Modern Sannyasins, Parallel Society And Hindu Replications | Karma ...

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MODERN SANNYASINS, PARALLEL SOCIETY AND HINDU REPLICATIONS MODERN SANNYASINS, PARALLEL SOCIETY AND HINDU REPLICATIONS A STUDY OF THE PROTESTANT CONTRIBUTION TO TAMIL CULTURE IN NINETEENTH CENTURY SRI LANKA AGAINST A mSTORICAL BACKGROUND By CHARLES R. A. HOOLE, M.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University June 1993 (c) Copyright by Charles Ratnamuktan A. Hoole, June 1993 McMASTER UNIVERSITY Hamilton, Ontario DOCTOR OF PIDLOSOPHY (1993) (Religious Studies) TITLE: Modern Sannyasins, Parallel Society and Hindu Replications: A Study of the Protestant Contribution to Tamil Culture in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka against a Historical Background AUTHOR: Charles R. A. Hoole, B.A. (Hull University) M.A. (Hull University) M.A. SUPERVISOR: Professor P. Yout:ger NUMBER OF PAGES: xii, 411 ii McMASTER UNIVERSITY UBRARY (McMaster University) ABSTRACT This thesis is a study of the patterns of change within Sri Lankan Tamil tradition, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. It endeavours to accomplish two things. First, by the examination of colonial Sri Lanka against a detailed consideration of the pre-existing society and culture, the thesis shows that the colonial period, far from being one of great change and disjunction with the past, in fact experienced a very gradual course of social change which was facilitated by the widespread incorporation of traditional structures that gave colonial society a much needed stability and a peaceful environment where trade and commerce could prosper. ~econdly, by taking this approach, the thesis demonstrates that the nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon Protestant missionaries eventually fell into the traditional role of sannyasins, a role, as this work shows, that had been adopted by the Jain mendicants and the Buddhist bhikkhus who had preceded them. The thesis first demonstrates that the sannyasin, although in a fundamental sense an enemy of caste, having turned his or her back on caste society, has nevertheless deeply influenced Hindu society, partfcularly when organized as a community of renouncers. The thesis then goes on to argue that the Protestant sannyasins likewise, in the establishment of male and female boarding schools, advocated a form of communal renunciation, which contributed .to the formation of a parallel society alongside the caste society, and which became instrumental in initiating many changes within Tamil culture in Sri Lanka. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My attention was attracted to the subject of this thesis several years ago while I was living at the Anglican Mission House in Nallur with my grandfather, the late Rev. Canon S. S. Somasundaram, whose ascetic ways invoked in those who knew him a sense of both awe and fear. Hindus and Christians alike readily recognized and acknowledged him as a holy man and gave him due honour. I was not, however, able to begin my investigation of this subject until recently when I began taking several graduate courses on South India and Hinduism under the instruction of Professor Paul Younger and the late Professor K. Sivaraman. Much of my research necessitated visits to libraries and archives in Sri Lanka, England and the United States and I am very grateful to the School of Graduate Studies for so generously providing the funds to make those trips possible. I.would also like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the librarians and archivists, especially those in the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Church Missionary Society, located in London, Birmingham University library and archives, the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Mass., Congregational House in Boston, Jaffna College library and archives, Jaffna University library and St. John's College library, Jaffna and Peradeniya University library. I am very thankful to all the friends and relatives in each of those places, who offered to my wife and me warm and generous hospitality. iv I wish to thank my advisors, Dr. Paul Younger, Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Dr. Paul Dekar and Dr. Gerard Vallee for all the help and encouragement given while this work was in progress. In particular to my supervisor, Dr. Paul Younger, I owe an immense debt of gratitude. He read and re-read, discussed and commented upon drafts of this thesis. Above all, he has been a real friend, always patient, outstandingly generous with advice and help, comments and criticisms from which I have always benefitted. I am also indebted to my brother, Dr. S. Ratnajeevan Hoole of Harvey Mudd College, California who gave me the computer, gave timely help throughout in dealing with all its intricacies and finally read and commented on it's product. The support, patience and encouragement of my wife, Jaqui and my children Thayamani and Anbesan, is beyond calculation and deserves far more than formal acknowledgement. It was Jaqui who cheerfully typed successive versions of the chapters and shared with me her knowledge of missionary societies and missionaries while serving as a sounding board for my ideas. Here all I can say to them is a heart felt "Thank You." v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES AND REFERENCES MAP OF SOUTH INDIA AND SRI LANKA x xii ... DEDICATION Xlll 1 INTRODUCTION PART ONE IDEOLOGY Chapter 1. THE HINDU CONCEPTION OF WORLD PROCESS, DHARMA, AND SOCIETY . 5 1.1 Kala or Time 1.2 Karma and Samsara. 1.3 Dharma. 1.4 Suddha (purity) and Asuddha (pollution) 2. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORLD PROCESS, HISTORY AND S~IETY 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Elohim: One God, Creator of All Yahweh: One Lord, Redeemer of All Peoples Berit: Covenant People of God. Some Comparisons vi 27 3. SANNYASINS, PARALLEL SOCIETY AND THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL CHANGE 50 PART TWO TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND 4. A REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS 59 5. TRIBAL HUMANISM IN THE CLASSICAL AGE 65 5.1 Cultural landscape 5.2 Chieftaincies 5.3 Material Life 5.4 Religious Life 5.5 Conclusion 6. EMERGENCE OF CASTE IN THE MEDIEVAL AGE 85 6.1 Pre-Medieval Society in Transition 6.2 The Gupta Intrusion 6.3 Brahmanical Kingship: From Pallavas to Colas 6.4 Social Structure: Hierarchy and Interdependence 6.5 Territorial Structure: Nadus 6.6 Religion: Hindu Bhakti 7. SOUTH INDIAN PATTERNS IN TAMIL SRI LANKA 140 7.1 The Rise of Rajarata Civilization 7.2 The Formation of Tamil Nadus in Rajarata PART THREE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 8. COLONIAL RULE AND THE FERSISTANCE OF TRADITIONAL PATTERNS 1505-1796 8.1 Portuguese Colonial Rule A.D.1505-1658 8.2 Dutch Colonial Rule A.D.1658-1796 8.3 Some Observations vii 189 9. SULTANS AND SANNYASINS IN BRITISH SRI LANKA 1796-1900 224 9.1 Wars of Monopoly and Conquests 1796-1833 9.2 Mercantilist Despotism 1796-1833 9.3 From Booty Capitalism to Free Enterprise 1833-1900 9.4 Sultanism 10. PROTESTANT MISSION AND COLONIALISM 240 10.1 The problem: Colonialism, Christianity and Commerce 10.2 Anti-racial Foundations of Protestant Mission 10.3 Revivalist Foundations of Protestant Mission 10.4 Ascetic Foundations of Protestant Mission PART FOUR THE DIALOGUE 11. 12. CONDmONS AT THE OUTSET:TAMIL SRI LANKA IN THE YEAR A.D. 1800 256 THE CHALLENGE: CHRISTIAN ACTMTIES IN TAMIL SRI LANKA 1800-1850 AD 264 12.1 Opposition to the Policy of Religious Patronage 12.2 Recruitment Strategies 12.3 Itinerant preaching : sowing on barren soil 12.4 Education: preparing the soil 12.5 Humanitarian Service 13. GURUS, SHISYAS AND THE INAUGURATION OF PARALLEL SOCIETY 13.1 The growth of Tamil Protestant Christianity 13.2 Tamil Protestantism: Its Missionary Appeal viii 306 14. HINDU REPLICATIONS 1850-1900 342 14.1 The Problem of Comprehending the Challenge 14.2 Arumuka Navalar (1822-1879) 14.3 The Significance of Navalar's Mission 15. CONCLUSION: THE DIALOGUE IN RETROSPECT 368 APPENDIX 1 Islam and Hinduism 382 2 Portuguese Burghers 384 3 Phillipus Baldaeus's account of Jaffna society in the seventeenth century 386 SELECTED BffiLIOGRAPHY 390 IX LIST OF ABBREVIAnONS USED IN NOTES AND REFERENCES ACM American Ceylon Mission Ak Akananuru CTHSS Ceylon TournaI of History and Social Studies CLS Christian Literature Society CMS Church Missionary Society Cor Corinthians Ex Exodus Gen Genesis HMCC A History of the Methodist Church in Ceylon Jn John Kt Kuruntokai Lev Leviticus Lk Luke LMS London Missionary Society Manu The Laws of Manu Mk Mark Mt Matthew n.d. no date Nr Narrinai Puram Purananuru Rom Romans x SISSW South India Saiva Siddhanta Works UCHC University of Ceylon History of Ceylon WMMS Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society Owing to the absence of a uniform system of using diacritical marks in romanized Tamil, this thesis has avoided their use in both Tamil and Sanskrit. Xl N SOUTH INDIA BAY OF BENGAL Vanni Trincomalee • Anuradhapura SRI LANKA lfdY o 50 100km. 1: 325,000 ' Map of South India and Sri Lanka xii ·To Elijah Hoole and S. S. Somasundaram, founders ofa Parallel Society INTRODUcnON A comparative work of this nature must begin with a study of the values or ideology particular to a society. This study proceeds from the recognition that ideology is prior to concrete reality. Ideology in this sense is taken to be constitutive, in that it does not merely reflect reality; on the contrary, it orders, explains, and legitimizes reality for the human beings of a particular society. As such, ideology embodies a model of the society that is isomorphic with its concrete manifestation.1 This view that value systems are primary and form a constitutive part of social action and social change, may be referring briefly to S. expl~ed by J. Tambiah's important work on Buddhist missionary expansion. 2 The Buddhist ,system of values, he shows, 1 The anthropologist B. Kapferer's argument about culture as "ontology" and the Indologist R. Gombrich's treatment of culture as "orthodoxy" are on a par with our understanding of ideology. For both culture constitutes a fixed set of values and practices from the past delivered to the present. See R. Gombrich, Precept and Practice, Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1971) 45f.; B. Kapferer, Legends of People. Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and PQlitical Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1988) 79-84 2 S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand a&ainst a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge UniverSity Press, 1976). 1 2 because they contrasted sharply to the prevailing ones, played a key role in recruitment and social change. In the Indian case, early Buddhist missionaries, armed with the critical doctrine of nonself (anatta), attacked the citadel of Vedic and early Hindu thought, a strategy designed to undermine the public legitimacy of the associated Hindu religious institutions and beliefs. This ideological confrontation directly led to open recruitment of "monks and nuns of Brahmans and Shudras alike" to the Buddhist ranks. 3 This early Buddhist denunciation of Hindu thought was deeply social and even political in its reality and implication, because on the opposing brahmanical conception of the self (atman) "rested the sociological institution of the joint family, its pattern of authority and rites of perpetuation, and the political institution..... buttressed by Brahman functionaries."4 1}1e Vedic Hindu society is here portrayed as ~'resting" on a system of ideas or values, and a fundamental alteration of those values resulting from the Buddhist impact logically amount to change of the society rather than merely change in that society. Since society as we have attempted to show rests on a particular set of ideas or values that are constitutive, thereby embodying a model of that society, the historian's task is not to invent concepts for the purpose of analysis and comparison, but to take concepts from those societies and develop an analysis in terms of them fully. A society, be it 3Ibid.,33 4Ibid.,34 3 Hindu or Christian, is for this reason best explained and understood through its own ideology and categories; through the model it has of . itself. In the case of the Hindu and Christian societies, we have access to their respective system of values through their encoded traditions, that is, through their normative literatures. In following this line of inquiry, Part One of this thesis introduces the core ideas of Hinduism and Christianity. These ideas provide the distinct frameworks for interpreting the behavioural patterns of Hindus and Christians, and the contrasting behavioural orientations present the nature of my argument regarding the "mutual" relationship between a parallel society and the caste society which is discussed in chapter 3. Parts Two and Three consist mostly of background essays which are important for establishing the historical context of my argument. In particular I regard chapter 6, the account of the religious disputes between the orthodox and heterodox establishments that occurred in the Medieval period, as crucial to the development of my argument, which has at its centre the religious and social significance of the sannyasins in the Tamil tradition. Part Four illustrates my thesis through a study of Protestant activities in the nineteenth century and the concomitant Hindu responses. PART ONE IDEOLOGY 4 CHAPTER 1 THE HINDU CONCEPTION OF WORLD PROCESS, DHARMA, ANDSOOETY The Hindu civilization with which Tamil Sri Lanka is closely associated, is often described in popular as well as scholarly literature as peculiarly open to influences outside itself. The Hindu tradition is here portrayed as eclectic, choosing concepts and values from many sources to create an· integrated world view. Such an interpretation cannot, however, be taken as an accurate reading of Hindu history, for one could argue that the most determining factor in its history is the endurance and persistence of the style and pattern of thought often called Hinduism. Despite internal changes and external invasions, Hinduism is heir to a way of thinking, away of living, and a way of understanding the world. From this perspective, Hindu civilization constitutes a universe in itself that differs in many fundamental ways from other civilizations. It is possible to identify a cluster of ideas that underlie Hindu civilization; they are kala, karma and sams~ra, dharma, suddha and subha. These ideas might also be described as the basic fabric of classical Indian religious thought. Throughout the ages this cluster of ideas has 5 6 remained characteristic of Hindu society and pervasive at all levels of culture. 1.1 Kala or Time: The classical Hindu conception of time is in terms of cycles that repeat themselves endlessly - having affinities with the classical Greek view. According to the Hindu view kala is one of the four original forms of ultimate reality. It is something which exists and is without beginning and without end. Its cyclical character is thus emphasized. In Sanskrit "epic mythology/' which has been described as "the real Bible of the people,"l Visnu is represented as resting on maha sesha (the great snake), the symbol of time. Sesha or the snake which in its coils represents the cycles of time, has two names - ananta meaning endless and adisesha meaning the primeval remainder. At the time of pralaya or dissolution, when the whol~ cosmos is reabsorbed into Visnu, it is kala which is the instrument of this process and it alone remains till the last of the world is in Visnu, who is therefore called Seshin, "one who has the last remainder of Time.,,2 The Visnu Purana declares, "The deity of Time is without beginning and his end is not known."3 The snake symbol illustrates how time moves in cycles 1J. N. Farquhar, An Outline of Relirjous Literature of India (London: Oxford University Press, 1920) 36 2 See K. N. Aiyar, The Puranas in the Light of Modem Science (Madras: 1916) E. W. Hopkins, EpiC Mythology (Strassbourg: Triibner, 1915) 189ff. 3 Visnu Purana bk.I:2, trans. H. H. Wilson (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1961) 11 7 within cycles,. all of immense duration conceived in terms quite beyond the scope of human imagination. It gives human history a setting not of thousands of years but of thousands of millions of years. Human history being a part of the cosmic process is moreover infused with the principle of deterioration, determining that its movement is towards pralaya or dissolution. 4 According to the Visnu Purana, Hari in his manifestation as kala was responsible for infusing the principle of deterioration and no human action can prevent it reaching its necessary end. Within this process world history is divided into four yugas or ages, each declining successively. The present age is kali yuga, Age of Strife, when the world is at its worst. It is the last age in which righteousness has given way to unrighteousness, where "dharma" is "only one footed", allowing humankind to go towards its inevitable "annihilation."S Time, therefore, personified as a deity, expresses an omnipresent power manifested in the deteriorating nature of the whol~ cosmos. It is this sense of time that caused Bhartrihari, the great Sanskrit poet who is said to have lived in the seventh century, to pay homage to the power of time: Great was the king With his circle of courtiers, 4 Visnu Purana bk. 1:2, bk. 6:1, Wilson, 41, 487 5K. I: 35; Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 259 28Dumont, Ibid., 35 29Manu I. 98f. 19 Brahmans in Indian history moreover ensured that the varna system would become virtually "universal" throughout the land. 30 The varna system, mediated by dharma, is, however, distinct from the caste system which is verifiable by direct observation. Varna is in this sense an ideological view of social reality. As such, varna is a model of the society that is prior to its concrete manifestation. 1.4 Suddha (purity) and Asuddha (pollution) While the core of the varna system is the distinction between status and power, the core of the caste system is the distinction between purity and impurity. The caste system, unlike the varna system, is the empirical society that can be observed. It is an undisputed fact that the Hindu society pays exceptional attention to purity and pollution. The ideas of purity and pollution are extensively treated in the scriptures and the law books. To understand, in ,fact, the Hindu concern with purity and impurity, systematically and meaningfully, it is essential to refer these practices to the underlying structure of Hindu thought. As Mary Douglas pointedly stated, "the only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought." 31 Classical Hindu thought, as already noted, is holistic, in which the trajectories of cosmic forces, symbolized by moving planets andflowing rivers, and human lives are all interconnected. The 3Ooumont, Homo 73 31M. Douglas, Purity and Dan&er (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966),41 20 movement is generated by the all-determining kala or time. Kala also accounts for the inter-section of the trajectories of human lives and astral bodies, which is experienced as significant events - such as birth, marriage, death and so on. The impact of kala on events is reflected in everyday language by the use of the terms auspicious time (subha kala) and inauspicious time (asubha kala). Auspicious time and inauspicious time in Hindu thought are said to have benefiCent (subha) and maleficent (asubha) effects. Anticipating the effects of kala on their lives, the Hindus would first consult astrologers, priests or almanacs to find out the auspicious or inauspicious moment or time to ensure well-being and maximize success or happy consequences. The effects of kala pervade all aspects of life. Even grace and merit are insolubly and divinely linked with time. Therefore, it is essential to know about the auspicious time; the astrologer, conversant with the movement of celestial bodies and their various influences, is indispensable for the average Hindu in all important situations.32 While kala determines the time and place of an occurrence, causing it to be auspicious or inauspicious, every such event carries good or bad karma, which is believed to permeate life and all its contacts with purity or pollution. Nothing in fact is impermeable to pollution: no person, no thing, no act; and the avoidance of pollution is a major preoccupation in Hindu social life. Pollution itself varies in degrees. An inauspicious event such as the birth of an Untouchable 32I, 29-45 27 28 historical Christian distinctiveness. The understanding of God as Creator (Elohim), and as the active Redeemer (Yahweh), and of humanity as a participant in redemptive history as a covenant people, provides for an internally coherent Christian world view. All three concepts are biblically based, but their later historical developments are no less significant. The notion of covenant, for instance, was important to the English Puritans in their struggle for emancipation from existing ecclesiastical and political structures. A study of Christian missions to Europe, Asia, and Africa will show that the Christian conception of God played a crucial role in formulating an alternative vision of the wo~ld. It is often in a missionary context that the idea of God as the sole arche of the world was consistently affirmed. Such an idea for the early Christians meant that God was no longer conceived as ontologically intertwined with the world as he was in Stoicism and most ~ontemporary cosmologies in the Greeco-Roman world. Nor was he the active principle in relation to a passive principle. God was independent of the world as its Creator - its sovereign as well as its beginning. The Christian conception clearly implied a different view of the origin of things and a different estimate of the material world. Early missionary-Christianity's conception of God thus became a fundamental factor in the development of Christian distinctiveness, which also made Christianity self-consciously in confrontation with contemporary cultures. 29 At a remarkably early phase missionary Christianity developed a coherent and distinct world view with respect to some fundamental characteristics of Mediterranean cosmologies, which were variations on the idea of the eternity of a divine world revolving through infinite aeons. In his work The Refutations of all Heresies, Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus, a disciple of Irenaeus, provides his own picture about the historical roots of the idea of eternal returns as he began to discuss Democritus' cosmology, where the innumerable parts of an infinite world were seen to be in a perennial process of creation and dissolution. Democritus, he points out, propounded his system after "conferring with many gymnosophists among the Indians, and with priests in Egypt, and with astrologers and magi in Babylon." This vision of the world seemed to contrast sharply with the perspective of the Creator God. In his concluding section, Hippolytus thus summarizes the two contrasting positions, as follows: The first and only (one God), both Creator and lord of all, had nothing coeval with Himself, not infinite chaos nor measureless water, nor solid earth.... nor refined spirit...But He was One, alone in Himself. By an exercise of His will He created things that are, which antecedently had no existence except that He willed to make them. 2 Not surprisingly, it is in such an ideological encounter that the Christian distinctiveness became fully developed. The ideological 2Hippolytus, The Refutation of all Heresies Bk.l0, ch.XXVIII, The AnteNicene Fathers: The Writing of the Fathers down to A.D.325 vo1.5 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Oark, 1986) 150; For further discussion of Hippolytus' cosmology see S.L. JaId, Science and Creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986) 166-167 30 encounter first crystalized in Alexandria, the chief focus of cultural activity during the first and second centuries A.D. It is there that one witnesses the emergence of the first school of Christian thought, with ~ the African theologians Clement and Origen as its leading representatives. 2.1 Elohim: One God, Creator of All The book of Genesis presents two accounts of creation. The account of Genesis 1 affirms a radically monotheistic universe, by deliberately purging the cosmic order of all gods and goddesses. The account begins with the declaration that God is Elohim, the Creator of all, and thus sets the stage for clearing the universe of its polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. The affirmation of Genesis 1.1 in this sense, already contains within itself an implicit denial of the gods that inhabited the various regions of nature;, the gods of sun, moon, and stars; the gods of sky, earth and water; the gods of light and darkness, animals and fertility. This becomes clearer in the following verses that deal with the six-day creation account. Each--day of creation takes on another set of divinity in the pantheons of the day and declares that these are not gods at all but creatures, creations of the one true God who is the only one. The monotheistic emptying of nature of its many resident divinities is always followed by the affirmation of the goodness of creation. Nature is thus demythologised and de-divinised, declared to be good, and placed under ultimate divine sovereignty. Finally, in 31 Genesis 1:26f, human existence too is emptied of any intrinsic divinity, while at the same time all human beings, from the pharaoh to the slaves, are granted a divine likeness. In that divine likeness, all human beings are given the royal attributes of dominion over the earth and of priestly mediation between heaven and earth. Since every nation surrounding ancient Israel, including the superpowers, Egypt and Babylon, were polytheistic, the radical affirmation of one Creator-God and the dismissal of the various. pantheons of the day, contributed to a radical shift in the (polytheistic) cosmologies of the day, a shift from the imagery of procreation to that of creation, from a genealogy of the gods to a genesis of nature. For the first time the natural order was allowed to become natural rather than supernatural. Just as nature becomes natural, so also time and history are no longer intimately related to the movements of gods and goddesses or of stars and planets but ar~ given freedom to move and exist in human and natural terms. They too are declared to be created by God and therefore good. By virtue of creation, events in time are worthy of attention, even though they are transient. In engaging the polytheistic cosmogonies of the surrounding cultures, Genesis 1 thus affirms faith in one transcendent, Creator God, for whom no cosmic region is assigned, no biographical details are offered. 3 Elohim is not restricted in his presence, power and authority in a way that the gods and goddesses would be. Marduk of Babylon or Re of Egypt may rise to supremacy in the pantheon, may absorb the 3d. Isaiah 40:12-13,18, 21-23 32 functions of other gods, but they were still national deities whose presence was circumscribed. 4 The Creator-God, because he is radically transcendent, is also immanent, interacting with the world at every level. In the words of the Apostle Paul, this God is, therefore, "Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."S 2.2 Yahweh: One Lord, Redeemer of All Peoples The second creation account in Genesis 2:4 and following, is as monotheistic and as critical of idolatry as the first account, but here there is a shift in focus from cosmos to history. The first account, by desacralising nature and humanity, offers a basis for the second. As such, a corollary to the Hebraic faith in one God and Creator of all, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Moses and the Exodus, in other words, the one who acts in human history.6 The term used fot God in Genesis 2:4ff is Yahweh. Yahweh is seen as a person, actively involved in human history, able to enter into personal relationships and the closest is that of the Father? 4"lbe essential point in the Babylonian theme is the victory of Marduk over the savage earlier gods, and the cosmogony is a part of the theogony; in the Bible, the essential point is the creation of the world, and cosmogony is divorced from theogony." Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 203 5Ephesians 4:6 (NIV) 6As such he is also known as the God of the Covenant: "The God of the Bible is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that is, the God of the Covenant, or a God who freely binds Himself to the welfare of mankind through the mediation of Abraham's progeny." Jaki, Creation. 