Print, Religion, and Canon in Colonial India: The publication of Ramalinga Adigal'sTiruvarutpa

Abstract

In India in the 1860s, print was becoming the primary medium for the reproduction of religious texts. The accessibility of print, and its ready uptake within a highly stratified and competitive religious landscape, had a significant effect on the ways in which groups contended for textual, and thus spiritual, authority. In 1867, the popular Tamil Shaiva mystic Ramalinga Adigal and his followers published Tiruvarutpa, a book of Ramalinga's poems that would help establish his reputation as a great Shaiva saint. Ramalinga and his disciples chose to publish the work in a form that shared the content and the material features of contemporaneous publications of Tamil classics, thereby claiming a place for his poems alongside the revered Shaiva canon. They showed an acute awareness that it was not solely the content of religious texts, but also the materiality of the printed object in which texts appeared, that sustained assertions for authority. This article argues that leaders on the margins of established centres of religious power in South India sought authority by exploiting the material aspects of print as the new medium of religious canons.

The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript

“…26 See also Bhoi 2005, 77, But one should be cautious not to read back into the 19 th century (provided that the manuscript witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai discussed here date to that period) contemporary practices, inspired by a revivalist or traditionalist approach. In another study, Richard Weiss (2015) argues that in the 1860s, as far as religious texts are concerned, the materiality of the printed object in which such texts appeared sustained assertions for authority. His example is that of the poems of a living author (the Tiruvaruṭpā, a collection of devotional poems by Irāmaliṅka Aṭikaḷ, who lived 1823-1874), not of one transmitted for centuries in manuscript form.…”

On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha Belonging to the Cambridge University Library (Or.2366)

“…But one should be cautious not to read back into the 19 th century (provided that the manuscript witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai discussed here date to that period) contemporary practices, inspired by a revivalist or traditionalist approach. In another study, Richard Weiss (2015) argues that in the 1860s, as far as religious texts are concerned, the materiality of the printed object in which such texts appeared sustained assertions for authority. His example is that of the poems of a living author (the Tiruvaruṭpā, a collection of devotional poems by Irāmaliṅka Aṭikaḷ, who lived 1823-1874), not of one transmitted for centuries in manuscript form.…”