South Asian Sovereignty

The Conundrum of Worldly Power

David Gilmartin, Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud, David Gilmartin, Pamela Price, Arild Engelsen Ruud

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000063820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology, and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work. The volume weaves important discussions around sovereignty in modern South Asian history with debates elsewhere on the world map.

South Asia's colonial history – especially India's twentieth-century emergence as the world's largest democracy – has made the subcontinent a critical arena for thinking about how transformations and continuities in conceptions of sovereignty provide a vital frame for tracking shifts in political order. The chapters deal with themes such as sovereignty, kingship, democracy, governance, reason, people, nation, colonialism, rule of law, courts, autonomy, and authority, especially within the context of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in politics, ideology, religion, sociology, history, and political culture, as well as the informed reader interested in South Asian studies.

Part I
Law, religion, and sovereignty in India

1
Sovereign Struggles

Governance and mathas under British imperial rule in South India

Pamela Price

British imperial sovereignty in directly ruled South India was not statically grounded, but was continually under construction in the course of the nineteenth century. Important were processes of engagement and discussion in colonial courts of law. Judicial officers could not take refuge in simple pronouncements from codes and regulations, but were compelled to use discursive reason and moral argumentation in meeting with a wide range of figures from subject communities. Because of the highly segmented nature of these socio-political communities, judicial officers were engaged in the encompassment of local sovereign statuses within the imperial state. The political needs of the state were served because, in the public, adversarial proceedings of litigation, subject institutions suffered the undermining of their appeal among important classes in the population. I have earlier discussed this process with reference to former little kingdoms which engaged in litigation as zamindaries,¹ revenue estates (Price 1996). In this chapter I examine this process with another type of political segment, large domains of Hindu mathas (‘monasteries’).

At the end of the eighteenth century, administrators of the presidency of Madras had to contend with religious chiefs, along with little kings and rural bosses, in competition for political allegiance.² There existed across the presidency network domains of mathas, some controlling thousands of villages, manned by members of spiritual lineages under the leadership of lineage heads, gurus. Widely honoured and respected, matha gurus sat on thrones and the wealthy among them went on elaborate processions with royal insignia. Colonial armies secured the Pax Britannica, but it was in the exercise of colonial moral order that the reframing of renouncer rule would take place. New meanings of renouncer leadership evolved, not in some frozen ‘legal sovereignty’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 296–297), but in sovereign displays of reason in processes involving public sphere elites.

In the course of the nineteenth century, British imperial notions of appropriate management and protection of property coincided neatly with the political undermining of matha domains. Imperial sovereignty was constituted around notions of ‘the rule of law’ (Ocko and Gilmartin 2009), and imperial rule of law found illegitimate certain actions which supported the sovereignty of matha guru heads.³ The maintenance of matha guru status required the personal distribution of matha resources, while the protection of endowment property constituted an important element in the delivery of imperial justice. Thus, guru notions of spiritual sovereignty clashed with imperial beliefs in the proper separation of the religious sphere from worldly property, and matha heads came to be stigmatised as corrupt. This chapter investigates processes through which the constitution of imperial sovereignty involved the discrediting of matha domain rule. I use conflict involving matha heads at the famous pilgrimage site of Tirumala Tirupati Devastanams (TTD) to illustrate my points.⁴ Litigation involving this site attracted wide attention and at the end of the nineteenth century one course of TTD appeal cases, ‘The Hathiramji Mutt case’, as it was called, became the most famous litigation of the day (Ramaswamy Aiyar n.d.: 273).

Imperial rule of law was epitomised in judicial rulings in the Anglo-Indian legal system. In British understanding, imperial judges stood apart from conflicting forces and desires in society and made decisions according to disinterested discourses of reason. The ideal was a vision of ‘justice as equity’ (Mukherjee 2010), fairness administered by an imperial state which could be fair because of its absolutist separation from the governed. In this vision the state operated free from the religious principles of Indian society. The extent to which the judiciary was an arm of the executive in colonial India has, of course, been debated since the nationalist movement. A recent contribution is a study of the Bombay High Court which argues for considerable independence on the part of the judiciary and mutual respect between Indian and British justices (Chandrachud 2015). In Madras Presidency district and appellate court judges appeared to take care in deciding which law and/or usage to apply and in examining evidence offered in court.⁵ Judicial efforts were persuasive, and by the end of the nineteenth century, elites in the public sphere commonly accepted ‘rule of law’ as the proper constitution of state sovereignty. The very existence of law courts in which suits could be and were instigated against officers of the state made a powerful impact on imperial subjects and played a major role in the constitution of imperial sovereignty (Mukherjee 2010: 46–48). Imperial claims to be purveyors of justice held credence when the state provided public forums where displays of discursive reason could result in the humiliation of its own officers.

In this study I focus on an area of colonial litigation in which judges argued in such a way as to support the imperial state against the sovereign influence of heads of Indian mathas. The adjudicators based their arguments on a British understanding of the proper separation of the ‘religious’ from the political which belied the significance of mathas in pre-colonial governance.⁶ Their argumentation appeared disinterested, at the same time as it served the political goals of the imperial state. Because of widespread preoccupation with religious reform among Indian actors in the public sphere in the nineteenth century, judicial decisions critical of matha leadership were commonly perceived as serving social needs.

In this study of processes in the construction and maintenance of imperial sovereignty, then, we find a curious confluence of images of authentic Indian spiritual practice. Ordinary people, it appears, continued to honour and revere guru heads of mathas, while reform-enthused elites accepted the sovereign right of imperial justices to remould guru domain leadership. Cultural and social change conspired to produce collaborators among elite imperial subjects as the Anglo-Indian legal system shaved the prerogatives of spiritual potentates. However, imperial ‘rule of law’ required some give and take between the rulers and their various constituencies, and judicial practitioners moved cautiously.

Mathas were centres of spiritual lineages concerned with sacred learning and worship. They had been associated with the sovereignty of pre-colonial regimes and by early modern South India, some matha heads were the spiritual sovereigns of vast domains. The renouncer heads of mathas were sources of knowledge of dharma (cosmic, moral order) and right practice and had played roles in managing conflicts in early modern South India (see, for example, Prasad [2007: 206]; Vail [1985: 139]). In the nineteenth century, heads of mathas could be ‘religious potentates’ who managed large holdings of agricultural land and were administrators at major temples with extensive landed endowments (Wash-brook 1976: 187).

In imperial courts judges found heads of mathas to be incompetent at best and, more commonly, avaricious and intriguing breakers of the law. Judges held that a matha head, as a renouncer, should be withdrawn from ‘worldly’ concerns. This view was contrary to much matha practic e before the consolidation of British rule, as matha heads and their lineage members administered the affairs of matha domains and served in dispute management. More than that, renouncer gurus were ‘expected to give gifts to devoted persons who approached them’ (Vail 1985: 139). In such redistribution, matha heads purveyed spiritual qualities; they were ‘gracing others with power [shakti]’ (Vail 1985: 140). When matha administrators engaged in the redistribution of resources in the tending of their domains, imperial officials labelled such activities as ‘misappropriation’ or ‘malversation’.

In the imperial understanding of rule of law, besides the protection of persons, the protection of property lay at the basis of justice, and the protection of property was a secular issue. Issues involving property were to be decided, not in terms of religious principles, but according to the defining formula for legal judgement, ‘equity, justice, and good conscience’. Under these circumstances matha heads appeared as embezzlers of matha and temple funds. As imperial sovereignty was constituted and performed, over time the scope of matha heads was contained. Checking the expenditures of matha gurus, officials were enacting the assumed moral superiority of British governance, dealing with Indian institutions of transcendent values presumably gone astray. In 1909, arguing a point of law, the British Chief Justice of the High Court at Madras appears to have made a common observation when he said, ‘The fact [is] that the heads of Mutts have more or less frequently abused their position’ (PC 1920: 69).

In the course of the nineteenth century, actors in the public sphere of the new middle class, including major figures of the Indian legal profession, came to share the imperial view of contemporary matha leadership. Matha heads acquired a poor reputation elsewhere in the subcontinent, as well (see, for example, Sarkar [1997], Kasturi [2009], and Kasturi [2016]). There was less acceptance of the many paths in renunciation which had emerged. Throughout British India, litigation involving mathas contributed to notions which juxtaposed the approach to religion of a reasoned ‘public’ against those who simply followed ‘custom’, including supposedly corrupt forms of practice (Gilmartin 2015: 377).

