Modern South India Research Articles

Ambivalent egalitarians? Pietists and the pedagogy of the “Pariah” in modern South India during the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT The pedagogy of the colonising British in nineteenth-century India was critical of traditional Indian education for various reasons. The proselytising pedagogists who viewed the cultural practice of caste as a major stumbling block to their evangelising mission continued to confront the practice, which appeared to have stood on a footing of social equality based on professional attributes. The colonial and missionary agencies often claimed that traditional Indian education revolved around the notion of social reproduction that emboldened caste-centric professions. Consequently, the colonial pedagogists, who were rooted in the principles of pietism, a Protestant movement in seventeenth-century Germany, introduced a new form of education for mind, heart, and hand. In India, the pietist pedagogy since the eighteenth century sought to replace traditional Indian education with Anglo-vernacular-religious education. It also created a controversial discourse of equality among Pariah, a generic term used to refer to all those who were believed to have been excluded from school education. This article shows how pietist pedagogists, widely known for their sense of religious supremacy and racialised pretensions, blended education and the pietist idea of equality before God to “refine” the subaltern social groups. In this way, the colonial pietist pedagogists acted as ambivalent egalitarians in the field of schooling.

Mathematics and Society. Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India, by Senthil Babu D.

Mathematics and Society. Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India, by Senthil Babu D.

Book review: Lennart Bes, The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India

Lennart Bes, The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India (Leiden: Leiden University Press), 2022, pp., 567 + illustrations + maps, price not stated.

Book review: Senthil Babu D., Mathematics and Society: Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India

Senthil Babu D., Mathematics and Society: Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2022, 384 pp., ₹1,765 ISBN: 9788194831600

Memory, history, and casteless consciousness: Tamil Buddhists in modern South India

ABSTRACT The study of memory and caste-based oppressed communities in India and in the Indian diaspora is largely an unexamined field. If caste was an imposition of the self-privileging groups then, how do we understand the memory and history of the subalternized communities? Likewise, if those Indians who were oppressed by the brahminical invention of untouchability were actually not untouchables, then in what ways do marginalized Indian communities re-member and sustain their intrinsic cultural and historical identities? Do their language, literature, philosophy, and knowledge practices present alternative perspectives about their memory and history beyond caste? This paper aims to address of some of these questions by focusing on the Buddhist movement of the Tamils, who had been marginalized as outcastes, Parayars/Paraiyars/Pariah. It examines the varying ways Tamil Buddhist cultural and communicative memory affirms their casteless and anticaste identity in colonial India. Furthermore, it argues that a direct consequence of such a retention and revival of Buddhist memory in modern India was that these subordinated communities could sustain alternative ways of identifying, representing, and centering themselves beyond brahminical valorizations of caste.

Book review: Bes, Lennart, The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India

Bes, Lennart, The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022, xxv + 567 pp., $84.00, ISBN 9789087283711 (Paperback).

Texts, Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India.

This essay will discuss the hegemonic role that texts have come to play in the historiography of subcontinental mathematical traditions. It will argue that texts need to be studied as records of practices of people's working lives, grounded in social hierarchies. We will take particular mathematical texts to show how different occupational registers have come to shape practices that defy the binaries of concrete and abstract, high and low mathematics or the pure and applied conundrum. Measuring, counting and accounting practices as part of the routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations then provide us with a spectrum of the computational activities that controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. In the process the act of computing itself gained certain political values such as cunning and manipulation, identified with professions of village accountant and merchant, for example. Drawn from my earlier work on these records, I discuss the occupational role of the accountant as a political functionary who assessed and authenticated the measurements of land and produce in the village, making values of the labor performed by others, and creating avenues for his own proficiency as a mathematical practitioner.

The Sense of Self in Early Modern South and Southeast India

No abstract is available for this article.

Seeing into the Mind in Early Modern South India

In contrast to the many South Asian texts that explore deep, metaphysically oriented states of mind, introspection of a personal, empirical, everyday kind is relatively rare in the textual archive until the early modern period, beginning roughly in the 16th century. At that time a remarkable richness of personal introspective works is evident in all the major south Indian languages. This article explores some of the features of that literature, with representative examples of literary, musical, and philosophical sources focused on the individual and on her or his sense of self.

Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India By Elaine M. Fisher. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii, 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520293014 (paper).

Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India By Elaine M. Fisher. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii, 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520293014 (paper). - Volume 81 Issue 3

Sanskrit and the labour of gender in early modern South India

AbstractIn the early eighteenth century, a husband and co-wife trio undertook a household project in Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. These migrants from the Western Deccan jointly authored a set of Sanskrit commentaries invested in the idea of ‘Maharashtrianness’. The unusual authoring of a Sanskrit commentary by these women alongside their husband exemplifies broader changes that were taking place in Sanskrit intellectual circles in early modern South India. Tracing new formulations of regional identity, changing ideologies of gender, and shifts in the very labour of Sanskrit intellectual production, I demonstrate how new avenues of access to Sanskrit emerged for women in early modern South India. These new avenues of access were facilitated by the growing importance of the household as a site of cultural production and the rise of new regional courts in the Karnatak and Coromandel Coast regions.

Colonialism, Caste, and Gender: The Emergence of Critical Caste Feminism in Modern South India

Colonialism, Caste, and Gender: The Emergence of Critical Caste Feminism in Modern South India

Fisher, Elaine M. Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii+286 pp. $34.00 (paper); free download (open access: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.24).

Fisher, Elaine M. <i>Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India</i>. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii+286 pp. $34.00 (paper); free download (open access: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.24).

Living Buddhism: Migration, memory, and castelessness in South India

ABSTRACT Studies on Indian communities which were denigrated as lower castes and untouchables are yet to fully unravel their cultural, religious, economic, and historical perceptions and practices in India. Scholarship that is sympathetic to the oppressed of caste-power have engaged with caste prejudice and bodily violence under the colonial and postcolonial states. But the questions of language, literature, philosophy, migration, knowledge traditions, and intrinsic cultural self-identity of these discriminated Indians have largely remained unanalysed. In contrast, based on ethnographic field study in Hubli, Karnataka and in northern Tamil Nadu, this article argues that the memory of the marginalized is key to unravelling their alternative cultural and religious history beyond caste. It shows that, on the one hand, the ancient Tamil Buddhist literary corpus forms the deep cultural memory of the marginalized Tamils, while on the other, the organic Buddhist intellectuals, writers, publishers, and practitioners, and their discursive and non-discursive practices have perpetuated the communicative memory of being the descendants of ancient Buddhism. This article further argues that this memory of marginalized Indians points to their sense of castelessness in modern South India.

We Called Her Peddamma: Caste, Gender, and Missionary Medicine in Guntur: 1880–1930

The medical work carried out by Dr. Anna Sarah Kugler in the town of Guntur (1880–1930), which was a part of the Telugu speaking region of the erstwhile Madras Presidency, as a foreign medical missionary associated with the mission field of the then General Synod of the Lutheran Church in America, constitutes a significant phase in the history of medicine and gender in South India. Despite bringing about visible changes in gender perceptions of medical professions, strangely, she or her work finds no mention in the social science literature on history of medicine in modern South India in general and coastal Andhra Pradesh in particular. This paper explores the nature and patterns of definitive changes that gender roles and patriarchal structures among the Telugus residing in coastal Andhra Pradesh have undergone after coming under the influence of a mission hospital in Guntur established by Dr. Anna Sarah Kugler. By doing so, it also brings out an analysis on how this medical institution transformed the firmly-held traditional perceptions and stereotypes on the sources of illness, disease, and treatments, and in turn laid the foundation for modern medicine to establish itself in South India.

