CHAPTER 13

BHAKTI IN SOUTH INDIA
100 BCE to 900 CE

CHRONOLOGY¹

c. 300 BCE Greeks and Ashoka mention Pandyas, Cholas, and Cheras

c. 100 CE Cankam (“assembly”) poetry is composed

c. 375 CE Pallava dynasty is founded

c. 550-880 CE Chalukya dynasty thrives

c. 500-900 CE Nayanmar Shaiva Tamil poets live

c. 600-930 CE Alvar Vaishnava Tamil poets live

c. 800 CE Manikkavacakar composes the Tiruvacakam

c. 880-1200 CE Chola Empire dominates South India

CAN’T WE FIND SOME OTHER GOD?

I don’t call to him as my mother. I don’t call to him as my father.
I thought it would be enough to call him my lord—
but he pretends I don’t exist, doesn’t show an ounce of mercy.
If that lord who dwells in Paccilacciramam, surrounded by pools
filled with geese, postpones the mercies meant for his devotees—
can’t we find some other god?

Cuntarar, eighth century CE²

The image of god (Shiva, who dwells in Paccilacciramam) as a parent, as a female parent, and finally as an abandoning parent is central to the spirit of bhakti, as is the worshiper’s bold and intimate threat to abandon this god, echoing the divine mercilessness even while responding to the divine love. Bhakti, which is more a general religious lifestyle or movement than a specific sect, was a major force for inclusiveness with its antinomian attitudes toward Pariahs and women, yet the violence of the passions that it generated also led to interreligious hostility. This was the third alliance, in which gods were not only on the side of devout human worshipers (as in the first alliance) but also on the side of sinners, some of whom did not worship the god in any of the conventional ways.

TIME AND SPACE, CHRONOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY

We have now reached a point in the historical narrative where a work of fiction would say, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” or “In another part of the forest . . .” Until now it has been possible to maintain at least the illusion (maya) that there was a single line of development in an intertextual tradition largely centered in North India, a kind of family tree with branches that we could trace one by one, merely stopping occasionally to note the invasion of some South Indian kingdom by a North Indian king or the growing trade between north and south. But now even that illusion evaporates. For Indian history is more like a banyan tree,³ which, unlike the mighty oak, grows branches that return down to the earth again and again and become the roots and trunks of new trees with new branches so that eventually you have a forest of a banyan tree, and you no longer know which was the original trunk. The vertical line of time is intersected constantly by the horizontal line of space. And so we will have to keep doubling back in time to find out what has been going on in one place while we were looking somewhere else.

Now we must go south.

ANCIENT SOUTH INDIA

To understand the origins of bhakti, we need to have at least a general idea of the world in which bhakti was created, a world in which there was a synthesis between North Indian and South Indian cultural forms, active interaction between several religious movements and powerful political patronage of religion. There was constant contact and trade between North and South India at least by Mauryan times, in the fourth century BCE. South India was known already at the time of the Hebrew Bible (c. 1000 BCE) as a land of riches, perhaps the place to which King Solomon^gt sent his ships every three years, to bring back gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks.⁴ The southern trade route brought pearls, shells, and the fine cottons of Madurai to western lands.⁵ There was bustling contact with Rome (the Romans imported mostly luxury articles: spices, jewels, textiles, ivories, and animals, such as monkeys, parakeets, and peacocks),⁶ with China, and with Indianized cultures in Southeast Asia.⁷ Oxen and mules were the caravan animals, camels in the desert, and more nimble-footed asses in rough hill terrain.⁸ Not horses.

The empires of South India endured far longer than any of the North Indian kingdoms, and some of them controlled, mutatis mutandis, just as much territory. The Greek historian Megasthenes, ambassador to the Mauryan king Chandragupta, in c. 300 BCE, says that the Pandya kingdom (the eastern part of the Tamil-speaking southernmost tip of India) extended to the sea and had 365 villages. Ashoka in his edicts mentions the Pandyas as well as the Cholas (the southern kingdom of Tamil Nadu), the sons of Kerala (the Cheras, on the western coast of South India), and the people on the island now known as Sri Lanka.^gu The Tamils, in return, were well aware of the Mauryas in particular and North India in general.

The Chola king Rajaraja I (985-1014 CE) carved out an overseas empire. The Cholas were top dogs from the ninth to the early thirteenth century, pushing outward from the Kaveri river basin,⁹ attacking their neighbors, Cheras and Pandyas, as well as the present Sri Lanka to the south, and almost continually at war with their neighbors to the north, the Chalukyas. The Chalukya Pulakeshin I (543-566 CE) performed a horse sacrifice and founded a dynasty in Karnataka, with its capital at Vatapi (now Badami); it spread through the Deccan,¹⁰ making treaties with the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras.¹¹ The Cholas finally took over the Chalukya lands in about 880.

In addition to the three great South Indian kingdoms, the Cholas, Pandyas, and Cheras, which endured for centuries, the Pallava dynasty that ruled from Kanchipuram (Kanjeevaram), directly north of the three kingdoms, was a force to be reckoned with from 375 CE on. Pallava ports had been thriving centers of trade with China, Persia, and Rome from Roman times, but the Pallavas achieved some of their greatest works of art and literature in the sixth century CE, after the disintegration of the Gupta Empire; northern artisans contributed to many of the innovations in Pallava Sanskrit literature and temple-based architecture.

EARLY TAMIL BHAKTI LITERATURE

As Pallava and Chola political power and architecture spread, so did bhakti, becoming a riptide that cut across the still-powerful current of Vedic sacrifice, just as moksha had done centuries earlier. Beginning among Tamil-literate people,¹² bhakti soon entered the literatures of other Dravidian languages and then reached nonliterate people. It swept over the subcontinent, fertilizing the worship of Krishna at Mathura and of Jagannatha at Puri, as well as widespread traditions of pilgrimage and temple festivals. Always it kept its Tamil character and thus transported Tamil qualities to the north, transforming northern bhakti into a mix of northern and southern, Sanskrit and Tamil forms.¹³

The geographical divide is matched by a major linguistic shift, from Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars derived from it (Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, and so forth) to Tamil (a Dravidian language, from a family entirely separate from the Indo-European group) and its South Indian cousins, such as Telugu in Andhra, Kannada in Mysore, and Malayalam in Kerala. Although we have no surviving literature in Tamil until anthologies made in the sixth century CE, other forms of evidence tell us a great deal about a thriving culture in South India, much of it carried on in Tamil, from at least the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE. As with Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars, Tamil was the language of royal decrees and poetry for many centuries before texts in Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam began to be preserved.

Tamil as a literary language appears to have developed from traditions separate from those of Sanskrit. The inscriptions in Tamil dedications of caves were written in a form of Tamil Brahmi script, probably brought not south from the Mauryan kingdom but north from Sri Lanka.¹⁴ The earliest extant Tamil texts are anthologies of roughly twenty-three hundred short poems probably composed by the early centuries of the Common Era, then anthologized under the Pandyas and later reanthologized under the Cholas in the ninth to thirteenth century.¹⁵ The poems are known in their totality as Cankam (“assembly”) poetry, named after a series of three legendary assemblies said to have lasted for a total of 9,990 years long, long ago. The sea is said to have destroyed the cities where the first two assemblies were held, yet another variant of that most malleable of myths, the legend of the flood. “Cankam” is the Tamil transcription of the Sanskrit /Pali word sangham (“assembly”) and may have been applied to this literature as an afterthought, as a Hindu response to the challenge of Buddhists and Jainas, who termed their own communities sanghams. The Cankam anthologies demonstrate an awareness of Sanskrit literature (particularly the Mahabharata and Ramayana), of the Nandas and Mauryas, and of Buddhists and Jainas.

Brahmins who settled in the South when kingdoms were first established there gradually introduced Sanskrit into the local language and in return learned not only Tamil words but Tamil deities and rituals and much else.¹⁶ This two-way process meant that Tamil forms of religious sentiment moved into Sanskrit (which had had Dravidian loanwords already from the time of the Rig Veda) and went north. The Sanskrit Puranas (compendiums of myth and history) arose in the context of the development of kingdoms in the Deccan—Chalukyas and Pallavas in particular.¹⁷ The Tamil “local Puranas” (sthala puranas) both echoed the Sanskritic forms and contributed to the contents of the Bhagavata Purana, composed in South India.

A few of the Cankam poems are already devoted to religious subjects, singing the praise of Tirumal (Vishnu) and the river goddess Vaikai, or of Murukan, the Tamil god who had by now coalesced with the northern god Skanda, son of Shiva and Parvati. But the overwhelming majority of these first Tamil poems were devoted to two great secular themes, contrasting the intimate emotions of love, the “inner” (akam) world, with the virile public world of politics and war, the “outer” (puram) world. The poems that praised kings and heroes in the puram genre were the basis of later hymns in praise of the gods.

The akam poems used geographical landscapes, peopled by animals and characterized by particular flowers, to map the five major interior landscapes of the emotions: love in union (mountains, with monkeys, elephants, horses, and bulls); patiently waiting for a wife (forest and pasture, with deer), anger at infidelity (river valley, with storks, herons, buffalo); anxiously waiting for the beloved (seashore, with seagulls, crocodiles, sharks); separation (desert waste-land, with vultures, starving elephants, tigers, wolves).¹⁸ Akampoetry also distinguished seven types of love, of which the first is unrequited love and the last is mismatched love (when the object of desire is too far above the one who desires). The bhakti poets took these secular themes, particularly those involving what Sanskrit poetry called “love in separation” (viraha), and reworked them to express the theological anguish of the devotee who is separated from the otiose god, not because the god does not love him in return but because the god is apparently occupied elsewhere.^gv The assumption seems to be that of the old blues refrain “How can I miss you if you never go away?”

Beginning in about 600 CE, the wandering poets and saints devoted to Shiva (the Nayanmars,^gw traditionally said to number sixty-three) and to Krishna-Vishnu (the twelve Alvars) sang poems in the devotional mode of bhakti. The group of Nayanmars known as the first three (Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar, sixth to eighth century) formed the collection called the Tevaram,¹⁹ which departed from the Cankam style in using a very different Tamil grammar. Nammalvar (“Our Alvar”), the last of the great Alvars, writing in the ninth century, called his work “the sacred spoken word” (tiruvaymoli), and Manikkavacakar (late ninth century) called his Shaiva text “the sacred speech” (Tiruvacakam ).²⁰ These works were clearly meant to be performed orally, recited, and since the tenth century they have been performed, both in homes and in temples.

Bhakti in the sense of supreme devotion to a god, Shiva, and even to the guru as god, appeared in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (6.23). Ekalavya in the Mahabharata demonstrates a kind of primitive bhakti: great devotion to the guru and physical self-violence. The concept of bhakti was further developed in the Ramayana and the Gita, which established devotion as a third alternative to ritual action and knowledge. But South Indian bhakti ratchets up the emotion from the Gita, so that even a direct quotation from the Gitatakes on an entirely different meaning in the new context, as basic words like karma and bhakti shift their connotations.

The Tamils had words for bhakti (such as anpu and parru), though eventually they also came to use the Sanskrit term (which became patti in Tamil). But the Tamil poets transformed the concept of bhakti not only by applying it to the local traditions of the miraculous exploits of local saints but by infusing it with a more personal confrontation, an insistence on actual physical and visual presence, a passionate transference and countertransference. A typically intimate and rural note is evident in the Alvars’ retelling of the legend in the Valmiki Ramayana about a squirrel who assisted Rama in building the bridge to Lanka to rescue Sita; the Alvars add that in gratitude for this assistance, Rama touched the squirrel and imprinted on it the three marks visible on all Indian squirrels today.^gx21 The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, and compassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysics demands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.

Despite its royal and literary roots, bhakti is also a folk and oral phenomenon. Many of the bhakti poems were based on oral compositions, some probably even by illiterate saints.²² Both Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti movements incorporated folk religion and folk song into what was already a rich mix of Vedic and Upanishadic concepts, mythologies, Buddhism, Jainism, conventions of Tamil and Sanskrit poetry, and early Tamil conceptions of love, service, women, and kings,²³ to which after a while they added elements of Islam. This cultural bricolage is the rule rather than the exception in India, but the South Indian use of it is particularly diverse. As A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler put it, “Past traditions and borrowings are thus re-worked into bhakti; they become materials, signifiers for a new signification, as a bicycle seat becomes a bull’s head in Picasso. Often the listener/reader moves between the original material and the work before him—the double vision is part of the poetic effect.”²⁴ This too was a two-way street, for just as Picasso imagined someone in need of a bicycle seat using his bull’s head for that purpose,²⁵ so the new bhakti images also filtered back into other traditions, including Sanskrit traditions.

Unlike most Sanskrit authors and Cankam poets, the bhakti poets revealed details of their own lives and personalities in their texts, so that the voice of the saint is heard in the poems. The older myths take on new dimensions in the poetry: “What happens to someone else in a mythic scenario happens to the speaker in the poem.”²⁶ And so we encounter now the use of the first person, a new literary register. It is not entirely unprecedented; we heard some voices, even women’s voices (such as Apala’s), in direct speech in the Rig Veda, and a moment in the Mahabharata when the narrator breaks through and reminds the reader, “ I have already told you” (about Yudhishthira’s dog). But the first person comes into its own in a major way in Cankam poetry and thence in South Indian bhakti.

SECTARIAN DIVERSITY IN SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLES

The growth of bhakti is intimately connected with the burgeoning of sectarian temples. We have seen textual evidence of the growth of sectarianism in the Mahabharata and Ramayana period, supported by epigraphs and references to temples in texts such as theKama-sutra and the Artha-shastra. We have noted the cave temples of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, Ajanta, and Ellora. And we will soon encounter the sixth-century Vishnu temple in Deogarh in Rajasthan, and other Gupta temples at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal. Now is the moment to consider the first substantial groups of temples that we can see in the flesh, as it were, in South India, for under the Pallavas, temples began to grow into temple cities.

Building temples may have been, in part, a response to the widespread Buddhist practice of building stupas or to the Jaina and Buddhist veneration of statues of enlightened figures. Hindus vied with Buddhists in competitive fund-raising, and financing temples or stupas became a bone of contention. One temple at Aihole, dedicated to a Jaina saint, has an inscription dated 636, which marks this as one of the earliest dated temples in India.²⁷ The Pallavas supported Buddhists, Jainas, and Brahmins and were patrons of music, painting, and literature. Many craftsmen who had worked on the caves at Ajanta, in the north, emigrated southward to meet the growing demand for Hindu art and architecture in the Tamil kingdoms.²⁸

Narasimha Varman I (630-638), also known as Mahamalla or Mamalla (“great wrestler”), began the great temple complex at Mamallapuram that was named after him (it was also called Mahabalipuram); several other Pallavas probably completed it, over an extended period. At Mamallapuram, there is a free-standing Shaiva Shore Temple, a cave of Vishnu in his boar incarnation, an image of Durga slaying the buffalo demon, and five magnificent temples, called chariots (raths), all hewn from a single giant stone.^gyThere is also an enormous bas-relief on a sculpted cliff, almost one hundred feet wide and fifty feet high, facing the ocean. The focus of the whole scene is a vertical cleft, in the center, through which a river cascades down, with half cobra figures (Nagas and Naginis) as well as a natural cobra in the midst of it. There are also lots of terrific elephants, deer, and monkeys, all joyously racing toward the descending river. (Real water may have flowed through the cleft at one time.) Sectarian diversity within Hinduism (as Indra and Soma and the Vedic gods were being shoved aside in favor of Vishnu, Shiva, and the goddess) is demonstrated by the dedication of different shrines to different deities and, within the great frieze, by the depiction of both an image of Shiva and a shrine to Vishnu. The frieze also contains a satire on ascetic hypocrisy: The figure of a cat stands in a yogic pose, surrounded by mice, one of whom has joined his tiny paws in adoration of the cat; Sanskrit literature tells of a cat who pretended to be a vegetarian ascetic and ate the mice until one day, noting their dwindling numbers, they discovered mouse bones in the cat’s feces.²⁹

[TOP] Great Frieze at Mamallapuram, Descent of the Ganges. [ABOVE] The Cat Ascetic.

Among many other figures on this frieze is a man standing on one leg in a yogic posture, about whom art historians have argued for many years. Some say he is Arjuna, generating inner heat to persuade Shiva to give him a special weapon, as he does in theMahabharata (3.41). Others say it is the sage Bhagiratha, who also appears in the Mahabharata (3.105-08), and in the Ramayana (1.42-3), generating inner heat to persuade the heavenly Ganges (the Milky Way) to come to earth to revive the ashes of his grandfathers. The wisest suggestion, I think, is that the frieze represents both at once,³⁰ that it is a visual form of the usual verbal panegyric, inspired by a great military victory, in 642 CE, by Mahamalla, and that it contains references to both Arjuna and Bhagiratha and to both Shiva and Vishnu. This would make it a stone realization of the Sanskrit figure of speech called a shlesha (“embrace”), a literary expression that refers to two different stories at once, like the rabbit/man in the moon.

Rajaraja I began building the great temple to Shiva in Thanjavur (called the temple of Brihad-ishvara [“Great Lord”] or Raja-rajeshvara [“the Lord of the King of Kings”]) in 995 but did not live to see it completed in 1012. An inscription credits him with introducing the practice of singing hymns in that temple. One of the largest and tallest temples in all of India, it had a monumental linga in the main shrine and was a major economic venture. Rajaraja donated a great deal of war booty, including the equivalent of 230 kilos of gold, even more silver, and piles and piles of jewels. Villages throughout the Chola kingdom were taxed to support the temple, which gave back some of that wealth by functioning as a bank that made investments and loans to those same villages.³¹

The Chola kingdom was watered by the Kaveri River, sometimes called the Ganges of the South, and indeed the Kaveri basin is to South India what the Ganges basin is to North India. Eventually (in 1023), the Cholas decided to go for the real thing: They hauled quantities of water, presumably in jars, all the way from the Ganges, more than one thousand miles away, to Thanjavur, and so claimed to have re-created the holy land of the north in the middle of Tamil Nadu.³² The water was presented to King Rajendra (1014-1044) for the ceremonial tank (henceforth known as “the Chola-Ganga”) in his capital.³³ The Cholas may have been inspired by a similar project that the Rashtrakutas had undertaken in the eighth century, when they added to the great Shiva temple at Ellora a shrine with images of the three great northern rivers—the Ganges, Yamuna/Jumna, and Sarasvati—and actually brought the waters of these rivers south in large jars.³⁴ Closer to home, they may have had in mind the real water flowing through the sculpture of the Ganges at Mamallapuram.

The Chola temples were a major source of employment for the community. Engraved on the walls of each temple were the numbers of architects, accountants, guards, and functionaries that it employed, as well as its land revenue.³⁵ Numerous nonliterate assistants and ordinary laborers worked under the direction of the chief architects and master sculptors who knew the textbooks of architecture and art (the vastu-shastras and shilpa-shastras).³⁶ The lists also include the names of numerous temple dancers, some of whom danced only for the god, while others also danced for the king and his friends, and still others were both dancers and high-class courtesans. Dancers are often represented in sculptures on temples.³⁷

The temples were not central to all aspects of worship; private worship in the home (puja) always remained at the heart of Hinduism, and on the other end of the spectrum, enormous communal festivals (melas) marked the religious year for specific areas and, on some occasions, for a great deal of the subcontinent. But temples filled a number of important roles that were covered neither by private puja nor by the crush of festivals. One of the innovations of bhakti was to shift the center of public activity from the courts to the temples. Now the temples, not the courts, were the hubs of pilgrimage, meeting places, and markets for souvenirs. Hinduism did not kick the moneylenders out of the temples, as some other religions (which shall remain nameless) made a point of doing.

The worlds of the temple radiated outward in concentric circles of temples like the concentric continents in the cosmographic mandala, growing more complex and detailed as they moved away from the core.³⁸ At the still center was the womb house (garbha griha), where the deity was present in a form almost (but not quite) without qualities (nir-guna), often a hidden or abstract symbol, a simple image, naked or swathed in thick layers of precious cloth. On the next level, in the chambers around the womb house, there were often friezes or freestanding images of deities, displaying more and more qualities (sa-guna), characteristic poses or weapons or numbers of heads or arms. The most extravagant and worldly images appeared on the outer walls of the temple and beyond it on the walls of the entire temple complex, rather like a temple fort, and on those two sets of outer walls artisans carved the more miscellaneous slice-of-life scenes as well as gorgeous women and occasional erotic groups. Just inside and outside the outermost wall, merchants sold the sorts of things that visitors might have wanted to give the deity (fragrant wreaths of flowers, coconuts and bananas and incense and camphor) or to bring home as a holy souvenir.

TEMPLES AND VIOLENCE

The downside of all this architectural glory was that sooner or later a bill was presented; there is no free temple. As endowing temples came in this period to complement and later to replace Vedic sacrifice as the ritual de rigueur for kings, the older triad of king, ritual, and violence was newly configured.

The great temple-building dynasties were people of “charm and cruelty,” to borrow a phrase that has been applied to kingdoms in Southeast Asia.³⁹ Death and taxes were, as always, the standard operating procedure, the death consisting, from Chola times, in a series of martial expeditions to conquer the world (dig-vijayas). In 1014, Rajendra I invaded (the present-day) Sri Lanka, sacked Anuradhapura, plundered its stupas, opened relic chambers, and took so much treasure from the Buddhist monasteries that the Buddhist chronicles compared his forces to blood-sucking fiends (yakkhas). But Buddhism was not the only Chola target. A western Chalukyan inscription, in the Bijapur district, accuses the Chola army of behaving with exceptional brutality, slaughtering Hindu women, children, and Brahmins and raping high-caste girls.⁴⁰ Clearly both of these are heavily slanted evaluations.

Such violence against temples had little, if anything, to do with religious persecution. The Cholas were generally Shaivas, but within their own territories they protected and enriched both Shaiva and Vaishnava temples, as well as Jaina and Buddhist establishments.⁴¹ It was, however, the Cholas’ custom to desecrate the temples of their fellow Hindu rivals and to use their own temples to make grandiloquent statements about political power. Plunder was a prime motive for Chola military aggression; Rajaraja looted the Cheras and Pandyas in order to build the Thanjavur temple.^gz42 Often the Cholas replaced brick temples with grander stone ones, particularly on their borders with the Rashtrakuta kingdom to the north.⁴³ Though kings and local rulers maintained large amounts of capital, the temples were the banks of that period, and the invading kings kept knocking off the temples because, as Willie Sutton once said when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

The Chalukyas, by contrast, did not destroy the Pallava temples but were content merely to pick up some of the Pallava architectural themes to use in their own capital,⁴⁴ importing workmen from both the north and the south. Some of the Chalukya buildings are therefore among the finest extant examples of the southern style, with the enormous front gate (gopuram), while others are in the northern style (later epitomized in Khajuraho) and still others in the Orissan style. At first the Chalukyas cut temples right into the rock, but Pulakeshin II (610-642), using local sandstone, built some of the earliest freestanding temples in a new style at Badami and at the neighboring Aihole, Mahakuta, Alampur, and Pattadal.⁴⁵ The Chalukya Vikramaditya II (733-746), in 742, left an inscription on the Pallavas’ Kailasanatha temple boasting that he had captured it but spared both it and the city, returning the gold that he had taken from the temple. Clearly this was a most unusual thing for a king to do.

KINGSHIP AND BHAKTI

South Indian religion under the Cholas and Pallavas was fueled by royal patronage, and kingship provided one model for bhakti, which, from its very inception, superimposed the divine upon the royal. Some of the early Tamil poems praise the god just as they praise their patron king; you can substitute the word “god” wherever the word “hero” or “king” occurs in some of the early royal panegyrics, and voilà, you have a hymn of divine praise.⁴⁶ While the secular poems praised the king’s ancestors, the bhakti poems praised the god’s previous incarnations; the battles of gods and of kings were described in much the same gory detail. But there is a crucial difference: The god offered his suppliants personal salvation as well as the food and wealth that kings usually gave to bards who sought their patronage, spiritual capital in addition to plain old capital.

We have noted the close ties between kingship and devotion in the image of Ram-raj in the Ramayana, Rama as king and god. The Cholas regarded themselves as incarnations (not the official avatars but earthly manifestations) of Vishnu but were by and large worshipers of Shiva.^ha Thus Vishnu (the king), the god manifest within the world, was a devotee of Shiva, the god aloof from the world. As the subject was to the king, so the king was to the god, a great chain of bhakti, all the way down the line, but the king was also identified with the god. The divine married couple, Shiva and Parvati or Sita and Rama, served as a template for the images of a number of kings and their queens^hb who commissioned sculptures⁴⁷ depicting, on one level, the god and his goddess and, on another, the king and his consort.^hc The bronzes commissioned by the Chola kings are the most famous, and surely among the most beautiful, of this genre of the couple standing side by side. Rama and Krishna, the primary recipients of bhakti in North India, were already kings before they were gods; the worship of Rama was by its very nature political from the start. But this was a two-way street, for the rise of bhakti also influenced the way that people treated kings and the games that the kings themselves were able to play.

Sacred places are the counterparts to the king’s domain, his capital and his forts.⁴⁸ The temple was set up like a palace, and indeed Tamil uses the same word (koil, also koyil or kovil, “the home [il] of the king [ko]”) for both palace and temple. Temples were central to the imperial projects of the upwardly mobile dynasties; every conquering monarch felt it incumbent upon him to build a temple as a way of publicizing his achievement. Brahmins became priests in temples as they had been chaplains to kings. Temples also brought puja out of the house and into public life, making grouppuja the center of religious activity, mediating between the house and the palace. These manifestations of the divine were specifically local; the frescoes in the great Thanjavur Brihadishvara temple depicted not just the images of Shiva and Parvati, or of Shiva as Lord of the Dance and Destroyer of the Triple City, images that were known from northern temples, but also scenes from the legends of Shaiva saints (Nayanmars), while other temples did the same for the Vaishnava saints (Alvars).⁴⁹ By building temples, making grants for temple rituals, and having the bhakti hymns collected, the Cholas successfully harnessed and institutionalized bhakti. The deep royal connection goes a long way to explaining the ease with which religious stories and images were swept up in political maneuverings throughout the history of Hinduism.

DARSHAN

A feudal king, subject to a superior ruler, had to appear in person in the court of his overlord, publicly affirming his obedient service through a public demonstration of submission, so that he could see and be seen.⁵⁰ So too the temple was both the god’s private dwelling and a palace, a public site where people could not only offer puja but look at the deity and be looked at by him. Many temples have annual processions in which the central image of the god is taken out and carried around the town in a wooden chariot (rath), in clear imitation of a royal procession.

Darshan (“seeing”) was the means (known throughout North and South India, from the time of the Alvars and Nayanmars to the present) by which favor passed from one to the other of each of the parties linked by the gaze. One takes darshan of a king or a god, up close and personal. Darshan is a concept that comes to the world of the temple from the world of the royal court. To see the deity, therefore, and to have him (or her) see you was to make possible a transfer of power not unlike the transfer of karma or merit. And this was the intimate transference that South Indian bhakti imagined for the god and the worshiper.⁵¹ Darshan may also have been inspired, in part, by the Buddhist practice of viewing the relics in stupas. But it was also surely a response to the new bhakti emphasis on the aspect of god in the flesh (“right before your eyes” [sakshat]), with flesh and blood qualities (sa-guna), in contrast with the aspect of a god “without qualities” (nir-guna) that the philosophers spoke of.

Artists, both Hindu and Buddhist, have always painted the eyes on a statue last of all, for that is the moment when the image comes to life, when it can see you, and you can no longer work on it; that is where the power begins.⁵² Rajasthani storytellers, who use as their main prop a painting of the epic scenes, explained to one anthropologist that once the eyes of the hero were painted in, neither the artist nor the storyteller regarded it as a piece of art: “Instead, it became a mobile temple . . . the spirit of the god was now in residence.”⁵³ The Vedic gods Varuna and Indra were said to be “thousand-eyed,” because as kings they had a thousand spies, overseeing justice, and as sky gods they had the stars for their eyes. The sun is also said to be the eye of the sky, of Varuna, and of the sacrificial horse (BU 1.1) and we have noted analogies between human eyes and the sun. Varuna in the Rig Veda (2.27.9) is unblinking, a characteristic that later becomes one of the marks that distinguish any gods from mortals.⁵⁴

In Buddhist mythology (the tale of Kunala⁵⁵), as well as South Indian hagiography (the tale of Kannappar, which we will soon encounter), saints are often violently blinded in martyrdom. The hagiography of the eighth-century Nayanar saint Cuntarar tells us that Shiva blinded him (darshan in its negative form) after he deserted his second wife but restored his vision (darshan in its positive form) when he returned home to her again. Many of Cuntarar’s bitterest poems are ascribed to the period of his blindness, including the poem cited at the opening of this chapter, which is in the genre of “blame-praise” or “worship through insult” that also became important (as “hate-devotion”) in the Sanskrit tradition. Cuntarar was known for the angry tone of his poems and sometimes called himself “the harsh devotee,” though the Tamil tradition called him “the friend of god.”⁵⁶ His poems, which range from humorous teasing to tragic jeremiads, combined an intimate ridicule of the god with self-denigration.

The sense of personal unworthiness and the desire for the god’s forgiveness that we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna is also characteristic of attitudes toward the bhakti gods, who are, like Varuna, panoptic, as is Shiva in this poem by the twelfth-century woman poet Mahadevi:

People,
male and female,
blush when
a cloth covering their shame comes loose.
When the lord of lives
lives drowned without a face
in the world, how can you be modest?
When all the world is the eye of the lord,
onlooking everywhere, what can you
cover and conceal?⁵⁷

The divine gaze makes meaningless the superficial trappings of both gender (“male and female”) and sexuality (“covering their shame”).

WOMEN IN SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTI

Gender and sexuality are front and center in bhakti poetry. The gender stereotype of women as gentle, sacrificing, and loving became the new model for the natural worshiper, replacing the gender stereotype of men as intelligent, able to understand arcane matters, and handing down the lineage of the texts. The stereotypes remained the same but were valued differently. And so men imitated women in bhakti, and women took charge of most of the family’s religious observances. At the same time, a new image, perhaps even a new stereotype, arose of a woman who defied conventional society in order to pursue her personal religious calling. Only one of the Alvars, in the eighth century, was a woman, Antal, who fantasized about her union with Vishnu as his divine consort until he finally took her as his bride. Her life story is best known of all the Alvars,⁵⁸ and many women saints followed her example; her poems express her protest against the oppression of women.⁵⁹ Two of the Nayanmars were women whose words were never preserved, one a Pandyan queen and the other the mother of the poet Cuntarar.⁶⁰ But a third Nayanmar woman did leave us four poems, Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

Karaikkal Ammaiyar probably lived in the mid-sixth century CE or perhaps in the fifth century.⁶¹ According to Cekkiyar’s Periya Purana (twelfth century), she was born the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and devout merchant family. Shiva rewarded her devotion by manifesting in her hand delicious mangoes, which magically disappeared. When her husband saw this, he left her. Thinking that he might one day return, she continued her dharmic wifely responsibilities, keeping her husband’s house and taking care of herself. One day, however, she discovered that her husband had taken another wife. Feeling that she had no more use for her physical beauty, she begged Shiva to turn her body into a skeleton and made a pilgrimage to Shiva’s Himalayan abode, walking the entire way on her hands, feet in the air. Shiva granted her request that she join his entourage as an emaciated ghost or demon (pey), singing hymns while Shiva danced in the cremation ground. Eventually she settled in a cremation ground in Alankatu.⁶² Four of her poems found a place in the Tamil Shaiva canon, the Tirumurai. Here is one:

She has shriveled breasts
and bulging veins,
in place of white teeth
empty cavities gape.
With ruddy hair on her belly,
a pair of fangs, knobby ankles and long shins
the demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation ground
where our lord,
whose hanging matted hair
blows in all eight directions,
dances among the flames
and refreshes his limbs.

His home is Alankatu.⁶³

The female saints flagrantly challenge Manu’s notorious statement about a woman’s constant subservience to her father, husband, and son. They are not usually bound to a man at all, and “It is more common for a married woman saint to get rid of her husband than to endure him.”⁶⁴ Defying her parents, she may escape marriage in any of several ways. She may become a courtesan, transform herself into an unmarriageable old woman, or terrify her husband by performing miracles (as Karaikkal Ammaiyar does). Or she may become widowed, presumably by chance (though those women saints were capable of almost anything). Widowhood is not normally a fate that any Hindu woman would willingly choose, but in this case the woman would regard herself as married to the god.^hd Or she may simply renounce marriage, walking out on her husband, leaving him for her true lover, the god. A woman named Dalayi deserted her husband while he was making love to her, at the call of Shiva (a rare reversal of the more usual pattern of the worshiper’s interrupting the god when he is engaged in lovemaking). Or transgressing the transgression, she may refuse to have the god as her lover: The Virashaiva woman saint named Goggavve was so obstinate that she refused to marry the disguised Shiva, even when he threatened to kill her.⁶⁵

The early, secular Tamil male poets often adopted a woman’s point of view and a woman’s voice. So basic was the woman’s voice to the language of bhakti that the bhakti poets took up this convention and developed it into a complex theological argument about men speaking with the voices of women; the fifteenth-century Telugu poet Annamayya wrote many poems in a woman’s voice. The female saints of course did not have to undergo any gender conversion (though some of the hagiographies tell of women who, with double-back perversity, “transformed . . . into a male by God’s grace.”)⁶⁶

In a poem to Krishna, Nammalvar imagines himself as a woman abandoned by Krishna, the Dark One:

Evening has come,
but not the Dark One.
Without him here,
what shall I say?
how shall I survive?
The bulls,
their bells jingling,
have mated with the cows
and the cows are frisky.
The flutes play cruel songs,
bees flutter in the bright
white jasmine
and the blue-black lily.
The sea leaps into the sky
and cries aloud.⁶⁷

Sometimes the male poet, as worshiper, takes over from the earlier genres of love poetry (akam) the voice of the lovesick heroine, or of her mother, and addresses the lover as the god. Here the male poet assumes the voice of the heroine’s mother addressing Rama as destroyer of Lanka:

Like a bar of lac
or wax
thrust into fire
her mind is in peril
and you are heartless.
What shall I do for you,
lord who smashed Lanka,
land ruled by the demon?⁶⁸

The fire that is already a cliché for lovesickness now also represents the fire of bhakti, and the expectation is that the lover/Rama can save the heroine/worshiper, as the incarnate god saved Sita from Ravana, but also that he may destroy her, as he destroyed Ravana, or even perhaps that he may just let her burn, as Rama let Sita walk into the fire of her ordeal.

Even the thoroughly male god Shiva, whom the poet calls “the lord of meeting rivers,” sometimes becomes a woman in Kannada bhakti myth and poetry:

As a mother runs
close behind her child
with his hand on a cobra
or a fire,
the lord of meeting rivers
stays with me
every step of the way
and looks after me.⁶⁹

The poem, quite straightforward, needs no gloss. But a Kannada listener/reader would hear echoes of this story:

SHIVA AS MIDWIFE

A devotee’s daughter was about to give birth to her first child. Her mother could not cross the flooding Kaveri River and come in time to help her waiting daughter. So Shiva took the form of the old mother—“back bent like the crescent moon, hair white as moonlight, a bamboo staff in hand”—and came to her house. Uma [Parvati, Shiva’s wife] and Ganga [the river, often said to be a wife of Shiva] had been sent ahead with bundles. When labor began, Shiva played midwife; a boy was born and Mother Shiva cradled and cared for him as if he were Murukan. Soon the floods abated, and the real mother appeared on the doorstep. Shiva began to slip away. Seeing the two women, the young couple were amazed. “Which is my mother?” cried the girl. Before her eyes, Shiva disappeared into the sky like lightning.⁷⁰

“As if he were Murukan” is one of those switchbacks that the mythology of doubling and impersonation, so dear to Shaiva literature, delights in: A human woman might indeed treat her grandson like a god (in this case, Murukan, the son of Shiva), but in this story the god pretends that the child is his very own son, pretends that he himself is a woman pretending to be Shiva—a double gender switch too, by the way. Careful, down-to-earth details, such as Shiva’s sending “bundles” on ahead with his two wives, strongly suggest that this is a story about “women’s concerns,” surely a place to hear women’s voices. Shiva clearly enjoys being a woman, or else why did he not just stop the river from flooding so that the real mother could get to her daughter? He wanted to be there himself, to be intimately involved with this most basic of women’s experiences.

CASTE

PARIAHS

One of the great bhakti legends is the story of the Nayanar saint named Kannappar, told in several texts,⁷¹ perhaps best known from the Periya Purana of Cekkilar, dated to the reign of the Chola king Kulottunka II, 1133-1150 CE:

KANNAPPAR’S EYES

Kannappar was the chief of a tribe of dark-skinned, violent hunters, who lived by hunting wild animals (with the help of dogs) and stealing cattle. One day he found Shiva in the jungle; filled with love for the god and pity that he seemed to be all alone, Kannappar resolved to feed him. So he took pieces of the meat of a boar that he had killed, tasted each one to make sure it was tender, and brought the meat to him. He kicked aside, with his foot, the flowers that a Brahmin priest had left on Shiva’s head and spat out on him the water from his mouth. Then he gave him the flowers that he had worn on his own head. His feet, and his dogs’ paws, left their marks on him. He stayed with him all night, and left at dawn to hunt again.

The Brahmin priest, returning there, removed Kannappar’s offerings and hid and watched him. In order to demonstrate for the Brahmin the greatness of Kannappar’s love, Shiva caused blood to flow from one of his eyes. To stanch the flow, Kannappar gouged out his own eye with an arrow and replaced the god’s eye with his. When Shiva made his second eye bleed, Kannappar put his left foot on Shiva’s eye to guide his hand, and was about to pluck out his remaining eye when Shiva stretched out his hand to stop him, and placed Kannappar at his right hand.⁷²

Kannappar may be a Nishada or some other tribal beyond the Hindu pale; one Sanskrit version of the story calls him a Kirata. The Periya Purana says that his mother was from the warrior caste of Maravars and his parents had worshiped Murukan, but Kannappar does not seem to know the rules of Brahmin dharma, such as the taboo on offering flesh to the gods. (Or with a historian’s distance, we might say that he does not know that high-caste Hindus, like the Brahmin for whose benefit Shiva stages the whole grisly episode of the eyes, no longer offer flesh to their gods.) He does not know about the impurity of substances, like spit, that come from the body, the spit that he uses to clean the image as a mother would use her spit to scrub a bit of dirt off the face of her child. (Or again, he is unaware of the centuries that have passed since Apala, in the Rig Veda, offered the god Indra the soma plant that she had pressed in her mouth.) He reverses the proper order of head and foot by putting his foot on the head of the god instead of his head on the god’s foot, the usual gesture of respect.

Kannapar does not understand metaphor: The normal offering to a god is a flower, perhaps a lotus, and in fact he gives the god flowers (though ones that have been polluted, in high-caste terms, by being worn on his own head). But Sanskrit poets often liken beautiful eyes to lotuses, and Kannappar offers the god the real thing, the eye, the wrong half of the metaphor. Moreover, Kannappar’s gruesome indifference to his self-inflicted pain may have had conscious antecedents in similar acts committed by King Shibi and by Ekalavya, in the Mahabharata (not to mention the blinding of Kunala in the Buddhist tradition).

Many texts retell this story, generally specifying that the form of Shiva that Kannappar found in the forest was a linga and occasionally adding details designed to transform Kannappar from a cattle thief and hunter with dogs (like the Vedic people) into a paradigm of bhakti; thus the animals that he kills are said to be ogres offering their bodies as sacrifice to Shiva.⁷³ But in the Periya Purana his “mistakes” are felix culpas that make possible an unprecedentedly direct exchange of gazes; instead of trading mere glances, he and the god trade their very eyes. This is darshan in its most direct, violent, passionate form.

BRAHMINS

Like the second of the three alliances, in which religious power (conceived of as inner heat) could be generated by individuals without the mediation of Brahmins, the third or bhakti alliance placed the power in the individual and hence by its very nature threatened the hegemony of the Brahmins. Chola records of demands for the lower castes to have equal access to temples further demonstrate that the bhakti movement had originally contained an element of protest against Brahmin exclusivity.⁷⁴ As the tale of Kannappar demonstrates so powerfully, some sects of South Indian bhakti regarded non-Brahmins as superior to Brahmins; at the very least, bhakti sometimes sidetracked Brahmin ritual by emphasizing a direct personal relationship between the devotee and the deity.⁷⁵ The devotion to the guru that played such a central part in bhakti was also a threat to Brahmins, for the guru was not necessarily a Brahmin. But it did not stop there. As Ramanujan noted, “In the lives of the bhakti saints ‘the last shall be first’: men wish to renounce their masculinity and to become as women; upper-caste males wish to renounce pride, privilege, and wealth, seek dishonor and self-abasement, and learn from the untouchable devotee.”⁷⁶ Some bhakti groups cut across political, caste, gender, and professional divisions. Some members were Pariahs, and many were non-Brahmins.

The questioning, if not the rejection, of the hierarchies of gender and caste, coupled with a theology of love, has sometimes inspired an image of the bhakti worshipers as some sort of proto-flower children, Hinduism “lite.” But on the one hand, the hierarchical categories are reified even as they are challenged—reversed sometimes, and mocked at other times, but always there. On the other hand, the Brahmin hegemony was still firmly entrenched. Shortly after the tale of Kannappar, the Periya Purana tells the story of Tirunalaippovar Nantanar, a Pariah who went through fire to purify himself since he was not allowed to enter a temple; he was transformed into a Brahmin, a solution that simultaneously vindicates this particular Pariah but enforces the superiority of all Brahmins and upholds the exclusion of Pariahs from temples.⁷⁷ Later Nantanar became the hero of tales of caste protest.⁷⁸ Like Buddhism and all the other so-called ancient reform movements that protested against the injustice of the Hindu social system, the bhakti movement did not try to change or reform that system itself; reform of caste inequalities came only much later, and even then with only limited success. Rather, bhakti merely created another, alternative system that lived alongside the Brahmin imaginary, a system in which caste injustices were often noted, occasionally challenged, and rarely mitigated.

But unlike the alternative universe that the mythical sage Trishanku created, a double of ours down to the stars and the moon, the bhakti universe was bounded by that permeable membrane so characteristic of Hinduism. The good news about this was that bhakti therefore leaked back into the Brahmin imaginary from time to time, improving the condition of women and the lower castes even there. Although the leaders of many bhakti sects came from the lowest castes, particularly in the early stages of the bhakti movements, high-caste Vaishnavas and Shaivas eventually accepted their literature.⁷⁹ But the bad news was that since all permeable membranes are two-way stretches, bhakti also often made concessions to the caste system even within its own ranks—and I do mean ranks. And so what once may have been non-Brahmin texts became tangled in Brahmin values as the price of their admission to the written record. They were compiled in writing long after the period of their oral circulation and compiled in the service of an imperial project of what was essentially Shaiva colonization. Despite the non-Brahminic elements in the bhakti saints of South India, the movement by and large served Brahmin ends.

With the passage of time caste strictures often reasserted themselves; Ramanuja, the philosopher who founded a major Vaishnava bhakti sect, accepted caste divisions in some limited form, and even Chaitanya, a much later Bengali Vaishnava leader, failed to do away with them completely.⁸⁰Nammalvar was from a low-caste farming family; all the hagiographies unanimously declared that he was a Shudra.⁸¹ But the Shri Vaishnava Brahmins who claimed him as a founder were aware of the shadow that this ancestry cast on their legitimacy in the Brahmin imaginary and took various measures to minimize the implications of Nammalvar’s low caste. For instance, one hagiographer claimed that the infant Alvar neither ate with nor looked at his family, even refusing the milk of his Shudra mother’s breast,⁸² as any self-respecting Brahmin would refuse the food prepared by someone of a lower caste. One step forward, two steps backward.

THE VIOLENCE OF SOUTH INDIAN BHAKTI

Bhakti, like the ascetic movements, was strong on nonviolence to animals, generally (though not always) opposing animal sacrifice (as the story of Kannappar’s meat offering demonstrates), but it was not so strong on nonviolence to humans. Love, particularly in the form of desire, can be as violent as hate, as the poet Robert Frost said of fire and ice. The ability to demonstrate indifference to physical pain was an intrinsic part of the narrative traditions of both ascetics (mortifying their flesh in various ways) and warriors, like Shibi and Karna, demonstrating their machismo. But the violence of bhakti was not always directed against the self (Kannappar tearing out his own eye) or the god (Cuntarar threatening Shiva with apostasy). Sometimes the violence was for god and, though usually directed against Hindus who refused to worship the god, occasionally in conflict with other religions. The violence inherent in great passion is evident in even the most superficial summary of the acts committed by the Nayanmars in the Periya Purana: One or another engages in violent conflicts with Jainas, attempts or commits suicide (in various ways), chops off his father’s feet or his wife’s hand or a queen’s nose or someone else’s tongue, slashes his own throat, massacres his relatives, grinds up his own elbow, sets his hair on fire, or kills and/or cooks his/her son.

Bhakti sometimes resulted in physical violence from the god toward the worshiper’s family:

CIRUTTONTAR AND THE CURRIED CHILD

A Shaiva ascetic came to Ciruttontar and asked for a little boy to eat, cooked into a curry by the child’s parents. Ciruttontar and his wife cut up their only child, a son, and cooked the curry. When they were about to serve it, the guest insisted first that they, too, share the meal and then that they call their son to join them, too. They called him, and he came running in from outside. The ascetic then revealed his true form, as Shiva, in the form of Bhairava, together with Parvati and his sons. He took Ciruttontar and his whole family to Kailasa.⁸³

This was just a test, of the type that we know from the testing of Yudhishthira and Shibi in the Mahabharata. But it was a gruesome test, even more tragic than the testing of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible (for Ciruttontar’s child was actually killed, though later revived) and even more horrible than the trick played on Thyestes in Greek tragedy (whose enemy served him a meal that was made of his sons, though Thyestes did not know it at the time). As in the cases of Yudhishthira and Shibi and Abraham and Job (though not Thyestes), the tragedy proves illusory or, rather, reversible: Just as Job’s losses are reversed and Abraham’s son is spared at the last minute, Ciruttontar’s child comes back to life unharmed. (In some versions of the Ciruttontar story—the tale is told in Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada—different parts of the child’s body smell of different spices as he comes running in at the end.) But surely the agony at the moment when the parents thought the child had been cooked for them was very real indeed; that too is bhakti: terrible suffering at the hands of a god. In a text from a later and rather different South Indian tradition, the Virashaiva Basava Purana, one of the saints excommunicates Shiva for having forced Ciruttontar to sacrifice his son. That too is bhakti: punishing the god. At the same time, we must not forget the other side of bhakti, the positive emotion of ecstasy, the rapture of being so close to the god.

INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE IN ANCIENT SOUTH INDIA

A poet writing in the eleventh century in Kerala said that in the capital city, “different deities coexisted in peace like wild beasts forgetting their natural animosity in the vicinity of a holy hermitage.”⁸⁴ But at times they remembered.^he

BUDDHISM AND JAINISM

There is a long, sad history of stories of mutual cruelty between Hindus, Buddhists, and Jainas in South India, though there is little evidence that such stories accurately represent actual historical events. The rise of this sort of polemical literature at a time when actual relations between religions were fairly tolerant, on the whole, can perhaps be explained by the fact that Hinduism had to compete, for followers and patrons, with Jainism and Buddhism, both of which were well established in the south well before the time of the Chola ascendancy. ⁸⁵ Jainism was particularly prominent in Karnataka and the Deccan, and Buddhism, from the time of Ashoka, had been firmly established among the Cholas and the Pandyas. The shift from Vedic sacrifice to other forms of temple-based Hinduism, such as sectarian worship in general and bhakti in particular, meant that ordinary people began using their surplus cash to support religious leaders and institutions other than Vedic priests. The competition for their patronage as well as for royal patronage, sometimes friendly rivalry, sometimes not so friendly, often generated tensions that bhakti intensified rather than alleviated, as it gathered force from the ongoing popular resistance to the ascetic and renunciant traditions, within Hinduism but also in Buddhism and Jainism. Even the bhakti caste reforms may be seen, at least in part, as an attempt to preempt much of the Buddhists’ and Jainas’ claim to be a refuge from Brahmin authority and caste prejudice.⁸⁶ By winning over people of all castes, the Hindu Alvars and Nayanmars may have hoped to stem the growth of Buddhism and Jainism in the South.⁸⁷ At times this competition became hostile and broke out in angry rhetoric, especially against Jainas,⁸⁸and in competing propaganda.⁸⁹

The Pallava king Mahendra Varman I (600-630), a Jaina, wrote a Sanskrit comedy, the Farce of the Drunkard’s Games (Mattavilasa-prahasana), about an inebriated Shaiva ascetic who accused a Vaishnava ascetic and a Buddhist monk of stealing the human skull that he used as his begging bowl, a bowl that, they eventually discovered, a stray dog had stolen. The Jainas alone escaped Mahendra’s razor-sharp satire, but that was the only blade he ever used against any religious group. The Shaiva saint Appar, who had been a Jaina ascetic, converted to Shaivism, bitterly attacked Jainas (his former people) and Buddhists, and allegedly converted Mahendra Varman from Jainism. But the Pallavas continued to support Buddhists and Brahmins as well as Jainas.

In other parts of India, from time to time, Hindus, especially Shaivas, took aggressive action against Buddhism. At least two Shaiva kings^hf are reported to have destroyed monasteries and killed monks. The Alvar Tirumankai is said to have robbed a Buddhist monastery, stolen the central image, pounded it into dust, and used the gold for the gopuram at Shrirangam.⁹⁰ Some of the hymns of both the Alvars and the Nayanmars express strong anti-Buddhist and anti-Jaina sentiments. The Tiruvatavurar Purana andTiruvilaiyatal Purana tell this story:

MANIKKAVACAKAR STRIKES THE BUDDHISTS DUMB

Three thousand Buddhist emissaries came from Sri Lanka to the Chola king, who told Manikkavacakar to defeat them in debate and proclaim the truth of the Shaiva doctrine, whereupon he, the king, would eliminate the Buddhists. After the debate, Manikkavacakar appealed to the goddess Sarasvati to keep the Buddhists from profaning the truth, and she struck them all dumb. When the leader of the Buddhists converted to Shaivism, his daughter regained her ability to speak and began to refute the Buddhists, who converted, adopted the costume of Shaivas, and remained in Citamparam.⁹¹

Interreligious debate surely hit a low point at that moment. Only in Bihar and Bengal, because of the patronage of the Pala dynasty and some lesser kings and chiefs, did Buddhist monasteries continue to flourish. Buddhism in eastern India was well on the way to being reabsorbed into Hinduism, the dominant religion, when Arabs invaded the Ganges Valley in the twelfth century. After that there were too few Buddhists left to pose a serious challenge, but Jainism remained to fight for its life, and there are many stories about the torture and persecution of Jaina missionaries and rulers in the Tamil kingdom.

In the seventh century the Shaiva saint Tirujnana Campantar, whom the Jainas (according to the Hindus) had attempted to kill, vanquished (also according to the Hindus) the Jainas not in battle but in a contest of miracles and converted the Pandya ruler from Jainism to Shaivism. The Periya Purana (which narrates several episodes in which Shaivas confound Buddhists as well as Jainas⁹²) tells the story like this:

CAMPANTAR AND THE IMPALED JAINAS

The wicked Jainas, blacker than black, like demons, plotted against Campantar. They set fire to the monastery where he was staying, but Campantar prayed and the fire left the monastery and, instead, attacked the Pandyan king, in the form of a fever. The king said that he would support whichever of the two groups could cure his fever; the Jainas failed, and Campantar cured the king. Then the Jainas proposed that they and Campantar should inscribe the principles of their beliefs on a palm leaf and throw the leaves into a fire; whichever did not burn would be the winner, the true religion. The fire burned up the Jainas’ leaf, but not Campantar’s. Then the Jainas proposed that they subject another pair of palm leaves to a floating test on the Vaikai River at Madurai. And, they added, “If we lose in the third trial, let the king have us impaled on sharpened stakes.” Only the Shaiva texts floated against the current, which washed away the Jaina texts. Eight thousand Jainas impaled themselves upon the stakes.⁹³

The king saw which way the holy wind was blowing and went with Campantar. The story of the three miraculous contests is not generally challenged; it is accepted as hagiography and left at that. But the part about the impalings, which does not defy the laws of nature and has been proposed as history, is much disputed.⁹⁴ Impaling was, as we saw in the tale of Mandavya, a common punishment in ancient India. But while Campantar himself reviles the Jainas in his own poetry, he doesn’t mention the impaling, nor does Appar (usually regarded as slightly older than Campantar), who tells only the story of the three contests, in the early seventh century. References to the impaling begin only centuries later, and this lapse of centuries casts doubt on the historicity of the impaling. Nampi Antar Nampi, in the reign of the Chola king Rajaraja I (985- 1014), refers to it, and it is illustrated in a frieze from the reign of Rajaraja II (1150-1173), in the main shrine of the Shiva temple at Taracuram (south of Kumbhakonam, in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu).⁹⁵ Cekkiyar, the author of the Periya Purana version of the story cited above, was known for his anti-Jaina sentiments.⁹⁶ Parancoti Munivar reworked the story in his Tiruvilayatal Purana, and it is illustrated in paintings in the great tenth-century Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur.⁹⁷ One panel shows Campantar at the left, with the river and the texts upon it; the king and his queen(s) and minister in the middle; the impaled Jainas on the right.⁹⁸ The mass execution of Jainas is carved in frescoes on the wall of the Mandapam of the Golden Lily Tank in the temple of the goddess Minakshi in Madurai.

But there is no evidence that any of this actually happened, other than the story, and that story is told, in the ancient sources, only by the tradition that claims to have committed the violence (the Hindus), not by the tradition of the people whom the story regards as the victims (the Jainas). The only historical fact is that there is a strong tradition among Hindus celebrating their belief (right or wrong) that a Hindu king impaled a number of Jainas, that for centuries, Hindus thought that it was something to brag about and to carve on their temples, and to allude to in their poems. Telling this story both generated tension between the communities and reflected already extant tensions.

There are other stories, on both sides. Inscriptions from the sixteenth-century in Andhra Pradesh record the pride that Virashaiva leaders took in beheading white-robed (shvetambara) Jainas. They are also said to have converted one temple of five Jinas into a five-linga temple to Shiva, the five lingas replacing the five Jinas, and to have subjected other Jaina temples to a similar fate.⁹⁹ An inscription at Ablur in Dharwar praises attacks on Jaina temples in retaliation for Jaina opposition to the worship of Shiva.¹⁰⁰ A dispute is said to have arisen because the Jainas tried to prevent a Shaiva from worshiping his own idol, and in the ensuing quarrel, the Shaivas broke a Jaina idol. When the dispute was brought before the Jaina king Bijjala, he decided in favor of the Shaivas and dismissed the Jainas.¹⁰¹ This crossover judgment of a Jaina king in favor of Hindus is matched by a case from the fourteenth century in which Jainas who were being harassed by one band of Hindus sought protection from another Hindu ruler.¹⁰² Evidently there were rulers on both sides who could be relied upon to transcend the boundaries of any particular sectarian commitment in order to protect pluralism. A ray of light in a dark story.

Indeed, when conflict arose at this time, it was not generally the Shaivas versus the Jainas (let alone the Vaishnavas), but the Pandyas against the Cholas, and both kings might well be Shaivas or, for that matter, Buddhists. From time to time too, Shaivas tore down Shaiva temples, or Vaishnavas Vaishnava temples, looting the temples and hauling the images home.¹⁰³ In other words, as was the case later with the Turkish invasions, warfare had political and economic motives more often than religious ones. Yet the debate between Shaivas and Vaishnavas sometimes became quite heated. Descriptions of intersect discourse are peppered with verbs like “pummel, smash, pulverize,” and, above all, “hate.”¹⁰⁴

CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM

Jainas and Buddhists had been conversation partners, friend or foe, with Hindus since the sixth century BCE. But from the early centuries CE, the Abrahamic religions joined the conversation, first Christianity, then Judaism, and then Islam.

According to the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas (perhaps from the first century CE), the apostles drew lots and the Apostle Judas Thomas, who was a carpenter, got India. When Jesus appeared to him in a vision that night, Thomas said, “Whithersoever Thou wilt, our Lord, send me; only to India I will not go.” Jesus nevertheless eventually indentured him, for twenty pieces of silver, to an Indian merchant, who took him to work on the palace of the ruler of Gandhara, sometime between about 19 and 45 CE.¹⁰⁵ After a second voyage, in 52 CE, Thomas landed in Kerala or Malabar and there established the Syrian Christian community that thrives there today; he then traveled overland to the east coast, where he was martyred in the outskirts of Chennai. As usual, the interchange went in both directions; in exchange for the goods and ideas that the Christians brought to India, they took back, along with Kerala’s pepper and cinnamon, always in demand in Rome, equally palatable stories—elements of Ashvaghosha’s life of the Buddha (in the second century CE), such as the virgin birth and the temptation by the devil—that may have contributed to narratives of the life of Christ.¹⁰⁶

Judaism was there in South India too. We have noted Solomon’s probable Malabar connections, and according to legends, Jews have resided there since the period of the destruction of the Second Temple (c. 70 CE).¹⁰⁷ The earliest surviving evidence of a Jewish presence, however, is a set of copper plates, dated between 970 and 1035 CE, written in Tamil, and referring to the settlement of Jews in a town north of Cochin, on the Malabar Coast in Kerala; the plates grant one Jacob Rabban various privileges, including the rights to hold a ceremonial parasol and to bear weapons.¹⁰⁸The Angadi synagogue, the oldest in India, was built in 1344; a second synagogue was constructed in 1489.

ISLAM AND BHAKTI

Islam too was established on the Malabar Coast during this early period. Arabs came to India before there was such a thing as Islam, trading across the Arabian Sea to India’s southwest coast, to the cities of the Chalukyas and Cheras, and to Sri Lanka. Arab horses were a major item of trade, imported by land in the north and by sea in the south, to the Kerala coast. Shortly after the Prophet’s death, a group of Arabs, whom the Indians called Mapillai (“newly wed grooms” or “sons-in-law”), settled in the northern Malabar area of Kerala; when Arab merchants, newly converted to Islam, arrived there later, they converted many of the Mapillai to Islam, and they have remained there to this day. By the mid-seventh century there were sizable communities of Muslims in most of these ports.¹⁰⁹

Islam thus came to India when the bhakti movement was first developing, long before Islam became a major force in the Delhi Sultanate in the eleventh century CE. These first Muslims had opportunities both to provide positive inspiration and to excite a response in opposition, to interact with South Indian bhakti on the individual and communal level. A text often appended to the tenth-century Vaishnava Bhagavata Purana contains a much-quoted verse that has been used to epitomize the negative relationship between bhakti and Islam. Bhakti herself speaks the verse: “I [Bhakti] was born in Dravida [South India] and grew up in Karnataka. I lived here and there in Maharashtra; and became weak and old in Gujarat. There, during the terrible Kali Age, I was shattered by heretics,^hg and I became weak and old along with my sons. But after reaching Vrindavana I became young and beautiful again.”¹¹⁰ Who are these heretics (pakhandas)?¹¹¹ They may very well be Jainas,¹¹² the traditional enemies of Shaivas in South India, but this is a Vaishnava text and probably northern rather than southern (Vrindavana being the center of pilgrimage for worshipers of Krishna in North India). The “shattering” is not mentioned until Bhakti has moved to North India, to Gujarat (an important Jaina center). Yet the verse has traditionally been interpreted to be referring to Islam, not to Jainism, as the villain of the piece.

At the same time, there were many opportunities for positive interactions between Islam and bhakti in South India. For instance, the idea of “surrender” (prapatti), so important to the Shri Vaishnava tradition of South India, may have been influenced by Islam (the very name of which means “surrender”). More generally, the presence of people of another faith, raising awareness of previously unimagined religious possibilities, may have inspired the spread of these new, more ecstatic forms of Hinduism and predisposed conventional Hindus to accept the more radical teachings of the bhakti poets.

PROSELYTIZING

It is not always appropriate to refer to shifts in religious affiliation, between Buddhism, Jainism, and the Vaishnava and Shaiva bhakti sects, as “conversion”; it is generally better to reserve that term for interactions with religions that have jealous gods, like Islam and Christianity. For ordinary people in ancient South India, religious pluralism was more of a supermarket than a battlefield. Laypeople often gave alms to Buddhist monks or, later, prayed to Sufi saints and still visited Hindu temples. But there were some people who really “converted,” in the sense of reorienting their entire lives in line with a distinctive worldview and renouncing other competing worldviews; these were the relatively small numbers of monks, nuns, or saints, as well as the members of certain philosophical sects and—the case at hand—some of the more fanatical bhaktas.

Though Buddhism and Jainism were proselytizing religions from the start, Hinduism at first was certainly not; a person had to be born a Hindu to be a Hindu. But the renunciant religions and, after them, some of the heterodox, bhakti, and philosophical sects argued that you might be born one sort of a Hindu and become another sort or even that you could be born a Jaina (or, later, a Muslim or a Protestant) and then belong not to some sort of umbrella Hinduism but to a particular ascetic or bhakti sect. And so some of the bhaktas proselytized like mad, and this made them a threat to the other religions in India in ways that Vedic Hinduism had never been. This zealous proselytizing, I think, justifies the use of the word “conversion” in some instances. The possibility of shifting allegiance entirely, from one Hindu sect to another or even to a non-Hindu religion, may be encoded even in the refrain of the god-mocking poem with which this chapter began: “Can’t we find some other god?”

The bhakti authors even mocked their own proselytizing:

SHIVA BECOMES A SHAIVA

A Shaiva saint was a great proselytizer. He converted those of this world by any means whatever—love, money, brute force. One day Shiva came down in disguise to test him, but the devotee did not recognize Shiva and proceeded to convert him, forcing holy ash on the reluctant-seeming god. When his zeal became too oppressive, Shiva tried to tell him who he was, but the baptism of ash was still forced on him. Even Shiva had to become a Shaiva.¹¹³

The violent power of bhakti, which overcame even the god, transfigured the heart of religion in India ever after.