Derived as they were from his Indological studies premised on Christian evangelism, the monumental mischief that Bishop Caldwell’s ideas did to divide and fragment Tamil society has been most comprehensively explained in a chapter in the well-researched book “BREAKING INDIA”: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines” ((2011: Manjul Publishing House) co-authored by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan.
It is worth quoting below some very relevant passages in-extenso from the book above to show how British Orientalists like G.U.Pope and Bishop Robert Caldwell, through specious academic studies produced new-fangled theories of Tamil ethnology and racial-profiling. Such missionary endeavors directly collaborated with and, in fact, sub-served the greater purposes of the British public policy of “Divide and Rule India“.
In Tamil country, both the Caldwellian theory and British Imperial policy combined also to drive a deep wedge between religious groups in society. Later Indian scholars and Tamil historians, thoroughly indoctrinated in Western modes of thinking and Christian-missionary proselytization, succeeded in furthering and worsening the communal divide and made it, in fact, the bedrock of all identity-politics and electoral politics in the post-Independence era.
A quick reading of certain very relevant passages from “BREAKING INDIA” reproduced below will give the reader a clearer picture of the basis for my humble submission in the matter specifically related to the narrative construct in the Tenkalai “tennaachaarya sampradaayam” about the so-called “Tamizh Vs Sanskrit” binary which, within the ranks of “ubaya-vedaantins” had hitherto for centuries always been unified and holistic.
It is my own submission that under British Rule in the Madras Governorate of the 19th-20th century CE, the Sri Vaishnava community too — not unlike the Saivities and Saiva-Siddhantin-s described in the above passages — could not have been immune to the fallouts of the profound social churning that was taking place all around them. The “ubaya-vedaantin-s” could not have escaped from or remained uninfected by the theories of toxic ethnology that British imperial intelligentsia and Christian missionaries had kept injecting into the religious consciousness of Tamil country for well over a century.
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi