CASTE
PARIAHS
One of the great bhakti legends is the story of the Nayanar saint named Kannappar, told in several texts,71 perhaps best known from the Periya Purana of Cekkilar, dated to the reign of the Chola king Kulottunka II, 1133-1150 CE:
KANNAPPAR’S EYES
Kannappar was the chief of a tribe of dark-skinned, violent hunters, who lived by hunting wild animals (with the help of dogs) and stealing cattle. One day he found Shiva in the jungle; filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannappar resolved to feed him. So he took pieces of the meat of a boar that he had killed, tasted each one to make sure it was tender, and brought the meat to him. He kicked aside, with his foot, the flowers that a Brahmin priest had left on Shiva’s head and spat out on him the water from his mouth. Then he gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head. His feet, and his dogs’ paws, left their marks on him. He stayed with him all night, and left at dawn to hunt again.
The Brahmin priest, returning there, removed Kannappar’s offerings and hid and watched him. In order to demonstrate for the Brahmin the greatness of Kannappar’s love, Shiva caused blood to flow from one of his eyes. To stanch the flow, Kannappar gouged out his own eye with an arrow and replaced the god’s eye with his. When Shiva made his second eye bleed, Kannappar put his left foot on Shiva’s eye to guide his hand, and was about to pluck out his remaining eye when Shiva stretched out his hand to stop him, and placed Kannappar at his right hand.72
Kannappar may be a Nishada or some other tribal beyond the Hindu pale; one Sanskrit version of the story calls him a Kirata. The Periya Purana says that his mother was from the warrior caste of Maravars and his parents had worshiped Murukan, but Kannappar does not seem to know the rules of Brahmin dharma, such as the taboo on offering flesh to the gods. (Or with a historian’s distance, we might say that he does not know that high-caste Hindus, like the Brahmin for whose benefit Shiva stages the whole grisly episode of the eyes, no longer offer flesh to their gods.) He does not know about the impurity of substances, like spit, that come from the body, the spit that he uses to clean the image as a mother would use her spit to scrub a bit of dirt off the face of her child. (Or again, he is unaware of the centuries that have passed since Apala, in the Rig Veda, offered the god Indra the soma plant that she had pressed in her mouth.) He reverses the proper order of head and foot by putting his foot on the head of the god instead of his head on the god’s foot, the usual gesture of respect.
Kannapar does not understand metaphor: The normal offering to a god is a flower, perhaps a lotus, and in fact he gives the god flowers (though ones that have been polluted, in high-caste terms, by being worn on his own head). But Sanskrit poets often liken beautiful eyes to lotuses, and Kannappar offers the god the real thing, the eye, the wrong half of the metaphor. Moreover, Kannappar’s gruesome indifference to his self-inflicted pain may have had conscious antecedents in similar acts committed by King Shibi and by Ekalavya, in the Mahabharata (not to mention the blinding of Kunala in the Buddhist tradition).
Many texts retell this story, generally specifying that the form of Shiva that Kannappar found in the forest was a linga and occasionally adding details designed to transform Kannappar from a cattle thief and hunter with dogs (like the Vedic people) into a paradigm of bhakti; thus the animals that he kills are said to be ogres offering their bodies as sacrifice to Shiva.73 But in the Periya Purana his “mistakes” are felix culpas that make possible an unprecedentedly direct exchange of gazes; instead of trading mere glances, he and the god trade their very eyes. This is darshan in its most direct, violent, passionate form.
BRAHMINS
Like the second of the three alliances, in which religious power (conceived of as inner heat) could be generated by individuals without the mediation of Brahmins, the third or bhakti alliance placed the power in the individual and hence by its very nature threatened the hegemony of the Brahmins. Chola records of demands for the lower castes to have equal access to temples further demonstrate that the bhakti movement had originally contained an element of protest against Brahmin exclusivity.74 As the tale of Kannappar demonstrates so powerfully, some sects of South Indian bhakti regarded non-Brahmins as superior to Brahmins; at the very least, bhakti sometimes sidetracked Brahmin ritual by emphasizing a direct personal relationship between the devotee and the deity.75 The devotion to the guru that played such a central part in bhakti was also a threat to Brahmins, for the guru was not necessarily a Brahmin. But it did not stop there. As Ramanujan noted, “In the lives of the bhakti saints ‘the last shall be first’: men wish to renounce their masculinity and to become as women; upper-caste males wish to renounce pride, privilege, and wealth, seek dishonor and self-abasement, and learn from the untouchable devotee.”76 Some bhakti groups cut across political, caste, gender, and professional divisions. Some members were Pariahs, and many were non-Brahmins.
