Earth As Lamp- The Formation of Srivaisnavism and Other Essays

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Friedhelm Hardy offered a strong evolutionary sequence for Tamil Srivaisnavism, seen in the light of meticulous philological analysis of the relevant sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Manipravalam. He provided an entirely new, firm foundation for studies of southern Srivaisnavism. This volume includes illuminating essays on Middle Indic, in various linguistic configurations (in particular, the marvelous study of Apabhramsa and Yogindu); on late-medieval or early-modern Tamil religion, including the world of living Tamil temples, in relation to the classical materials; on a particularly eloquent, autobiographical Marathi text; on central techniques and topics within the self-transforming world of Sanskrit poetry (always in relation to the Prakrits, which Hardy certainly loved and knew from the inside); on Jaina narrative; and so on. These essays have been separated into thematic clusters or sections, each one of them testimony to the truly astonishing richness of Hardy’s interests and knowledge.

Friedhelm Hardy (1943-2004) was the most original and penetrating scholar of the history of Tamil Sri Vaisnavism in his generation. Trained in Indology at Cologne and Oxford, he was the author of a monumental study, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India (Oxford University Press, 1983; Reprint MLBD 2015) and The Religious Culture of India: Power Love and Wisdom (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He was the first to define clearly the specific character of South Indian bhakti as highly emotional and sensual, in profound contrast with earlier forms of Vaisnava devotionalism. Adept in Sanskrit, many forms of Prakrit, Tamil, and Marathi, he was a wide-ranging scholar who offered imaginative syntheses of South Asian religious literature and practice over many centuries.

DAVID SHULMAN is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has specialized in the study of South Indian languages, including Sanskrit, and in the cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the south, with particular emphasis on the late-medieval or early-modern period. He is currently completing a book on Kutiyattam performances.

I first read Fred Hardy's Viraha-bhakti or rather, the doctoral dissertation that eventually became that great book, in 1977, while sitting in the general reading room of the National Library in Jerusalem. In those days, one had to order such a dissertation through Inter-library Loan, a lengthy and laborious process. I will never forget the excitement that I felt when the volume arrived. Here was a work of pioneering scholarship, utterly alike anything that had been written on the Tamil Alvars before. I had read some of the poems in Tamil and most, perhaps all, of the secondary scholarship that was available at that time and that was mostly trivial and, as Hardy himself wrote, obsessed with the question of dating these works but quite incapable of formulating what they might mean. Fred's work took the task of understanding their meaning as the primary goal.

He also, of course, offered a strong evolutionary sequence for Tamil Srivaisnavism, seen in the light of meticulous philological analysis of the relevant sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Manipravalam. This sequence still stands today, fleshed out by Fred's subsequent studies, many of which are included in this volume. Not everyone will agree with the details of his arguments, but no scholar can deny the revolutionary significance of his vision. Fred Hardy provided an entirely new, firm foundation for studies of southern Srivaisnavism, which he knew better than almost anyone else in his generation.

He built his thesis around the critical notion of viraha - separation, absence, longing - as a personal mode of experiencing and knowing God (Fred would not have been averse to the capital G in the context of Srivaisnavism). Absence and separation and the agony they induce were, he argued, both the dominant, privileged theme in the Alvar corpus and the only available path toward some form of connection with a deity who can never be fully internalized, in a stable way, by those who seek him. A frustrating asymmetry characterizes the relations of devotee and deity; the former waits, hopeful but perpetually disappointed, for the latter, who cannot but elude him. This painful waiting is, however, for the devotee a goal to be affirmed in its own right. Human emotions and perceptions are the sadhana, the effective medium of reaching toward God - and in this, south Indian bhakti religion differs radically from the cooler, "intellectual" bhakti of the Bhagavad-gita, as Hardy beautifully showed. Not yogic self-abnegation but human sensual and emotional experience are what one has to work with.

