transfers made in the name of, or nominally for the benefit of, someone other than the real beneficial owner (Derrett 1963: 524–8). 63. One Saturday morning, watched by a bemused and astonished crowd, the corporation workmen supported by the police flattened all the shops within a few hours. A Saturday was chosen because no court could be petitioned for a stay order, and although it was rumored that Rajan Chellappa had asked the Chief Minister to intervene, the demolition was immediately interpreted by the priests as evidence that he had lost favor, which may have been true. The Munnani naturally claimed that it had won a victory. 64. Hindu (Madurai edition), November 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 1994; Hindu, December 5, 6, 1995; November 22, 1996; December 3, 1998. 65. In 1923, Madurai District Court upheld a claim that part of the hill, including the tomb, is owned by Muslims, and it ruled that the rest of the hill is the temple’s property. This decision is referred to in the Privy Council’s judgment on a second appeal, in which the Muslims were not a party: Madurai, Tirupparankundram, etc., Devasthanams v. Alikhan Sahib (1931) 61 M.L.J. 285, p. 286; on the hill, see Francis (1906: 279–80). 66. Sikandar has been popularly conflated with Skanda (Subrahmanya), the god of Tirupparankundram temple, but also with Iskandar, Alexander the Great, who is widely regarded as a Muslim precursor king in and around Madurai (Bayly 1989: 108–9, 191–2, 210). This sort of eclectic identification in popular religion is despised by Hindu nationalists and Islamists alike. Thus in December 2002, the VHP started a campaign to “purify” and claim exclusive Hindu control of the famous Budangiri shrine in southern Karnataka, a joint Sufi Muslim and Hindu place of worship (reported by S. Anand in Outlook, March 3, 2003). For a detailed and penetrating discussion of mixed devotion in similar sites in northern Karnataka that are or were both Hindu and Muslim, see Assayag (1995: ch. 5 and passim). Compare also the case of Kataragama, Skanda in Sri Lanka, analyzed by Obeyesekere (1992), who used to be a “rich composite of mythic symbolism” (ibid.: 232) as Murugan of the Tamils, a Buddhist guardian deity and future Buddha, a Sanskritic god of war for Sinhalas, and much more. During the course of recent ethnic conflict, multiplicity has become dichotomy, so that the Sinhalas have insisted that Kataragama is first and foremost a Buddhist deity and the Tamils have insisted that he is Murugan. 67. In 1976–77, there were no trustees because, as political appointees of the DMK, they had been dismissed when emergency rule was imposed. The Temple was therefore under the sole control of the Executive Officer. 68. On Minakshi’s white sari, see Fuller (1980: 324–5). Although the official’s conclusion may sound odd, the idea that troubles beset the kingdom if Shiva is not worshipped properly is an orthodox one. Sundareshwara’s linga is specially cooled with dripping water during the agni naks• atra, the exceptionally hot period (in May) when the sun is in kr• ttika¯ naks• atra (“lunar asterism”), at the end of Chittirai and the beginning of Vaigasi. 69. On corruption, see especially Gupta (1995); Osella and Osella (2000a); Parry (2000); Wade (1982; 1985).