The questioning, if not the rejection, of the hierarchies of gender and caste, coupled with a theology of love, has sometimes inspired an image of the bhakti worshipers as some sort of proto-flower children, Hinduism “lite.” But on the one hand, the hierarchical categories are reified even as they are challenged—reversed sometimes, and mocked at other times, but always there. On the other hand, the Brahmin hegemony was still firmly entrenched. Shortly after the tale of Kannappar, the Periya Purana tells the story of Tirunalaippovar Nantanar, a Pariah who went through fire to purify himself since he was not allowed to enter a temple; he was transformed into a Brahmin, a solution that simultaneously vindicates this particular Pariah but enforces the superiority of all Brahmins and upholds the exclusion of Pariahs from temples.77 Later Nantanar became the hero of tales of caste protest.78 Like Buddhism and all the other so-called ancient reform movements that protested against the injustice of the Hindu social system, the bhakti movement did not try to change or reform that system itself; reform of caste inequalities came only much later, and even then with only limited success. Rather, bhakti merely created another, alternative system that lived alongside the Brahmin imaginary, a system in which caste injustices were often noted, occasionally challenged, and rarely mitigated.
But unlike the alternative universe that the mythical sage Trishanku created, a double of ours down to the stars and the moon, the bhakti universe was bounded by that permeable membrane so characteristic of Hinduism. The good news about this was that bhakti therefore leaked back into the Brahmin imaginary from time to time, improving the condition of women and the lower castes even there. Although the leaders of many bhakti sects came from the lowest castes, particularly in the early stages of the bhakti movements, high-caste Vaishnavas and Shaivas eventually accepted their literature.79 But the bad news was that since all permeable membranes are two-way stretches, bhakti also often made concessions to the caste system even within its own ranks—and I do mean ranks. And so what once may have been non-Brahmin texts became tangled in Brahmin values as the price of their admission to the written record. They were compiled in writing long after the period of their oral circulation and compiled in the service of an imperial project of what was essentially Shaiva colonization. Despite the non-Brahminic elements in the bhakti saints of South India, the movement by and large served Brahmin ends.
With the passage of time caste strictures often reasserted themselves; Ramanuja, the philosopher who founded a major Vaishnava bhakti sect, accepted caste divisions in some limited form, and even Chaitanya, a much later Bengali Vaishnava leader, failed to do away with them completely.80 Nammalvar was from a low-caste farming family; all the hagiographies unanimously declared that he was a Shudra.81 But the Shri Vaishnava Brahmins who claimed him as a founder were aware of the shadow that this ancestry cast on their legitimacy in the Brahmin imaginary and took various measures to minimize the implications of Nammalvar’s low caste. For instance, one hagiographer claimed that the infant Alvar neither ate with nor looked at his family, even refusing the milk of his Shudra mother’s breast,82 as a
ny self-respecting Brahmin would refuse the food prepared by someone of a lower caste. One step forward, two steps backward.
THE VIOLENCE OF SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTI
Bhakti, like the ascetic movements, was strong on nonviolence to animals, generally (though not always) opposing animal sacrifice (as the story of Kannappar’s meat offering demonstrates), but it was not so strong on nonviolence to humans. Love, particularly in the form of desire, can be as violent as hate, as the poet Robert Frost said of fire and ice. The ability to demonstrate indifference to physical pain was an intrinsic part of the narrative traditions of both ascetics (mortifying their flesh in various ways) and warriors, like Shibi and Karna, demonstrating their machismo. But the violence of bhakti was not always directed against the self (Kannappar tearing out his own eye) or the god (Cuntarar threatening Shiva with apostasy). Sometimes the violence was for god and, though usually directed against Hindus who refused to worship the god, occasionally in conflict with other religions. The violence inherent in great passion is evident in even the most superficial summary of the acts committed by the Nayanmars in the Periya Purana: One or another engages in violent conflicts with Jainas, attempts or commits suicide (in various ways), chops off his father’s feet or his wife’s hand or a queen’s nose or someone else’s tongue, slashes his own throat, massacres his relatives, grinds up his own elbow, sets his hair on fire, or kills and/or cooks his/her son.