139 7"God," The lllustrated Bible Dictionary vo1.1 (Leicester: Tyndale House, 1988),570 33 Yahweh in contrast with Elohim, is a proper noun, the name of a person, though that person is divine. Strictly speaking Yahweh in Hebrew is the only "name" of God. The name in Hebrew thought is a ~ reflection of a person's character. In particular God's names such as Yahweh Shalom (the LORD is peace) and Yahweh Jireh (the LORD provides) are the designation of his attributes. Such personal titles are always given in the context of his people's needs: compassion in the presence of misery, long-suffering in the presence of ill-dessert, grace in the presence of guilt. All this suggests that Yahweh is a redeemer who enters into personal relationships with those who feel their need of him. 8 Yahweh redeems by his acts, and history is the theatre of his activity. He thus chooses to reveal his name at the time of the Exodus when he liberated his people from slavery in Egypt. Since he is known by his redemptive acts, it may be more a~curate to refer to the Bible as the Acts of God rather than call it the Word of God. The Bible is a story of redemption in which God appears as a dynamic being, introducing dynamic change, engaged as it were in the active direction of history. In the Hebrew narratives "Yahweh Elohim" is remembered as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in other words as the God who has been active in past history and who for this reason will also be the God of the future. Yahweh's historical involvement with his people is moreover presented against a dark backdrop of a broken fraternity characterized 8lbid., 571f. 34 by continual conflicts between brothers. The history of the Old and New Testaments is dominated by hostility between brothers. In each generation brother attacks' brother, while parents either suffer because they have no means of expressing their love in the situation or take sides with their favorite child. At the beginning of the story the eldest son of the first human pair murders his younger brother because of jealousy and denies that he is responsible for him. So we have Cain and Abel, only to be followed by Lot and Abraham; Ishmael and Isaac; Esau and Jacob; the eleven brothers and Joseph; Saul, Jonathan and David; Amon,Tamar and Absalom (11 Sam. 13); Jerusalem, Samaria and Sodom (Ezek.16);· and finally, the eleven apostles and Judas. Biblical history contains a long list of brothers and sisters who are suspicious, jealous, aggressive, murderous towards one another, who consequently find themselves separated from the common heritage that bound them together. Against this background, biblical history unfolds as the mission of God, missio DeL in which the broken humanity is remade. Andre Dumas, in his work, Political Theology and the Life of the Church, points out how central and pervasive throughout the Bible is the theme of mutual relations between brothers. Reconciliation is always a costly and difficult task requiring time, patience and restraint - as the stories of Jacob and Esau, and of Joseph and his brothers illustrate. 9 Just 9Andre Dumas, Political Theology and the Life of the Church (London: SCM Press, 1978) 32-42 35 rule is seen as a divine instrument for establishing a just peace among brothers. From an early stage, Yahweh's acts of restoration of brotherl¥ ~ relations point toward a future that would embrace the whole human family. It gradually becomes clear that Yahweh as the Creator and Lord of the whole world is as concerned with the nations as with Israel, and that he will ultimately bring into being a universal "fratriarchy;'" a supra-ethnic community on earth. The New Testament identifies the establishment of the Jerusalem community on the day of Pentecost as Yahweh's eschatological deed par excellence, which is seen as the fulfilment of global reconciliation promised in the Old Testament. As such the role of Ebed Yahweh (Is. 42:10, the promised messiah became crucial to this interpretation, who is acknowledged as the one who presides at the messianic banquet of reunion (Matt. 22:1-14, Is. 2 :6-9) The Pentecost marks the birth. of Christianity. Christians throughout the world have continued to celebrate the day of Pentecost as a new beginning, a turning point in world history. It is celebrated as the beginning of a new messianic era of the justification of the godless, the forgiveness of sins and the reconciliation of brothers in enmity. Crucial to this memory is the establishment of the Jerusalem community that is understood in Christian thought as a pledge and sign and foretaste of God's intention to reunite the whole human family into a united fraternity. 36 2.3 Berit: Covenant People of God. The two key-words in the Bible for covenant or alliance are Hebrew berit and Greek diatheke. Berit is found in the earliest records, and usually refers to the act or rite of the making of a covenant. It also refers to the standing contract between two partners. The idea of a covenant relationship between a god and his people is well attested through the history of the ancient Near East. It is a contract between two unequal partners. The Bible also uses this form of relationship to express Yahweh's relationship with his people. The covenant contracted between God and his people involved certain promises from God and certain obligations on the people.10 From a biblical perspective the covenant between God and his people belongs to a history in which the relationship is frequently broken and reaffirmed. That history with all its human failures and resultant uncertainties is, however, purpc;>sefully shaped by a series of divine initiatives and human responses. The covenant(s) with Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus Christ were ratified for the purpose of creating a people set apart for service. Primarily they were to serve the marginal in their midst: the orphan, the widow, the poor, and the stranger. Whenever the people of God renew their covenant with Yahweh, they recognize that they are renewing their obligations to the victims of society. lON. H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1946) 135ff.; "Covenant", Bible Dictionary, 326-332; S. 1. Jaki, ''The Beacon of the Covenant", Creation, 138-161; L. Newbigin, "Politics and the Covenant", Theology 84 (September 1981): 356-363 37 Also, in God's ultimate purpose the covenant people are called to participate in the missio Dei to the whole world. In the New Testament the covenant people are seen as the divine instrument for the inclusion of all nations (Matt. 28:19) and all nature into a unity with Christ as its head (Col. 1:20). To realize this missionary goal the covenant people are called by God to display a prototype of the new humanity of his ultimate purpose. From this eschatological perspective the covenant people may be seen as a deliberate reflection of God's relation to humanity at large. In biblical history, the divine affirmation "I am the LORD your God" served to define not only the identity of the chosen people of God but also their purpose in the world. This affirmation constitutes indicative declaration by which the members "are "born" into or baptized into the community known as the people of God. They are now regarded as God's covenant partner~ invited to respond gratefully to the prior acts of undeserved love; they are summoned by an imperative to do God's will in gratitude for his grace. His will is to live as the people of God, as the new humanity on earth. It was to fit them for this purpose that a host of vertical and horizontal obligations formed part of the covenantal relationship. It is evident that the covenant community draws its motivation and model for ethical life from the pattern of God's redemptive activity. The structure of the covenant shows that divine grace provides the main stimulus for a host of horizontal obligations. So for 38 instance the slaves and other vulnerable people must be treated generously because God treated Hebrew slaves with generosity in Egypt: Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens because you were aliehs in Egypt.11 Social obligations include generosity to the poor, justice for workers, integrity in judicial process, considerate behaviour to other people, equality before the law for the immigrants, and other earthly social matters. This series of obligations in the book of Leviticus is presented with the constant refrain "I am the LORD" as if to say, "this is what I would require of you because it is what I myself would do." In all the covenants it can be observed that God's character and his deeds are consistently understood as the pattern or paradigm for social ethics. God is presented as the exemplar and example for ethical life. What he has done out of compassion for his people as well as for the whole world is thus turned into motivation for consistent ethical behaviour. The motivation clause for this reason became the most characteristic feature of the covenant obligations. For the Christians the summons to walk in God's way is exemplified in the "way of Jesus." The overall shape and character of Jesus' life - comprising his actions, attitudes and relationships as well as his responses, parables and other teachings - became the supreme paradigm to test the "Christ-likeness" of the same components of their own lives. In this respect, the Sermon on the Mount, apart from llExodus 22:21 39 expressing the way of Jesus, provides the most detailed account of social life in the eschatological community of Christ. For Jesus the quality of life in this community must reflect the very heart of God's character. The most succinct expression of this principle is found at the end of the Sermon: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). The statement is a summary of his social teaching; which echoes a verse in Leviticus: "Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy" (Lev. 19:2), a command given in the context of the Mosaic covenant. The kind of holiness appears here in Jesus' teaching as a distinct messianic lifestyle that has also been regarded in circumstances as thoroughly practical. In both the Old and the New Testaments it is possible to identify three key-terms, hesed, emeth and koinonia, that at once spell out the ethical requirements for the members of the covenant society and define their messianic lifestyle. (i) Hesed In Hebrew thought the idea of faithfulness comprises a trio of words of which the most significant is hesed. It is often translated as kindness or love, but it is more solid than those words suggest. It means one's abiding loyalty to his/her covenant, one's unshakable will to keep his/her promise. Snaith suggests 'covenant-love' as the nearest English equivalent. It is a two way word, and can be used of God and of human beings. 12 12Snaith, Distinctive Ideas, 119 40 Hesed is often found in association with the word covenant, and denotes an attitude of faithfulness which both parties to the covenant should observe. Hesed in this sense provides the basic framework for the establishment of covenant relationships. Faithfulness or covenant love, that abiding loyalty to one's covenant gives a person a fixed purpose as well as the motive for carrying out corporate responsibilities. (ii) Emeth Closely related to hesed is the term emeth, translated truth or faithfulness, a word that describes what is firm, unchangeable and trustworthy, from which is derived the word Amen, meaning "our Rock" - a favorite and early description of God in Israel.. The Hebrew word emeth therefore has a strong personal and moral connotation that is clearly absent in the Greek equival~nt, aletheia. In Biblical thought the notion of truth in person always refers to a social or covenant relationship and means that a person characterized by emeth (faithfulness) is also reliable for others. This truth is demonstrative. The words and actions of a person are regarded emeth to the extent that they prove reliable. It is such occurrence of truth, of faithfulness, that justifies a confidence that has been bestowed on a member of the community. This demand for consistency in human conduct - modelled on the divine conduct - accounts for the emergence of the historically cast idea of truth. Emeth in human conduct must occur again and again 41 and through constancy be projected into the future. True being is here understood as historical, having to demonstrate its reality through a history whose future is open. 13 In line with this logic the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Mark remains a secret throughout his public ministry and is disclosed only at the end when his messianic mission is vindicated through his death and resurrection. The reality in a person is known by what he/she does in space and time, comprising words and actions in relation to others. Emeth also defines the historical character of covenant community, which effectively relativises the prevailing socio-political structures. At best, their role can only be considered provisional. In biblical times the community had passed through a tribal confederation, charismatic judges without a dynasty, a hereditary monarchy and the fragmentation of the kingdom, deportation, colonial dependence, wars of independence, and s~ on. (iii) Koinonia This is distinctly a New Testament term. 'Fellowship' is the usual translation of the Greek 'koinonia'. The fundamental connotation of the root 'koin' is that of sharing in something with someone. In the New Testament, koinonia relates to actual social and economic relationships between Christians who belong to a covenant community. It denotes a practical, often costly sharing in the social and 13Anthony T. Hanson, Grace and Truth (London: SPCK, 1975); Wolfhart Pannenberg, "What is Truth?", Basic Questions in Theology vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 1-27 42 economic demands of koinonia fellowship. Its effect was to encourage an intense awareness of corporate solidarity, binding members into a single community of brothers and sisters. Some examples will make the point. At Pentecost, marking the birth of Christianity, the members of the new community, in devoting themselves to the fellowship (te koinonia), shared everything in common (Acts 2: 42,44) and ensured that nobody was in need (Acts 4:34). In 1 Timothy 6:18, the rich are to be commended to be "generous" (koinonikous). The same duty is laid on all Christians in Hebrews 13:16. Paul refers to his financial collection among the Greek churches for the aid of the Judean Christians as an act of fellowship (koinonian tina, Rom. 15:26), which he justifies on the grounds that if the Gentiles have shared (ekoinonesan) spiritual blessings from the Jews, they owe it to them to share material blessings (v.27). The same reciprocal principle applies in the relationship betw:een teacher and the taught in Galations 6:6 (koinoneito). In commending the Corinthians for their eagerness to share in the financial koinonia collection (2 Cor. 8:4; 9:13), Paul describes it as proof of their obedience to the gospel, implying that such concrete economic evidence of fellowship was the essence of a genuine Christian profession. It is not coincidental that when Paul's own gospel was accepted as authentic in Jerusalem by means of the "right hand of koinonia", he immediately asked "to remember the poor" - as if in proof (Gal. 2:9,10). Koinonia is evidently the most visible fruit of redemption, a concrete expression of brotherhood in Christ; for the goal of redemption 43 through Christ is "sincere love for your brothers" (1 Pet. 1:22). In demonstrating a concern for the poor and needy (d. 1 In. 3:17) koinonia expresses the ideal of equality (normally defined in terms of justice or . righteousness) in both economic (cE. 2 Cor. 8:13-15) and social Gas. 2:1-7) I relationships. It is an equality expressed through mutual care, through relationships of mutual responsibility. In the history 6f the covenant people the transition "from prophetic to apocalyptic eschatology" in the late sixth century B.c. 14 is highly significant because it led to the identification of hesed, emeth and koinonia as transcendent values that belonged not to this-age but to the coming age. Such identification implied that these values could only be proleptically present in a community that has already renounced this-evil-age. In inheriting the dualistic structure of the Jewish apocalyptic thought, the Christian communities of the first century, namely, the ekklesiai of Chri~t (Rom. 16:16), continued to emphasize world renunciation as the necessary condition for the realization of the divine order (cE. Lk. 14:26-27). Consequently, owing to this emphasis, the ekklesia became exclusive, "virtually the primary group for its members, supplanting all other loyalties."ls Being baptized into Christ, that required the undertaking of a death ritual (d. Rom. 6:4ff.), signaled for Pauline' converts an extraordinarily thorough14Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of the Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,197S) 16; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Revelation as History, (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969), ch.4 15 W. A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians. The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 78 44 going resocialization through the articulation of transcendent values, whereby the believers in Messiah Jesus came to belong to a single, universal "ekklesia of God" (l Cor. 10:3216; 11:16,22). This universal brotherhood found particular expression in the cultivation of hospitality among the virtues of the Christian common life. The Pauline letters show that ordinary Christians, Jews and Gentiles, travelling to another city could expect to find accommodation with fellow Christians in Laodicea, Ephesus, Corinth, or Rome) 7 World renunciation and exclusivism which were essential characteristics of the earliest Christian communities, did not, however, make them into typical apocalyptic groups, sectarian and introverted, jealous in guarding their boundaries. This is because, the dualistic structure of Jewish apocalyptic thought was for the early Christians profoundly modified by the Christ-event. The death and resurrection of Christ marked the incursion of the fu~ure new age into the present age, and in consequence, the ekklesia of Christ was expected to live in the inescapable tension between the "already" and the "not yet," between joy and agony (2 Cor. 4:7-10); straining itself in all its activities to prepare the world for its coming destiny. In the midst of a "crooked and depraved generation" the Christians were to be ''blameless and pure" to "shine like stars in the universe." 18 16The identification of "Jews and Greeks" with "the ekklesia of God" implies that the unity of the universal ekklesia is dramatically realised in the equality of Jew and Greek within the local ekklesia. 17Ibid., 109-110 18Phil. 2:15 45 Unlike the usual apocalyptic groups the ekklesia of Christ were vigorously committed to a world mission. It saw itself as "the sign of the dawning of the new age in the midst of the old, and thus the vanguard of God's new world, battling against the forces of evil and being beleaguered by them."19 As a result the members did not withdraw into the desert, like the Essenes of Qumran: They remained in the cities, and their members continued to go about their ordinary lives in the streets and neighbourhoods, the shops and agora. Paul and the other leaders did not merely permit this continued interaction as something inevitable; in several instances they positively encouraged it. 20 The evidence shows that the Pauline communities, although they remained exclusive, maintained significant "gates in their boundaries."21 Continued interaction between the people of God and the people of this world in this way contributed to momentous developments in the West. The small communities bearing "the marks of Jesus"22 which articulated an alternative lifestyle gradually penetrated the mores of the larger society around them in the Mediterranean world. Their lifestyle as we saw combined intensive face-to-face interactions within disciplined local communities with supralocal networks of 19 J. C. Beker, Paul's Apocalyptic Gospel. The Coming Triumph of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982) 41 20Meeks Urban, 105 21 Ibid., 105 22 Gal. 6:17 46 relationships. It is the resultant double identity that accounts for the social and even political success of Christianity in the age of Constantine. According to Adolf von Harnack, "It was this, and not any evangelist, which proved to be~the most effective missionary.,,23 2.4 Some Comparisons The foregoing discussion relating to the Hindu and Christian ideological systems may be summarized in the following theses. (i) Hindus and Christians have different ideas of God or ultimate reality, and these ideas in turn locate and orient human beings differently within their social realities. In Hindu (holistic) thought God is one with the foundation of the cosmos in such a way that he belongs to the cosmos as its ground. God in Christian (dualistic) thought is distinct from his creation as one who acts freely and contingently. This means that for the Christian, the cosmos, is not divine or part of God. In contraposition to the Hindu henotheistic view that the cosmos is an emanation of God, the Christian view affirms that God is transcendent and essentially different from the world. (ii) In the Hindu scheme the cosmos is conceived of as being in a condition of continual flux; determined by the all-encompassing time. The process moves in cycles with no beginning or end. Gods, no less than human beings are inseparably bound to the eternal cycle. The cosmos in the Christian scheme belongs to the created, contingent and finite order that is maintained by divine faithfulness. Time in this 23 Quoted in Meeks Urban,lOB 47 finite contingent order is conceived of as a linear progression with a beginning and an end, where it moves under the control of a telos of divine faithfulness toward a finis. Moksa, the highest goal for the ~ individual in Hindu thought, is deliverance from the coils of time. Time according to the Christian view is intimately bound up with human nature and destiny. The present time (kairos) is therefore decisive, that for which human beings are responsible. (iii) The Hindu looks to nature as the locus of self-knowledge and understands the position of .humanity in the cosmos by the strict application of the natural law of causality; in contrast the Christian looks to God in history, particularly his action in Jesus of Nazareth, to understand humanity's nature and destiny. The application of the universal law of karma divides humanity into a religious hierarchy, with different classes controlled by norms of behaviour appropriate to their status in t~e hierarchy, or station in life. On the other hand the Christian conception of humanity as the bearer of the divine image recognizes the essential equality of all human beings before their Creator, who alone is the ultimate arbiter of human conduct. (iv) For Hinduism, purity as well as impurity is perceived as inherent in material objects in the natural order; and the distinction between pure and impure provides the Hindu society with a multiplicity of concrete criteria for grading the innumerable castes in terms of degrees of purity. For Christianity, the unitary Creator alone exists as the very principle of purity and the ultimate source of moral 48 government. Implicit in this Christian view is a special moral sphere for humanity. The Hindu view on the other hand does not acknowledge a special moral sphere since humanity like all living beings is caught up in the same cycles of rebirth, and subject in the same way to the law of karma. In corporate life the Christian understands the breaking of a right relationship in terms of the making of a right relationship, in other words in terms of a covenant. The Hindu understands impurity in terms of purity. The former is dealt with by confession while the latter is dealt with by rituals of purification, commonly by washing. (v) The ideal social order depicted in .the dharmasastra tradition is a social hierarchy conceived of as the varna system - with the Brahman at the top - legitimised by the law of karma, which is therefore an extension of the cosmic order. The core of the varna system is the distinction between Brah~an and Ksatriya, or between status and power. Varna is an ideological view of social reality, prior to its concrete manifestation in the form of caste. The core of the caste system is the distinction between purity and impurity. Purity and impurity, because they are perceived as inherent in material objects, offer a multiplicity of concrete criteria for grading the innumerable castes. The ideal social order portrayed in the Sermon on the Mount is an eschatological, global society that has its origin and destiny in the missio Dei, accomplished through God's redemptive acts in history. It manifests itself at the consummation of the divine mission when the 49 kingdom of this world becomes transformed into lithe kingdom of God" (Rev. 11:15). The covenant society of Christ therefore exists messianically and prolepticaUy in "the kingdom of this world" to the extent that the eschatological values - hesed, emeth and koinonia - are appropriated and practised by the covenant people of God. The covenant society is an egalitarian brotherhood, with its members sharing in the economic and social demands of koinonia fellowship. (vi) Hindu and Christian societies function by replicating what is perceived as cosmic and historical patterns. Hindu society by replicating .- the way of cosmic Brahman, has made caste a model of . - interdependence and consensus. Replication of orthodox Brahman structures makes social changes institutionalized, contributing to an upward and downward movement along the purity - impurity axis. Christian society by replicating the way of God in history, particularly the way of the incarnate and crucified c;hrist (portrayed implicitly in the Sermon on the Mount), adopts a messianic lifestyle, consciously moving forward by subverting the present. CHAPTER 3 SANNYASINS, PARALLEL SOCIETY AND THE PROCESS OF SOQAL CHANGE The Brahmanical ideology that regulates the caste society places a high premium on conformity, and does not regard individual freedom as valuable per se. Members of the society, particularly those at the top, are primarily concerned with the maintenance of their caste-status which depends on rigid observation of caste-rules. The observation of caste-rules generally means the avoidance of pollution which may adversely affect their ritual status in the hierarchy. The rules which prescribe the type of behaviour appropriate to caste-status thus tend to be negative rather than positive in character. Ritual status is to be maintained not so much by positive actions as by abstentions from many types of behaviour. It is by limiting their range of activities, by abstaining from a great variety of food, that the caste Hindus could expect to either preserve or raise their status in the hierarchy.1 This negativistic ethic informed by Brahmanical ideology emphasizes not dynamic action, originality and initiative, but austerity 1 See section 1.4, 24f 50 51 and restraint, which are qualities esteemed and cultivated in the caste society. It is an ethic that does not favour social mobility, but rather, restricts the individual's choice in regard to residence, occupation, marriage and social contacts. ~he goal of this ethic is to extinguish all personal inclinations and to submit completely to the dharma of one's pre-ordained role. 2 The individual is not seen here as an independent agent, one guided less by subjective than by ascriptive values. One is a member of a tightly organized community, whose actions affect not only his own social status but also - owing to the contagious character of pollution - the status of those closest to him. Yet, every caste Hindu has one possibility of freeing himself from the shackle of caste-rules and the need to consider the reactions of his caste-fellows. The Hindu can abandon caste society and caste status, and become a sannyasin or homeless wandering ascetic. In wearing the sannyasin's ochre robe and divorcing oneself from home, family and village, he is freed from the need to observe caste-rules and any other responsibility towards society. Indeed the kinsmen perform a kind of funeral rite, or sraddha, on behalf of the initiate, to indicate that the one who has become a sannyasin is dead to the family.3 Once initiated the sannyasin is an individual outside-the-world, and should one return to the life of a householder, both he and his children would be 2 d. Bhagavad Gita on niskama kanna, ch. 2 ; R. Lannoy, The Speaking Tree (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3Of. 3 R. Thapar, "Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-eulture?", Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979) 80-81; K. Klostennaier, A Survey of Hinduism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 179f. 52 degraded to the status of Untouchables. It is therefore by discarding the bonds of conformity which society imposes on its members that one becomes a sannyasin, able to think and act as an individual and aim for personal liberation, the attainlllent of moksa. The result is an opposition and an antithesis between the man of caste, "the man-in-the-world, who is not an individual" and the renouncer "who is an individual-outside-the-world."4 In turning one's back on society, being concerned solely with the transcendent aim of moksa (release from the world), the renouncer stands as the archetypal dissenter, posing a threat to the dharmic order of the world. For one is then a living reminder of the transcendent value that disturbs the settled order. It is this disturbing quality of the renouncer that produced "a subdued hostility" to the institution of renunciation. S The ensuing "dialogue" between the two kinds of persons, the renouncer and the person of caste, must then be seen as the relationship and the interaction of two opposites. 