A typological divide separates these two modes of religious experience, and Fred Hardy was the first to see it clearly and give it a name. On one side we have the yoga-based, meditative, conceptually driven, anti-sensual vision of the Gita, on the other, the highly concrete, aestheticized, restless, conflictual, and passionate voices of the Alvars. This second type, first attested in Tamil in the middle of the first millenium, eventually conquered the entire Indian sub-continent. It is this type of emotional relation to the god that we find in homes and temples wherever we go in India, and that underlies the poignant passage Fred quotes from Forster's Passage to India on the first page of his book: "I say to Sri Krishna [this is Godbole speaking], 'Come! come to me only.' The god refuses to come I say to him, 'Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come'."

Hardy offers a sensitive and differentiated picture of this somewhat abstract set of ideas as they appear in the works of the individual Alvar poets. He notes the diversity and the wide range of tones and perceptions. At the same time, he rigorously excludes from his analytical template any attempt to read these poems as allegories of an ethereal spiritual, as opposed to a flesh-and-blood, praxis. The Alvar poems have an aesthetic and poetic integrity that is destroyed by allegoresis - as we find it in the later works of the Srivaisnava Manipravalam commentators. Hardy was, I think, the first to make this aesthetic wholeness clear, setting the poems in their historical and cultural setting as self-sufficient works preceding by centuries the commentators' prismatic views. When I first read his discussion of the erotic verses in Nammalvar, a discussion extended to the Saiva Tirukkavaiyar, I knew at once that he was right - and there was a palpable sense of relief, as happens when one encounters real insight.

Hardy was prepared to formulate the Alvars template in schematic, intellectually coherent, metaphysical terms. The human being who seeks contact with the god is always a limited, conditioned creature. He or she can never contain the plenitude of the god's being and presence. Thus even when the deity comes close, as happens, unpredictably but not so rarely, a residual sense of distance and incompleteness is always there, close to the surface of the devotee's awareness. As Hardy states the matter with reference to Nammalvar, the central point of the Tamil Srivaisnava canon is:

"Empirically no mystic has obtained physical union with Krsna on earth, and theologically Krsna's nature as the Absolute precludes such a union with a contingent being. Thus the I and the you find themselves `separated', which... means that they meet in a manner which does not eliminate the fundamental difference and distance between them." [Viraha-bhakti, 443]

This tension, so severe as to tear the personality of the human devotee into shreds, is also the necessary condition and underlying logic of the powerful aesthetic, sensual, and emotional responses that are immediately evident to anyone who reads these poems.

One longs for god and feels somehow separated from him even at moments of great closeness to him. This idea has a long prehistory in Tamil; the old, Cankam-period love poems also articulate it, making extreme pirivu, separation, the default and universal substratum (natuvunilai) of all our experiences of love. The Alvars have extended the principle to the theological domain, at the same time celebrating it, and its attendant sorrow, as the medium of connection to a dimension of existence that goes beyond our more restricted knowledge and need.

It would, however, be wrong to conclude that Hardy would have wished to apply this scheme in a generalized manner. Each of the Alvars has his or her own set of variations on it, and some, beginning with the very first three, in whom we see the later template in a relatively early and still open-ended form do express the ecstatic wholeness of the meeting between deity and devotee as a possible telos, accessible through artistic media such as poetry and music. Indeed, the somewhat abstracted theological paraphrase of what is, as Hardy clearly saw, a highly nuanced and dynamic emotional range seeking expression in fiery verses may distort the deeper interweaving of the human self and the god-self, the latter repeatedly hiding himself somewhere inside the former. Indeed, without this dizzying braiding of selves we cannot fully understand the accessibility of a connection predicated on viraha or pirivu. There is, in the texts, a recurrent sense that the painful separation in question can also be classed as an overwhelming, perhaps no less painful proximity, though I am not certain that Fred Hardy would have accepted this formulation. In any case, as he has shown with excruciating precision, without viraha there is no text, no language, no self-knowledge, and no god.

**Contents and Sample Pages**