The small religious community of Sri Vaishnavas for several centuries, have always been apolitical.
As priests, religious scholars, spiritual seekers, temple up-keepers, poets, litterateurs, philosophers and theologians, “ubaya-vedaantins” kept themselves away from most of the affairs of kings, kingdoms, the state and the government. Their indifference to matters of politics was the norm. Exceptions were few and far between.
In the 11th century CE, in Sri Rangam, there was one such very notable exception. Due to the then prevailing Saivite bigotry against Vaishnavas, the then Chola King Kulothunga-II found Sri Ramanuja’s reformist religious ideas too radical and subversive of the established social order and the caste pecking-order, as it were. The resulting game of political intrigue between Saivite and Vaishnavite of the times put Ramanujacharya very much at odds with the King. He had to perforce suffer tragic consequences, violence and eventually was exiled from Sri Rangam and could not return there until after twelve long years spent in Melkote/Thondanoor in Karnataka State.
The second exception was much later and during the reign of the Vijayanagar dynasts. The services of the Thaathacharyas of Kanchipuram and a few scions of the famous Utthama Nambi family lineage of Sri Vaishnava “thennaachaaryas” at Sri Rangam were off and on retained by rulers and chieftains of the lands in the capacity of “raja-gurus”, “raja-purohits” etc. — i.e. as advisors, mentors, administrative counsels and part-time expert consultants.
Long before the idea of “separation of State and Church” was even conceived and implemented in the great empires of the Western civilization, in India that particular ethic and protocol of good governance was already in place. It was scrupulously adhered to by both the royal rulers and their subject priesthoods and religious community-leaders. There was mutual respect for each other’s functioning space. One did not encroach upon or interfere in the other’s domain. There was general amity, synergy and symbiosis between them.
It was precisely because the religious leaders in India always maintained safe and healthy apolitical distance from kings and rulers that the there was hardly any conflict, friction or tension between the State and Church — certainly none of the sort that known to be common in the medieval history of empires of the western hemisphere — such as, say for example, in Tudor England or the Holy Roman Empire. The priestly classes of Tamil Brahmins in the land of the Tamils — including Saivites, Vaishnavites and Smaathas, or, Buddhists, Jains, Saakthas, Taantriks, Naasthikas, Chaaruvaakas etc. — all received not only due respect from the rulers of their respective climes but also generous financial, economic aid and moral support.
For more than 500 long years of rule in the Tamil lands, under successive kings, dynasts and regents — variously of the Pallava, Chola, Pandya, Vijayanagar, Saluva and Naayak eras — the “ubaya-vedaantins” had been the recipients of the beneficence of their royal sovereigns. They enjoyed it in abundant measure and means their generous patronage and largesse. As already described in Parts-18 through 22, the hereditary family lineages of the Thaathaacharis in Kanchipuram and generations of the family scions of the Uttama Nambi families in Sri Rangam — the two temple-capital cities of the “ubaya-vedaantins” — indeed enjoyed handsome financial and infrastructural endowments the Vijayanagar Empire bestowed upon them, unstintingly. That was how they established their spiritual fiefdoms over temples for hundreds of years. Indeed, one might say, as far as the Sri Vaishnavas of the Tamil country were concerned, there was no necessity at all for any formalized “separation of the State and Church”. The “State” or the Government of the day willingly and generously patronized the “Church” and its vast religious domain of temples, of the entire religious institutional temple-ecosystem that was nurtured and promoted. This became possible because the Vijayanagar Kings themselves were devout and practicing Sri Vaishnavites and firm followers of Ramanujacharya’s spiritual legacy.
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When India’s Independence came, for the very first time perhaps in a 500+ years history of Tamil country, the Sri Vaishnavas — as as all other Brahmins too did in the new State of Tamil Nadu — began experiencing the pain and oppressive clime of politics in which the “State” was openly and viciously inimical to the “Church“.
An overly secularistic philosophy was enshrined in the nation’s avowedly new “holy book“, the Constitution of the Republic of India. It openly and stridently supported, legitimized and encouraged not only the “separation” of Religion from the entire socio-political ethos of new India but also actively championed if not crusaded for clear cleavage between the two. For the first time in the history of India, the “State” became the virtuous enemy of the “Church“!
The distancing of Religion from the rest of the larger socio-political landscape of the country was seen as both necessary and essential pre-requisite for the modernization of India. In the name of ushering in a new era of a caste-less and “superstition-free” society in India, the Brahminical order as it had been existing right across the country for centuries, and more especially in Tamil Nadu, was targeted as archvillain and an archetypally reactionary enemy of the reforms that the Constitution of India itself was advocating. They were sweeping reforms for “equality” and “fundamental human rights“, “social justice” and “for fighting caste-discrimination”.
In, Tamil Nadu a great new historical movement began. The Tamil majority Backward and Dalit caste-groups seized the historic moment and opportunity to rally themselves together into a formidable and aggressive phalanx that began the political fight for an egalitarian Tamilian social-order heralding a new so-called “Dravidian era and Renaissance”. Ancient Tamil pride would be reclaimed, they said. And wherein socio-economic opportunities they claimed had been hitherto denied to them for centuries in history, would rightfully be theirs…..