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70. Under the DMK, a different scam also started; until Karunanidhi “smelt a rat in this appointment spree,” lots of new jobs for people in the ruling party were created in temples in Tamilnadu in 1997, and no less than 50 out of the total of 350 were in the Minakshi Temple. Hindu, May 8, 1997. Notes to Chapter 6 1. This section mostly summarizes the more detailed account in SG (chs. 4 and 5), which also supplies references omitted here. 2. The photograph is not dated, but while Willingdon was Viceroy between 1931 and 1936, he appears to have made only one official tour of the Madras Presidency, in December 1932 (referred to in Report on the Administration of the Madras Presidency, 1932–33 [Madras, 1934], “General summary,” p. viii). Willingdon was Governor of Madras between 1920 and 1923, but knowing his and one of the priests’ ages in 1932, I am confident that the photograph cannot date from those earlier years. 3. Cf. also Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976); Dirks (1987: chs. 9, 12); Good (1989; 2001); Reiniche (1989: ch. 6), although Reiniche is a partial exception because she also develops her argument in a more Indological direction. Ishita Banerjee Dube’s recent book (2001) on the Jagannath temple in Orissa is a valuable study, but it mostly pursues the same issues as earlier work on South India. 4. Subramania Aiyar was close to Annie Besant, leader of the Theosophical Society (cf. SG, 150–2); indeed, he was so close that in 1919—in a revealing controversy described by Conrad (2001: 240–1)—he put his loyalty to Besant above his loyalty to Gandhi. But many Brahman nationalists in Madras, not only Subramania Aiyar, were greatly influenced by Theosophy and its ideas of “scientific and rational” Hindu spirituality (van der Veer 2001: 77–8). Gyan Prakash, who also criticizes Chatterjee’s misdrawn opposition between inner and outer domains (2000: 158, 201–2), makes a similar point to van der Veer about Theosophy (2000: 78–80) and argues more generally that a “combination of science and religion . . . characterized the Hindu revival extending from the Punjab to Madras.” 5. Idealistically but still revealingly, S. Radhakrishnan—then a professor in Oxford and later President of India—summed up the mutual relationship between religion and modernity in these words (note his mention of temple ritual): “The practical results of this whole movement [of reform] can be seen in the endeavours to remove the disabilities from which . . . Harijans suffered for centuries, to raise the status of women and give them increased rights consistent with their human dignity and right to happiness, to modify the laws of marriage, to improve the ritual in temples, and to effect innumerable reforms which are all intended to give the whole Hindu community a progressive and democratic outlook. As a result, Hinduism has become an ethical religion with a social gospel. The influence of the West here is considerable. It has brought about a revaluation of India’s religious heritage” (S. Radhakrishnan 1941: 352–3). 6. This comment is not made frivolously. In early Subaltern Studies writings, studies of social groups of peasants, workers, or tribal peoples predominated, but later on far more attention was given to “the clash of unequal cultures under

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colonialism and the dominance of colonial modernity over India’s resistant, indigenous culture” (Ludden 2001: 19), as exemplified by Ranajit Guha’s essay on “dominance without hegemony.” In this long essay, passing reference is made to specific social groups, but the majority of the argument is abstract, and much of it depends on the analysis of various kinds of textual discourses. Reference is made, for example, to the Mahabharata on dharma and the duty of the king and his subjects; “Translated into the politics of resistance under the raj this implied an effort to correct what appeared to Indians as its deviation from the ideals of government inspired by Dharma” (Guha 1989: 268). This sentence exactly describes the resistance of one group of Indians, the Minakshi Temple priests, against government action to violate the rules of dharma in 1939–45. But does that make the priests subaltern resisters? Given Guha’s list of admittedly paradoxical features in the political culture of the “indigenous elite” and “subalterns” (ibid.: 272), it is hard to place the priests in either category, but it seems unlikely that they could be admitted into the subaltern one. As Jim Masselos (2001: 190) suggests, “moral values” and “approval of action according to social category” tend to define which people count as authentic subalterns, and the almost universal prejudice against Brahman priests will in the end disqualify them from serious consideration. 7. Multiple Modernities is the title of a collection of essays in Daedalus 129, 1 (2000), a companion volume to Early Modernities in Daedalus 127, 3 (1998); Alter/Native Modernities is the (tricksy) title of a collection of essays in Public Culture 11, 1 (1999). 8. Somewhat strangely, given his own emphasis on the distinctive character of Indian modernity—which is also highlighted in a jointly written statement (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995)—Appadurai comes very close to Giddens when he contends that under conditions of modernity and globalization, even the invention of tradition, let alone its maintenance, “can become slippery” (1996: 44), and “the work of cultural reproduction becomes a daily hazard” (ibid.: 45). But there is no evidence, for example, that for the priests or even government bureaucrats in Tamilnadu, there might be anything “slippery” or “hazardous” about upholding the Agamic tradition. Like Giddens, Appadurai exaggerates disjunction and newness, as Assayag (1998a) shows, and therefore similarly fails to appreciate the power of traditionalism. 9. Weber’s discussion of prophets, priests, and canonical writings in his “Sociology of Religion” (1978: 457–68) is particularly apposite here. The priesthood, committed to traditional authority, has to codify a prophet’s new doctrine or the old doctrine that has survived the prophet’s attack. Canonical writings containing the new revelations or old traditions, and dogmas containing priestly interpretations of them, are consequently produced (ibid.: 457–8). The canon is generally closed at some stage, on the premise that only a past epoch “had been blessed with prophetic charisma” (ibid.: 459), and the priests’ main task was then systematizing the content of prophecy or of the sacred traditions (ibid.: 460). But although the canon may be closed, Weber’s entire analysis makes it plain that codification and systematization, even in the absence of new prophetic revelations, continually involve rethinking; for example, the establishment of a lay congregation is one key stimulus “for the development of the substantive content of the