6 It is not so much an orderly exchange as a conflict and an insoluble one at that; which is made particularly evident by "the totally contradictory rules of discipline applied to the householder and the renouncer."7 4Louis Dumont, 'World Renunciation in Indian Religions," Contributions to Indian Sociology 4 (1960) 47 SIbid.,45 6Ibid.,37f 7R. Thapar, 80 53 Despite the chasm that separates the two, they clearly shared the same world, and have had to acknowledge each other's existence. It is this reality on the ground that gave rise to the mutual relations between the renouncer and th~ person of caste. The renouncer, though he or she has left the world behind in order to be consecrated to liberation, has therefore, through these relations, significantly influenced the society by the discovery of new ideas and the invention of new techniques. In this "dialogue", observes Dumont, initiative and innovation are on the side of the renouncer. He goes so far as to venture that lithe agent of development in Indian religion and speculation, the creator of values, has been the renouncer." "Not only the founding of sects and their maintenance, but the major ideas, the 'inventions' are due to the renouncer whose unique position gave him a sort of monopoly for putting everything in question/'8 . The Brahman,' the exemplar of the man-in-the-world, on the other hand, is a highly effective agent of integration and aggregation who, in the end, all but completely absorbs his rivals. 9 Vegetarianism and ahimsa are originally renouncer's values which the Brahman w~s compelled to borrow and integrate with his ethic so as to maintain his moral pre-eminence in the world. The great Brahman orthodox theoreticians and founders of orders, Sankara and Ramanuja, absorbed the sannyasins, while also remaining Brahmans.10 Thus faced with 8Dumont, World Renunciation, 47 9Ibid.,47 lOIbid.,47 54 this creative influence of the renouncer's thought and practice upon Hinduism, Dumont is led to the assertion: "The true historical development of Hinduism is in the sannyasic developments on the one hand and in their aggregation to worldly religion on the other."ll Dumont's speculations on the mutual relations between the renouncer and the caste society must be seen as an attempt to assess the contribution of the renouncer to Hinduism, by showing how renunciation transformed and fertilized Hinduism and how Hinduism reproduced structures and organizations first generated by the renouncer. But to appreciate fully how the renouncer, who in some fundamental sense is an enemy of caste, could have so deeply influenced Hindu society, it would be useful at this point to make a distinction between individual and communal renunciation. Orthodox Brahmanism had little difficulty in containing the challenge of individual renunciation. In dealing with the sramanas as individual ascetics, Hinduism, notes Dumont, adopted a containment policy of converting the renouncer's vocation to the last stage in the life cycle of the Brahman. In displaying the characteristic pattern of encompassment, "An individual religion based upon choice is added on to the religion of the group."12 In this manner Brahmanism came to accept the sramana as an individual renouncer and recluse, by successfully limiting renunciation in its relation to worldly conditions. 11Ibid., 47 12Ibid.,46 55 Brahmanism on the other hand was deeply resentful, indeed, hostile towards the Buddhist bhikkhus and Jain mendicants because it appreciated the fact that renouncers organized as a community and as a fraternity, were a major tl:lreat to the Brahman's beliefs and supremacy.1 3 Communal renunciation, intended to endure for the life-time of a member, is a long step from the notion of individual renunciation. The renouncer, when he leaves the society at large, enters a special society "where one life-style, that of the householder, was substituted for by that of the community of monks, where the refuge of society was replaced by the refuge of the order and the monastery."14 The special society was essentially a brotherhood of monks or a sisterhood of nuns, who through the adoption of a common disciplinary code and collective rituals not only marked themselves off from other groups, but also lent each other support in the pursuit of a common ascetic goal. The development of institutional structures became useful for the purposes'of practising the ascetic mode of life, transmitting philosophical wisdom, and for making a missionary appeal to the lay public. As Horner has commented, the Jain and Buddhist monastic orders for both men and women "were strange growths, constitutionally alien to the soil of India, foreign to the mentality of the people. In spite of their genius for religion, refined by numerous and minute shades of belief and expressed in diversity of 135. J. Tambiah:The renouncer's individuality and community," Way of Life ed., T. N. Madan (Delhi: MotHal Banarsidass, 1988),317 14Thapar, Ancient. 81 56 forms, only the followers of Mahavira and Gautama formed themselves into communities of almspeople. Otherwise monasticism in India has never taken root."lS The creation of an "jllternative or parallel society"l6 of renouncers, bound by a common disciplinary code often in contradiction to the caste-rules, must therefore be considered highly significant in the history of India. How would orthodox Hinduism with its characteristic genius of "including and hierarchising" new components, respond to this "heterodox" challenge? Would monasticism in time take root within the Hindu fold? How could the institutional structures developed by the "heterodox" movements for seemingly specialized pursuits, affect the life of the householder? The ensuing discussion, which will deal with the. history of Sri Lankan Tamils, will address these basic questions in an attempt to assess the contribution of Protestant renouncers, organized as a community and as a fraternity, to the Hindu society at large. Early Protestantism too, it will be shown, was tinged with asceticism, drawing its main inspiration and example from the apocalyptic emphasis on renunciation leading to the creation of an alternative life-style before God. The Protestants, however, were not the first of the "heterodox," missionary sannyasins to operate on the Tamil soil. They had been preceded by the Buddhist bhikkhus and Jain mendicants, whose 151. B. Homer, Women under primitive Buddhism: Lay women and Almswomen (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1930) xxiii 16R. Thapar, 98; definition, 63 57 activities in early medieval South India had significantly influenced the development of Tamil Hinduism. This raises the possibility that the Protestant activities in the nineteenth century and its influence on Hinduism may well have their precedents and resonances in the antecedent Cola and Pallava eras. The next few chapters will follow this line of inquiry in order to understand and evaluate the social and religious significance of the sannyasin in the development of the Tamil tradition. PART TWO TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND . 58 CHAPTER 4 A REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY INTERPRETATIONS The richness and variety of South Asian social and religious life stems from a long history of social change and religious modification. As such it would be inadequate and misleading to describe and attempt to understand the social life from the standpoint of the recent colonial impact without also taking into account the earlier precedents. And yet, for a variety of reasons, it is the colonial standpoint that has dominated the nineteenth and twentieth century historical writings on South Asia, and these writings show a strong bias toward implanted colonial institutions and toward political, as opposed to social, change. The bias in turn has led the historians who author these writings to take a more macroscopic perspective and ignore the grass-roots social world or village - the focus of anthropologists. In the opinion of the present writer neither Victorian writers nor contemporary historians, despite important differences, have given sufficient weight to the material and moral transformations of pre-colonial Tamil society. For the early Victorian writers, traditional society, characterized as rigid and superstitious, was deemed quite incapable of changing itself, but was now on the threshold of deep changes caused by the winds of individual conscience and scientific 59 60 thought. Marx and the first generation of socialists also described a sudden change but saw its cause as a material one. For them the basis of caste was the hereditary nature of the village economy, and it was that economy which would be blown apart by the railways and Lancashire exports. The picture was essentially the same for the Utilitarians and the Socialist historians of the nineteenth century, in that both held that Hindu society had undergone no significant change before British rule. Writers in the second half of the twentieth century have dissented. Some modern writers have almost seemed to turn the earlier argument on its head by arguing that the subcontinent was condemned to stagnation by its subjection to colonial interests - that the society was frozen into caricatures of its feudal past by the colonial (Dutch and British) land revenue systems. Pre-colonial caste and religious practices were, according to this recent view, seen as fluid, eclectic and uncodified. In a seminal study called Social History of a Dominant Caste Society) S. Arasaratnarn has traced the main sources of the Vellalar dominated society as it emerged in Tamil Sri Lanka in the Twentieth Century to new economic and social elements introduced by the colonial powers. In his view it was a series of developments between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, which fundamentally altered the "balance of power shared by agricultural artisan and maritime castes representing the three sectors IS. Arasaratnam, "Social History of a Dominant Caste Society: The Vellalar of North Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the 18th Century," The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XVTII, Guly - Dec. 1981),377-391. 61 of the economy on which society was based."2 Using Arasaratnam's argument, Bryan Pfaffenberger has so far provided the baldest statement of this view. After analyzing the Maviddapuram Temple entry conflict of 1968 he concludes: On the surface, one sees a "premodern" caste system and an "ancient" temple tradition in conflict with "modern" values and sodal change. Looking beneath the surface, however, one finds that this "premodern" caste system is actually a grotesque relic of a colonial plantation economy, a fundamentally unstable system that could be maintained only by the regular application of force. 3 Yet in an earlier work, he had stated that the aim of the colonial economy was "not of transforming the indigenous social system, but rather of exacting from it as much profit as possible"4; pointing out that this indigenous system was premodern, composed of "pure and esteemed Brahmans," of a non-brahman "dominant agricultural caste"; of despised "Untouchable" labourers and a number of small, professional castes. 5 It was a system, he argued,~based on shared religious belief and social consensus. 6 In the revised argument, which is dependent on Arasaratnam's work, it is clearly economic 2Ibid., 378. 3B. Pfaffenberger, liThe Political Construction of Defensive Nationalism: The 1968 Temple-Entry Crisis in Northern Sri Lanka", The TournaI of Asian Studies, vol.49, no.1, (February 1990), 93 4 B. Pfaffenberger, Caste in Tamil Culture: The Religious Foundations of Sudra Domination in Tamil Sri Lanka, (Syracuse; Maxwell School of Foreign and Comparative Studies, 1982), 36 SIbid.,38 6Ibid.,25 62 considerations that become basic to one's understanding of the relationship between castes. Under colonial rule, this view states, changes in modes of production opened up new avenues to economic power and domination. The~ conditions in north Sri Lanka, it is pointed out, were peculiarly favourable to such developments. The presence of only "a few Brahman settlers in Jaffna" matched by "the absence of scrupulous concern over vellalar blood purity, were factors that significantly enhanced that process of Tamil social formation."7 Such recent historical formulations are, of course, based on an important observation that is undeniable. In the last two centuries the economy and the society, together with the political and legal frameworks in which they are situated, have experienced very great changes. On the other hand, at another level, at the level of religion and ritual, it is far from apparent that a similar radical change has occurred. Evidence would seem to suggest that these traditional features have persisted in spite of drastic changes at the material level, which may have therefore significantly influenced the shape of the society as it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The main objection to Arasaratnam's work is its exclusive concentration on the study of material interests. In part this one-sided interpretation stems from a methodological limitation in his work. As an expert on Dutch power in Sri Lanka, he tends to rely on colonial documents even when he is trying to explain Tamil social formation. Many of his conclusions are at best conjectures drawn from the records 7Arasaratnam, "Dominant Caste," 385-386 63 of Dutch colonial officers, and usually they involve no independent confirmation based on Tamil sources. Even if we take the records of the colonial authorities as our source, the data they reveal is still open to a different interpretation from that of Arasaratnam's. The Dutch and British land-revenue policies, for instance, codify many local customs together into a unified Hindu law or Thesavalamai, and they also classify people:_ into immutable castes through their ethnographic surveys and court procedures. Such records do then offer the historian grounds for finding an element of rigidity in the modem Tamil social system, but they do not satisfactorily account for the origin or the operation of that system. These more recent scholars are then not as different from their Victorian predecessors as it first appeared, for in the final analysis both emphasize the disjunction between traditional and colonial societies. Some of the reasons for this emphasis are understandable. First, there is a remarkable paucity of information about Tamil Sri Lanka prior to Portuguese rule (A.D.1619-1658). Secondly, a retrospective vision which allows us to ascribe to colonial institutions the foundations of contemporary society, in turn encourages us to emphasize the differences between the society and religion of tradition and those of modernity. As a result, historians of Sri Lanka have tended to identify the colonial period as one of great change and disjunction with the past. 64 A more realistic picture of Sri Lanka's social history would give weight to deep rooted social changes within Tamil society that continue precedents from the Medieval and Classical periods. In this larger picture it might be p~ossible to show that the hierarchical formulations of caste, which stressed the great gulf between the pure and the polluted, and the immutability of caste boundaries and lifestyles, far from being "colonial relics" created by local r~.venue records, were but long established patterns in an alliance of rural Brahmans and peasant cultivators. To make this suggestion is not to argue that modern Tamil society is a socio-cultural fossil of the medieval era, but simply to recognize that we are dealing with a powerful tradition that has undergone many social changes over the centuries and is in the process of constant reinvention. This picture of a slower, less disjunctive, course of social change would indicate that the recent developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be understood systematically and meaningfully only if they are seen in relation to their precedents in the pre-colonial eras and extending back into the time of Tamil cultural emergence. Despite the relative paucity of information concerning the society prior to western colonial rule, the available historical and anthropological data when combined together appears to be so sufficient that we must attempt to paint that larger picture by undertaking a historical reconstruction of the Tamil tradition. CHAPTERS TRIBAL HUMANISM IN THE CLASSICAL AGE A great deal of our information about South India and North Sri Lanka during the early period comes from the poetical depictions of life in the Cankam or Classical Tamil literature. These poetical sources far from being otherworldly and vague - as their Sanskritic counterparts often are - do provide a fairly reliable picture of people living under tribal chieftains, and following folk beliefs and religious practices in a territorially divided culture with a certain degree of urbanization in a few core areas where there were advanced agrarian and commercial organizations. 5.1 Cultural landscape In the classical age the human interaction with the physical environment has left more than a few tangible footprints on the surface. The effects of geographic phenomena upon political and clan boundaries, and upon the whole course of the early Tamil civilization, are reflected in the body of poetry written under the patronage of the Cankam or the Academy. The bulk of these poems is now believed to 65 66 have been written between the middle of the first century and the late third century.1 The Cankam poetry divides the Tamil world, Tamilakam, into five tinais. Tinai means a~stretch of land which marks off a topographically defined world into itself. Each territory was thus conceived as a total web of life, wherein the flora and the fauna, the clans of human beings, and the deities all interacted with one another '. . and with the physical features of the landscape. In effect "each tract had its own poetic moods, its own characteristic flora and fauna, its own tevan or deity."2 Tamilakam in this sense was composed of five distinct territories, namely, kurinci (hill), palai (arid, wilderness), mullai (pastoral, forest), marutam (agricultural, riverine), and neytal (seashore). This division highlights the challenges involved in the human occupation of the earth's different regions, and it led in turn to the development of a distinct conception of social life peculiar to each of the five regions or tinais and to the 'general recognition of social diversity. The precise extent of what was thought to be Tamilakam has varied from time to time. It is beyond dispute that peninsular India which stretched southwards from Tirupati (Venkadam) hill down to Kanyakuamri, was part and parcel of Tamilakam. 3 This area is roughly IS. Vaiyapuri PilIai, History of Tamil Language and Literature (Madras: New Century Book House, 1956), 29ff. 2p. Clothey, The Many Faces of Murukan: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978), 24 3K. K. Pillai, A Social History of the Tamils vol.1 (Madras: University of Madras, 1975), 14-17 67 covered by Kerala and the Tamil Nadu of today. The actual status of Sri Lanka in relation to Tamilakam is more difficult to determine, and that question will be explored later in another chapter. At this stage it is sufficient to point out that Jaffna peninsula, on linguistic grounds alone, can be regarded as having the closest South Indian ties of any region of Sri Lanka. During the Cankam age there were strong cultural contacts between Jaffna and South India. In the classics like Akanan uru , Narrinai and Kuruntokai, for instance, there are on the whole seven verses composed by one TIattu Putandevanar. 4 This poet is believed to have gone to Madurai from Sri Lanka and presented these verses at the Academy. Among the other poets who made presentations at the Academy during this epoch, quite a few had "Naga" prefixes or suffixes attached to their names. This indicates Naga descent, with a probable conn€ction to Jaffna, the Sri Lankan home of the Nagas.5 All the territories of Tamilakam; including Jaffna peninsula, were united by a common language. The early bardic travelling troupes, whose function was to entertain the community with songs, dances, and long recitals - of the past heroic achievements of the clan - may have significantly contributed to the development and standardization of language. Th~se bards were not mere entertainers. As "the custodians and perpetuators of antiquarian learning, 4Ak.: 88, 231, Kt.: 343, 360, Nr.: 366 SDuring the Cankam Period, the Nagas dominated the western and northern parts of the island. See The Mahavamsa trans. W. Geiger (London: Luzac and Co., 1964) l.46ff. 68 genealogical lore, and other accounts of the past,,,6 these men and women were clearly the foremost educationalists of that age. Their regular participation in the Academy that flourished in the Pantiyan capital of Madurai, would ha¥e contributed to the diffusion of bardic poetry across Tamilakam. At the same time, the panel of bards in these academies who scrutinized these creative works with a view of approving them, would have ensured that the standard literary conventions as prescribed in the grammatical treatise, the Tolkappiyam, were adopted throughout the Tamil territories. 5.2 Chieftaindes Politically Tamilakam was divided into a number of territories governed by little kings (l class - who were very like the Vellalars of South India; and the port-based trading sector on the other hand was controlled by the merchant and artisan classes. Since it is well attested that at the beginning of the Christian era there was an explosive expansion of trade along the maritime trade route extending from the Red Sea to South China, the trading sector of the Rajarata economy would have certainly kept pace with the expansion of the agricultural sector during the first millennium of the Christian era. In ancient Sri Lanka, there were three major port-based satellite principalities that were active in domestic and maritime trade. All three principalities were closely linked to the capital principality through domestic trade. The Chronicles refer to the existence of important commercial routes connecting Anuradhapura with the port31 Tamil involvement with Buddhism continued well into the medieval period. The Mihintale Tablets from the late tenth century which lay down regulations for the monastery there refer to a community of Tamil bhikkus in residence. d. H. W. Codrington in Indrapala (ed.), Rajarata, 15 155 cities of Mannar, Jaffna and Trincomalee. These routes are described as main highways (mahamagga), distinct from roads (magga), streets in towns (vithi) and footpaths (ekapadikamagga or anjasa).32 Through these commercial routes the three port-based principalities mediated between the outside world and the agriculture-based principality in the interior. In the light of these observations, is it legitimate to speak of Rajarata as a single society? The answer to this question would require a detailed analysis of the relevant sources - literary, archaeological and anthropological - a task that is beyond the scope of this study. But the foregoing discussion would remain incomplete without some comment on this question. One thing that has become evident from the discussion is the extreme diversity of the region. Rajarata was clearly not a centralised, unitary state. It was instead a galactic or segmented state composed of several autonomous principalities, often culturally and economically distinct from one another. It also appears that every principality was dominated by a distinct variga, or ethnic group.33 On the other hand, behind all these complex and diverse social manifestations, it is imperative that we recognize that the Rajarata society was built on certain general structures. Apart from giving the region considerable uniformity, these structures 32UCHC voU, pt. 1, 14-15 33 Sinhalese word variga (variety, kind) denotes categories of human beings of all kinds -endogamous, racial, linguistic, etc. In its usual narrower sense variga is a sub-caste. d. E. R. Leach, Pul Eliya. A Village in Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 23f. 156 reverberated through the region's socio-economic life. Our next task is to ask about the nature and origin of these underlying structures. South Indian patterns in Rajarata Susantha Goonatilake, using using .what he describes as "hard archaeological evidence prior to the introduction of Buddhism" has argued that the hydraulic civilization of Rajarata has its foundation in the aboriginal (Veddha) "settlements associated with the South Indian megalithic culture.,,34 On this ground he rejects the Sinhalese nationalist attempt to link the birth of the hydraulic civilization with the "so-called coming of· the Aryans."35 Evidence based on archaeological excavations in the 'dry zone, he argues, demonstrate that well before the advent of the "so-called Aryans" and the "Mauryan traditions in the third century B.C.," the inhabitants had cultivated rice through tank irrigation and were culturally close to the early iron age "megalithic" man of South India. 36 In his opinion, the village tanks associated with the megalithic culture are central to understanding the subsequent socio-economic changes in the next millennium and a half. 37 Goonatilake believes that those early settlements based on tank irrigation were widely distributed, and that we may conclude that the 34Ethnicity and Social Changg in Sri Lanka, (Colombo: SSA, 1984), ii,iv 35Ibid., v 36Ibid., iv 37Ibid., v 157 megalithic-rice culture was truly pan-Sri Lankan. 38 There were at least three chiefdoms cultivating rice by the use of tank irrigation in the preVijayan times, namely, Mahiyangana, Nagadipa and Kelaniya - the three localities allegedly visited. by the Buddha. The people of these localities would have lived in houses made of wattle and daub, used implements like grinding stone, and left artefacts associated with weaving. In this connection, the later Chronicler's portrait of the Veddha princess Kuveni spinning cotton may be seen as an accurate reflection of the pre-Vijaya culture. Secondly, critical use of literary sources shows a characteristic South Indian social process at work through the early and medieval periods of Sri Lankan history. In a comprehensive study of the Vijaya story using multiple sources, R. A. L. H. Gunawardena has argued that the Mahavamsa version of the "myth", which was composed a thousand years -after the event in about the sixth centuty of the Christian era, is best understood in terms of a social "charter" conceived in the Malinowskian sense. 39 The myth identifies and explains the origins of certain major social groups in the island, providing in consequence a charter that serves to locate and justify the positions of these groups within a particular social order. 38The discovery of the first megalithic burial site in one of the Anaikottai mounds in the Jaffna peninsula, in December, 1980, has finally "confirmed" that "there was a megalithic phase common to the whole of South India and Sri Lanka preceding the early historic period': James T Rutnam, ''Jaffna: before the Dawn of History," Iaffna Public Library. Commemorative Souvenir (Jaffna: Jaffna Public Library, 1984), 12 39R A. L. H. Gunawardena, "The People of the Lion: Sinhala Consciousness in History and Historiography," Ethnicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka, 1-53 158 The Vijaya myth recognizes the existence of three major groups: "Sihalas," service castes, and Pulindas.40 The main concern of the myth is to validate the sacred and prestigious origin of the Sihalas. Who are the Sihalas? Gunawardena convindngly argues that the sixth century myth identifies the term "Sihalas" With the ruling dynasty, implying that it is the members of this lineage who are the real people of the lion. It may be recalled that ruling dynasties in contemporary Sou.th India were also known by their totemic emblems such as fish, tiger, lion, etc.. The myth establishes the sacred origin of the Sihala lineage by pointing out that Vijaya, the founder of the dynasty and also the conquering coloniser of Sri Lanka, landed in Sri Lanka on the very day of the Buddha's parinibbana4t The temporal synchronidty further assodates the house of Sfhalas with the "faith," making their destinies inseparable. On the other hand, the soda) status of the Sihalas is defined in the account of Vijaya's marriage to a ksatriya princess from Madura, after brusquely dismissing his aboriginal wife, Kuveni. 42 The Mahavamsa version presents the view that only by manying Ita maiden of a noble house" could Vijaya rightfully be "consecrated as king.,,43 This view according to Gunawardena: embodies the message that the ksatriya status of the ruling family marks them out from people of all other ritual categories. The story of the embassy sent to Madura to fetch a ksatriya princess and Vijaya's treatment of Kuvanni seNe to underline the point that only such a king who is a ksatriya and who also has a queen of the same YiIlla. status can be consecrated.44 40Geiger identifies the Pulindas with the Veddhas, but for want of space their position in relation to others will not be discussed here. 41Mv.vii. 42 The act implicitly defines the inferior position of the Pulindas and their distant relationship with the Sihala dynasty. 43M,y. vii.46,47 44R. A. H. L. Gunawardena, "People of the Lion," 16 159 The members of Vijaya's retinue were "by reason of the ties between him (Sihabahu) and them" called Sihalas, so they were recognised as part of the dominant social group.45 In accordance with their higher ritual status whiCh marked them out from the great majority of the populace, the~e men established their own villages. 