Bhakti sometimes resulted in physical violence from the god toward the worshiper’s family:
CIRUTTONTAR AND THE CURRIED CHILD
A Shaiva ascetic came to Ciruttontar and asked for a little boy to eat, cooked into a curry by the child’s parents. Ciruttontar and his wife cut up their only child, a son, and cooked the curry. When they were about to serve it, the guest insisted first that they, too, share the meal and then that they call their son to join them, too. They called him, and he came running in from outside. The ascetic then revealed his true form, as Shiva, in the form of Bhairava, together with Parvati and his sons. He took Ciruttontar and his whole family to Kailasa.83
This was just a test, of the type that we know from the testing of Yudhishthira and Shibi in the Mahabharata. But it was a gruesome test, even more tragic than the testing of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible (for Ciruttontar’s child was actually killed, though later revived) and even more horrible than the trick played on Thyestes in Greek tragedy (whose enemy served him a meal that was made of his sons, though Thyestes did not know it at the time). As in the cases of Yudhishthira and Shibi and Abraham and Job (though not Thyestes), the tragedy proves illusory or, rather, reversible: Just as Job’s losses are reversed and Abraham’s son is spared at the last minute, Ciruttontar’s child comes back to life unharmed. (In some versions of the Ciruttontar story—the tale is told in Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada—different parts of the child’s body smell of different spices as he comes running in at the end.) But surely the agony at the moment when the parents thought the child had been cooked for them was very real indeed; that too is bhakti: terrible suffering at the hands of a god. In a text from a later and rather different South Indian tradition, the Virashaiva Basava Purana, one of the saints excommunicates Shiva for having forced Ciruttontar to sacrifice his son. That too is bhakti: punishing the god. At the same time, we must not forget the other side of bhakti, the positive emotion of ecstasy, the rapture of being so close to the god.
INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE IN ANCIENT SOUTH INDIA
A poet writing in the eleventh century in Kerala said that in the capital city, “different deities coexisted in peace like wild beasts forgetting their natural animosity in the vicinity of a holy hermitage.”84 But at times they remembered.he
BUDDHISM AND JAINISM
There is a long, sad history of stories of mutual cruelty between Hindus, Buddhists, and Jainas in South India, though there is little evidence that such stories accurately represent actual historical events. The rise of this sort of polemical literature at a time when actual relations between religions were fairly tolerant, on the whole, can perhaps be explained by the fact that Hinduism had to compete, for followers and patrons, with Jainism and Buddhism, both of which were well established in the south well before the time of the Chola ascendancy. 85 Jainism was particularly prominent in Karnataka and the Deccan, and Buddhism, from the time of Ashoka, had been firmly established among the Cholas and the Pandyas. The shift from Vedic sacrifice to other forms of temple-based Hinduism, such as sectarian worship in general and bhakti in particular, meant that ordinary people began using their surplus cash to support religious leaders and institutions other than Vedic priests. The competition for their patronage as well as for royal patronage, sometimes friendly rivalry, sometimes not so friendly, often generated tensions that bhakti intensified rather than alleviated, as it gathered force from the ongoing popular resistance to the ascetic and renunciant traditions, within Hinduism but also in Buddhism and Jainism. Even the bhakti caste reforms may be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to preempt much of the Buddhists’ and Jainas’ claim to be a refuge from Brahmin authority and caste prejudice.86 By winning over people of all castes, the Hindu Alvars and Nayanmars may have hoped to stem the growth of Buddhism and Jainism in the South.87 At times this competition became hostile and broke out in angry rhetoric, especially against Jainas,88 and in competing propaganda.89
The Pallava king Mahendra Varman I (600-630), a Jaina, wrote a Sanskrit comedy, the Farce of the Drunkard’s Games (Mattavilasa-prahasana), about an inebriated Shaiva ascetic who accused a Vaishnava ascetic and a Buddhist monk of stealing the human skull that he used as his begging bowl, a bowl that, they eventually discovered, a stray dog had stolen. The Jainas alone escaped Mahendra’s razor-sharp satire, but that was the only blade he ever used against any religious group. The Shaiva saint Appar, who had been a Jaina ascetic, converted to Shaivism, bitterly attacked Jainas (his former people) and Buddhists, and allegedly converted Mahendra Varman from Jainism. But the Pallavas continued to support Buddhists and Brahmins as well as Jainas.
In other parts of India, from time to time, Hindus, especially Shaivas, took aggressive action against Buddhism. At least two Shaiva kingshf are reported to have destroyed monasteries and killed monks. The Alvar Tirumankai is said to have robbed a Buddhist monastery, stolen the central image, pounded it into dust, and used the gold for the gopuram at Shrirangam.90 Some of the hymns of both the Alvars and the Nayanmars express strong anti-Buddhist and anti-Jaina sentiments. The Tiruvatavurar Purana and Tiruvilaiyatal Purana tell this story:
MANIKKAVACAKAR STRIKES THE BUDDHISTS DUMB
Three thousand Buddhist emissaries came from Sri Lanka to the Chola king, who told Manikkavacakar to defeat them in debate and proclaim the truth of the Shaiva doctrine, whereupon he, the king, would eliminate the Buddhists. After the debate, Manikkavacakar appealed to the goddess Sarasvati to keep the Buddhists from profaning the truth, and she struck them all dumb. When the leader of the Buddhists converted to Shaivism, his daughter regained her ability to speak and began to refute the Buddhists, who converted, adopted the costume of Shaivas, and remained in Citamparam.91
Interreligious debate surely hit a low point at that moment. Only in Bihar and Bengal, because of the patronage of the Pala dynasty and some lesser kings and chiefs, did Buddhist monasteries continue to flourish. Buddhism in eastern India was well on the way to being reabsorbed into Hinduism, the dominant religion, when Arabs invaded the Ganges Valley in the twelfth century. After that there were too few Buddhists left to pose a serious challenge, but Jainism remained to fight for its life, and there are many stories about the torture and persecution of Jaina missionaries and rulers in the Tamil kingdom.
In the seventh century the Shaiva saint Tirujnana Campantar, whom the Jainas (according to the Hindus) had attempted to kill, vanquished (also according to the Hindus) the Jainas not in battle but in a contest of miracles and converted the Pandya ruler from Jainism to Shaivism. The Periya Purana (which narrates several episodes in which Sha
ivas confound Buddhists as well as Jainas92) tells the story like this:
CAMPANTAR AND THE IMPALED JAINAS
The wicked Jainas, blacker than black, like demons, plotted against Campantar. They set fire to the monastery where he was staying, but Campantar prayed and the fire left the monastery and, instead, attacked the Pandyan king, in the form of a fever. The king said that he would support whichever of the two groups could cure his fever; the Jainas failed, and Campantar cured the king. Then the Jainas proposed that they and Campantar should inscribe the principles of their beliefs on a palm leaf and throw the leaves into a fire; whichever did not burn would be the winner, the true religion. The fire burned up the Jainas’ leaf, but not Campantar’s. Then the Jainas proposed that they subject another pair of palm leaves to a floating test on the Vaikai River at Madurai. And, they added, “If we lose in the third trial, let the king have us impaled on sharpened stakes.” Only the Shaiva texts floated against the current, which washed away the Jaina texts. Eight thousand Jainas impaled themselves upon the stakes.93
The king saw which way the holy wind was blowing and went with Campantar. The story of the three miraculous contests is not generally challenged; it is accepted as hagiography and left at that. But the part about the impalings, which does not defy the laws of nature and has been proposed as history, is much disputed.94 Impaling was, as we saw in the tale of Mandavya, a common punishment in ancient India. But while Campantar himself reviles the Jainas in his own poetry, he doesn’t mention the impaling, nor does Appar (usually regarded as slightly older than Campantar), who tells only the story of the three contests, in the early seventh century. References to the impaling begin only centuries later, and this lapse of centuries casts doubt on the historicity of the impaling. Nampi Antar Nampi, in the reign of the Chola king Rajaraja I (985- 1014), refers to it, and it is illustrated in a frieze from the reign of Rajaraja II (1150-1173), in the main shrine of the Shiva temple at Taracuram (south of Kumbhakonam, in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu).95 Cekkiyar, the author of the Periya Purana version of the story cited above, was known for his anti-Jaina sentiments.96 Parancoti Munivar reworked the story in his Tiruvilayatal Purana, and it is illustrated in paintings in the great tenth-century Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur.97 One panel shows Campantar at the left, with the river and the texts upon it; the king and his queen(s) and minister in the middle; the impaled Jainas on the right.98 The mass execution of Jainas is carved in frescoes on the wall of the Mandapam of the Golden Lily Tank in the temple of the goddess Minakshi in Madurai.
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