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priestly doctrine” (ibid.: 460). None of this can be adequately characterized as mere reinterpretation and clarification of a closed tradition. 10. Texts of the kind referred to make up a very large proportion of the material on Indian modernity analyzed by authors such as Chakrabarty (2000), Chatterjee (1993), and Prakash (2000).

Glossary

This selective glossary only supplies meanings strictly relevant to this book; it also excludes names and terms occurring only at one or two places in the text. Words are transliterated from their Sanskrit forms, unless indicated as Tamil (Tam.). For the transliteration system, see “Note on Transliteration”; listed in parentheses are words whose spelling is modified when diacritics are removed.

abhiseka (abhisheka) a¯ca¯rya (acharya) a¯ca¯rya¯bhiseka (acharyabhisheka) A¯dis´aiva (Adishaiva) A¯gama alan˙ka¯ra arcaka (archaka) arcana (archana) •

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bathing ritual performed during puja priest; guru

consecration (bathing) ritual for new priest “first Shaiva”; Shaiva temple priests’ subcaste text prescribing ritual in Shaiva temples decoration ritual performed during puja temple priest worship; specifically private worship in a temple by or on behalf of an individual devotee cantai (chandai) (Tam.) oral teaching of text by guru in pathashala; cf. tiruvai remuneration made to a priest daksin a¯ (dakshina) dharma religious law and moral code; cf. sanatana dharma dı¯pa¯ra¯dhana ritual of displaying and waving lamps during puja Gan apati homa ritual of offering oblations into a fire for Ganapati (Ganesha) Gan es´a (Ganesha) Shiva’s elder son, elephant-headed god of beginnings and obstacles garbhagr ha (garbhagriha) “womb-chamber,” inner sanctum of temple gurukula tradition wherein a pupil lives in his guru’s house as his disciple in_a¯m (Tam.) tax-free grant of land (revenue terminology) Ka¯mika¯gama one of the primary Agamas, regarded as the principal authority in the Minakshi Temple Ka¯ran a¯gama one of the primary Agamas, regarded as a supplemental authority in the Minakshi Temple •

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kat t alai (Tam.) Kr sn a (Krishna) Yajur Veda • •

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Kulacekara (Tam.) kumbha¯bhiseka (kumbhabhisheka) •

endowment in a temple “Black” version of the second Veda; important in Shaiva temple ritual as source of two texts, S´rı¯rudra and Camaka name of group of Minakshi Temple priests