HINDU PLURALISM: RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN EARLY MODERN SOUTH INDIA. By ElaineFisher. South Asia Across the Disciplines. Oakland, CA: University of California, 2017. Pp. xii + 262. Paper, $34.95.

HINDU PLURALISM: RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN EARLY MODERN SOUTH INDIA. By ElaineFisher. South Asia Across the Disciplines. Oakland, CA: University of California, 2017. Pp. xii + 262. Paper, $34.95.

Public Space, Public Canon: Situating religion at the dawn of modernity in South India

AbstractWhat is ‘early modern’ about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic ‘Other’ that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the ‘Sacred Games of Śiva’ as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India.

Hindu pluralism: A prehistory

AbstractSectarianism is a term that has become firmly ingrained in Western scholarly literature on Hinduism for more than a century—and with a definition that, at best, may seem peculiarly idiosyncratic, and at worst dangerously misleading. In emplotting theistic difference as deviance, previous scholarship has gone too far in erasing the variegated textures of the Indic religious landscape, layers of difference that persist unabated to this day beneath the guise of Hindu unity. By reframing the diversity of Hinduism in light of its early modern precursors, this article aims to re‐situate Hindu sectarianism as a precolonial, and distinctively non‐Western form of religious pluralism. The sectarian religious publics of early modern South India provide us with an opportunity to rethink the very criteria for a non‐Western pluralism, founded not on the prescriptive model of a Western civil society but on a historically descriptive account of the role of religion in public space.

Remaking South Indian Śaivism: Greater Śaiva Advaita and the Legacy of the Śaktiviśiṣṭādvaita Vīraśaiva Tradition

Śaiva Advaita, or Śivādvaita, is typically regarded as an invention of the late sixteenth-century polymath Appayya Dīkṣita, who is said to have single-handedly revived Śrīkaṇṭha’s commentary on the Brahmasūtras from obscurity. And yet, the theological rapprochement between South Indian Śaivism and Advaita Vedānta philosophy has a much richer history, and one that left few South Indian Śaiva communities untouched by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article is an attempt to trace the outlines of what we can call a “Greater Śaiva Advaita,” defined as the interpenetration of nondualist Vedānta and a number of discrete South Indian Śaiva lineages, including the Śaiva Siddhānta in present-day Tamil Nadu (both Sanskritic and Tamil), the Sanskritic Vīraśaivas (writing in both Sanskrit and Kannada) based in heartlands of Vijayanagar, and the Brāhmaṇical Smārta Śaivas. The article demonstrates, specifically, that Appayya Dīkṣita did not coin the term “Śivādvaita,” but drew on an entire discursive sphere known variously as Śivādvaita or Śaktiviśiṣṭādvaita, a school of Vīraśaiva theology that provides a crucial missing link in the transmission of Śrīkaṇṭha’s Śaiva Vedānta across regions and language communities in early modern South India.

Public philology: text criticism and the sectarianization of Hinduism in early modern south India

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, south India had witnessed a widespread sectarianization of its religious landscape. We observe a growing polarization among religious institutions, the social and economic networks they mediated, and religious discourse across genres, whether Sanskrit or vernacular, whether devotional poetry or systematic theology. The present article examines the textual culture that emerged from the intersectarian discourse of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tamil country. In particular, I focus on a definitive but overlooked dimension of this discourse that I refer to as ‘public philology’: text criticism that serves as public theology. During the early modern centuries, sectarian theologians across community boundaries increasingly challenged their rivals specifically on philological grounds, combing the scriptures of their rivals for textual corruptions and unstable recensions. Focusing on one particular case of public philology in practice – the debate concerning the scriptural justification for bearing the sectarian tilaka on the forehead – I argue that the philological ventures of these early modern theologians served simultaneously as public theology. This trans-sectarian public theology, far from being a strictly academic enterprise, served to solidify the boundaries between sectarian communities. By adjudicating public standards for orthodox religious belonging, ‘public philologians’ left a lasting impression on the religious landscape of south India up to the present day.