46 On the same grounds they too had to find wives of high birth. So the embassy sent to Madura not only asked for the king's daughter but also "daughters of others.,,47 The required number of maidens was obtained by giving compensation to the families of the maidens. While outlining in such great detail the origin of the Sihalas, the myth also attempts to explain the origin of the service castes. On the return voyage three categories of people are reported to have accompanied the embassy. The Madura king's "daughter, bedecked with all her ornaments"; "all the maidens whom he had fitted out according to their rank"; and "craftsmen and a thousand families of the eighteen guilds." This arrival of the thousand families of craftsmen in the mythical past is intended to explain another social reality of the sixth century A.D., the existence of groups of service castes relegated to subservient positions in the social hierarchy. As descendents of the "thousand families" from Madura, they are unlinked by blood to the 45Mv. vii.42 46Mv. vii.43-45. 47Mv. vii.50 160 Sihalas and thereby excluded from membership in the dominant social group. Even though the term Sinhala (Sihala) gradually became more inclusive, the Sinh ala ruling dynasties continued to emphasise the purity of their descent and their distinct varna status. It has been noted that as late as the eighteenth century, the Sinhalese royalty "considered it a privilege to intermarry with the Madura dynasty and in the seventeenth century it became a matter of state policy for the chief queen (aggamahesi) of Kandy to'be a princess from Madura."48 In this manner, the Chronicles, especially the most revered Mahavamsa, have played a key role in mediating South Indian social structures to Buddhist Sri Lanka. This is precisely why the capital province of Rajarata, which was ostensibly orthodox Buddhist, developed a South Indian type of social differentiation. 49 Finally, anthropological studies show that Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka are all based on common principles of kinship. Nur Yalman has further shown that marriage rules in South India and Sri Lanka form a common structure, and are not related to any particular economic or group features of special 48S. Gopalakrishnan, The Nayaks of Sri Lanka, 1739-1815 (Madras: New Era Publications, 1988), 17-18 49 Similar evidence is provided by G. Obeyesekere's discussion of the Gajabahu story as a "colonisation myth" which, according to him, "has been a continually viable one, justifying and explaining the existence of South Indian settlers" who arrived "through waves of conquest, peaceful immigration, or 'introduced' by Sinhala kings themselves." The colonisation myth thus "served as a useful mechanism for incorporating immigrant populations into Sinhala social structure" [G. Obeyesekere, "Gajabahu and the Gajabahu Synchronism," B. 1. Smith (ed.), Sri Lanka, 160-161 161 communities. "We find," he insists, lithe same rules in communities that exhibit every conceivable variation in ecology, economy, caste structure, lineage, and so on." 50 The marriage rules when applied to a small circle who are allowed to intermarry such as the early Sihalas, serve to produce small exclusive endogamous groups of people, who would consider themselves to be of the same variga (sub-caste) and of the same social status. In a typical Sinhalese (or Tamil) village, members of one variga would be enjoined to intermarry with one another, but are strictly forbidden from marrying with members of any other variga, even when they are of a higher social status. 51 Marriage rules in this way have become a major aspect of the Tamil and Sinhalese social systems, and have significantly contributed to the uniformity of the medieval Rajarata society. 7.2 The Formation of Tamil Nadus in Rajarata In the preceding discussion it was argued that the models of the pre-modem state developed by theorists such as Stein, Tambiah, and Geertz, help us to understand the historical material from Rajarata in terms of relatively loosely structured organizations built up on the bases of heterogeneity and on the ideal of the delegation of power from the centre. Burton Stein's work on South India exemplifies such an approach. Stein, drawing on Southall's work on Africa, argued that the SON. Yalman, Under the Bo Tree (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 9 SlE. R. Leach, Pul Eliya. A Village in Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1961), 23,27 162 Indi~ pre-modern state in South is best conceptualized in terms of segments or nadus: The parts of which the state is composed are seen as prior to the formal state: these segments are structurally as well as morally coherent units in themselves. Together, these parts or segments comprise a state in their recognition of a sacred ruler whose overlordship is of a moral sort and is expressed in an essentially ritual idiom. 52 The Chronicles, it was noted, provide lengthy descriptions of this style of sacred kingship, and not of a bureaucratic monarchy, as is often implied in the popular representations of the past. The Sinhalese king exercised symbolic overlordship in the regions beyond the capital province. This ritualistic form of hegemony is actualised when the lesser chieftains of those regions .acknowledge the king at the centre as the upholder of the social order by virtue of the eminence that he acquires through a special relationship to the guardian deities of the island. 53 The assumption of Sinhalese royal titles is the most common gesture of accepting overlordship. Emulating royal deeds such as giftgiving and tank-building, was regarded as the means by which the minor rulers could aspire for similar eminence. Jaffna Peninsula or Yalapana kuda nadu : A Secondary zone It appears that the Jaffna peninsula was one such segment within the Rajarata state. The peninsula was known to the Chroniclers 52Stein, Peasant State, 23 53M v. vii.1-4 163 as Naga dipa, over which Anuradhapura probably did at one time exercise ritual hegemony. By the beginning of the Christian era more than a trade relationship appears to have existed between the Naga inhabitants of the peninsula and the Sinhalese. Evidence shows that the N aga rulers adopted Sinhalese royal names. The following list of early Naga rulers - Ila Naga (95-101), MahalIa Naga (193-199), Kuja Naga (246-248), Kaunca Naga (243-244), Sri Naga 1 (244-263), Abhaya Naga (285-293) and Sri Naga 11 (293-295) - provided by M. D. Rag a van54 mostly correspond with the names of the kings of Anuradhapura, belonging to the Lambakanna dynasty.55 What was probably a somewhat ambiguous political relationship was however strengthened by common religious values. The Nagas and the Sinhalese at this time shared a common religious bond through their commitment to Buddhism. Archaeological surveys have shown that in the early Christian era there was a strong Buddhist presence in Jaffna. In its own refractive way the sixth century chronicle, the Mahavamsa, also acknowledges this fact. In contrast to the Yakkhas, the Nagas are presented in the Mahavamsa as friends of the faith who accept the authority of the Buddha. 56 There is, of course, no justification for believing the author's claim that the conversion of the Nagas occurred during one of the Buddha's three visits to the island. It 54Tamil Culture in Ceylon,: A General Introduction (Colombo: Kalai Nilayam, n.d.), 73 55UCHC,179-193 56Mv. i.59-60 164 is more likely to have happened much later and less dramatically through the influence of South Indian merchant communities. As long as the centre remained strong, the local chieftains with their own power bases would be willing to lend various kinds of support to the Sinhalese overlords. From the time of the legendary Kuveni, the Veddha leaders have provided military support to the Sinhalese kings. In the middle ages, the Polannaruva kings became dependent on South Indian me~cenaries of the left-hand division - recruited for them by the powerful merchant communities resident in the port principalities. But such commitments were highly ambiguous, and involved a high degree of voluntarism where everyone's calculations of advantage had to be taken into account. Allegiances therefore could easily be switched to some rival overlord if conditions warranted. This is precisely what must have happened in the thirteenth century when the Sinhalese centre became very weak. Well before the Cola invasions of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Sinhalese kings had become entangled in the dynastic politics and military conflicts of southern India, as both plunderers and the plundered. Long distance raids of plunder were becoming more frequent. Along with the building of monuments or of irrigation tanks, court sponsored military expeditions were also seen as compensatory activities designed to strengthen the centre in weakly integrated " _: political systems. Through the grisliest military deeds the warrior-king would earn fame and immortality, while the network of personal loyalties would be strengthened by the distribution of plunder. Rajaraja 165 I, Magha and Parakramabahu I are examples of this newly emergent royal style. Many modern historians have unfortunately followed the medieval court propagandists in exaggerating the effects of these raids of plunder. The medieval work, Culavamsa, for instance, catalogues the Cola outrages in great detail, precisely because its compilers were the group most adversely affected by the plunder. As far as the Colas were concerned, the great viharas of Anuradhapura simply happened to be conspicuously prosperous and hence tempting as objects of plunder. At the same time, the Colas do not appear to have tried to disrupt the intricate irrigation system of Rajarata. The hydraulic civilization seems to have continued to flourish despite repeated invasions by South Indian kings and adventurers. A great deal has been written about the destruction of the administrative machinery57 of the irrigation network by Magha of Kalinga, and the over-centralisation58 of authority in the political system bequeathed to his successors by Parakramabahu I. These two developments are sometimes cited as the two principal causes of the "collapse" of the Rajarata civilization. On the other hand, if the central state thesis is rejected, as we must, then the spread of malaria remains the most likely cause for the disintegration of Rajarata society. In the stagnant pools of water in the dry zone, anopheles mosquitoes found ideal breeding places when they were introduced to Sri Lanka, and they 57K. Indrapala (ed.), Rajarata 58K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka. 62, 83 166 thereafter made large scale occupation of the capital province virtually impossible - until the advent of DDT in this century helped rebuild the population in this area. As a result starting in the fourteenth century, the Sinhalese kings and their capitals seem to have retreated farther and farther into the hills of the wet zone in search of a new economic base on which to establish their authority. While the Sinhalese capitals drifted southwards, peoples from the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, by now Hindus, continued to arrive in the Rajarata region as peaceful immigrants, soldiers and traders. Coastal principalities centred in Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Jaffna and Mantota grew significantly in size and strength through colonisation. Three Siva temples of antiquity, Tirukethisvaram at Mantota, Konesvaram at Trincomalee and Tirukovil near Batticaloa, enable us to make reasonable inferences regarding the growth of Saivism in these localities. The first two are mentioned in Tamil literature as famous Saiva centres which attracted pilgrims from South India. The growth in population and the economic activity of the coastal principalities, made it more and more difficult for the sovereign, whose position was by now weak, to even control formally these domains. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Cola power waned, a series of Pantyan warriors, notably one Kulasekhara . . (A.D. 1196-1215) had free· reign over Rajarata. Under Maravarman Sundara Pantya I (A.D. 1216-1227) and Jatavarman Sundara Pantya IT (A.D. 1227-1251), Pantyan power became supreme in South India. It is 167 during these heroic days of Pantyan expansion that Sri Lankan chieftains from the modern Vanni and Jaffna regions appear to have thrown off their traditional political affiliation to the Sinhalese monarch and set off on an independent course of their own. The allegiances of these rulers were switched primarily for defensive reasons, but also in a search for a new legitimacy. The rulers of Jaffna began in this period to style themselves as Arya Cakravartis, tracing their origins to Ramesvaram in the Pantyan kingdom. The founding of the Arya ~akravartin dynasty seems to have synchronised with an event recorded in the Culavamsa, according to which Aryacakravarti, the "Damila", general sent by the Pantyas plundered and destroyed many political and religious centres i!t the island. The Tamil chronicle Kailayamalai identifies this Pantyan warrior as Cinkaiyariyan or Ceyaviran, the Tamil king who founded the Arya Cakravarti dynasty.59 Whatever the relationship between the two Aryacakravartis, Pillay has rightly pointed out that the "invasion enhanced the prestige" of the Jaffna kings. Certainly, for the Tamil chroniclers the link was crucial to their purposes. The royal motives of valour, destruction, plunder, and fame associated with the Tamil classic hero served to affirm the dynasty's prestigious origin and thus afforded it imperial legitimation. On the other hand, modern Tamil historians have paid close attention to the study of lineage~ in tracing the ancestry of the Jaffna 595. Pathmanathan, The Kingdom of Iaffna (Colombo: A. M. Rajendran, 1978), 199-200; K. K. Pillai, South India and Ceylon (Madras: University of Madras, 1963), 103 168 kings to either Brahman60 or Ksatriya61 origins. In order to strengthen the Ksatriya claim the authors have shown ingenuity in establishing matrimonial links with families beyond South India, for example, Orissa, GUjarat or Bengal. None of these claims, however, are based on any reliable evidence. What the evidence does point to, with a great deal of certainty, is the dynasty's connections with Ramesvaram in the , modern Ramnad district. This is borne out by the fact that the Aryacakravartis of Jaffna were also known by the epithet "Cetukavalan," and they also issued coins having the legend cetu in Tamil characters, thereby affirming their connections with the cetupathis of Ramnad. 62 The kings of Jaffna must have made their claim to the title "Cetukavalan," meaning "the guardian of cetu," on account of their descent from the cetupatis of Ramnad. The word cetu has several meanings: it may denote a causeway, a dike, or a landmark. 63 Specifically, the island of Ramesvaram, as well as the reef connecting it to Mannar, are generally referred to as cetu. In the course of time several localities around Ramesvaram also came to be called cetu. Based on this evidence it may be inferred that the Aryacakravartis of Jaffna were closely affiliated to the Maravar rulers of Ramnad. 6Oc. Rasanagakam, Ancient Iaffna (Madras: Everyman's Publishers, 1926) 61PilIay; S. Gnanapragasar, (l928);Pathmanathan. 4 62pathmanathan, 207-208, Pillay, 36 See also C. R. A. Hoole, "A Perspective on Edicating for Peace," Tamil Times (April, 1993): 14-15 63Tamil Lexicon 169 The Maravars of Ramnad are depicted in Oassical works as personifications of the harsh and forbidding paJai In those times, northwestern Sri Lanka could be regarded as an extension of the same tinai. The Maravars always retained an independent kingship tradition, and are portrayed in subsequent literature as a fierce, clan-like folk, famous for their military prowess. Maravar chiefs achieved considerable eminence in medieval ; times, eSPedally dUring the time of the Nayaks of Madurai, and consequently became major political actors in the southern peninsula. But their political fortunes rapidly declined under the British when the Maravars became branded as a "criminal caste."64 Tenitorial proximity also ensured that the Tamil Maravars would become major actors in Sri Lanka's affairs throughout both andent and medieval times. The Maravar themselves affinn this involvement by claiming descent from Kuha, Rama's boatman who rowed him across to Sri Lanka.65 In historical times, the head of the Maravars was called the "setupati," '10m of the bridge or Raja of Ramnad,n66 The Rev. J, E. Tracy points out that the cetupati line claims great antiqUity: According to popular legendary accounts, it had to rise in the time of the great Rama himself, who is said to have appointed, on his victorious return from Lanka (Ceylon), seven guardians of the passage or bridge connecting Ceylon with the mainland.67 The Rev. Tracy does not question the antiqUity of the cetupati dynasty: 64Stein, Peasant State, 302 65E. Thurstan, Castes and Tribes of Southern India vol. 5 (Madras: Government Press, 1909),24 66Ibid.,25 67Ibid.,25 170 It rests its case principally upon a statement in the Mahawanso, according to which the last of the three Tamil invasions of Ceylon, which took place in the second or third century B.C., was under the leadership of seven chieftains, who are supposed, owing to the silence of the Pantyan records on the subject of South Indian dealings with Ceylon, to have been neither Cheras, Cholas, or Pandyans, but mere local adventurers, who territorial proximity and marauding ambition had tempted them to the undertaking. 68 In the middle ages, many of these Maravar families came to prominence through military exploits. Their eminence in the twelfth century is marked by the frequency with which they are mentioned in Cola inscriptions, the titles which they bore, and lithe practice of including Chola royal titles."~9 The adoption of royal names and titles by minor chiefs is one expression of ritual sovereignty. There were others who attained the status of Vellalars by imitating the modes of life appropriate to the peasantry.70 All the evidence shows that the Maravars - until the advent of the British - were not excluded by the dharmic society. On the contrary, some Maravar groups achieved eminence within this larger society. During the period of Pantyan expansion, the maravars who retained their predatory ways, would have found suitable employment as soldiers. For the Pantyan kings of a loosely integrated state, the predatory wars in Sri Lanka were vital to their more immediate purpose of winning the allegiance of the local chieftains. It was a long 68Ibid.,25 69Stein, Peasant State, 115 70Ibid., 304 "171 established practice that at the end of a successful expedition, the war leader would not keep the loot for himself, but would dispense it to his comrades and also make pious donations. For the warrior chieftains of the peripheral nadus, these military exploits were in addition, an opportunity to earn fame and royal titles. Inscriptions belonging to this period, in fact, mention that the title Aryacakravarti was a distinction earned in military service. 71 There are also references to Aryacakravartis in Ramnad in the inscriptions of Maravarman Kulasekhara (1268-1310).72 At the same time we know that this dry plain was locally controlled by Maravar and Kallar chieftains. It is therefore highly probable that the Maravar rulers known as cetupatis would have both aspired to and attained this "high status in the Pantya kingdom."73 It would then follow that the kings of Jaffna known by the twin epithets cetupati and aryacakravarti, were the descendents of the Maravar chieftains from Ramnad. Ramnad is also instructive for the purpose of understanding the transformation of Jaffna peninsula into an intermediate zone. Unlike _ 71Pathmanathan, 174-175 72Ibid., 173 73"Historically," states Carol Appadurai Breckenridge, "the royal head of the Maravar community, entitled '5etupati', had played a prominent role among Tamil kings. Since at least 1600, 5etupatis had borne royal titles, had carried royal paraphernalia, and had commanded contexts in which both to grant and to receive honours." See "From Protector to Litigant-Changing Relations Between Hindu Temples and the Raja of Ramnad," South Indian Temples ed. Burton Stein (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978),76. The Maravar 5etupatis' desire to replicate the royal rituals of Vijayanagara sovereigns, that included the performance of the rajasuya rite, would suggest that these regional kings also claimed to belong to the sacred Ksatriya clan (Ibid., 78,88). On rajasuya ritual, see above, ch. 6.3 172 Colamandalam, the region surrounding the Kaveri delta, peasant influence came late to Pandymandalam, the country lying south of the river Kaveri. This is why this r~gion proved a difficult place for the Cola overlords, requiring numerous punitive expeditions against would-be restorers of. Pantyan kingship. In the desolate parts of the ~. , southern country Cola hegemony was often non-existent. But with the arrival of peasant colonists, the southern plain was progressively being transformed into an intermediate zone. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Vaigai and Tambraparni (Ambasamutram) river basins were already well-settled core areas?4 During this time.some palai tracts which were back waters of this core region would have emerged as fully-fledged intermediate zones. It is here that we observe Kallar and Maravar gradually converting their lands to agriculture. In the original Ramnad and Madurai regions comprising the "eighteens nadus" ruled by Kallar and Maravar warrior-chiefs, the existence of Brahman and Vellalar settlements from the late Classical age would have exercised considerable influence on these changes. So as tank-supported irrigated agriculture was very slowly established in these palai tr~cts, the people there modified their lives to take advantage of these changes. Some groups of Kallar and Maravar evidently attained Vellalar status and began imitating the modes of life appropriate to the peasantry, just as their kurinci mannars (little kings) became elevated to the rank of Aryacakravartis by the performance of brahmanical rituals. 74Stein, Peasant State, 299 173 A similar Vellalization process occurred in Sri Lanka. The Jaffna and Mannar areas originally belonged to the palai category, virtually extensions of the southern Cor.omandel coast. On account of their geographical proximity these areas had been exposed to South Indian colonisation from pre-historic times. Around the middle of the first millennium, the colonisation of this region assumed a new phase with the appearance of Vellalar and Brahman settlements along the coast. Many Hindu temples, mostly of brick, were built in the Pallava style. Among them, Tiruketisvaram and Konesvaram became sufficiently prominent to draw the attention of two Brahman hymn-writers, Tirunanacampantar and Cuntarar, who have sung of their glories. From this time on the Hindu - Vellalar influence grew steadily along the northern coast, primarily through peaceful immigration. By the year 1310, a date which marks th~ decline of Pantya fortunes as Muslim power was extended to their part of South India, the Vellalars had no doubt emerged as the dominant group in the Jaffna peninsula. The Kailayamalai and the Vaiyapadal are the earliest works on the colonisation of Jaffna. They are written in poetic style, paying no attention to chronological detail. Besides, the authors of these chronicles are mainly concerned with the deeds and achievements of the Aryacakravarti dynasty. The pages of Kailayamalai are almost entirely devoted to the reign of Cinkaiyariyan, the founder of the dynasty. In outlining his reign in great detail, the author, Mutturaca Kaviracar, also gives an account of the arrival of peasant colonists from South India. They name chiefs, or Nattar, from the Coromandel coast, 174 who had brought service castes with them to the peninsula. The names indicate that most of these Nattar belonged to the VeIlalar caste.75 These chiefs and their large retinues are credited with the founding of many of the well-known localities in the region, areas such as: Irupalai, PuloH, Tirunelveli, Mayilitti, Tellippalai, Inuvil, Pachilappalli, Tolpuram, Koyilakanti, Velinadu, Netuntivu (Delft) and so on.76 The presence of a large number of high-status peasants with their menial labourers in Jaffna at the close of the Polonnaruva period follows the classic pattern of colonisation in the Tamil plain of South India where too, Vellalars migrated from the core areas to the periphery. The same pattern was also observed in the colonisation of Rajarata, a task accomplished by the Goyigamas and their service castes. Through the denser settlement of this region, Jaffna had, however, emerged as the most South Indian region of Sri Lanka. It is this region that created and preserved the most characteristic patterns of peasant domination. In fact, while in medieval South India the rise of Brahman secular power through royal endowments sometimes obscured the ancient patterns based on the Brahman-peasant alliance, in Jaffna the older features of peasant settlers have been . the ritual and social domination of the ..... preserved. Here there are no brahmadeyas, or royal donations of Brahmin villages. Secular power has thus remained in the hands of the Vellalars, whereas, the Brahmans, though relatively poor and 75 But eleven of the leading colonists have kaIIar and maravar caste titles. 76pathmanathan, 195-198, Pillay, 138-139 175 powerless, are still accorded the highest rank, and are supported by the Vellalars.77 Pathmanathan may be correct in his observation that this particular system of agrarian caste relations became fully established during the period of the Cola occupation of Rajarata: The social and cultural institutions of the Tamils settled in the island continued to be more or less the same as those found during the period of Cola rule and did not differ fundamentally from those of contemporary South India. They were vitalised by the streams of Indian cultural influences that flowed from South India as a result of the close contacts that existed between Sri Lanka and that region. The endogamous castes and the division of society as a whole into two broad categories called Valankai and Itankai - the two main characteristics of medieval, Tamil society - were to be witnessed in the island during this period.78 These observations lead to the conclusion that Jaffna or Yalpana kuda nadu (Jaffna peninsula nadu) best preserves the features of intermediate nadus in South India. Economic and social powers wer~ in the hands of the dominant Vellalar caste. The powerful brahmanical institutions associated with central nadus are not found in Jaffna. VeIlalar domination of this region was achieved not through coercion in the Western sense, but-by ritual design, which situated the Vellalars advantageously with respect to cosmic, divine, human and demonic powers. The result is a social order exemplified in the varnasrama 77Pfaffenberger, 26-27. Dumont was mistaken in his belief that Jaffna was a marginal and distinct region, d. Homo, 216 78pathmanathan, 83 176 dharma - rooted in religious beliefs profoundly accepted by everyone, including the subordinate castes. The Vellalars were also ritually linked to the Aryacakravartis and through them to the Pantyan kings. It may well be true that the Maravar kings of Jaffna who maintained a martial tradition did deem themselves to be Ksatriyas. But it needs to be emphasised that the Ksatriya model of domination has never found currency in the heartland of the South, the rice-growing plains. In Jaffna as in South India, the Maravars and Kallars were peripheral to the agrarian social formation. 79 Vanni nadu: a peripheral zone Much of the land between- Jaffna and Anuradhapura, commonly known as the Vanni, was on the other hand almost unaffected by the socio-economic forces operating in the peninsula. Cankam poetry identifies this type of region as kurinci, where people live by hunting and primitive cultivation. It is quite possible that the term Vanni, like kurinci, primarily referred to the nature of the tract. Among the many derivations assigned to this terr~l, one is taken from Sanskrit or Pali " vana," meaning Iforest." SO Whether this derivation is correct or not, in Sri Lanka the word Vanni does denote forest tracts, and also refers to a distinct conception of social life peculiar to those tracts. 79Stein, Peasant State, 70-71 BOJames E. Tennent, Ceylon. An Account of the Island. Physical, Historical and Topographical, 6th ed., 1st ed. 1859, vol. 2 (Colombo: Tisara Prakasakayo, 1977), 961, S. Paranavitana, UCHC, 736-737 177 In the medieval Sinhalese and Tamil chronicles, the term Vanni or Vanniyar was used to refer to the chiefs of the Vanni areas. 81 According to these sources, many chiefs in the North Central and Eastern Provinces claimed the title of Vanniyar around the thirteenth century, following a series of invasions by mercenary armies. It is also known that members of the Vanniyar caste, noted for their skill in archery, served in these mercenary armies and some of them were given land-grants as well as grandiose titles for their services when Magha seized Polonnaruwa and the northern centres of Sinhalese power in A.D. 1215. It is not difficult to understand why these soldiers chose to adopt these peripheral tracts as their· new home. South Indian evidence shows that the Vanniyar were originally a "forest race" given to martial pursuits. The link between the name Vanniyar and their original habitant (skt. vanya) appears strong in the North Arcot district bordering on the Telugu regions, where, the Vanniyar still live and where the use of Sanskrit caste names is not uncommon. 82 This would in part explain the soldiers' decision to settle in the forest tracts of Sri Lanka, because these areas enabled them to pursue the age-old occupation of hunting and chena cultivation. That decision also helped them to escape from the debilitating effects of the caste system in their homelands. Since the "fall of the Pallava dynasty" these people had 81 K. Indrapala, ''The origin of· the Tamil Vanni chieftaincies, of Ceylon," The Ceylon TournaI of Humanities vol.l (July 1970):125-126 82Ibid., 124-125 178 become gradually absorbed into the system as "agricultural servants under the Vellalars."83 Joining a military expedition, normally offered them only a temporary respite; since any such expedition consisted of no more than "temporary assemblages" of warrior-cum-service castes, belonging in this case to the right hand division associated with the dominant peasantry.84 Yet only a small percentage of the people in the Vanni areas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could have actually > • belonged to the Vanniyar castes of South India. We know that the forest tracts of Rajarata were already populated by the Veddhas. It may be inferred in the absence of. contrary evidence that the new arrivals were absorbed into the Veddha population through a process of miscegenation. 85 In this regard they were continuing a social pattern that had already made the Veddhas an extremely heterogeneous community. Over the centuries, the Sinhalese royal families had probably contributed much to this growing heterogeneity of the Veddha population for during the turbulent history of royal dynasties, entire families regularly fled to the forests for extended periods of refuge. South Indian invasions also contributed to this "flight to t~e ~ . forest," with perhaps the largest movement of this having occurred when Magha seized the capital, Polannaruva in A.D. 1215.86 83Thurstan, vol. VI, (1909), 9 84C. W. Spencer, Chola Conquest. 25-26 85Implied in S. Fowler's observation in the 19th century, see Indrapala, (ed.) Rajarata, 24. 86UCHC, (1960), 715-716 179 Among the Vanni chiefs, those from the Trincomalee area claim the closest links with the South Indian Vanni caste. A Tamil chronicle, Konecar Kalvettu, from Trincomalee, which preserves a tradition of Vanniyar migration from South India, claims that the Vanniyar who came to the Trincomalee area were "introduced" by a Cola prince by the name of Kulakkottan, under whose patronage chieftains were "appointed" in -different regions. The more reliable Mattakkalappu Manmiyan from Batticaloa suggests that the mysterious Kulakkottam could well be Magha, whose authority did extend as far as the lower reaches of the Eastern Province. These slightly different legendary accounts seem to- be in agreement that the first Vanni chieftaincies emerged in the Trincomalee area in the thirteenth century - if not before - and that they, at least temporarily, indicate a period of South Indian overlordship. For some reason, the chiefs of other parts of Rajarata found it to their advantage to adopt the usage of the Trincomalee region and assume the prestigious appellation of "VannL" As a result there gradually emerged a plurality of chieftaincies, made up, no doubt of Veddhas, Vanniyars and Mukkuvars, in the peripheral regions all bearing the title Vanniyar. The Mattakkalappu Manmiyam thus refers to the existence of Vanni chiefs of Mukkuvar caste in the Batticaloa area. The Vanni principalities of Batticaloa and Puttalam were dominated mostly by Mukkuvar. In the Batticaloa area they are found in greater numbers than anywhere else. The circumstances surrounding the arrival of the 180 Mukkuvars are somewhat similar to those of the Vanniyar in Trincomalee. Both groups served in the mercenary armies that frequently invaded Sri Lanka, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. They are together referred to as "Tamils and Keralas" during Magha's invasion in A.D. 1215, but their differences are significant. The Vanniyar were of Coromandel origin where they had become agricultural servants of the Vellalars. As such they belonged to the right hand division of the dharmic society. At least nominally, they would be Saivites. The Mukkuvar, by contrast, were of Malabar (or Kerala) origin where they are recognized as hereditary fishermen. As such, they were traditionally neither bound to the land nor to the caste system. In their relative freedom they had pursued occupations other than fishing, particularly trade and cultivation. In the Batticaloa area they assumed the role of chiefs and powerful landlords (potiyar), and generally consider themselves fishermen. There is still no solid historical evidence of how the Vanni principalities of Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu, Vavuniya and Puttalam were colonised and settled in the middle ages. From the meagre evidence we have, some based on legendary accounts, it may at this point be suggested that the Mukkuvar and Vanniyar who swelled the ranks of the mercenary armies assumed dominance in particular localities of Sri Lanka by wresting political power from local chieftains. ~ Dennis McGilvray thus refers to a legendary account from Batticaloa which credits the Mukkuvar with expelling the local fishing caste and establishing strict dominance. Their dominance was, he points out, 181 symbolized in many aspects of domestic and public ritual and maintained by possession and control of the largest share of the land. 87 But in most cases, as the previous Vanniyar-Veddha example would indicate, the Mukkuvar, Vanniyar and other warrior contingents easily amalgamated with the local groups to create broad-based kinship traditions. 88 These traditions of the Vanni areas may at the same time be seen as a regional variation of .those found in the peripheral zone of South India. The peripheral zone represents the territories outside the settled agricultural zone, an unsettled world inhabited largely by martial predators and forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Although this unsettled realm had many links with the settled agrarian world, including many complex transactions, it remained independent of the Vellalar and the Brahman ritualists. In the same manner, the deities of blood and power, which also inhabited this realm, were in many ways related to the "pure" and "high" gods of the other realm, but here they acted independently by actively seeking and possessing, often without invitation, their human devotees as well as victims. The blood and power dei~es of the Vanni are mostly goddesses or ammans, who are believed to revel in sickness, gore and slaughter. The fierce and malevolent side of their character is duly acknowledged 87Dennis B. McGivray, ''Mukkuvar vannamai: Tamil caste and matrician ideology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka", Caste Ideology and Interaction, ed. D. B. McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),60 88 Mattakkaluppu Manmiyam preserves the traditions of Mukkuvar kinship with its principle of matrilineal succession 182 in worship. The village "mother" goddesses such as Kannaki amman and Mari amman, the bringer of small-pox, are the most prominent in popular worship throughout all the nadus and are the most readily appealed to in time of calamity.89 They have remained popular despite the fact that any victory that may be gained in time of calamity is always temporary, because in order to gain even this partial victory over the demonic world, the goddess must become as terrible as the enemy she fights. The "demonic" goddesses, though universally venerated by Tamils, have always been more prominent in the world of the warriors and forest dwellers. Consequently, the spread of goddess worship has been closely related to the movement of migrant warrior groups in South India and Sri Lanka. The goddesses with their capacity to possess living men and women became powerful protector-patronesses of warrior groups, in whose honour many shrines, often around trees, were built. The martial groups were specifically drawn to these goddesses because of their sakti (divine power or energy) which was seen and experienced in everyday life. Although all beings are believed to possess some measure of sakti, the goddesses are possessed of an extra endowment. Hence to contend with the "demonic" world, the domain of lust, pollution and greed which threatened the harmony of 89 W. T. Elmore writing no doubt from a western perspective, observes that these dieties being female ammans "is m;>t especially complimentary to the female sex among the Dravidians. The qualities which bring these goddesses the worship of the people are the most undesirable ones. These qualities are quarrelsomeness, vindictiveness, jealousy, and similar attributes." J. Cartman, Hinduism in Ceylon (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena, 1957), 74 183 their universe, these people sought and enlisted the powers of the deities by offering worship. This basic picture of a warrior world remained unchanged throughout the medieval period despite the establishment of settlements of Vellalars -with their service castes and "high" gods - in the maritime principalities. Such settlements were never large enough to change the existing features of the Vanni. The warrior elites had indeed permitted these "strangers" to maintain their corporate character while retaining superior political control in their own hands, an arrangement that could also be observed in the dry areas of the southern Indian peninsula. This arrangement led to, most noticeably in maritime regions of the east, the creation of a two-part society. As the Vellalars slowly pushed into the warrior world, they did leave their mark on the Vanni society. In the Batticola region where the Vellalar and Mukkuvar co~peted for economic domination, the Mukkuvar borrowed religious symbols from the agrarian world in order to enhance their claims to domination. In this situation it eventually was the Mukkuvar and not the Vellalar who emerged as the chief guardians and overseers of the major temples - the institutions which have traditionally played the central role in organizing and legitimizing the peasant society. It would however be a mistake to conclude from this development that the Mukkuvar at this time had also become, perhaps unwittiIi.gly, patrons of a brahmanical world-view. On the contrary, the Mukkuvar appear to have deliberately modified the borrowed religious symbols with the sole 184 purpose of reinforcing their own established systems of authority and overlordship. In opposition to Brahmanism and Hindu orthodoxy, the Mukkuvar of Batticola embraced Virasaivism (rather than Saiva Siddhanta), as numerous lower caste South Indian groups had done, as the ideological vehicle for furthering their economic and political aspirations. The Brahmans have consequently stayed out of this region, and the Virasaiva Kurukkals, the non-Brahman priests who serve in the Virasaiva temples, "stoutly maintain their superiority to Brahmans and the brahmanical 'varna doctrines' (varuna vetam), reflecting an antipathy well known from South Indian ethnography."90 Finally, on account of their cultural links, the fisherfolk of the neytal region can be grouped with the peoples of Vanni. These especially mobile people are found on the coastline as well as the offshore islands of Sri Lanka in large numbers. From ancient times, the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka shared with the Veddhas in the worship of ~ spirits, ammans 91 (blood-drinking goddesses) and other "demonic" deities. Their life too was hazardous. Every day the fishermen had to traverse the "demonic" world. The sea is regarded by all South Indians as a domain of formless "demonic" chaos. The seafarer is the man who sailed or dived into this demonic void. The classical symbol of this destructive world is the shark. Its hideous flesh-devouring qualities 90McGilvray "Mukkuvar", 63 91 Kannaki valakkurai kaiviyam which preserves the traditions of kannaki cult in Sri Lanka suggests that the cult was primarily confined to the fishing and trading comunities in its early stages of development inthe island. [5. Pathmanathan, "South India and and Sri Lanka, A.D. 1450-1650, Political, Commercial and Cultural Relations," Journal of Tamil Studies, 21 (June 1982): 53-54 185 has made the shark the perennial embodiment of the wild, destructive energies of the sea. 92 These people of neytal were only partially integrated into the society of the interior. Along the northwest and northeast coasts of Sri Lanka, three distinct castes or groups of fisherfolk were settled: Karaiyar, Mukkuvar and Thimilar. It was noted in the Cankam period that some of these people left their ritually polluting, low status occupations, to take advantage of more lucrative trades. As Max Weber has suggested, in Hindu society entrepreneurs were often outsiders to the caste system and would sometimes include those of low caste status. In the early Christian. era there was a great expansion in the maritime trade. From humble beginnings as fish dealers some groups of fishermen first built up capital and then moved into ship-building and other waterfront industries in the ports. Thus we saw the emergence of urban centers or pattanams, controlled by powerful maritime trading clans. Their wealth and opulent lifestyle are described in Cankam literature. It is such opportunities in maritime trade which enabled the Karaiyar fisherfolk to move up the ladder by establishing themselves as chank and pearl traders and boat owners. They owe their rise to an accident in geography. They are mainly concentrated on the strip of the northwestern coastline which runs along the Gulf of Mannar. Although the Karaiyars are found in other parts, this must have been 92Susan Bayly, Saints, goddesses, and kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),333 186 their original home. This meant that unlike the Mukkuvar, the Karaiyar were in a position to exploit one of the region's great natural resources, the celebrated pearl-bearing oyster- beds which lay offshore. Pearling had become an important Sri Lankan export industry as early as the first century A.D. What really set these people apart from other farming and labouring groups is the high level of skill they acquired in a variety of specialised occupations. Pearling and its associated trade of chank diving involve great skill and specialist knowledge of the region's oyster beds. The fishermen also moved into other lucrative trades. In the port towns of Mantai, Kankesanturai and Kayts, they easily moved into ship-building, and their skill in building fishing boats gradually enabled them to take up carpentry in a more general service. They also moved into the interior from their homes on the Sri Lankan coast as itinerant merchants and artisans. By first century A.D. some were permanently based in the "foreign" residents' quarters of Anuradhapura city 93 from where they may have controlled much of the internal trade. Circumstantial evidence would further suggest that the bulk of the port-based trade was controlled by the Karaiyar in alliance with the South Indian Paravas, a group with marked similarities. Owing to these occupational specialities, the Karaiyar of the middle ages were the least homogeneous among the fishing communities. Specialized occupations on the other hand led to the 93Paranavitana in UCHC yoU, 236 187 formation of tightly knit and caste-like regional groups with their little (port) kings and talaivans (headmen or elders). These locality leaders often received privileges and titles from would-be-overlords in order to secure them as clients. This may explain the emergence of Mudaliyars and Pillais among the elite maritime trading clans. These exchanges of honour and service tended to further reinforce the Karaiyar locality's sense of corporate identity. The titles conferred, moreover, strengthened the position of the talaivan of headman, and, consequently, the institutionalised leadership that emerged from this patronage network94 proved to be useful for recruiting and disciplining the coastal population and developing the social identity of those with valuable maritime skills. 941t is through this network that the Karaiyar came to embrace Saivism and Roman Catholicism, while the Paravas [5. Bayly, (1989)] under slightly different circumstances, embraced Hinduism, Islam and Roman Catholicism. PART THREE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 188 CHAPTER 8 COLONIAL RULE AND THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL PATTERNS 1505-1796 8.1 Portuguese Colonial Rule A.D. 1505 - 1658 From the beginning of the sixteenth century, to 1948 Sri Lanka has been partially or wholly ruled by European colonial powers. For four and a half centuries, a political and ,military hegemony was formed by three successive powers: the Portuguese (1505-1658), the Dutch (1658-1796) and the British (1796-1947). Through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial rule was confined to the maritime regions, while an indigenous ruler, in the Kingdom of Kandy, continued to exist in the interior. The existence of a hostile power in the interior to some extent weakened the Portuguese and Dutch control over the coastal areas and thus opened many gaps in their attempt to monopolize the seaborne trade. The eastern and southeastern littoral in particular remained mostly outside the control of these two powers. 189 190 Conquest The Portuguese conquests of the Sri Lankan littoral proceeded spasmodically throughout the sixteenth century. Their primary aim was to gain control over the island's lucrative trade in cinnamon and pearls and to this end an initial contact was made with the Kingdom of Kotte in A.D. 1505 and a fortified settlement was established at Colombo in 1518. As the century progressed, other settlements were established at strategic points along the coast. Portuguese interest in the Tamil areas in the north of the island stemmed from two considerations. First there was the pearl fishery in the Mannar region; and secondly, the Jaffna Peninsula was strategically important in - securing control of the seaborne, traffic, to and from the South Indian coast. By the end of the century, Jaffna came under Portuguese control with the capture of Nallur in A.D. 1591 and the beheading of Puviraja Pandaram, the King of Jaffna (A.D. 1582-1591). The power and control of the Portuguese were subsequently extended to the east coast by fortifying the ports of Trincomalee and Batticaloa. The Portuguese conquests of the strategic ports through this period were designed to gain control of the flourishing long-distance trade around the Indian sub-continent. From Hormuz of Persia came horses, silks, carpets and dyes. Bengal exported cloths and food-stuffs, while Coromandel provided cloths' and yarns. Sri Lanka exported cinnamon and precious stones,. while Malabar through the port of Calicut provided pepper. In order to take control of this trade the Portuguese in the year A.D. 1600 created an empire based on control of 191 the sea by means of naval power. Land areas were bases only, and revenue was overwhelmingly derived from maritime activities.! This however was not deliberate policy. In fact in most areas of Sri Lanka as well as India, the Portuguese were faced by societies strong enough to resist any encroachment inland. Control of the sea meant that the Portuguese could hold on to littoral areas, but penetration further inland was too risky and difficult. Seaborne tributory system On the seas the Portuguese operated a "tributory system.,,2 All ships trading within Asia were required to take a pass or cartaz issued by the competent Portuguese authority and to call at a Portuguese fort to pay customs duties before they proceeded on their voyage. A cash security left at this fort served as a guarantee that the ship would call there on its return voyage also, and that again involved more dues. Enemies of the Portuguese and forbidden goods such as certain spices were not to be carried. The Portuguese in introducing the cartaz system claimed they were providing protection against piracy. But in reality it was the system that created the need for protection, and what was sold was exemption from the threat of Portuguese violence. In the modern sense, the cartaz system was nothing less than a "protection racket."3 Ie. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (London: Hutchinson,1969) 25. Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1670-1740 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986),114 3M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India. The New Cambridge History of India voI.1, pt.1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987),78 192 In this manner Portuguese aims were achieved without "introducing a single new element into the commerce of Southern Asia."4 In fact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries India was, in technological areas, "one of the advanced countries of the world."S Portuguese dominance in Asia was thus based entirely on their artillery ships. It implied that indigenous patterns of trade would continue to operate as in the past but under the Portuguese "protection" system. By selling 'protection on the sea they created a "redistributive empire"; where the Portuguese skimmed off a layer of profits for themselves, but were not able to effec.t radical changes in routes, products or productive techniques at any level. In its simplest terms, the Portuguese system did nothing except divert trade in some goods, and force some Asian traders to pay extra customs duties. At most they manipulated, but did not transform. 6 Conversions In addition to profits the Portuguese sought religious conversions to Roman Catholicism. A member of Vasco da Gama's crew, when asked in Calicut, 'What brought you here?" is reported to have replied "We seek Christians and spices."7 Indeed for the 4J. C. Van Leur: quoted in S. Arasaratnam, Merchants, 113 SPearson, 57 6pearson,77-78 7c. R. Boxer, "Christians and Spices. Portuguese Missionary Methods in Ceylon 1518-1658," History Today, vol. VIII, no.s (1958): 346 193 Portuguese kings there was no contradiction or unconscious irony in their linking of service to God and Mammon. As the great chronicler Diogo do Couto has stated "The Kings of Portugal always aimed in their conquest of the East, at so uniting the two powers, spiritual and temporal, that the one should never be exercised without the other." 8 Their spiritual commitment was strengthened by Papal Bulls of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which gave the Portuguese crown certain revenues and privileges within Portugal and overseas, in return for the financing and support of the missionarr drive in Asia and Africa. This patronage, or padroado, became the basis on which the Portuguese built up a massive overseas missionary operation. 9 The term padroado 10 specifically applied to the state-backed church system, and within Asia its Headquarters was the main Portuguese trading enclave at Goa. For the Portuguese in Sri Lanka, religion, politics and economics were not clearly distinguished; and frequently all three combined in a confusingly intermingled way. If cinnamon and pearls were the attractions, "from the early days they (also) had hopes of converting to Christianity one or other of the three~ings who divided the island 8Pearson, 30 9Ibid., 118-120 10 Stems from the medieval assumption that the pope held supreme authority over the entire globe, including the pagan world. In the papal Bull of Pope Alexander VI, this authority over the pagan colonies was delegated to the kings of Portugal and Spain. It meant that by right of padroado the king of Portugal had dominion over Sri Lanka, not only politically, but also ecclesiastically. see D. J. Bosch, Transfonning Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York: Maryknoll, 1991),227 194 between them in 1521.,,11 The padroado clerics were given the task of making converts. Most of their work was confined to the fisherfolk localities "along the coastline where they used the well established precolonial state patronage networks to create bonds of religious affiliation and clientele. Under the patronage of the padroado clerics religious "conversion" for the Karaiyar fisherfolk from the Mannar and Jaffna regions involved a two-fold response. First, following the lead of their caste elders and notables they went through ceremonies of mass baptism - and a pledge of allegiance to the Portuguese crown. 12 Secondly, they became clients of their European patrons, serving as pearl and chank divers; sailors on Portuguese warships and trading vessels; and boat-builders and sail-makers in colonial ports. 13 The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (A.D. 1506-1552) exemplifies this approach to conversion. It reveals a pattern that is also found in the Padroado missions in other territories of Estado da India the chain of fortified Portuguese settlements in the Indian subcontinent. In every region the activities of the church soon came to reinforce the Estado's military and commercial pursuits. Prior to Xavier's arrival in Mannar, by the year 1521, a small Portuguese naval force was present in the Gulf exacting tribute from pearling. In the lle. R. Boxer, "Christians and Spices," 346 12Susan Bayly states, "The great ceremonies of mass baptism ........ were really declarations of tactical alliance rather than""religious conversions as the term is usually understood", see Saints, goddesses, and kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),328 13M. Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka 1500-1931, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982), 50-53, 80-89 195 period 1536-1544, a large number of people of the Karaiyar caste associated with the pearl fisheries were converted to Christianity.1 4 At their "invitation" Francis Xavier, lithe Apostle of India," arrived from Madura to baptize them. As an integral part of their baptism they were taught to make the sign of the cross and to recite garbled Tamil renderings of the Creed and the Ave Maria. Xavier himself could hardly speak Tamil, so he used the appropriate Portuguese terms to convey key Christian concepts such as heaven, grace, sacraments, priest and cross.l 5 Following this event the pearl fishery itself was organized as a Portuguese venture, with the collaboration of the Christian Karaiyars as a new client community. It is highly unlikely that conversion to Christianity under these circumstances could have constituted a change in the community's existing world view or caste lifestyle. On the contrary, the dominant religious strain was still the traditional Hindu pattern thinly overlaid with Roman Catholicism.16 Francis Xavier, once canonised, became a powerful guardian-intercessor for the Karaiyar. In their hierarchy of patrons and cult figures he was second only to their most celebrated supernatural patron figure, the Virgin Mary)7 There are also startling 14c. R. de Silva, Sri Lanka: A History (New Delhi: Vikas, 1991), 116-117 15James E. Tennent, Christianity in Ceylon (London: John Murray,185m, 10-12 16 In many ways this is similar to the religious atmosphere of Portugal at the time where "folk religion" retained its sway under the veneer of Catholicism, and was characterized by "belief in magic, the ev'il-eye, witches, miracles, and love potions" and infuenced "all aspects of life, and all classes." d. Pearson, The Portuguese in India, 16 17Bayly, Saints 329-331 196 parallels between the Marian cult and the Pattini (Kannaki Amman) cult; the latter being the chief deity of the sea-faring and trading communities in the island.l B "The Virgin Mary" of the Sri Lankan fisherfolk, observes Obeyesekere, had "the attributes of the goddess Pattini"19 and the famous "shrine of Our Lady of Madhu," near Mannar, was, he points out, "originally a Pattini shrine."20 It is a well known fact in Sri Lanka that the Portuguese ruthlessly carried out an ecclesiastical decree of 1567 requiring all heathen temples in Portuguese controlled territory to be demolished;21 and "with the stones of the demolished temples, they built their forts and churches, often on the very site previously occupied by a Hindu temple."22 The padroado missionaries at this time deliberately stressed emotion and devotion, that is bhakti, over strict adherence to norms. Fervent devotion to the patron figures was therefore characterised by processions and fairs, plays and dances, feasts and fasts, pujas and tirtams; and attachment was to such symbols as images, statues, bells, pictures and crosses. 23 These practises were no doubt aided by the similar trend in Hinduism at that time; for the very influential bhakti 18pathmanathan, "South India and Sri Lanka, A.D. 1450-1650, Political, Commercial and Cultural relations," TournaI of Tamil Studies, no. 21(1982): 53-54 190beyesekere, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, 480 20Ibid., 480 21Boxer, "Christians and Spices," 348-9 22J. Cartman, Hinduism in Ceylon (Colombo: M. D. Gunasena and co., 1957),44 23Tennent, Christianity,18-19; Pearson,128-129 197 movement also put personal devotion above all else. The manner in which Christian customs and observances were introduced by the missionaries greatly strengthened rather than weakened the Karaiyars caste institutions. 24 Christian symbols created a fusion between the group's social institutions and their identity as Roman Catholics. In effect Christianity became a caste lifestyle for the group, distinguished by common marriage customs, dress styles, eating habits and other codes of behaviour that mark off one jati from another. Stones, blood and caste The Portuguese presence also served to reinforce the caste-based worldview of the majority of Tamils who did not embra,ce Roman Catholicism. In the Sinhalese sixteenth century work Rajavaliya,25 the Portuguese are described as people who ate stones and drank blood. The two symbols chosen by the Rajavaliya, stones (unleavened bread or shipsbiscuits) and blood (wine), form the basis of the ritual for the communicant in a Catholic mass. The communicant not only partakes of these symbols, representing Christ's flesh and blood, but also believes that by the miracle of transubstantiation performed by the officiating priest, this bread and wine actually become flesh and blood. The Sinhalese vegetarian Buddhist and Tamil vegetarian Hindu alike would have thus been nauseated by the dietary habits of the 24Bayly, Saints, 327 25The Rajavaliya: or, A Historical Narrative of Sinhalese Kings from Vijaya to Vimala Dharma Surya II trans. B. Gunasekara (Colombo: Government Printer, 1900) 198 Portuguese, which was for the author of the Rajavaliya, powerfully expressed in the celebration of mass. In offering an important reinterpretation of this well-known account, Mich3el Roberts maintains that this reaction has something to do with the innate "racism" of a people bound by caste, who react in horror at what their caste-rulers consider the ultimate pollution - the eating of meat and the drinking of blood. In his usage the "racism" in this case was an Apartheid social system based on dietary, sexual and work-related taboos. 26 In the religious perspective of the Rajavaliya, the Portuguese and their descendents, the Burghers,27 were to be looked down upon as carnivorous beings who were polluted and "sinful", and therefore contact with them had to be avoided, except where absolutely necessary. 8.2 Dutch Colonial Rule A.D. 1658-1796 In 1851, the great orientalist Richard Burton categorically declared that the decline of the Portuguese empire was a result of "above all things, the slow but sure workings of the short-sighted policy of the Portuguese in intermarrying and identifying themselves with Hindoos of the lowest castes."28 Such quasi-biological, overtly racist explanations, although dominant for nearly two centuries, must 26Jane Russel, "Fact and Fiction: The De Silva vs. Roberts Debate", Lanka Guardian, vo1.15, nos. 4,5, (1992), 11£. and 19£. Prominent Sri Lankan historians representing the "status quo" have strongly objected to this interpretation. 27Appendix 2: Portuguese Burghers 28R. Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains, (London: R Bentley, 1851),45 199 be rejected in favour of the more obvious. Even at the height of their powers at the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were militarily over-extended, and as a contemporary observer complained, the empire "could not last forever, even if we had only the natives to fight against.,,29 Sure enough, in the following decades, Portuguese India was virtually battered to extinction by the great land-oriented powers, the Mughals and the Marathas. The Kandyans of Sri Lanka on the other hand, were inward looking and never really tried to dislodge the Portuguese from the island's shores. Conquest By the seventeenth century the Portuguese were also being challenged on the seas by two new sea-oriented powers, the Dutch and the British. England at first made peace with the Portuguese in 1635, and these links were subsequently strengthened by matrimonial alliances. In 1661 the English received Bombay from the Portuguese crown as part of King Charles IT's dowry from Catherine of Braganza. The Dutch on the other hand were to be the main opponents of the Portuguese. The hostility between the two was intensified when the Dutch revolted against the Spanish Crown, which had by then absorbed Portugal. For the Kandyan king, the entry of the Dutch into Indian waters in the beginning of the seventeenth century seemed at first to be a good thing. By a treaty signed in A.D. 1638 the Dutch promised to 29 Charles R Boxer, Portuguese India in the Mid-seventhteeth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980),3 -200 assist the king in his war with the Portuguese, and in return the king granted them a monopoly of the major articles of trade and a repayment of their expenses in the war on his behalf. For the Dutch, the island's cinnamon was the great prize, for in the seventeenth century cinnamon had become a most desired spice in European trade, and both its price and volume of sales increased immensely. A few years of fruitful cooperation with the Kandyan king led to the final expulsion of the Portuguese from their strongholds in 165830 and the Dutch takeover. Dutch East India Company The success of the Dutch in the East was a result of the domination of the seas achieved by their large, well-equipped navy and merchant fleet, which was already dominating the carrying trade in northern Europe and the Mediterranean. 31 At the same time they pioneered new forms of financial management which were carefully copied by the British who were also active in the region. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie or VOC) raised capital on the open. market like a modern . company. It had regular accounting and auditing systems which included the cost of military operations in its calculations of profit and 30Sinappah Arasaratnam, Ceylon (Englewood OUfs, N. J.: Prentice-Han, 1964),137-138 31In 1669 "two-thirds of an seafaring vessels" belonged to HoUand. Karl Barth, ''Man in the Eighteenth Century," Protestant Theology. Its Background and History (London: SCM Press, 1972), 38 201 loss. In a sense, therefore, the company created the first capitalist empire. The Dutch developed more fully the system of "factories" (fortified trading posts) inaugur.ated by the Portuguese. The English were to copy this institution also.32 The Dutch were also more interested than the Portuguese in establishing a territorial empire. The latter had sought to control trade by the control of strategic points through which it passed. The Dutch too, like the Portuguese before them and the British after them, tended to use this unsophisticated method, destroying rival traders and producers by military force. But they in addition desired to control the areas that produced valuable commodities, including spices, and thereby master their supply. Operating this policy in Sri Lanka, the Dutch decided very early to take over the rich cinnamon lands of the south-west coast as well as the o,:tlets for this spice. was thus out-manCEuvred, becoming a v~ctim ~e K~dyan king of his own strategy. He was, however, somewhat better off than he had been under the Portuguese for he had a few ports on the east coast for ~is own trade activity. In the Jaffna and Mannar areas the Dutch maintained and developed the Portuguese system by seeking to enforce an even more rigid monopoly33 over trade in items such as areca nut, elephants, 32<:. A. Bayly ed., The Raj and the British India, 1600-1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990), 61-63 33As in Portuguese times Tamil and Muslim traders - with connections in South India - had to carry passes issued by the Dutch authorities and their trade had tobe confined to one of the larger ports in laffna, Colombo orcSalle, where various dues would be collected. 202 dyes, palmyra timber, pinaddu (palmyra produce), oils (coconut, margosa and illupai) as well as over the pearl fisheries. At the same time many traditional industries were significantly expanded. With the burgeoning demand for Jaffna tobacco in south Malabar, the acreage under tobacco cultivation increased steadily in the peninsula and extended into the Vanni. The expansion in this instance was facilitated by cash being advanced to the' cultivators by the Malayali (Kerala) resident purchasers in Jaffna and slaves from South India. The small scale weaving industry received .a big boost from the famine in Madura (1659-1660) when the Dutch induced a number of Kaikolar weaver families to migrate to Jaffna. Cotton yarn was imported from South India and the finished cloth was bought from the weavers by the Dutch. When the conditions in South India improved and the migration of weavers stopped, plain cloth was directly imported from South India to be dyed in JafEna, and was exported direct to Europe and to Batavia where it became part of the Southeast Asian market. The consequence of this trade was that from the very firs~ year of the conquest of Jaffna, the Dutch were realizing substantial surpluses of revenue over expenditure. 34 Monopolistic state-building In the Dutch held areas, the growth in commerce was accompanied by more intrusive forms of state building, frequently 34sinappah Arasaratnam, Historical Foundation of the Economy of the Tamils of North Sri Lanka. Chelvanayagam Memorial Lectures GaUna: Thanthai O1elva Memorial Trust, 1982),6-11 203 contributing to widespread unrest among the populace. The Dutch introduced a number of personal taxes, most of which had to be paid in cash. The mo~t important of these was the poll-tax paid by each adult male inhabitant. It was more or less equal in its burden on the rich and the poor alike. In 1688, an increase in the poll-tax led to popular unrest in Jaffna, and thus forced the authorities to remit the increase. In addition to personal taxes, there was a personal labour service tax levied on every able-bodied male who was required to perform labour for the state for a total of twelve days a year. This service was called uliyam and could be directed to~ards any public works undertaken by the state. Those not able to perform the labour could pay instead a fine. Taxes on the land and their produce resulted in a traditional form of protest in that many peasants evacuated their villages and absconded into the Vanni, where the chieftains were engaged in hostility against the Dutch. Dutch state-building tended to reinforce caste and racial hierarchies. To collect revenue they had to know a fair ,bit about the constitution of the Tamil society and the character of the villages and lands. Consequently, Dutch legal experts sat down with some Mudaliyar landlords of Jaffna to codify the civil laws of the region. The resulting document is known as Thesavalamai, the codification of the laws and customs of the Tamils of Jaffna. This document has ever since been used as a guide in the village administration and by the courts and revenue collectors. This codifying of the caste customs in this document tended to sharpen distinctions and to further 204 institutionalize the power of the headmen, through whom taxes were now collected and justice administered. At the top of the caste hierarchy were the Mudaliyars and Brahmans, and at the bottom the untouchable Nalavar "slaves,r who were employed in domestic and farm labour, and were even expected to perform the obligatory uliyam service on behalf of their masters. Racial hierarchy An informal hierarchy also emerged among Europeans, with the Dutch at the top, the Dutch Burghers (children of Dutch/Sri Lankan unions) below, followed by the Portuguese Burghers. The latter were lithe worst race of people....... corrupted by the climate" so that " any blackfellow who can procure a hat and shoes with a vest and breeches, and who acquired some little sm'attering of the Catholic religion, [can] aspire to the title of a Portuguese."3.5 The Burghers, however, remained a key group in the Dutch administration. When, however, the British succeeded the Dutch, the Burghers were for two generations excluded from political and military office36 because many were of Portuguese origin, and in the British view compounded the "superstition" of Catholicism with the "depravity" of their Sri Lankan 35Robert Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon 2d. ed. . ._. > - 286 Hindu temples. brought about at the instigation of pa.droado missionaries. "The natives have not forgotten" the report continues, "the violence practised on them and their Religion by the Portuguese."S8 Under these circumstances, it concludes, flit is a matter of aston"ishment to us that we have been permitted to proceed so quietly with our schools and our daily instruction."S9 (b) "Rice" Evangelism. Gift-giving, dana, is the proven method of securing religious allegiance and social contro1. 60 In adopting the established Hindu-Buddhist practice of ritual exchange, the Dutch used the dana of rice to secure clients, who earned the name "rice Christians." The Protestant missionaries of the British period, however, saw the dana of rice as a problem and thus stopped it: You ask them, will you come and hear me preach - the answer is yes, if you will give me rice. The head man of a large and populous village of 16,000 people, told me one" day, if you will give me and the people plenty of rice and curry, we will all become Christians. It seems as though they could not conceive of a greater degree of happiness than is found in gratifying the appetite ·for food and drink. They, therefore, pay little attention to what is told them about Christ, for they do not care whether it is true or not. 61 58Missionary Herald. vol. XVI (1820); 251:ABCFM Archives 59Ibid., 251 60See above, sections 5.3 and 7.1 61Miron Winslow, Letter, 25 July 1820, Memoirs. 237 287 Rice-evangelism, it was felt, had made the Tamil people indifferent to the concerns of "their "souls" by paying too much attention to their ''bellies.'' (c) Caste System. Unlike the Roman Catholic missionaries, the Protestants saw caste as primarily a religious rather than a civil institution. According to their view, caste was the cement of Hinduism, closely binding the whole socio-religious edifice.62 From being ideologically opposed to Christianity, the system of pollution rules Cmuraikal) associated with caste imposed severe restrictions on the extent of the missionaries' contacts with the Tamils. As soon as Joseph Knight, the first CMS missionary in Jaffna, commenced work in Nallur in November, 1818, he was thus faced with "difficulties and opposition": The people thought it necessary to bathe themselves and purify their houses after the missionary's visit, and it was usual for the pundit to bathe at the tank on his way home after giving a lesson at the Mission House. 63 62Policies on caste: ABCFM: Slavery, Caste and Polygamy (New York: American Missionary Association, 1854), CMS: Bishop Daniel Wilson's pastoral letter of 5 July 1833 to Anglicans in the Diocese of Calcutta - to which Sri Lanka at that time belonged - published in J. Bateman, The Life of Daniel Wilson (London: John Murray, 1860),437-443. The letter gives the following injunction: The distinction of castes, then, must be abandoned, decidedly, immediately, finally; and those who profess to belong to Christ must give this proof of their having really 'put off', concerning the former conversation, 'the old man', and having 'put on the new man' in Christ Jesus. (Ibid., 438) His policy on caste was to be enforced throughout the Diocese even though it diverged from the Government's line of non-interference with the local social and religious customs. 63Balding, Church MissionaJY Society in CeylQn 1818-1918.89. The practice of washing and bathing to remove contamination from Christians continued well into 288 Again, it is these pollution rules that became "a formidable obstacle to the establishment of Boarding schools": To send one's children away from home to eat, drink, sleep, and have companionship with ethers, some of whom perhaps might be of lower caste or family standing than themselves, was a difficulty not easily got over by native parents. 64 Since caste imposed barriers against commensality, it would have been regarded by Christians, to be the greatest obstacle to the progress of the gospel, and therefore, also, the best defence against Christian proselytizat}on. (d) Idolatry and Superstition. As they lived and moved among the people of Tamil Sri Lanka, the missionaries saw a vivid variety of gods and goddesses, of divine beings and demons, and manifestations of the divinity in human and animal forms. Most of these gods and goddesses would have been visible to them in the countless wayside shrines. They also had some knowledge of puranic and epic mythology, especially Kantapuranam which was regularly popula~ized through recitations and ritual enactments. 65 This rich iconography and mythology was in every sense opposed to their Protestant sensibilities. By calling the belief in them idolatry and superstition, the missionaries the twentieth century, d. G. D. Somasundaram, My Recollections. n.d.,1Of. [private circulation] 64Brief Sketch of the American Mission Oaffna: American Mission Press, 1849),10 6S ego W. Adley's detailed desa:ipti9.n 9.£;Klinq~swaJIlY F~ti:val ~t ~~1~\Y', 7 September, 1826: CCE/0/28-30, CMS Archives. Poor's use of Kandapumam at the Seminary in Root, 12-13 289 saw in those beliefs a distortion of true religion. They were thus firmly resolved that they must "expose the utter folly and irrationality of idolatry and superstition" without which true religion cannot be safely or securely established. Since "idolatry with its grim satellite, superstition" were mysteriously ~edded to "caste," any such exposure could not be carried out without also rooting out and destroying the other "monster evil."66 (e) Illiteracy. At this time "there were only a few Tamil schools here and there, and only a few could read and write with the style on ola, but very few could read the printed character with ease and fluency."67 The few were almost all men, since there were "no more than a dozen women,"68 at the time of the commencement of Protestant missionary work "who knew the Tamil alphabet."69 If ordinary men and women should be able to read the Bible in the vernacular, mass illiteracy of this kind would have appeared totally unacceptable. The missionaries firmly held to the convic~ion of Martin 66 The language is borrowed from Alexander Duff's pamphlet, What is Caste? (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1858), 21: CMS Archives. In more sober language Percival declared, "it is not from the priesthood that they have anything to fear, but from the Brahmanical system, coupled with the Oriental aversion to change and the cementing influence of caste." Quoted in Tennent, Christianity, 164-165 67 J. V. Chelliah, A Century of English Education. The Story of Batticotta Seminary and Iaffna College 1st ed. 1922 ~~'.(1 DY,' i,'" :',;'u; Y';l:e Centre for Religion and Society, 1975), 59 rr~ ,:~lc ;..... -oiT-~ i_,"'i :h~~ 1;~ 72Report of the F.B-S. at Oodooville, April, 1839, 10 -. . ~-~J-':.i r,_':-· ir .-' .... ""j or "Ll':' , , ~ ;i, J-t,~_ r::'~~ 291 While the missionaries needed women converts to build Christian homes, the women themselves remained largely beyond the reach of hearing the gospel. It became a formidable difficulty in having any form of contact with wi\'"es, mothers and daughters, particularly those of the higher castes, who seemed confined in the most rigorous cloister-like seclusion with all its ignorance, frivolity and narrow~indedness. Indeed, the whole interior of the Tamil home in the Vanni and Jaffna was (and still is) considered a refuge for women. Most of these houses have an exterior verandah or a specially built reception room called a talaivcal in which visitors can be entertained. The kitchen, kucini (a corruption of Portuguese), is set apart from the house, usually at the rear of the compound. So the women who spend their time either in the interior (vitu) or in the kitchen will not be visible from the verandah. Then to ensure that no stranger may penetrate the house, it will be surrounded by a stout fence. What was therefore obvious to any missionary operating in these regions, is the fact that the society took every possible step to seclude its women. Faced with this reality, the missionaries broadened their objectives, and spoke of the need to "raise" the females "so as to hold their proper rank in society.,,73 Roberts's lengthy report on women shows that the missionaries were aware that the present status of women was reinforced by a powerful tradition of "wretched fables and tales of wonder," of "ancient and modern literature bearing more or 73Report of PBS at Oodooville. April, 1839, 9; using almost identical language a Wesleyan report urged for the need to "r.aise.~', Jhe females "to their proper and just place in society" and thereby "partake of the bl~ssings atour common faith." Roberts, 20 Jan. 1828, NR16:WMMS Archives 292 less upon the depravity, ignorance and meanness of woman."74 But the missionaries seem to have been unaware that they were here dealing with another religious issue, and therefore, any attempt to emancipate women would brtng formidable resistance from the men of higher castes. The cloistered woman in the interior of the house that the missionary on rare occasions saw, is to a Hindu a protected womb, as sacred as the womb in the inner sanctum of the Hindu temple, and sl:lch protection from the disordering forces, it is believed, brings great blessings to the family, including the birth of many sons?5 In taking into account these many obstacles, the missionaries in their usual manner appeared confident that they could develop methods and institutions whicl). could overcome them, and would create a mental and social environment more conducive to the spread of Christianity. Anticipating this change in direction, in 1817, the 74 He refers to the works of Akattiya, Tiru Valluvar and the woman sage, Auvaiyar. Another Methodist report, also from Jaffna, gives a slightly different perspective: '''The Hindoo female is a fit object of sympathy, not as degraded in her relation to the government of her own household (for in that respect, in this Province, they hold a high and commanding place) but in the deprivation of all intellectual and moral training to which she is subjected." NR19:WMMS Archives 75'''The status of women in South Asia," states Susan Wadley, "is related to Hindu belief. Women, who like the goddesses are feared, must like the goddesses, be kept under control. Through male control and her own chastity, the Hindu woman controls her dangerous sacred powers and is able to use them for the benefit of the family." Susan Wadley (ed.), The Powers of Tamil Women (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), xxii. The need for protection and social control arises from the woman's alleged propensity to create disorder (on ananku. see above, section 5.4) which led to the enforcement of a decree from Manu that she should never be independent: In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent. Though destitute of virtue, seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife. In reward of such conduct, a female.... gains in this life highest renown, and in the next world a u , . place near her husband. (The Laws of Manu v. 148~i54~'166J' ,~, .'~ .. ' 293 Methodist Chairman of North Ceylon District, James Lynch, reported to his supporters at home that "it would not be easy to find congregations without schools."76 Within the following decade the three missionary societies were engaged in the founding of schools in the three major population centres; the areas surrounding Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Jaffna. Education was seen both as a means of preparation for the gospel, and as itself an evangelising agency. " The three missionary societies, American, Methodist- and Anglican, as they expanded their activities in the Tamil-speaking areas, started to co-ordinate their activities through the formation of a "missionary union" where they came together "to contribute the results of past experience, and decide on measures for the future." As a result their methods came more and more to be "almost one and the same," and more importantly, they appeared to the Tamil public as united. they have altogether avoided, in the eyes of the Tamils, the exhibition of controversial rivalry, which to some extent has impeded the success of the missions amongst the Sinhalese in the South. 77 It was the Missionary Union which by the 1830's resolved that from then on the societies would "rely less upon formal preaching than on familiar discourses, and trusting more to the intimate 76HMCC, 110 "~"''''- - .,-, .. ---- - r _ •• 77Tennent, Christianity, 144 _ --_ -'C •• r' .. ... -. _ n_ ~_ : 1, ,-. I' -}',' -~- . --.' '\'-' • :-'3 :;. ~ 294 exhortation of a few than to the effect of popular addresses to indiscriminate assemblies."78 Schools of all kinds were established in the north-east region, beginning with primary (vinage) schools and going up through secondary schools (or the so-called colleges) and a university. Unlike the other two societies the American missionary work was restricted to the peninsula, wher.e they emerged as the leaders in the field of education. As indicated in an Anglican Church missionary instruction at the time, the schools of all three societies "were the principal, if not the only, means of converting th.e heathen to Christianity.,,79 Because the educational institutions were primarily intended to serve a religious purpose, it is not surprising that religion was a central part of the curriculum. Among the missionary schools the village schools were the most numerous. In just about every Tamil village a school was established to deal with the problem of mass illiteracy, since only a few traditional scholars in 1800 could read and write on ola leaves. In the classes ranging from grades one to five, children were taught to read and write in their own tongue; to read portions of the Bible; and to learn small bits of Tamil poetry, plus some arithmetic and geography.80 They learned to write their own language, first by tracing 78Ibid., 144 79Ranjit Ruberu, Education in Colonial Ceylon (Kandy: Kandy Printers, 1962), 208 t ...-Vi<~_·r,r'Ii l)r tv-yv .........'\...~y •• ,l"'~_,,, __ ,,;~ ,_.~. _> 80 Methodist School Report of 1823, NR4: ~SlAr.clUVes, J.~V...._Chel1ian.. ~_:._~: ::.~ - -::" L_·~.. 2; Tennent, Christianity, 144 ~ . 295 the letters on the sand, and eventually by inscribing them with an iron style on palmyra palm leaves. It is through these primary-village schools that the Protestants strove to raise up a reading population. By 1850, in the free village scho6ls of the American Mission alone there were 4000 pupils; one fourth of whom were female. The American Mission calculated in 1850 that over 90,000 children had been taught by them alone to read and write since the schools were opened. In other words about one-half of the population of the peninsula at that time had an education in an American Mission primary school. 81 The establishment of primary schools was only one stage in the proposed strategy of the missionary societies. They were not satisfied with the meagre education given in these schools, and were anxious to provide a more thorough system of training by keeping pupils entirely under their influence. With this objective a second initiative was taken with the opening of secondary schools, of male and female boarding schools starting in the 1820's as well as central day-schools at stations where the missionaries were already resident. The initiative for educating the girls in this manner came from the female members of the missionary societies, usually the missionary wives, who first laid the foundation for this work by taking Tamil girls into their homes for the purpose of education and training.82 81Ibid., 145 82Jane and Daniel Poor had nine Tamil girls besides their own three children, and thus operated their own "ready made boarding- School" until the lirsfFemale Boarding School in Sri Lanka was opened by the AmeriCims'at "dOdoo~11e··'(\%ti~i> in 1824. d. G. D. Somasundaram, My Recollections. 2 296 When several boarding schools opened in the 1820's, they offered to feed, clothe and educate the pupils free. But it was found that most Hindu parents remained apprehensive, for they were reluctant to permit their children to reSide under the same roof with their Christian teachers and to share the same food and water with children of other castes. To deal with this problem the missionaries had to be firm, yet tactful, and it took a few years before the matter could be resolved satisfactorily. In the boarding schools the pupils received instruction in both English and Tamil, whereas in _the village schools, the instruction was solely in the vernacular. According to a Methodist report on the Central School in Jaffna in 1846: Every useful branch of education is taught in this establishment Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Grammar, Geography, History, Algebra, Geometry, Natural Philosophy and Elements of Mental and Moral Science. Great prominence is given to the Bible, which is systematically taught in its Evidence, Doctrines, and Morals. There is a Sabbath School conducted in connexion with the Day School, and the attendance of the boys on that day is regular and encouraging. The daily duties of the school are commenced and closed with singing and prayer. We regard this school as one of great importance and as calculated, 'with the blessing of Almighty God, to advance the cause of the Redeemer in this part of the island.83 Boarding schools were found in Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Jaffna, but were not found in the inland area of Vanni (north-central) or the coastal area of Mannar (north-west). Protestant schools were conspicuously absent in the heavily populated neytal or coastal tracts, including the island of Mannar, because it was widely recognised as a 83Report of 1846, NR19: WMMS Archives. PerCival; the'-author:.~_:t.: ed·,llCHCvo1.3,73,75 306 :,"~",(:.:'~_,',~:;:~!, . ""'- ...... , 307 kind required. It had above all the right sort of personnel: innerdirected men and women, singular in their commitment to this task. By training and deploying larger and larger numbers of such men and women recruited from Hindu society, the missionary societies were able to greatly expand their operation in the 1830's and 1840's. Throughout this period of expansion the societies had the field entirely to themselves, since there was no other body capable of mounting a challenge to their dominant position in education. This unrivalled monopoly over modern education, which included the teaching of the English language, soon gave the missionaries and their Tamil "assistants" certain advantages and benefits that may not have been fully anticipated when the educational enterprise was launched. From the 1820's the colonial rulers, having secured territorial control of the Indian 'subcontinent and the island of Sri Lanka, began to pay greater attention to the administrative unification of those territories. In the 1830's and 1840's the process of unification included such things as the introduction of the railway, telegraph and postal service. As a result there was a phenomenal rise in employment opportunities, in government service. In accordance with the colonial policy, English educated Sri Lankans - who would have, particularly among Tamils, been through mission schools - were now being hired to fill a variety of positions in government. The higher caste Tamils showed the greatest interest in these new economic opportunities and this in turn dramatically changed their earlier attitudes towards missionary education. Parents showed a keen interest in sendiri.g.their~·sons· to the secondary schools, even to board'them, if only to secure a government 308 job for them at the end. This rather utilitarian interest in modern education would continue long after the~ demise of missionary schools. 2 With the clamour for missionary education that started in the late 1820's, the public's attitude toward the missionary also went through sharp revisions. The earlier images of the missionary, as a wandering sannyasin, a carrier .of other-worldly doctrines, were still retained, if only because well known missionaries like Poor and Percival recognized their importance to mission, and thus through their own personal example encouraged 1rhe cultivation of these images alongside other images. Among the latter, the image of the missionary as a guru-sannyasin was now gaining in prominence, owing to the superior knowledge as well as powers he displayed, almost routinely, when instructing his pupils. In the first half of the nineteenth. century the alliance between modern science and Protestant theology was still intact, and science was one of the deadliest weapons in the educational arsenal of the missionary to be used to undern:tine Hinduism. 3 On several occasions this weapon was effectively wielded by the missionaries in their controversies with the learned Hindus of the day. A controversy which 2According to the missionary, Winslow, the Tamil interest in religion is equally utilitarian, which he saw reflected in a village lrteadman's reply, along the lines, 'Will you give me rice in exchange for listening to you preach?' (see above). It compares favourably with Pfaffenberger's description of the "Shudras": a powerful orientation toward the mundane and earthly, and the USE~ of religious rituals to achieve, in exchange, secular power. see Caste in Tamil Culture (1982) 3David L. Gosling, Science and ReligiQn in:IDSt~{¥adras, CLS, 1976), 10; R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise Qf Modem Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Acadamic Press, 1972) 309 ''became public, and excited the utmost attention amongst the Tamil population" was over the question of the validity of the Tamil-Puranic mode of determining the time of the eclipse. 4 The public interest was heightened by the fact that an accurate prediction using "the Puranic system of Astronomy" would also, it was believed, validate the entire Hindu system,S including its mythology and religion. 6 The calculation for the eclipse of 20 March, 1829" was originally made by Visvanandan, a Brahman of "Batticotta," a professional almanac-maker and "the most celebrated of the astronomers of Ceylon."7 Daniel Poor, the Principal of Batticotta Seminary disputed the Brahman's calculations. Then several other lesser astronomers made their own calculations that confirmed the Brahman's prediction. Following these developments, on the evening of the eclipse, many people assembled near the Seminary, to witness the result. A learned Tamil pandaram was there to infonn the people of the "three points of difference" in the predictions, so "as to leave no room for doubt or dispute afterwards."8 In the end, when the eclipse occurred it was found that the three errors 4Tennent, Christianity. 139-141, This method of calculation is to be found in Ennal, "the standard work on Astronomy, used by almanac makers" in the Jaffna province. d. Chelliah, 22 5 "Hinduism's boast of its.....divine system of Astronomy, including a marvellous mass of astrological principles by which they claim to be able to foretell future events, discover secrets, anticipate and avoid impending evils and make out the whole course of domestic and popular life," Brief Sketch of the American Ceylon Mission with an Appendix Gaffna: American Mission Press, 1849), 7. In short, unlike Christianity, Hinduism does not separate Astronomy and Astrology. 6Chelliah, 23-24 7Tennent, Christianity, 139 8Chelliah, 24 · 310 to which Poor had drawn attention, were "'sufficiently glaring to be noticed by superficial observers." The people who followed the dispute would have noticed that according to Visvanandan's calculations, "the eclipse would commence fifteen minutes lat(~r - continue twenty-four minutes longer - and cover three digits more of the moon's disc - than the true calculation showed."9 The Tamils who witnessed this incident were undoubtedly dazzled by the indisputable powers of the new guru or acarya, especially, his profound insight into the mysteries of this and other worlds, an insight which imping~d on their religion. This new and exalted image of the missionary'is a stark contrast to the . LCJiIL~ur, 19 NR14:WMMS Archives, London. 315 life.,,20 In other words, his aim was to be what he was, a gurusannyasin. It may be observed here that "the Christian head teacher lives with his family inside the school's compound.,,21 This spatial separation reinforced the symbol of the teacher's sannyasin-like credentials. The typical Protestant teacher's spiritual journey from one social state to another was constituted of three things; which both define his status and witness to who he is for those still within the Hindu society. The first was the teacher's acceptance of the "death ritual" of baptism by which he renounced and left his former social state. Secondly, the teacher came to function as a man "outside" and "above" his previous social state, in that he undertook a vocation designed to instruct and discipline a temporarily assembled multi-caste society. This vocation incidentally demonstrated that he himself had transcended the restrictions on social contact between high and low groups in the normal Hindu society. The third aspect of his witness is the manner in which he exhibits his new social state by adopting a different mode of life embodying Protestant values which were clearly articulated by certain styles of dress, speech and behaviour. 22 From classical times, there have been, at least to the ordinary householders, objects of selective imitation. Heterodox sannyasins, especially, have always had for that reason a disturbing or a 20Unpublished document on Village Schools, NR91: WMMS Archives, London 21Ibid. ~ ! '--J" ~ .-. .::.: . . . _-.-=-~.- .~_- -.,....l ; •• -r..~j""- - C .... ~ , , - (:., 22 For a definition of Tamil Protestant mOde' of life see" "Rules of Ufe'~' "," , 'adopted by the American Mission churches, in American Ceylon Mission. (1849), 34-36 "-1""J<, ·'r" ;:-;--.;-~ : ~-- _r : 316 transformative effect on the householders life. This is precisely what was expected of the Protestant head-teacher, that he and his school would be a "point of contact with the non-Christian people"23 and ~ through that contact have a preparative effect on the people around him by the diffusion of Protestant values. That this type of school was serving its designed purpose is confirmed in a letter written by Joseph Knight to the C.M.S. Secretary in London, to whom he had previously expressed concern about the powerful social barriers that inhibited his work. Writing in 1820 from his station in Nallur, located half a mile from the famous Kantaswamy Temple, he states that owing to the point of contact provided by the schools "we find gradual openings for preaching the Gospel around us." He is quite specific about the nature of that contact. "Through the medium of the children," he says, "we frequently find access to the parents, and thus little by little we are furnished with opportunities of delive.ring our message to them." Based on these observations he expresses his confidence in the missionary character of this kind of school, which was already laying the groundwork for the future; as may be evidenced in the "gradual but, sure effect of clearing away the prejudices which the people entertain respecting us...."24 23 NR91, WMMS Archives, London 24Letter, 11 June 1820, 0/77/5, CMS Archives, 'Binningham 317 Oi) Boarding Schools and Seminary: the structures of Parallel Society Sooner or later the guru-sannyasin must found a matha, that is, a monastic order, to propagate his peculiar discipline, knowledge and wisdom among his or her chosen shisyas. When the missionaries spoke of the need to found a self-propagating Native Agency, they were referring to such an order that would assume full responsibility for the missionary work in Tamil Sri Lanka. The decision to establish boarding schools in order to provide a community for the shisyas, may still seem an unusual one. In missionary thinking, however, there were two good reasons for starting with the children. First, owing to their primary school work, the missiot:ary societies were by the early 1820's acquainted with thousands of Tamil children, and these children in turn would have been socially comfortable in the presence of the missionaries. Secondly, adults were considered to be unsuitable material for the purpose of training in holiness. Not infrequently, field reports speak of adult minds being too filled with "superstition," of hearts given over to "idolatry," and bodies made "rigid" by a life sustained by rituals. 25 The children on the other hand were co~sidered amenable to Christian discipline, as long as they could be weaned from their parents before they started walking in the way of their ancestors, and raised in a distinct social setting. The practice of taking boys into a 2S The girls in the Female Boarding School at Oodooville "are generally taken ~t the age of six to eight or nine y~ars, e~perieI).S1_~~vi_~~..ta:U$.~Lu~,th;i-~:~~ls '> ;;1;"-'" .. ': ;,'" x,- Ii ~ past tlns age do not make good progress In th~lJstud~es/.~nd,fliaq~el_rplanners and;_ : ,1., u· ~ habits of thinking and speaking are too much in accordance with heathenism and corrupt morals of the country." American Ceylon Mission (1939),4 318 monastic setting for "mental and moral training,,26 cannot be conceived of as a Protestant innovation in Sri Lanka since the Buddhists had been doing it for almost two thousand years. . As already discussed, the missionaries, soon after their arrival had started taking in Tamil boys and girls for the purpose of imparting in them a Christian education and some practical training. This practice was at first not well received. The Tamil parents, according to a school record of 1823, "regarded the missionaries as outcastes" and "were naturally unwilling to allow their sons to be more than dayscholars."27 With respect to the education and training of girls at mission houses, there was not one but two objections. The parents of the girls, states Mrs Winslow, the first principal of the Female Boarding School at Uduvil, "could not t~ of having their children lose caste, by eating on our premises and there was 'no custom' for girls to be instructed."28 The second objection WiilS equally strong owing to a "popUlar" prejudice that supposed that education of a female "would spoil her modesty, endanger her chastity, and render her insubordinate . to the other sex." It was based on the assumption that "to superintend the affairs of her house and to minister to the wants of her family, were thought to be not only her first, but her sol4? duty.,,29 There was in consequence a price to be paid by those who violated this II custom." 26 NRI9:WMMS Archives, London 27 A History of St. John's Coll~, Jaffna 0823-1983) (Jaffna: St. John's College, 1983), 1; ACM (1849), 10 - ._; '1'-. _ .... :;,,._ 28 ACM-I 1849, 13 29Ibid" 12-13 319 "Little girls, when first brought into the schools, could hardly overcome their sense of shame so as to go on with their studies, and those who gave up their daughters for instruction were subjected to no ~ small degree of reproach and ridicule for this departure from national and immemorial usage.,,30 The year 1823 may be conveniently fixed as the Pentecost of Protestant Christianity in Sri Lanka. This year saw the founding of Nallur English Seminary (later, St. John's College) by the Church Mission; English Central schools (later, Jaffna Central College, Batticoloa Central College, Trincomalee Central College) in the towns of Jaffna, Batticaloa and Trincomalee by the Methodist Mission; and Batticotta Seminary by the American Mission. The first of such schools for boys was opened by the Americans at Tellipalai before this year, and they continued their pioneering work in English education by founding the first Female Boarding Scho~l, possibly in Asia, in the year 1824. Several more of this type of institution, almost one in every mission station, were to be opened for boys and girls within the next two decades. In a very real sense, the year 1823 AD also marks the beginning of the "parallel society." This "parallel society" was founded on Protestant principles, which were manifested both in its organisational structure and its disciplinary code. The establishment of this "parallel society" would not only determine the overall shape of Protestant Christianity as it emerged in Tamil Sri Lanka, but it also 30 For more details see Miron Winslow, A Memoir of Mrs. Harriet Wadsworth WinslQw. Combining a sketch of the Ceylon Mission. (New York: Leavitt, Lord &: Co., 1835) at ABCFM Archives; Monier-Williams, "Adress on the Women of India," India's Women and China's Daughters, vol. XVIII, (March, 1989): 73-78 320 would be the primary stimulus for a variety of developments within Hinduism. When the boarding schools were first opened, the . n~mber of shisyas being discipled in the mission schools under the personal care of the guru-sannyasins were relatively small. In 1823, it is said, "Mr. Knight succeeded in bringing seven boys to his bungalow," better known as the Mission House. 31 Similarly, when Mrs. Winslow started her work in Uduvil before the year 1824, she had three girls "who took their food on the mission premises."32 By the time this Boarding School was officially opened the work ha4. considerably grown, so that the admissions the first day were restricted to the girls from the homes of missionaries and 29 were enrolled that day. Poor had arrived at the school early, with his nine girls and the first to be enrolled was the youngest, Anne Bates, it:1 the lowest class. 33 , The enrolment pattern here shows that Uduvil, being the only institution of its kind in that year, catered to a much wider area, which would account for the unusually large numbers enrolled on the first day. In these early years, the missionaries could hardly be expected to be choosy about who should be admitted. The pupils came from the high as well as low groups, from the "respectable" nalla (good) jatis as well as the not-so-respectable kurainta (low) jatis. Apart from a few stations found in pattanams (towns), the vast majority of their homes, both in the north and the east, were located in the cultivated secondary zone, 31St. Iohn's ,1 32ACM, 1849, 14 33Somasundaram, Recollections, 2 321 and therefore most of the students belonged to agriculturally oriented castes. Among these the dominant caste was the Vellalar caste, the same caste that owned and managed the prestigious temples. Below them, serving them like vassais,'were the right hand, kutimaL castes and the left hand, atimai, castes. There were also the Brahmans, particularly in the neighbourhood of the prestigious temples in Nallur and Mavittapuran. Given this background, one of the novelties of the schools being established is that the students who had, until then, belonged to separate communities due to the principle of purity and pollution, were now living together under the same roof as a single community, sharing the same food and water and also the same "cup of the Lord."34 In those early years the secondary boarding school appeared identical with the Protestant Church. To be sure, the school was the locus of the church and manifested the ~arks of the church, and yet, the school was not, strictly speaking, the Church. In the school there were to be found the baptized and the unbaptized, though, they were all subjected to a common religious discipline. The church in this sense existed as a community within the community of the school. It came into being through a typically sarulyasic process: The· pupil, when admitted to the school, was like a novice on probation, "expected to show the fruits" of faith "in his general behaviour."35 It meant that 34According to an American missionary report, these pupils "eat, drink, sleep...have companionship....and sitting together on the same mat in church.....drink wine from the same cup in the celebration of the Lord's supper" and as such, they "are acts opposed to the observance of caste," ACM (849), 10-11 3SHMCC 152 322 only those who had begun to adopt a ne'~ way of1if~- would 'bJ';' baptized, and thus become members of the Church. These preliminary remarks, give us sufficient grounds for the assertion that the Protestant boarding school is a type of monastic order, ;[ntemally organized as an annex of the Protestant Church, and outwardly as a "parallel society" for the purpose of proselytization.36 Every novice attending a secondary day or boarding school was fully aware that the moment he or she stepped into the school compound the student was entering another social order that required the adoption of a new set of rules. As Tennent points out, before ... -~ adopting "a discipline which is essentially and avowedly Christian,"...... "the little Hindoo must show such an outward respect for the religion........as to lay aside for the moment the distinguishing symbols of his own idolatry." It meant that the Hindu was "not permitted to enter (the school) with the mark of as~es on his forehead."37 The Americans, who had the largest number of schools in the peninsula, stipulated that the "pupils in attendance in the village and English schools" would "not be allowed to wear ashes or other marks of heathenism on their bodies while in the school.,,38 The holy ash obtained by burning cow-dung and often worn on the forehead, was -at that time the most widely used distinguishing mark of being a Hindu. 36The tenn annex attempts to express physically the more fundamental internal relations. The church and the school at every station are situated in the same compound. The school functions for the church as the point of contact with the larger society 37Tennent, !=hristianity. 148 38 ACM, (1849), 5 323 It was considered "essential to wear holy ash at dawn, noon and dusk, sunrise, sunset," and to the orthodox Hindu, the smearing of ash on the body symbolised: the attainment of Sivahood by the removal of the bonds (paasam) by the bonds being burnt by the fire of jnana (knowledge).39 The prohibition in other words infringed on the religious customs of the Hindus, and in consequence it also once again violated the colonial policy of ,non-interference in matters pertaining to religion. But there was, strange as it may seem, no public controversy over the matter of prohibition during the first half of the Century. ---- - ~--- ----------------------------- Tennent in fact rightly observed that the parents of the pupils "urge no objection to the rwe," which to him was suggestive of "the genius and character of this anomalous people.,,40 It is, however, a serious understatement on his part to suggest that these parents, by permitting their children to remove such marks "entertained no apprehensions" concerning the possible consequences. By 1830 Hindu parents in general were aware of the proselytising role of the seco~dary day and boarding schools, and the accounts given by converts' indicate that many parents strongly objected to their children attending these schools. 41 One source of anxiety for them was that a son, puttiran, , converted to Protestant Christianity would be unable to perform the 39V. K. Palasuntharam (trans), Sri-la-Sri Arumuga Navalar's Saiva Vinaavidai Book 2 (Kuala Lumpur, Second International Seminar on Saiva Siddhanta, 1986),21,23 4OTennent, Christianity,148 41 Accounts of E. Hoole and R. Watson in CCE 0/71/12, CMS Archives" Birmingham 324 obligatory funeral rites. 42 But by th~s time the clamour for English education among the young was becoming too strong for the parents to resist. Renunciation of idolatry, signified by the removal of the most prominent mark of being a Hindu, is the first step that the novice is obliged to take in order to enter the new order in which he or she would submit to a different code of conduct. The novice was now obliged "not only to attend public worship on the Sabbath, but join in the daily reading of the Scriptur~s and the study of the first principles of Christianity."43 In the study of the Bible, lhe pupil was encouraged "to store his memory with the text" presumably in the belief that it would remove the influence of superstition. Through this and other ways, the "teaching of Christianity.........ente'red into every aspect of school activity."44 Throughout this period of apprenticeship, the pupil was prohibited from not only the wearin~ of ashes but the attending of Hindu temples. 45 Every effort was thus made to "seclude" the pupil "from heathenish influences," to subject him to the Protestant ''Rules of Life" with the hope of "constructing a new person, different in their 42HMCc. 102 "The son, ~ is so called, the scriptures say, because he pulls his parents out (tra) from hell because it has authentic, indeed demonstrable evident manifestation is in sannyasil~ features, the~protection that and their most Christianity offers to the women. The language of protection instead of emancipation may at first seem to be a curious one, but it was, without doubt, calculated to make Protestant Christianity appealing to a conservative society, and in consequence to elicit a desirable response from the hearers. The language touched on a deeply religious issue and was intended to draw the sharpest possible distinction between the two societies in question, the Hindu society and the "parallel society." Which society is best equipped and able to protect and preserve the chastity of the Tamil women? Posed in this way, it was hoped that the hearer would recognize the unusual length to which his own society went to protect the womb (the garbhagrha) of the women. For the Hindu parents, the protection of the womb is a major preoccupation in life that begins with the construction of a carefully designed house that could provide refuge from strangers as well as from guests. It was also an endless source of anxiety for those who saw themselves as protectors. -The hearer was then reminded that this undesirable situation exists only because his is a society devoid of virtue: the Brahman, the architect and archetype of your society is devoid of any virtue because you cannot entrust your daughters to him. Instead of promoting goodwill and "trust" the caste 341 society founded by him breed's "suspicion" and "cynicism."71 A striking contrast to such a society is, as the argument goes, the one built on "trust", in which alone the womb can be protected. The word "trust" used frequently in preaching is a core concept in Christianity, by which it was meant that a society based on "truth" (emeth), that would be expected to show itself in human relationships, by proving in word and deed, to be "faithful, trustworthy and dependable."72 The Tamil Protestants, indeed, boldly claimed that their own society embodi.ed this transcendent value, a pointed contrast to the values embodied in the (worldly) caste order and the et~c recommen~e~~x_the ~~ahma~. This sort of carefully crafted ethical argument is fully consistent with the entire missionary strategy for proselytization. Presented in this way the Protestant challenge to the Hindu was forceful and decisive. A challenge of this nature was undoubtedly directed specifically at the high caste Hindu, and it was from him that the reply would come.73 71In a caste society, the need to be vigilant in dealings with one's neighbour, and the necessity of avoiding pollution-prone food and water at the simplest level, probably contributes to the development of a suspicious and even cynical character. ''TIle Jaffna man", it is said, "is suspicious and with regard to his own kind, irredeemably cynical. ...The Jaffna man's cynicism is most scathing when one of his fellows does something generous:' W. R. Holmes, laffna (Sri Lanka) 1980 Uaffna: The Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1980),9 72See above, section 2.3 73A parallel society founded o~ missionary paternalism and guru-sishya relations can be construed as a weakness, but it is a weakness only from a Western point of view, because, neither the Tamil Protestant nor the Tamil Hindu, in the year 1850, raised any fundamental questions about these structural features that have been proven sources of strength and stability. On the distinction between Western and South Asian concepts of patriarchy see S. Chitnis, "Feminism in India," Canadian Woman Studies vo1.6, no.1 (1984): 41-47 Q-lAPTER 14 HINDU REPLICATIONS 1850-1900 14.1 The Problem of Comprehending the Challenge Hinduism had to respond to the Protestant challenge at two levels. First, at the social level, the Protestant renouncers, deliberately organized as a "parallel society," were proving to be successful not only in transmitting the gospel and a Christian code of conduct, but also in proselytizing the Hindu householder. At this level, the universally valid ethic of the sannyasins would have appeared as a pointed contrast to the caste ethic recommended by the Brahmans, and also more than a few Hindus seeking admission for their children to mission schools appreciated that the former was economically and socially most beneficial. The projection of the sannyasin as the protector of the "womb" again drew attention to the contrast between the two modes of life; and that contrast was readily apprehended by Hindus with little exposure to the precepts and practices of Protestant Christianity_ Secondly, at the ideological level, the Protestants from their strategic bases conducted polemical attacks on Hinduism, upon its world-view and upon its demons of idolatry and superstition; employing both scholarly evidence and the sword of Christian truth; 342 343 and they were attacks aimed at undermining the public legitimacy of the existing Hindu beliefs and institutions. These polemics were based on Christian assumptions and Christian models of legitimation. There was consequently a major use ·of the religious texts, both Christian and Hindu, in support of the missionary arguments. At the ideological level then, the opposition between the two models of life was seen by the missionaries as an opposition between textually grounded Biblical and Hindu values. This textual argument was the perspective from which the main missionary attack on caste was launched. In t~eir arguments, they sought legitimacy for their own code of conduct in -~---- --- ---- - Biblical values, such as the value derived from the original spiritual equality of humans, whose ultimate source was the creator-God. This argument was opposed to values ascribed by birth and to their social consequences, particularly in terms of their impact upon women and low castes. 1 At the commencement of the Protestant missions in Tamil Sri Lanka, the effects from such attacks on Hinduism would have been almost negligible, because few Hindus at that time were familiar with the Protestant models of legitimation, particularly the demand for consistency in religious practice based on textual· prescriptions. TheHindus of the day, of course, had their authoritative texts stretching back into antiquity, but their attitude to those texts was very different lThe Wesleyan missionary, J. Roberts, for instance, cites numerous texts from standard Tamil works to argue that Hinduism (or the tradition) denies the Tamil women of any social value or status as individuals outside thelr ascribed social roles as wives, mothers or daughters. Report of Chairman, North Ceylon District, 20 Jan. 1828; NR16; WMMS Archives, London 344 from the Protestant one. In drafting the prospectus for the Seminary in 1823,the American missionaries thus made the following observation: All agree in looking to their ancestors for books which were composed, as they imagine under a kind of inspiration: and have greater degree of sanctity from being quite unintelligible to the common people. 2 The reference is to the Puranas andl the other sacred books available only in "high or poetic Tamul" which few men at that time could read correctly and fewer still could understand. For most Hindus then a religious text, like the Latin Bible in the European Middle Ages, had an aura of authority derived from its unintelligibility, whose content would be mediated by a priesthooavlith~so1e-acress-tIT the-iext:---~---­ Under such circumstances, the missionary argument concerning the discrepancy between the religious texts and contemporary religious practices, for example, would appear incomprehensible, apart from the fact that such an argument was drawn from Christian models of legitimation, rather than Hindu. 