Besides being a cultural descriptor, the very term ‘Dravidian’ has today also come to stand for a worldview that came into the public consciousness through that movement which began in the early 20th century. A very brief history of this Dravidian worldview is worth noting here: https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/opinion/in-perspective/a-look-at-the-linguistic-and-socio-political-history-of-dravidian-stock-985292.html
QUOTE: “In November 1916, at a historic meeting in the city of Chennai, a ‘Non-Brahmin Manifesto’ was issued by the then leading political leaders of the state, M/s C Natesa Mudaliar, P Theagaraya Chetty, Dr T M Nair, and others. Among their demands was for more non-brahmin representation in the then Brahmin-dominated government services. In 1919, the organisation that had taken birth on account of this meeting—the South Indian Liberal Federation (popularly known as the Justice Party)—won the first elections in the Madras Presidency under the dyarchy system introduced by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of the colonial British Government. Among the government’s actions in the 1920s were the introduction of a caste-based reservation in government services and State control of many temples in the province.
“Nair’s death in 1919 and Chetty’s in 1925 meant that the leadership of the movement passed into the hands of E V Ramasamy Naicker (‘Periyar’). Periyar’s ascent ensured that the movement took both a vernacular and a popular turn. His movement, which he called the ‘Self-Respect Movement’, confronted caste, religion and patriarchy upfront.
“Periyar had been a part of the Congress, but had left in disgust at what he saw as the casteism of its Brahmin leaders. He sought to make a distinction between the indigenous Dravidian and the North Indian Aryan, who in the Madras Presidency was represented, in his view, by Brahmins. One of the movement’s more trenchant agitations was against the imposition of Hindi language by the …. Congress (Party) administration that ruled the province between 1937 and 1939. The Justice Party and Periyar’s movement merged in 1938 and in 1944, assumed the name Dravida Kazhagam (DK). In 1949, the DK split, with C N Annadurai forming the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and choosing to pursue the electoral politics route (to power)”. UNQUOTE
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The Dravidians captured power in Tamil Nadu in 1967 and held on to it firmly for much of the next 50 years thereafter … and in fact they run the State Government even today (2022).
Over the same five decades, the Sri Vaishnavas, being part of the priestly Brahmin castes that were hitherto pre-eminent in Hindu society, underwent turbulent and harrowing social misfortunes. Much against the grain of their nature and communitarian predisposition, they could no longer remain strictly apolitical. The socio-political climate during this period virtually dragged the community, as it were, into the vortex of a toxic socio-political churn which in the popular lexicon of today is referred to as the “Dravidian Vs Aryan culture-war“.
This war left the entire community of Sri Vaishnavas in Tamil Nadu shell-shocked for over five to seven decades after Indian Independence. They were utterly unprepared and unarmed — ideologically, demographically and resource-wise — for it. It left them deeply traumatized, disoriented and disenfranchised. It plunged them into a deep identity-crisis the scars of which are still borne today on their collective, communitarian psyche.
From being for long being held in high esteem as the highly “cultured cream” at the very top of Hindu society for ages in history, the Sri Vaishnavas as Brahmins suddenly found themselves being targeted, attacked and hurled down to its very bottom! They suddenly had to face the onslaught of ceaseless vilification by Dravidianists who began labelling them as “Aryan outsiders” or “aliens” of Tamizh society and the “root cause” of all social-ills in it. A classic example of such vilification is that of a prominent south Indian, C. Sankaran Nair, who in a public lecture delivered in 1919, (ibid. G.Sudarshan Reddy) QUOTE: “declared that India was beginning to realize that nationalism was “an impossible dream so long as the caste system stands in the way”. The Brahmans, he said, were responsible for the caste system and maintained it rigidly in order to prevent the lower castes from rising in status. Any Brahman who entered public life brought with him ‘his Brahmana ideas, his philosophy after death, and Maya, which were out of place there’. As a result of Brahman dominance, other classes were becoming unfit to accept political responsibility”. UNQUOTE
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Now, the label of “Aryan outsiders” that was stuck on Sri Vaishnavas was given for several complex reasons but 4 of them could be said to be the principal ones:
- One, the Sri Vaishnavas continued to use Sanskrit as their most revered language much to the detriment of the Tamizh language which in fact was even more ancient and culturally superior.
- Secondly, the Sri Vaishnavas were stubborn in their reluctance to completely disavow or openly forswear one of the most fundamental tenets of Hindu Sanaatana Dharma viz. the social order of “varna-ashrama-dharma”, the age-old and 4-fold hierarchic structure of the caste-system of Indic societies into Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishyas and Shudhras.
- In spite of the “varna-ashrama-dharma” being virtually outlawed in and by the Constitution of India for being, as it were, the very fount and instrument of “social discrimination” of countless centuries past — and being utterly violative too of the fundamental human right to Equality in the eyes of the Law — it continued still to afflict and plague Tamil society many covert and overt cultural forms and through many religious practices. And that was mainly due to Brahminical dominance if not stranglehold on Education, Employment, Governance and Arts and Culture at large.
- The Sri Vaishnavas, like their other Brahmin kindred-communities in the Saivite, Sakta, Smaartha fold of Tamil Nadu, were also only perpetuating the Aryan and Sanskritic culture in the State via the hereditary and traditional rights they were able to exercise to control the wealth and administration of their temples.
Each of the four principal causes of social trauma and painful alienation — Sanskrit, “varna-ashrama-dharma”, Brahminical dominance, and hereditary right of control over temples — the “ubaya-vedaantin” community suffered in the six decades following India’s Independence will be briefly described next in Part-40.
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi