Inventing a Nation: Envisaging Tamilised Saivism in Colonial Tamil Society

Abstract

This study seeks to analyse the complex and contentious relationship between Saivite revivalism and the nationalist aspirations of Tamils during the colonial period in India. One of the versatile faces of Saivite revivalism in modern Tamil society—Maraimalai Adigal, who engaged with the crises of colonial modernity, Brahminical Hinduism and Sanskrit supremacy, is celebrated to have offered nascent nationalist consciousness among non-Brahmin Tamils. Many scholarly works strongly approved his contributions as vital for the modern Tamil society as his passionate exegeses were believed to have laid the foundation for a nation to be imagined by non-Brahmin Tamils. This study disputes such a claim by delineating the inherent supremacy of ascriptive ideology in his Saivite revivalist paradigm. By invoking the conceptual framework of Ernest Gellner, who insisted that a nation is a self-conscious political community where some deep, permanent and profound changes take place in which society is organised. This article seeks to explicate how the contributions of Maraimalai Adigal and his Saivite revivalist fraternity firmly prevented the emergence of a new Tamil society to be organised with a reordered culture as a meta-local homogeneity or of power as a new political community.