3 All this effectively meant that the initial challenge would be largely sociological in character and the Hindu response to the challenge was entirely defensive. Threats were, therefore, often used against potential converts: 2Plan. Batticotta Seminary 3Daniel Poor, an innovator in so many respects, was aware of this problem, and therefore, took measures to remove the sanctity attached to the text. To demonstrate publicly- his access to the sacred books and to undennine the legitimation of Brahman superiority, he printed and circulated the texts of Kantapuranam among his students and then proceeded to read and explain it to them in the class. H. Root, The American Board in Ceylon, 1816-191~, 12-13 345 Fathers threatened to disinherit their children; masters, to dismiss their servants; and persons of high caste to burn down the houses of low caste people, if they attended the means of grace. 4 Opposition also took the form of attacking the converts of the missionaries: The houses of converts were stoned, their belongings were robbed....... The peace of the neighbourhood was at stake, and often Police inspectors and Magistrates had to appear on the scene in order to maintain an atmosphere of calm and goodwill. Christianity to the high caste Hindu was anathema, not only because it destroyed his ancestral faith, but also because it put him on an equal footing wi th men of low birth. 5 The early Hindu reaction to Christian encroachment in this sense was sporadic and unorganized, and in most cases confined to the families of converts or potential converts. Confirming this general pattern for the period of 1800-1850, an American missionary record for the year 1849 noted that" there was no "active opposition to the efforts of the missionaries, except in cases of conversion to Christianity, when the friends of the converts have sometimes been stirred up to a most intense hatred."6 But, curiously, in the very same page, there is a brief reference to "the rise of a new class of gooroos, who pretend to adopt in some sense or other, the morals of the New Testament, and, like the deists of modern times, give credit to their own system, for truths first introduced to their acquaintance by Christianity." 4R. Scott, Annual District Report of the Batticaloa Stations, North Ceylon, 1846: NR20, WMMS Archives, London SHMCC. 103; for a case history of a convert subject to kidnapping, beating and banishment, see ACM (1849), 16-17 6 ACM. (1849), 16 . 346 It is probable that the American missionary who recorded that statement was not fully acquainted with this new class of gurus whose activities were centred at Nallur, six miles from the nearest American station at Uduvil. The Nalhir parish was covered by the Church missionaries, and therefore, J. T. Johnson, an Anglican missionary at Chundikuli, stationed one and a half miles from the Nallur Kantaswamy Temple, was probably right when he wrote in 1848 about the state of active opposition to Christianity: Certain young men are rising up and endeavouring to revive the straitest sect of Hindus. They hay~~ regular weekly sermons in the principal temple at Jaffna, and unusual efforts are being made not only defensively but aggressively7 Unlike the old gurus, the "new ~rus" had been closely acquainted with Protestant Christianity, thus having fully appreciated the challenge, they responded to it in a typically Hindu way. By doing so they gave notice that the long delayed "dialogue" between the new breed of "renouncer" and the caste bound "man-in-the-world" had finally begun.8 14.2 Arumuka Navalar (1822-1879) Vigorous attempts to counter the ChrJlstian influence began in an organized and concerted way with Arumuka Navalar in the year . 1848. His efforts on behalf of Saivism eventually evolved into a major revival on both sides of the Palk Strait. Without doubt, Navalar was 7Quoted in HMCC, 580 8Dumont, "World Renunciation," 37f 347 unique for his time, and since then, has come to occupy a prominent place in the history of Tamil Saivism. It has been claimed that without him, Saivism would today be extinct in northern Sri Lanka. 9 A . generation after his death, the Tamils remembered him not only as a religious, but also as a social reformer and a great national leader'! 0 Virtually every significant development in the nineteenth century, actual or imagined, is now attributed to him and as a result, Navalar has become a symbol of a century of development in Tamil Saivism. It is in this perspective that the traditional biographers have constructed his story: Sri La Sri Arumuka Navalar was born at a propitious hour. The Shaiva religion was panting· for him. The Thamil language was thirsting for him. Jaffna was longing for him. The Shaiva religion had been in the strangle hold of alien forces for two centuries. Thamil Literature and Grammar were goaled in palmyra leaves. Jaffna had no leader and was groping in the dark. Navalar came, saw and gave them all relief. l l In other words, in the Geertzian sense, Navalar belongs to the category of persons such that "Whatever they originally were or did as actual persons has long since been dissolved into an image...." In short they have become "metaphors... human recapitulations of a social transformation."12 Even "if they did not wholly make the history of 9K. Irattinam (ed.), Navalar Ninaivu Malar, (Navalar Rememberance Souvenir), (Chunnakam: 1938), 15-16 10Ibid.,24 11 Quoted in K. Sivathamby, "Hindu Reaction to Christian Proselytization and Westernization in 19th century Sri Lanka. A study of the educational and sociorelgious activities of Arumuka Navalar (1822-1879)." Social Science Review, vol.1, no.1, (1979),41 12c. Geertz, Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 25-27 348 their times...... [they] embodied it.. ..They sum up more than they ever were."13 Arumuka Navalar's biographical details have been ably examined by Sivathamby and~ others making it unnecessary for us to repeat those details except as they enabh~ us to understand his contributions to the development of the Saivite tradition.l 4 To suit our study, his life, like that of most Tamil Protestant .leaders, can be conveniently divided into three phases, the first two being his formative years: (i) 1822-1834: Education and training under traditional Tamil scholars (in 1834-1847: Education and training under Protestant scholars (iii) 1848-1879: Leader of a "Counter refonnation" movement His traditional credentials are impeccable. Arumukam Pillai was born in 1822 into a wealthy and .influen~al Karkatta Vellalar family in Jaffna. His father, P. Kanta Pillai (1766-1842), held the office of Aratchy at the Jaffna katcheri for eighteen years, and had knowledge of Portuguese, Dutch and English. The young Arumukam's family, observes Sivathamby, "can safely be descrih~d as having responded successfully to the changing employment patterns of the higher caste 13Ibid.,74 14Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam, Arumuka Navalar:Religiou5 reformer or national leader of Eelam," The Indian Economic and S!~HistQlY Review. vol. 26, no. 2,(1989), 235-256; K. Kailasapthy, liThe Cultural and Linguistic Consciousness of the Tamil Community in Sri Lanka," Punathavathy Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture, (Colombo; New Leela Press, 1982), [parnph.l II 349 yet preserving its orthodoxy."lS It was a pattern that was first established by a large majority of'rice-Christians'in the Dutch period, who had comfortably settled down to a dualism in religious practice and profession. 16 His father ~was understandably keen that his sons should have what he saw as the best in the two worlds, the Tamil and the Western. Kanta Pillai himself was a Tamil scholar, and the boy Arumukam had the privilege of studying under Senathiraya Mudaliar (1750-1840), one of the famous traditional scholars of the day who specialized in certain literary and grammatical texts (with their commentaries).17 In his formative years, the next phase was equally crucial, that is when he was sent to Wesleyan Central School in 1834 to receive an English education. This school, later renamed as Jaffna Central College, was located in the town, opposite the Dutch Fort and is about two miles from Nallur Kantaswamy Kovil, from ~here Navalar would launch his crusade as well as revival. 1834 is also the year that Peter Percival became the principal of the school under whose administration the school was about to emerge as a collegiate institution. Just two years before, the Jaffna Auxiliary of the interdenominational Bible Society, under the leadership of Percival, had undertaken a revision of the whole Bible.l 8 The Bible Society together with The Jaffna Religious 15Sivathamby, 61 16d. above, section 8.2 17Kailasapthy, Iaffna College Miscellany. 85. S. Mudaliar is also a guru of Sanmuka Sattainbiyar (1794-1845) who taught Tamil at Batticotta Seminary 180. Rajarigam, The History of Tamil Christian Literature, 43 350 Tract Society, instituted in 1823 by Joseph Knight, was'in 1834 able to expand considerably its work of translating and printing following the installation of the newly enlarged and improved American printing press.l 9 So in the year that Navalar entered the Central School, all three societies were pooling their resources in order to step-up their religious advocacy, and soon he would have the rare privilege of studying this enterprise from inside, as a shisy~ of a Protestant guru. Peter Percival very quickly recognized the young boy's abilities, and employed him in 1838 as a pupil-teacher. Arumukam was now learning English in the higher classes and teaching Tamil in the lower classes. Before long he was als6engage-Qa5-aITanstator,-and-umany--~~--~----- _. Christian tracts translated by him were distributed among Hindus."20 Whether the young Arumukam considered the offer an honour or not, in 1841, he accepted an appointment as an assistant in the Bible translation enterprise. This was a fairly sophisticated enterprise for that time, undertaken by a committee of competent scholars, who would contribute their distinctive knowledge to the common pool. To gain acceptance, the work would have to supersede the many versions and revisions of the Bible already in circulation. In style and idiom the Fabricius version printed in 1798 had set a high standard, which inspired the poet Vadanayaga SaMriar to call it "the golden translation of the immortal Fabricius."21 In other words, the nineteen year old 19Ibid.,29 20Cartman, Hinduism in Ceylon. 55 21 Neill, History of Christianity in India vol. 2, 44 351 Arumu.kam was from now on working closely with a team of missionary and Tamil scholars, who were using modern language aids such as dictionaries and lexicons - as opposed to the traditional practice ~ of memorizing the metrical Tamil vocabularies, called Nikandus or Nikandukal, to produce a prose work written in simple, yet respectable vernacular, that could be placed in the hands of the common people. He would have observed that an enterprise of this nature, if it was to succeed, required a great deal of flexibility and creativity in the use of the language, which had already become the hallmark of the Bible translation process. 22 All the indications are that more than a professional relationship existed between Percival and his assistant throughout this phase. Like all other students an~ teachers, Arumukam participated in the obligatory Christian rituals. For thirteen years he learned Christian theology while submitting himself to th~ Methodist disciplinary code of conduct. Not surprisingly, liThe puritanism of the Methodist Church had a lasting impact on Navalar." 23 As far as Percival was concerned, he could see nothing heathen about his puritan student, and thus treated him as a promising novice, and a loyal shisya. The relationship between the two was so close that Arumukam, even after his resignation from the school, to work for the revival of Saivism, was able to obtain a testimonial from Percival concerning his competence which was filed in the case he had instituted against Ramalinga 22Rajarigam,I1f! 23 Sivathamby, 63 352 Swamika1. 24 It is precisely this relationship that was built on loyalty and submission, which gave the .shisya the privilege and access to the knowledge of "the methods, the organization and the propaganda of Christians."25 The above account shows that all his activities in the second phase of the formative period can be summed up in Arumukam's role as a novice, whereby he entered a Protestant society, submitted to a guru, adopted a distinct code of conduct through which he gained access to a certain form of knowledge. He was at this stage almost entirely at the receiving end of knowledge and training. The Jaffna or ---- - Tentative version of the Bible to which he did contribute much, eventually had to be shelved on the grounds that it did not adequately meet the requirements of the "p~rallel society." Apart from its lack of simplicity in the style and idiom which is a basic requirement of an egalitarian society, the idiom of the Jaffna version tended to ignore the distinct religious language of the Protestants that had already emerged, to which the Fabricius version had contributed most. But for Arumukam, the involvement in the Bible translation project proved to be an invaluable experience. 26 Sabapathy Kulandran, the late bishop of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India, has drawn attention- 24Ibid.,62 25Cartman, 55 . 26Kulandran, "The Tentative Version of the Bi.ble," The Word. Men and Matters. vol. V, (Jaffna: ISRS, 1985), 74-5, originally published in Tamil Culture. vol. 7, no. 3, (July 1958) 353 to the link between this role as translator and the next stage in the shisya's life: Odd as it may seem, however, the association of Navalar with the project of Bible translation.. had greater influence on Saivism than on Christianity. Percival's introduction of Navalar into the workings of the Christian missionary movement gave him an inside knowledge of how a religion is best propagated in modern conditions. His introduction into the literary circles of South India gained him many important contacts on the continent. With this invaluable training he severed his connexion with Percival's school soon after the publication of the Tentative version and embarked upon a campaign of breathless zeal for the revival of Saivism throughout South India and Ceylon, that ended only with his death in 1879. 27 With his formative years ended, in the final phase Arumukam comes into his own. He now bears the honorific title of "Navalar," meaning "orator" or "the silver-tongued," and would be referred to by everyone as Arumuka Navalar. He immerses himself in ceaseless activity in the form of preaching, teaching and humanitarian service, mirroring precisely the activities of the Protestant sannyasins. But Navalar had a new message, his. activities were now being preformed in a specifically Hindu context, and they eventually came -to represent a direct protest against Christianity. In defining the Hindu context of his work Navalar saw the chief end of life as love and service for Siva, which begins when one obtains "Siva deeksha," "the initiation ...into Saiva religion by a guru." 28 Since anyone who belongs to the right caste 29 qualifies for this initiation, it 27Ibid.,75 28 Saiva Siddhanta Catechism pt.1, (1986), 15 29Ibid., 16 354 alone cannot be taken as a mark of one's dedication to the cause of Siva. What distinguished Navalar from most Saivites was that he pursued his initiation through to the third. stage on the "Nirvana deeksha"30 which was considered the sannyasic stage. As a result, he was seen as a religious leader, a jivanmuktb worthy of emulation. Being a man of means, his wealth would, in the spirit of the sannyasin, be poured into the cause of propagating Saivism in Sri Lanka and South India. Arumuka Navalar was a great preacher, and wanted preaching to playa paramount role in reviving Saiviam, even though it had not earlier played a paramount part in Saiva worship. He defined preaching in terms of exegesis and expositi.on of religious texts, and through his personal example started a tradition of "street sermons."31 Every Friday, on the Hindu Sabbath, he would gather his fellow Saivites around him at Vannarponnai and '''give a sermon on Saivite doctrine, and he did the same during his journeys in Tamilnadu."32 In Jaffna, this practice of expository preaching (}~atap-irasangam) became so well established as a temple ritual that it continues to this day. In the temples he also introduced group singing, songs being sung by children or adult groups before a pucai and in- between pucais in- Tamil, and - - 30Sivathamby, 64 31 Hellmann-Rajanayagam, 237 32lbid., 237-238 355 thus made Hindu worship more congregational in character than it had been before. 33 Exposi tory preaching, because it aims to popularize textual religion, requires that the sacred texts are in prose rather than verse. In 1849, two years after leaving Protestant missionary service, Navalar became the owner of a printing press purchased in India. Between the years 1849 and 1852 he had publjshed Periya Puranam, Nannul, Kolai Maruta!, Nikantukals, Nirottakayaka Antati 34 and three Palar Patam (Lessons for Children).35 By rendering Periya Puranam, a epic of more than four thousand verses, into prose, Navalar would become the first to popularize this work on the lives of the nayanmars. The publication of the grammatical works Nannul and Nikantukals with his own commentary, meant that Navalar in 1850 still preferred the timehonoured practice of memorizing the metrical Tamil vocabularies to the use of dictionaries and lexicons, as ai~ to the study of literature. He wrote in chaste, faultless and simple Tamil, and established new standards in prose writing and literary scholarship. Owing to these accomplishments, the Saivite so~iety on both sides of the Palk Strait would soon hail him as "the father of modem Tamil prose" as well as "the originator of public speaking./ 36 33He composed many "SOUl-stirring" kirtanaikal d. Mu. Varadarajan, A History of Tamil Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988),248 34The author of Nirottakayaka Antati is a Virasaiva sannyasin who lived in the seventeenth century. d. Mu. Varadarajan, A History of Tamil Liteature, 206 3S Thananjayarasingham, The Educational Activities of Arumu&a Navalar, (Colombo, 1974),32 36Kailasapathy, 4. It appears that Professor Kailasapathy himself endorses these claims. · 356 In 1846, while still engaged in full-time Christian missionary service, Navalar began giving private tuitio.n at his Nallur residence to the Saivite children in the n~ighbourhood, which, in 1848 led to the founding of the first Hindu· school, Saiva Prakasa Vidyasalai, at Vannarpannai. Two others were establishE~d subsequently within the Jaffna peninsula, one at Kopay and the other at Point Pedro. In 1864 he also founded a Saiva Prakasa Vidyasalai at Citamparam, South India and made plans to set up a Vedagama Seminary in the same town for the training of Saiva missionaries. The main purpose of these schools was to provide instruction in Saivism and to raise up genuine Saivites. 37 All these schools adopted the monitorial system of teaching and used printed books and stationary. The content of education in these schools was much narrower than that available in the Christian mission schools. In other words the education offered at Navalar's schools was almost entirely religious. The Vannarpannai school had only eight classes, and education was provided in the vernacular. Instruction in the first three grades was based solely on Palar Padam - books 1, 2 and 3. The pupil was first taught Arithmetic" at grade five, and then "History and Geography of /I Hindustan" at grade eight. 38 Conspicuously absent in th.e scho.()l curriculum was English language, which was by then becoming popular among the wealthy, influential and even orthodox Hindu families. The low level of enrollment at his schools shows that 37Thananjayarasingham, 32-33 38Ibid.,19-21 357 Navalar, during his life-time was never able to counteract the influence of Protestants in the field of education. The period between 1865 and 1880, in fact, saw a rapid growth in the number of Protestant schools and pupils, and "also t>f considerable success in the gaining of converts through the schools, especially through the Girls' Boarding schools."39 Navalar's successors, Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, S. Rajaratnum and others were far more successful in the education field, and eventually proved themselves to be effective in stemming the Protestant tide. Ramanathan's speech in 1884 at the Legislative Councill, where he attacked the work of the managers of Christian schools, may be taken as the first serious challenge to the Protestants in the field of education and an important turning point in the history of religious education in Tamil Sri Lanka. Finally, Navalar's sacrificial life in the service of Siva was extended to humanitarian service. K. Kailasapathy has in this connection, placed Navalar among the great social reformers of the nineteenth century. He thus speaks of lithe paramount role played by Navalar," in this area, "that went beyond that of any other Tamil religious reformer of his time."40 It is pointed out that during the famine and the cholera epidemic of 1876, Navalar "organized re1ie~f measures - providing meals for the needy," and his commitment to this kind of work was so strong that he "unhesitatingly threw his weight behind the campaign against the Government Agent of Jaffncl, 39HMCC,313 40Kailasapathy, 5 358 w. C. Twynam, whose measures were extremely unpopular."41 By the term "campaign," Kailasapathy is referring to a petition against Twynam, sent to the Governor in 1878. 42 Also, Navalar was instrumental in the founding of the Jaffna and Batticaloa Commercial and Agricultural Company Limited, whose prime purpose was to develop agriculture in the Trincomalee District. 43 14.3 The Significance of Navalar's Mission Underlying the obvious similarities between the Protestant and Hindu missions, were differences that are of central significance to the present discussion. The Protestant sannyasins in their three-fold activity - preaching, teaching and humanitarian service - were inclusive, in that they would admit all into their ranks. By contrast there was a strict exclusivism practised by Navalar. When he began his first school, for instance, all the pupils enrolled in the first class were from the upper castes: three Brahmans, three Vellalars, and one Cetty; (as inferred from the name endings: PilIai, the titular ending for Vellalars, Iyer, for Brahmans, ~nd Cetty for Cetties.)44 During the severe famine in 1876, Navalar distributed food only to Vellalars, and certainly not to the low castes, whose plight under those circumstances 41Ibid.,5 42Sivathamby, 5 43Kailasapathy, 5 445. Thananjayarajasingham, Navalar Panikal~ (The Ufe and Work of Arumuka Navalar), (Peradeniya: Hindu Students Society, University of Ceylon, 1964) 359 would have been worse than that of others. 45 The food distribution was in line with his teaching in the fourth Palar Padam, that requires cattiram (gifts, alms) to be given not only to Brahmans, but to the deserving Vellalar poor as welI. 46 In the end, the rationale for this caste-like behaviour is to be found in the temple - the central symbol of the caste system, both in its architecture and in its social organization. 47 The temples that Navalar chose for his operations were all exclusively dedicated to various members of Siva's family. These were the orthodox, agamic temples of the Great Tradition as opposed to the folk temples of the Litt1l~ Tradition. From these temples, wearing " a pun ul of pure gold," 48 he aimed his teaching and preaching at people of respectable family and caste. His intention was, in part, to acquaint them with a strictly textual religion based on the Siva Agamas and the Puranas connected to Siva, so that they may be enabled to fulfil their ritual duties correctly and be proper Saivites. Taking a cue from the Protestants, Navalar was able to simplify the requirements of textual religion by the publication of Saiva Vinavidai (Saivite Catechism; 1873). Here, in a series of questions and answers, he not only provides a definitional statement about thle faith - in PatL Pasu and Pasam - but also a description of the daily Agamic ritual for a Saivite h01Jseholder down to the last detail. In 4SHellmann-Rajanayagam, 248 46Ibid., 242 47See above, section 6.6 48Thananjayarajasingham, 74 360 short, the upper castes were encouraged to adopt purer lifestyles and customs. In pursuit of these goals, he initiated a campaign against the priests, particularly the Br·ahmans attached to the prestigious Kantaswamy Kovil at Nallur. In one of his early pamphlets, he wrote: "If one has ignorant and ill-trained priests perform the rites, god will not respond, and further there will be harm to the world itself, according to the Siva Agamas.,,49 In reminding them of their ritual duties, which was service to high-castes, he harshly criticized those who employed low-caste people· for certain ritual functions; and who during festivals and special puja times take up all the best space for their own rituals while Vellalars have to share limited space with people from low and untouchable castes, thereby being subjected to considerable ritual pollution.SO It needs to be appreciated here t~at caste was not far from the mind of Arumuka Navalar when he attempted to make the masses accept textual forms of Hinduism. The campaign against .the Brahmans was not an attempt to abolish the caste system; on the contrary, it was an effort to return them to textual religion, and thereby keep them in their proper place in the varna order. This move was crucial to his larger strategy, which was the reassertion of the power and status of the Vellalars at a time when it was being successfully challenged by the 49Quoted in V. Kanakaratnam, "The Saiva Siddhantic Foundation of Navalar's Work" in Aromuka Navalar Centenary volumg, ed. K. Kailasapathy (Jaffna, Tiromakal Press, 1979), 107 50Aromuka Navalar, Palar Patam book 4, 28th edn. (Madras, Saiva Siddhanta, 1949), 70-71, 89, 151 361 Protestant missions. The Brahman, he appreciated, may well be powerless as he was in Sri Lanka, residing in his quarters in the temple, from where he would emerge to perform ceremonies at the temple or ~ at the homes of the Vellalars, but without him the Vellalar cannot remain either a Vellalar or a Hindu. Historically, the two have needed each other and have defined each other's status and honour in the caste hierarchy. Also, by protecting and securing the status of the Brahman at the apex of the system, Navalar was keen to define the relative position of others, incltlding the ones at the bottom. His writings show that there was among Tamils a fair amount of confusion as regards ritual duties,51 and therefore he set out to educate them in the temple, through the correct performance of pucai (pujas) and the organization of tiruvilas (festivals). It is the Vellalars who were to benefit most from these missionary efforts. They were traditionally regarded as Sudras in the varna order, ~though, as it has been sho'wn, for all practical purposes, they may be thought of as serving the functions of the Vaisya or the Ksatriya of the region. Until Navalar began his mission their status had remained somewhat anomalous. He ascribed to them the right to read the Vedas and to wear the Punul. Implicitly therefore, he elevated them to the status of the twice-born. This is, of course, a well known "brahmanical" device employed by the lower castes to advance their claims within the framework of varna and asrama. 52 In advancing these claims on behalf of the Vellalars, 51See his early pamph., Yalpana Samaya Nilai (The State of Religion in . Jaffna) !st. edn. 1851 (Jaffna: 1872) 52Weber calls this method the "usurpation" of status and honour in Religion of India 187-188; while Srinivas calls it "sanskritisation." 362 Navalar was aware of the independent power and status of the Karaiyar, who too had strong claims to Ksatriya status. To put the Karaiyar in their "proper" place he would once again appeal to the texts. Citing puranic and other literary evidence, Navalar referred to them as an "unclean" and "pollufed" community.53 This call for ritual purity also had a transformative effect on the Hindu ideology in general. In the second half of the nineteenth century the two most creative processes in Tamil Sri Lanka were, arguably, Christianisation and Sanskritisation. In both cases the values advocated were expressed in Tamil texts, and in each case these values were mediated by predominantly Vellalar agents. It is possible here to argue that the process of Christianisation, initiated by the Protestant missionaries was a catalyst that awakened the indigenous process of Sanskritisation. When translating their message into Tamil, the missionaries unconsciously showed a marked preference for the Great Tradition of Hinduism (or Sanskritic Hinduism) over the more emotional popular traditions. In attempting to express the Christian concepts in Tamil, the terms in referenCE! to God, Tevan, Sarva Iswaran, Paraparam and Karthar, were iul taken from the Great Tradition; whereas the word Satan was used to translate the similar sounding word, Sattan in Tamil which was one of the names of a deity in the Little Tradition, who is also called Iyanar. Since "translation" implies some measure of "commensurability," some amount of base " -< :- .' 'J. 53"Saiva Virotam," Navalar Pirapanta Tiral1Y, ed. S. I