Richard S Weiss Recipes for Immortality Healing, Religion, and Community in South India

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.Kamil Zvelebil was right when henoted back in the early 1970s that It is only very recently that the Siddha doc-trine is, so to say, being rehabilitated.as the expression of pure Tamil indig-enous thought, as the Tamil medicine, the Tamil philosophy and so on. 58 This isdue in large part to the modern convergence, under the mantle of Tamil revival-ism, of depictions of the siddhars and contemporary Shaiva Siddhanta.In their122 recipes for immortalityconsideration of the Shaiva nature of the siddhars and their medicine, vaidyasfollow Maraimalai Adigal, probably the most prominent proponent of ShaivaSiddhanta in the twentieth century, who vehemently attacked caste yet took amoderate stance on Hinduism, advocating its reform rather than its destruction.59Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta is a Shaivite philosophical and devotional tradition cen-tered on the Tirumuxai corpus, the Shaiva gamas, and subsequent philosophicalliterature.Shaiva Siddhantins today consider Shiva be the prototypical Tamil god,often citing an Indus Valley seal depicting a figure in a meditative posture as materialproof both that this civilization was a Tamil civilization, and that the worship ofShiva among Tamils dates to thousands of years before the common era.The relationship between the Shaiva Siddhantins and members of Ramasami sSelf-Respect Movement was extremely ambivalent.On the one hand, they wereunified in their opposition to the Congress and in their attacks on brahmans andSanskrit.However, E.V.R. s strident atheism limited close ideological links betweenthe two groups.The Dravidian, the official periodical of the Self-Respect Movement,attacked Maraimalai Adigal as the bedfellow of Hindu brahmans. Theism, faith inGod, Hinduism (both Saivism and Vaishnavism) all belong to the Aryan brahmins.Maraimalai Adikal who supports these is a slave of the Aryans.Only those who sup-port atheism are genuine Tamils. 60 Yet others, usually Shaiva Siddhantins, madeattempts at reconciliation.Thus Ilavalaganar, a student of Maraimalai Adigal, wrote,Saivism is not one iota different from the primary aim of the Self-RespectMovement.The Self-Respect Movement arose to dispel the illusion ofBrahminism from the Tamil people and infuse self-respect into them.Saivism also does the same.The Self-Respect Movement detests theAryan Brahmins.Saivism too doesn t like the Aryan Brahmins onebit.The Self-Respect Movement wishes to uplift the depressed classes.That is also the basic idea of Saivism.The Self-Respect Movement isagainst caste differences among the Tamil people.Saivism too empha-sizes the same point.When there are so many common points, whyshould Saivism and Saivite apostles be deprecated and condemned? 61The two groups did cooperate in certain anti-brahman activities, especially in theirdefense of Tamil when Congress attempted to introduce the mandatory study ofHindi in all schools in the Madras presidency in 1938.62 Shaiva Siddhanta writingsthat celebrated the greatness of Tamil civilization preceded the founding of theSelf-Respect Movement, and Maraimalai Adigal claimed that E.V.R. s movementwas based on Adigal s own views and principles.63 Even so, it is important to notethat the two groups drew from one another in their formulations of Tamil identity,and both asserted that intelligence and rationality were defining qualities of theTamil people.the utopian character of siddha medicine 123Maraimalai Adigal (1876 1950) was born R.S.Vedachalam and later changedhis name to the Tamil equivalent, Maxaimalai A�ika�.64 In his English preface toTami�ar Matam (Religion of the Tamils), Adigal emphasizes the racial and culturaldifferences that divide Indian society.He employs the distinction between Aryanand Dravidian and claims the autochthony of Tamils by bringing together archeo-logical findings with Tamil literature.If Sir John Marshall had had a first hand knowledge of the Tholkap-piam and some other ancient classics of Tamil, he would have easilyshown in corroboration of what he stated as regards the pre-Aryanantiquity of one of the Dravidian languages, that Tamil alone, and notany other as he vaguely affirmed, must have been the language spokenand cultivated by the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Indus valley.Weare now in a position strong and unshakable to correlate with the abovearchaeological evidence, the proofs afforded by the ancient and genuineliterary works of the Tamil language [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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