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ID:
139684
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| Summary/Abstract |
In India in the 1860s, print was becoming the primary medium for the reproduction of religious texts. The accessibility of print, and its ready uptake within a highly stratified and competitive religious landscape, had a significant effect on the ways in which groups contended for textual, and thus spiritual, authority. In 1867, the popular Tamil Shaiva mystic Ramalinga Adigal and his followers published Tiruvarutpa, a book of Ramalinga's poems that would help establish his reputation as a great Shaiva saint. Ramalinga and his disciples chose to publish the work in a form that shared the content and the material features of contemporaneous publications of Tamil classics, thereby claiming a place for his poems alongside the revered Shaiva canon. They showed an acute awareness that it was not solely the content of religious texts, but also the materiality of the printed object in which texts appeared, that sustained assertions for authority. This article argues that leaders on the margins of established centres of religious power in South India sought authority by exploiting the material aspects of print as the new medium of religious canons.
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| 2 |
ID:
157868
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the impact of Western discourses of religion and community on Tamil Shaivism in the 1860s and 1870s. I focus on Ramalinga Adigal, one of the most important and innovative Tamil Shaiva leaders of the time. In 1865, Ramalinga founded a new society that incorporated features of Western associational culture, including an emphasis on individual ethical transformation, social activism, charitable outreach and voluntary association. Yet, at the same time, he drew on Shaiva devotional and Tantric traditions. I conclude that the impact of Western conceptions of religion was gradual and uneven, especially on the margins of colonial cosmopolitanism.
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