“water-pot bathing ritual,” temple renovation ritual kun˙kuma red powder sacred to and used in worship of the goddess lin˙ga aniconic phallic emblem of Shiva man d apa hall Mı¯na¯ksı¯ (Minakshi) presiding goddess of her Temple; wife of Sundareshwara mira¯cu (mirasu) (Tam.) hereditary right to land or office (revenue terminology) mu¯la¯gama “root Agama,” one of twenty-eight primary Agamas mur_ai (Tam.) turn, rota; in Minakshi Temple, specifically rota of rights to open sancta doors mu¯rti form or image of deity Murukan_ (Murugan) (Tam.) Shiva’s younger son, a favorite deity of Tamils naivedya food offering made during puja na¯ma¯vali list of deity’s names recited in praise nampiya¯r (nambiyar) (Tam.) priest in sole charge of major festival in Minakshi Temple o˘ru ka¯la pu¯ja¯ (Tam.) “one-time” puja; a scheme to encourage each temple in Tamilnadu to hold worship at least once a day paddhati Agamic ritual manual, principally those written by Aghoras´iva and Somas´ambhu parica¯rakar (paricharakar) (Tam.) Brahman temple servant assisting the priests pa¯thas´a¯la¯ (pathashala) traditional Agamic or Vedic school pat t ar (Tam.) Shaiva temple priest in southern Tamilnadu pradha¯na “principal” prasa¯da “grace”; sanctified food and other substances given to worshipers at end of puja pu¯ja¯ worship berry sacred to Shiva, usually worn on a necklace rudra¯ksa (rudraksha) • •

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sa¯dhaka S´aiva (Shaiva) s´akti (shakti) sana¯tana dharma S´an˙kara¯ca¯rya (Shankaracharya)

priest directing an acharya and chanting mantras at kumbhabhisheka of or pertaining to Shiva; worshipper of Shiva divine power; often personified as feminine and hence a form of the goddess “eternal religion,” term for Hinduism among modern reformist Hindus

spiritual successor to the philosopher Shankara, in particular the head of Kanchipuram monastery sarva sa¯dhaka priest with supreme responsibility for kumbhabhisheka sa¯stri (or ca¯stiri) (Tam.) Brahman domestic priest and/or chanter in temple (from Skt. s´a¯stri) S´iva (Shiva) one of the two great gods of Hinduism, alongside Vishnu S´iva¯ca¯rya (Shivacharya) “priest of Shiva,” synonym of Adishaiva Soma¯skanda Shiva accompanied by his consort and younger son, the form displayed in his main “festival image” sta¯n_ikar (Tam.) chief priest of temple Subrahman ya Shiva’s younger son Sundares´vara (Sundareshwara) form of Shiva, husband of Minakshi, and presiding god of Minakshi Temple tiruvai (Tam.) practicing recitation of text as done by students in pathashala; cf. chandai utsava temple festival Vaisn ava (Vaishnava) of or pertaining to Vishnu; worshipper of Vishnu Veda the four earliest and most authoritative sacred texts of Hinduism vibhu¯ti white ash sacred to and used in worship of Shiva Vikkira Pa¯n t iya (Tam.) name of group of Minakshi Temple priests Vina¯yaka Ganesha, Shiva’s elder son Vina¯yaka Caturthı¯ (Chaturthi) “Vinayaka’s fourth,” the god’s annual festival Visn u (Vishnu) one of the two great gods of Hinduism, alongside Shiva ya¯gapu¯ja¯ “fire-sacrifice worship,” ritual at kumbhabhisheka ya¯gas´a¯la¯ (yagashala) “fire-sacrifice hall,” location of fire sacrifice at kumbhabhisheka or inside temple •

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Index

Adishaivas (Shivacharyas), 21, 76–77; and nonpriestly Brahmans, 110–12 Agamas, 1, 3, 6, 18, 80, 93; and Hindu reformism, 80, 104, 106, 159; and law, 89; printing and publication of, 86–93, 103, 109, 159; and temple ritual, 80– 82, 87–88, 91, 108, 115, 141, 143, 148; and Vedas, 95, 101, 105. See also Agamic education; Agamic schools; Shiva, and Agamas Agamic education, 80, 82–86, 109–13, 123–24; and memorization, 97, 102–6, 109, 112; and Minakshi Temple priests, 3, 5, 11–12, 16–18, 48, 50, 53, 93–95, 155, 160, 166–67; and ritual practice, 104–8; and teaching system, 100–103. See also Agamic schools Agamic schools: Allur, 94, 96–97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 109, 119; Palani, 94; Pillaiyarpatti, 94, 96, 97–98, 99–100, 101, 103, 104, 109; in Tamilnadu, 179n.7, 181n.23; Tirupparankundram, 85, 94, 96, 98–100, 103, 104, 110, 122, 128, 176n.31. See also Agamic education All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), 4, 7, 84, 116–18, 121, 124, 125, 131, 132, 134–35, 142 anti-Brahmanism, 4, 29, 114, 117–18, 119, 137, 151, 155