Heads of mathas in South India were commonly respected by ordinary people (e.g. Mudaliar 1974: 36, 49), but, in the evaluation of public sphere elites, the moral authority of the heads came to be undermined (see, for example, Venkatachalapathy 2012: 31). In courts of law, members of spiritual lineages demeaned each other with accusations of wrongdoing. From the mid-nineteenth century, Indians who were interested in reform of practices and beliefs in worship and sacred study pressured the imperial government to expand its oversight and control of the administrations of mathas and the temples they were associated with.⁷

Theological change and activities of publication in South India were among the results of the meeting with Protestant Christianity. We find this in the careers of major reformers Arumukam Navalar (1822–1879), Ramalinga Swami-gal (1823–1874),⁸ and Mayuram Vetanayakam Pillai (1826–1889) (Ebeling 2010). Publications and public discussion of religious change in general emerged from the 1840s with the career of Arumukam Navalar in Sri Lanka and India. Blackburn observes that Navalar ‘proposed that Saivism be purified by reviving its ancient texts and eliminating later-day corruptions’ (2003: 144). Apart from issues of texts and ritual, reform attention turned to concerns which imperial officials voiced about the administration of temple and matha property. From the 1860s and 1870s petitions, memoranda and addresses appeared in the public sphere arguing that the imperial government should take greater action to protect the endowments of temples and mathas (Mudaliar 1974: 31).

It is one of the paradoxes of imperial rule that Indians became active participants in the formal depoliticisation of institutions of worship and sacred learning, the undermining of spiritual-political authority and scope for action. Members of spiritual lineages instantiated British notions of imperial sovereignty as they took part in processes of competition which were managed in bouts of litigation in the Anglo-Indian legal system. Early in the nineteenth century rivals for authority, status and/or wealth in temples and mathas began to discover imperial preoccupation with the ‘misappropriation’ of religious endowments and sought to undermine their rivals with such accusations.⁹ Such charges were not only the cause of disgrace, but – when ‘proven’ – also could be the basis for removal from a position of authority in a temple or matha. In litigation, interactions among lineage members lay open to public view in novel ways. Court proceedings were public and commented on in newspapers. Judgements were published in organs like the Indian Law Reports and discussed in the Madras Law Journal. Imperial procedures and institutions sought to mould matha heads into an official vision of the meaning of their vocation, one that simultaneously protected the sovereignty of the state. The politics of imperial legal procedures, as matha heads and their rivals adapted to the new dispensation, involved negative representations of the parties in litigation.

Regimes, temples, and mathas

From at least the tenth century in South India, warrior leaders seeking ruling legitimacy endowed worship in temples and acted to manage conflicts in the institutions (Appadurai 1981; Heitzman 1997). Protection of worship in these and other ways was an important constituent of royal sovereignty. In a later political development, ruling houses in early modern South India sought the services of the heads of spiritual lineages and they endowed mathas, places where members of a spiritual lineage lived and where the teaching of the lineage founder might be transmitted. Spiritual lineages produced figures who played important roles in the consolidation of ruling regimes. Under the expanding Vijayanagar empire, for example, heads of spiritual lineages facilitated imperial protection of major temples in conquered areas by organising and managing endowments funding worship (Appadurai 1981: Chapter 2; Stoker 2016). Establishing mathas proved to be a flexible means for the expansion of imperial economic and political control (Stoker 2015). In early modern South India, then, there emerged across South India network domains consisting of large and small mathas, attached to temples, propagating sacred learning, and serving the needs of ruling lords, local and far away. Heads of powerful mathas were beholden only to the heads of major ruling houses¹⁰ and used, themselves, monarchical symbols as part of the representation of their authority, both within mathas and when they went on procession. They headed spiritual domains in polities with strong elements of segmentati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: South Asian sovereignty: the conundrum of worldly power
• PART I Law, religion, and sovereignty in India
• PART II Kingship reconfigured
• PART III The nation and the sovereign imagination
• Afterword: we have other ideas
• Index