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), 3, 29, 33, 85, 114–18, 121, 123, 124–25, 127, 131, 134–36, 144, 146, 155 Durga, 38, 41, 175n.27 economic liberalization, 4, 39, 45, 118, 122, 146 Ekamranatha temple, 171n.7, 172n.9 French Institute of Pondicherry, 86, 91–93 Ganapati homa rituals, 49–50, 51–52, 149, 150 Ganesha (Ganapati, Vinayaka), 7, 44, 61 Gopalan, Rama, 134, 135, 140

Chidambaram temple, 171–72n.7 Christians: and Hindu nationalism, 134, 136 Congress Party, 82, 154, 157 corruption, 122, 138, 145–46; in Minakshi Temple, 137, 139, 144–47, 148 “cross-cousin” marriage, 71–73, 177n.10

hereditary priesthood, abolition of, 3, 29, 77, 114, 124 Hindu Munnani, 132–36, 137, 139–42, 147, 150 Hindu nationalism, 130–31, 142; and “public sphere,” 137, 149–51; and religious revivalism, 4, 125, 130, 136–37, 149, 150–51, 155; and Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram, 129; in Tamilnadu, 131–37 Hindu reformism, 80, 82–86, 89, 90, 109, 129, 157–60 Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department, 3, 4, 114, 116, 119–20, 124–25, 140, 142, 146– 47, 148, 151, 154, 157; and priestly education, 5, 84–86, 94, 109, 155 Hindu Religious Endowments Act, 83, 157, 158, 159 Hindu Religious Endowments (HRE) Board, 2, 153, 159; and priestly education, 5, 83–84 Hindu Religious Endowments Commission, 84

Dakshinamurti, 38, 96 Dharma Rakshana Sabha, 82–83, 89, 157, 158

Jayalalitha, J., 4, 7, 84, 117, 119–26, 130, 131–32, 134–36, 138–39, 146 Justice Party, 83, 88, 157–58

Besant, Annie, 82, 187n.4 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 130–32, 135, 136

206 Kalugumalai temple, 31, 81, 173n.18 Karunanidhi, M. 114–16, 118, 124–25, 134, 135–36 king, 20, 119–20; and priests, 31–32, 152– 55 Kumbeshwara temple, 32, 174n.18 land, tax-free grants of, 3, 23, 29, 32–33, 53–54, 153 middle class, 37–38, 39–41, 65, 118, 127 Minakshi and Sundareshwara, 20, 37–39, 44, 55, 57, 115, 143, 151, 186n.68; temples of, 7, 170n.1 Minakshi Temple, 7, 19–20; administration of, 3, 41, 42–45, 139, 142–48, 151, 154; archanas in, 34–35, 36, 38–39, 40– 41, 101, 114–15, 173n.17, 174n.21; attendance at, 40, 174n.26; chanters/ sastris in, 16, 22, 29, 48–49, 110–11, 145, 176n.32; collection boxes in, 175n.28; daily worship in, 19–20, 22, 57–59, 170n.2; devotional singers in, 22, 30; endowments in, 39, 42–43, 175n.29; festivals in, 20, 28, 57–59, 143; golden car in, 37–38, 41, 42, 138, 149; honours in, 37, 43; musicians in, 22, 30; private worship in, 19, 33–42, 55, 142–43, 174n.21; renovation ritual in, 7–18, 120–21, 128; sponsorship in, 37, 43–45; temple-entry dispute in, 3, 26, 32, 53, 142, 154, 159–60; temple servants in, 22, 23, 30, 145; trustees of, 14, 121, 144, 153 Minakshi temple, Pearland, 1–2, 18, 51– 52, 111 Minakshi Temple priests: adoption among, 23; Association of, 14, 144; and barber, 68–69; chief priests of, 12, 14–15, 21– 22, 153, 154; consecration of, 21, 27– 31, 76, 145; daily routine among, 57– 59; and devotees, 30, 35–36; dress of, 59–61; education of, 6, 15–16, 17–18, 45–48, 73–74, 93–95, 109–13, 175n.30 (see also Agamic education); employment in overseas temples of, 16, 21, 24, 50–53, 55, 94; employment outside Temple of, 45–47, 54; “family deities” among, 171n.5; hairstyle of, 59–60, 79; household structure of, 61–62; houses of, 53–54, 62–67; income of, 34–35, 36– 37, 41–42, 50, 52, 53–56; inheritance

INDEX

and succession among, 23–27, 62; marriage among, 62, 71–77; modern attitudes among, 5–6, 78–79, 112–13, 167; morale of, 305, 18, 33, 113; public worship rights of, 19, 22–33, 55, 62, 149, 172n.14; and purity and pollution, 67– 71, 77–78; and renovation ritual, 9–18; and ritual performance, 107–8; Tirucculi group of, 21–22, 24–29, 31, 153; traditionalism of, 5–6, 31, 33, 56, 60, 77–79, 112–13, 167; Vikkira Pantiya and Kulacekara groups of, 12, 15, 18, 21–23, 28, 30, 31, 71, 153; wives and daughters of, 21, 23–24, 45–48, 61, 66–67, 69–70, 78 modernity and traditionalism, 160–67 Murugan (Skanda, Subrahmanya), 7, 40, 94, 186n.66 Muslims: and Hindu nationalism, 131, 132–34, 136, 138, 140–42, 147, 186n.66; and Islamism, 149–50; and Minakshi Temple, 147–48; and Quranic publication, 90, 150 Mylapore Group, 82, 89 Nachiappan Swamigal, C., 85–86, 92 Naidu, R. S., 147, 153, 154 Nallaswami Pillai, J. M., 88–90 Nayaka kings, 7, 31, 152–53, 154 neo-Shaivism, 88–89, 114 Non-Resident Indians (NRI), 2, 4, 37, 111 Parashakti, 117, 134, 175n.27 Rajagopalan, P., murder of, 137–40 Rajan Chellappa, V., 138–40, 146–47, 185n.60 Ramachandran, M. G., 116–18, 119, 120 Ramasami, E. V., 114, 116, 137 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 130, 132 renovation rituals, 4, 49–50, 120–23, 125, 149, 183n.18. See also Minakshi Temple, renovation ritual in Sadasiva Aiyar, T., 89, 90 Sanskrit: in Agamic schools, 95, 102, 103; and Brahmans, 111–12; Grantha script for, 86, 88, 100, 103; and Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram, 129; and Tamil, 89; in temple worship, 115–16 Sarasvati, 38, 96 Seshagiri Aiyar, T. V., 89

207

INDEX

Shankaracharyas of Kanchipuram, 52, 84, 85, 92, 96, 110, 118, 126–30, 131, 136 Shankaracharyas of Sringeri, 84, 126 Shiva: and Agamas, 3, 5–6, 18, 80–82, 88, 92–93, 101, 102, 108, 111, 167 (see also Agamas); as Dakshinamurti, 38, 96; Mahashivaratri festival of, 44; as Nataraja, 39; and priests, 21, 59, 82, 111–12, 171n.4 Subramania Aiyar, S., 82–83, 89, 157, 178n.2, 187n.4 Sundareshwara. See Minakshi and Sundareshwara Tamil archanas, 114–16, 124, 151 Tamilnadu (Madras) government: religious policy of, 84–85, 117–18, 119–25, 140;

reservations policy of, 47, 117; temple policy of, 156–59 Tirupati temple, 51, 171n.7 Tirupparankundram temple, 22, 26, 49, 76, 139, 140–42 Tiruvannamalai temple, 31–32, 81, 141, 171–72n.7, 173n.18 Tiruvarur temple, 32, 171n.7 Veda Agama Education and Research Academy, 84, 123, 125 Vinayaka Chaturthi festival, 132–34, 135, 136, 138 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 130–32, 135, 136 Willingdon, Lord, 154