Mysticism, Devotion and the Place of the Erotic in Devotional Expression: Reflections on Andal

Andal

In this blog post I would like to explore the life and poetry of the famous South Indian devotee-poetess Andal. The intense emotionalism and highly charged eroticism of her poetry has exercised a profound influence on the religious, devotional and artistic imagination and self-understanding of South Indian Hinduism. Moreover, whether in her role as an exemplary devotee or goddess, Andal continues to evoke and inspire devotion in the hearts and minds of the faithful. The hagiographical narratives that developed following her death reveal the complex and at times deeply creative ways in which succeeding theologians sought to make sense of the poetess’ life, poetry and unique devotional self-expression. As the hagiographical corpus on Andal developed, the poetess was made to undergo numerous transitions and transformations. By studying the development of the Andal narratives we can track the multiple trajectories entailed in Andal’s transformation from poet to saint to goddess; here though I am not so interested in the ontological implications of Andal’s eventual apotheosis- my objective here is to study the various roles that Andal assumes in the self-understanding of the Sri Vaishnava community.

The ambiguity inherent in Andal’s position seems to me to speak to not only the remarkable polyvalence of her poetry but also to the tremendously protean nature of her religious experience. This is not to suggest that Andal’s mysticism is of a particularly unstructured variety (after all, all mysticisms are by definition fluid and at least to some extent unstructured) but only to point out that the various guises that Andal employs in her devotional self-expression reflect in some important ways the various roles that her tradition have subsequently assigned her. In other words, when Andal speaks of the intense suffering that she experiences as a result of her separation from God, she speaks as an intimate devotee of the Lord. When she speaks of the felicity that her passionate union with the Lord engenders, she speaks as the Lord’s consort. Equally however, when Andal speaks of the nature of devotion to God, the means by which to achieve the Lord (etc) she speaks as a saint par excellence. All of these patterns of mysticism structure Andal’s poetry; Andal embraces all of these roles but as the hagiographical corpus devoted to her demonstrate, theologians following her chose to emphasise or privilege one role over another. This privileging process, of course, is fascinating since it reveals the complex dynamics at play in a religious community’s attempt to situate or position an influential religious figure in the broader tradition.

Andal’s deeply idiosyncratic life, the emotionalism of her poetry and the intensely erotic tenor of her devotional outpourings all combine to make the poetess a fascinating subject of study and reflection; I should, however, admit to a personal interest in my subject. I have been deeply attached to the poetry of Andal ever since I first encountered it almost a year ago. The path-breaking poetry of Andal forces us, in my view, to confront the widely held but all-too-often infrequently explored presuppositions that inform our understandings of, among other things, devotion, mysticism and the place of the erotic in devotional self-expression. Moreover, the subversive nature of Andal’s life reveal more generally the complex ways in which devotees are often required to negotiate the deeply entrenched social orthodoxies of their milieu in their attempt to express themselves devotionally; this tension between devotionalism and orthodoxy that Andal’s life does an important job of illuminating is in many respects a perennial one that finds expression in all of the major theistically-oriented world religions- I hope to be able to explore the issue in more depth as the post progresses.

Introductory remarks aside, let us now move on to consider Andal’s life in a bit more detail. Before we do so, however, it is important to point out that according to the religious imagination and theological self-understanding of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, Andal and her poetry are not self-standing. As many scholars on Hinduism know, devotional poets were often coopted by religious traditions and communities in an attempt to bolster their own legitimacy and self-standing within the wider community. The religiously competitive and deeply pluralistic nature of Indian society meant that religious communities depended not just on political patronage for their sustenance and development but equally, and perhaps more importantly, on the possession of charismatic or influential figures capable of inspiring commitment and devotion to tradition. Andal doesn’t quite fit into this pattern of religious formation. The sort of co-opting and contrived affiliation that we see with other poets doesn’t seem to have happened with Andal. In order to flesh out Andal’s positioning within the wider community of the Alvars, a few words need to be said about the background of the Alvars and Andal’s place among them.

The Alvars were a tremendously influential group of poet-saints who composed poetry in praise of their beloved Deity, Vishnu (in any one of his innumerable forms). [The word Alvar derives from the Tamil root Al ‘deep’ and the term Alvar ‘one who is immersed in the love of God’ was employed by the Sri Vaishnava community to refer to the twelve poet-saints- See Carman and Narayanan’s ‘The Tamil Veda’.] Unlike the sacred hymns of the Vedas and their corollaries, however, the Alvars wrote and sung in the vernacular. The vernacularization of devotion across the pan-Indian landscape has been the subject of detailed academic study but the important point to note for our purposes is that the Alvars were very much the progenitors of this tradition. This vernacularization of devotion and the bhakti movement that it gave rise to was to have an indelible impact upon the pan-Indian religious landscape. The notion that devotion could be expressed in the mother-tongue, ‘a language continuous with the language of one’s earliest childhood and family, one’s local and folk lore’, and not just in the religious lingua franca of the time (Sanskrit) transformed the nature of religious devotion in the subcontinent and gave rise to an intermingling of cultures and languages, vocabularies and themes whose effects we continue to experience quite palpably today. The Tamil hymns of the Alvar poet-saints (known as the Nalayira Divya Prabhandam) came to be seen by the Sri Vaishnava community as of equal revelatory significance to that of the Sanskrit Vedas. The two-fold Vedanta (Ubhaya Vedanta) that this gave rise to was a tremendously important innovation that was to distinguish the Sri Vaishnava community from its counterparts across the Indian religious landscape. There is much that can be said about the attribution of Vedic authority to the hymns of the Alvars. As interesting as that discussion may be, I don’t want to get into it now. Let us, instead, move on to consider Andal’s place within the Alvar lineage.

Of the twelve Alvars, Andal was the only woman. Later hagiographical developments, however, were to problematize Andal’s positioning within the Alvar lineage. Notwithstanding the vital role that her poetry played (and continues to play) in the religious and ritual imagination of the Sri Vaishnava community, Andal’s eventual apotheosis meant that she had, in some sense, transcended her Alvar affiliation in ways that other Alvars had not. Notwithstanding the ambiguous if also contested nature of Andal’s place within the Alvar lineage, Andal was, historically at least, very much an important part of the devotional milieu of the Tamil bhakti poets. Her poetical compositions display the same intimate familiarity with the conventions of secular Tamil poetry that characterize the Divya Prabhandam as a whole. Moreover, her exclusive devotional focus on Vishnu and the manner in which she expresses her devotion to the Lord’s iconic incarnations (so characteristic a feature of Alvar poetry) very much makes her a part of the Tamil bhakti movement.

Much of what we know of Andal comes to us from two important documentary sources: the Guruparamparaprabhavam 6000 or the ‘6000 Verses on the Splendor of the Succession of the Gurus’ (composed by Pinpalakiya Perumal Jiyar) and the Divyasuricaritam of Garudavahana Pandit. The hagiographical nature of both texts means that it is very difficult to construct a historically verifiable account of the poet’s life. However since my interest here is less in the historicity of Andal and more so on her place in the religious and ritual imagination of the community, this isn’t a problem. The following account of Andal’s life presents the key components of her life story as it is remembered in the Sri Vaishnava tradition.

Born probably in around the 8^th century in Sri Villiputtur, Andal as an infant was found in the flower (Tulasi) garden of Periyalvar (who was himself an Alvar) and was raised and brought up by the latter with great love and paternal affection. As a precocious child, Andal developed an intense yearning to marry God and to live with him in deep, lasting union. Her father, Periyalvar, was responsible for making the flower garlands for ritual offering to the presiding deity of the Sri Villiputtur temple, Lord Visnu. However, unbeknownst to her father, every morning, in a playful enactment of her fantasy as Visnu’s bride, Andal would wear the sacred flower garland that was meant exclusively for the Lord’s pleasure. One morning however, her father ‘caught her in the act, chastised her for the ritual transgression, and refrained from offering the polluted garland to the deity in the local temple.’ However, to his astonishment, Visnu appeared in a dream that night to Periyalvar and made clear his displeasure at not being offered Andal’s worn and used garland. [This famous episode, which forms the centerpiece of most Andal narratives, earned the poet the famous epithet cutikotuttanacciyar (meaning the ‘lady who gave what she had worn’)] The revelation notwithstanding, Periyalvar remained oblivious to his daughter’s increasingly intense desire to achieve union with the Lord. As Andal reached marriageable age, Periyalvar’s mind naturally turned to the issue of his daughter’s marriage: Andal, however, would have none of it. She vociferously ‘rejected the idea of marriage with a mere mortal: her womanhood was to be dedicated to none other than Visnu. According to the hagiographies, it was at this time that Andal produced her famous poetical compositions: the Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. I will explore both of these compositions in greater detail as the post progresses.

Before I progress with Andal’s life story, it is important to say a few words about the notion of iconic-incarnation as it is understood in the Sri Vaishnava tradition, especially since the former forms an important part of the narrative focus of Andal’s life. According to Sri Vaishnava theology, the Supreme Lord makes himself tangibly present in various iconic-incarnations in response to the requests of his most intimate devotees. These famous iconic-incarnations are considered to be real, embodied manifestations of the Deity: they express and concretize God’s redemptive power and grace and speak to the extent to which the Lord can go to make himself accessible to his devotees. In fact these iconic incarnations are regarded as the ultimate in God’s descent, entailing as they do the apparent diminishment of the Lord to a level even lower than that of his devotees. The particular sites of these divine manifestations are especially sacred to the Sri Vaishnava tradition and are known by the name ‘divya desams’ (literally, divine abodes). These forms of the Lord have their own interesting personal histories that are invariably related to either the more famous pan-Indian Hindu epic narratives or to more sectarian Sri Vaishnava tales. Much, much more could be written about the theology underpinning the devotional notion of iconic-incarnation (or archa-avatara) but for our purposes, this much is enough (of course, I should also point out that I have written an earlier blog post on the topic of image worship in Hinduism and so readers interested in the subject are advised to consult that post).

As Andal’s days passed in increasing absorption in her beloved Lord, Periyalvar’s understanding of his daughter’s predicament developed. He inquired from her as to which form of the Lord she particularly desired. In response to his daughter’s request, Periyalvar sung of the glory and deeds of the Lord in each of his forms. As Andal listened rapturously, her love for the Lord of Sri Rangam (one of the most famous iconic-incarnations) intensified. Andal’s resolute commitment to Ranganatha (the Lord of Sri Rangam) concerned Periyalvar who became increasingly anxious about his daughter’s future. However, gracious as he is, the Lord appeared (yet again) in a dream to Peryialvar, assuaging the father’s deep concern and assuring him that he would accept Andal as his bride. The hagiographies indicate that the Lord himself arranged for Andal to be brought from Sri Villiputur to Sri Rangam for the sacred marriage. Indeed, it is said that when the bridal procession eventually arrived at the sanctum of Ranganatha, Andal emerged from the palanquin and after embracing the feet of her beloved Lord, merged into the divine iconic-incarnation. Her union with the Lord, after much agony and anguish, had been finally consummated.

Now, what are we to make of this wonderful story? The question of the historicity of the events related above are not my concern here; indeed, the only real historical evidence that we have regarding the life of Andal is the internal evidence of her poems. In terms of their historical content, these poems do not give us much to work with. However, in terms of their theological and mystical content, these poems constitute a veritable repository of devotional themes and motifs that help illuminate Andal’s (and by extension, the Sri Vaishnava tradition’s) understanding of devotion, separation from and union with God, and the place of the erotic in devotional expression. Before I go on to reflect more deeply on Andal’s mysticism, let us take a closer look at the main themes of her two poems, the Tiruppavai and the Nacciyar Tirumoli.

Andal’s Tiruppavai occupies an incredibly important role in the ritual and theological imagination of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. As its title (pavai) indicates, the poem is structured on and around a famous religious rite (vrta) observed in South India (but also across certain sections of North India) by aspiring brides during the sacred autumnal month of Margasirsa. The purpose of the rite is to secure for the aspiring bride an ideal husband. The Tiruppavai is, if you like, Andal’s own imaginative reenactment of the rite in which she herself becomes a participant in the ritual. Of course, here though, her desire is not so much to secure an ideal (mortal) husband, as it is to secure the Lord himself as her groom. As an aside, it should be pointed out that the pavai ritual is featured in the Bhagavata Purana as well, all be in it in a slightly different form. There the cowherd maidens (gopis) construct and propitiate Katyayani’s sand image on the banks of the sacred Yamuna river. The pavai ritual’s defining moment, as it were, is the predawn ritual communal bathing that precedes the propitiation proper. All of the ritual motifs that are present in Andal’s pavai reenactment are rich with symbolic and theological meaning; these are brought out expertly in the commentaries that were written on the text. Dissecting the poem here would render this blog post inordinately lengthy but in my subsequent posts I hope to be able to go through each stanza of the poem in more detail, looking closely at the way the poem features liturgically and theologically in the imagination of the Sri Vaishnava tradition.

Andal’s poetry forces us to confront the question of the use of the erotic in devotional expression. Before we dive deeper into Andal’s idiosyncratic use of erotic imagery in her poetry, it would be useful to abstract from Andal’s particular context a little and say something more generally about the issues at hand. The devotional use of the erotic sentiment is of course, not a distinctly Hindu phenomenon. Every major theistically oriented world religion contains within itself certain traditions or mystics who have taken recourse to erotic imagery in their articulation of the relationship between God and man. I think that the reason why sexual imagery features so prominently in such articulations is because it is, in some sense, the most effective means by which to articulate something of the passion and intensity that is entailed in a deeply intimate union with God.

When poets and theologians speak and write of ‘transcendental issues’ they employ secular vocabularies, idioms and themes that are broadly well understood among the laity- to shed light on the unfamiliar we take recourse to the familiar. This is how we make intelligible issues that are otherwise overly esoteric in their scope and comprehension. I think that something very similar happens in the poetry of the great mystics. Their task is to invite us all to share with them the deep and profound religious experiences that animate and sustain their lives. But of course the more intimate and esoteric one’s relationship with God the more ineffable it becomes- ineffability, however, is a problem for those who wish to say something about the nature and the depth of their religious experiences. So what do they do? Well, [many of them] they take recourse to the erotic imagery of our world because that comes closest to approximating something of the intensity, passion and deep and enduring intimacy that characterize their relationship to God.

Think for example of the use of alcohol or wine in the poetry of the Sufi saints. They find themselves so deeply immersed in God that they wish to express something of that experience. But how do you go about doing that. This is where the metaphor of intoxication becomes important. To help those of us who lack intuitive insight into the divine reality and the effects of ‘drowning in it’, the Sufi mystics employ the imagery of alcohol and intoxication since it helps to convey, didactically at least, something of what is involved in the experience of monistic union with (or in) God. It is also what helps to explain, for example, Omar Khayyam’s remarkable statement in his Rubaiyat: ‘I will leave all reason and religion behind, and take the maidenhead of wine for mine’. Or better still: ‘Piety and moral goodness have naught to do with ecstasy; stain your prayer rug with wine! (Hafiz)’.

Looks can, of course, be deceiving. It is vitally important not to lose sight of the fact that there are profound philosophical strategies at play in the poems and other such compositions of the great mystics. I want to telescope back into the Indian traditions in this part of my discussion since it is the area that I am most familiar with. Moreover, even though my preceding two paragraphs focus generally on the employment and use of secular themes and imageries in devotional expression, let me move this discussion back into the primary subject matter of this blog post: the use particularly of the erotic in devotion.

The non-carnal nature of the erotic themes that we find, for example, in the poems of Andal, is best brought out by reflecting theologically and philosophically on the role that love for God plays in the theology of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. According to Sri Vaishnava theology, the individual soul is utterly and existentially dependent on God; this relationship of dependence that obtains between the individual soul and God indicates that the former exists solely for the pleasure of the latter. Why is it that in so many of their poems, the Alvars conceive of themselves as consorts of God? Well, the ‘consort-hood’ concept, I would argue, brings out important themes that critically underpin the devotional experience involved in relating to God as a servant. For example, the notion of being absolutely dependent on God, of being firm in the decision to serve none but God and the conviction that God is the most enjoyable object of devotion and love are all effectively personified in the consorthood concept; and yet all equally signify the defining characteristics of the experience of ‘servitude to God’. In other words, what I am trying to say here is that assuming the guise of a consort of God acts as a particularly effective means by which to draw attention to the defining characteristics of our relationship with God. What appears to be a poetic device then becomes on closer inspection an incredibly effective theological strategy that it enables the poet to speak meaningfully (if also didactically) about the experience of God. The conjugality of the poems, then, function as symbols that are expressive of the deep, mutual and passionate attachment that the individual soul has for God.

For the sake of clarification let me be clear that I am not suggesting that poets like Andal are best understood as theological strategists, creatively and intentionally crafting poems that work didactically for the benefit of the religious community of which they are a part. Andal’s poetry is, in the first instance, a spontaneous expression of her deep, intimate love for God. There is, I would argue, little that is calculated about the way she sings or expresses herself. However, her employment of certain guises or ritual motifs are best understood when the theological parameters that implicitly structure her poetry (and her tradition’s understanding of her poetry] are made clear and explicit. This requires a detailed analysis of the ways in which Andal’s poetry makes use or relies upon theological assumptions that inform devotional expression more generally in the Indian religious context.

As a starting point, it needs to be pointed out that Andal’s yearning for the Lord, which in her poetry tends to be expressed in overtly erotic vocabulary, represents, more theologically, an estranged soul’s longing for reunion with the Lord. This intense yearning and longing that Andal experiences is expressed in deeply poignant fashion in her Nacciyar Tirumoli, a poetic composition of 143 verses wherein Andal, in the guise of a gopi in love with Krishna, implores the Lord to consummate her desire for union with him. In a remarkably touching passage, Andal declares, again, in deeply erotic language, the complete offering of herself to God: ‘My voluptuous breasts swell for that lord alone. [If there is even talk of offering my body to mortal men, then I cannot live. It is equal in violence to a forest jackal stealthily entering and sniffing at the sacrificial food the learned Brahmins [] offer the gods in heaven.] Andal’s breasts here symbolize the poet’s femininity or womanhood: it is this that she has offered to her Lord. In other words, here Andal offers her most intimate possession, the attribute that arguably defines the most, to God, thereby affirming that she exists solely for the Lord’s pleasure and not for the use or pleasure of ‘mortal men’.

While experiencing anguish born out of separation from the Lord, Andal often seeks to convey her feelings of grief through birds and objects of nature as messengers. This of course is a poetical strategy quite common to the kavya genre of Indian literature; Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, for example, is arguably one of the finest examples of that rhetorical strategy at work. According to tradition, however, these various objects employed by Andal and other such Alvars represent the spiritual preceptors who act as mediators in between God and the individual soul. These preceptors assist the faithful by pleading on their behalf to secure divine grace.

In the preceding paragraphs I sought to demonstrate, if only very briefly, the myriad ways in which theistic mysticisms are structured. Interestingly, Andal’s mysticism is distinguished from that of other Alvars since the former did not need to adopt the voice of the lover of God: she was the lover of God. Again this goes back to the theological self-understanding of Andal within the Sri Vaishnava tradition: as an avatara or incarnation of Bhudevi, Andal’s relationship with the lord is the relationship towards which all devotees aspire, it is, to put it another way, representative of the ontological relationship that all individuals have with God.

Earlier I alluded to the tensions that often exist between devotion and social orthodoxy. The question can be raised, to what extent (if any at all) is Andal’s mysticism of socio-political consequence? This brings me back to the various hagiographical developments that Andal was made to undergo. As her hagiographies developed, Andal was transmogrified into an ideal mystic; the ‘idealism’ of her mysticism and her dual status as mystic-goddess essentially meant that her poetry was prevented from being construed in socio-political terms. The domestication of Andal in the process of universalizing her importance is expressed brilliantly by Vasudha Narayanan:

‘Every Sri Vaishnava bride is dressed like Andal and during wedding rituals, a particular set of songs in which Andal describes her dream in which she gets married to Lord Vishnu is recited. In one sense, the human bride is likened to Andal; but the theological explanation is that all human beings- the bride, the bridegroom, and the guests- ought to be like Andal, all devotees of the Lord. While this theme of Andal as paradigmatic devotee is unquestioned, it seems to me that the Sri Vaishnava community subscribes only to selective imitation of certain features of Andal’s life. What is important to note here is that the community has avoided the issue of making Andal a social or dharmic role model, and has instead opted to make her a theological model or model of one who seeks moksha; she then becomes a model for all human beings. Thus, the Sri Vaishnava community, does not encourage young girls to socially imitate Andal’s life; that is, girls are not encouraged to be unmarried and dedicate their lives to the Lord. Andal’s rejection of marriage and her subsequent union with the Lord is seen as a unique event and as suitable only for her’.

Book Review: Righteous Republic; The Political Foundations of Modern India

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India

By Ananya Vapeyi

Vajpeyi’s ‘Righteous Republic’ is a challenging, but extremely rewarding read and an important contribution to the growing body of Indian intellectual scholarship. The book has as its primary aim the explication of the term ‘swaraj’ or self-rule. In critiquing both past and present scholarship in the area, Vajpeyi argues that scholars have focused inordinately on what the concept of political sovereignty entailed for India’s founding fathers without paying sufficient attention to the first portion of the term, namely the self. How exactly did India’s leading nationalist thinkers conceive of the relationship between self and sovereignty? What did the swa in swa-raj mean to them and how did they go about conferring content on that term? These are hugely important questions but have, as the author persuasively argues, been inadequately addressed in much of the literature on India’s intellectual history. In reading the search for the self through India’s founders, Vajpeyi focuses on five thinkers: Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore.

The author argues that the search for the self ‘took the form of an attempt to recover a line of moral inquiry from a welter of Indian traditions’. Vajpeyi suggests that traditions are text-centric; that is to say, texts constitute the building blocks of tradition. This characterization of traditions as text-centric may come across to some readers as inordinately parochial buts its persuasiveness as a characterization need not detain us here- what is important is that once Vajpeyi characterizes traditions in the way that she does, she can then proceed to argue that the best or most insightful way of tracing the founders’ search for self is to examine the manner in which they engaged with particular Indic texts of premodernity. Vajpeyi writes: ‘Rather than trying to figure out where the five founders stood with regard to the idea of “Tradition” as such, I examine particular intellectual engagements with traditional texts that each one undertook, and bring out the categories of selfhood that emerged from these acts of interpretation’.

So what are these texts that India’s founders are said to have engaged with in their attempt to search for the self- the self whose political sovereignty they all struggled to reinstate. Vajpeyi argues that Gandhi’s search for the self is brought out most clearly and compellingly in his engagement with the Bhagavad Gita; Nehru’s search is clarified by looking at his engagement with the texts and artifacts of the Mauryan Empire. Kalidasa’s Meghadhuta is the relevant text for Rabindranath, Abanindranath’s search is reflected in his conceptualization of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal and finally; Ambedkar’s agonizing search for the self is best explicated by examining his engagement with the classical texts of Buddhism.

The claim that the political foundations of modern India derived from classical and historical Indian intellectual traditions is not a new one; the beauty and importance of Vajpeyi’s book, however, lies in its meticulous explication of the ways in and terms on which which India’s founders engaged with the rich knowledge traditions of their past. In fashioning a sense of Indian selfhood, these leading thinkers utilized the vocabularies, themes and concepts embedded in the text-rich traditions of India’s past, employing them in inventive ways to address problems that those traditions had probably not envisaged themselves. The founders engagement with Indian texts of premodernity and their employment of indigenous conceptual categories and idioms to deal with the ‘crisis of the self’ and the issue of political sovereignty enabled them collectively to formulate their values and visions in ways that were intelligible to the Indian masses who although themselves participants in the swaraj project lacked the resources by which to articulate the precise nature of their existential predicament.

Vajpeyi’s book is a thoroughgoing attempt to demonstrate the ways in which India’s rich intellectual, aesthetic and moral heritage influenced the Indian founders collective search for selfhood. In this attempt, the book succeeds masterfully.

Book Review: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea; The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

Austerity: The History of Dangerous Idea

By Mark Blyth

 

Blyth’s ‘Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea’ is a tremendously well-researched and well-written critique of austerity and the assortment of political and economic policies that it inevitably gives rise to. Blyth’s central thesis is that austerity is a dangerous idea since it is riddled with all sorts of internal contradictions and is easily prone to misapplication in practice. Moreover, he argues persuasively that, in its real-world application, austerity imposes a disproportionate burden on poorer households. The book itself is structured into three parts. In its first section, the book examines the current economic crises and fleshes out their causes and consequences. In so doing, Blyth provides us with a perspicuous account of recent economic history, which in turn enables us to better understand our current economic climate. Without going into the economics of the section, Blyth exposes the deeply mischievous manner in which ‘austerians’ have marketed what was essentially a private banking crisis into a sovereign crisis, insinuating ingeniously thereby that profligate national governments are to blame for our economic problems and not the financial elite who are as a result exonerated from the more serious wrong doing. In the second section of the book, Blyth reviews the intellectual history of the Austerity idea, from the Enlightenment to the present, and examines various historical attempts at its employment, concluding in the end that austerity economics have invariably failed to deliver by way of increased economic growth and increased competitiveness. In the final section of the book, Blyth, by way of conjecture, considers what would have happened if governments had not embraced the austerity agenda and concludes the book by offering his own proposals on how the economy and the financial sector in particular could be better managed. All in all, this is a fantastic book, lucid in style, trenchant in its analysis and persuasive in its critique.

 

The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills

By David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu

‘The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills’ is a powerful and persuasive critique of governmental attempts to curb fiscal expenditure in an attempt to enhance economic growth and reduce public debt. The book’s central aim is to shed greater light on the human and health costs of austerity politics and economics. The authors argue that healthcare spending, when carried out productively and wisely, can strengthen national economies and heighten national well-being. Countenancing their arguments and undergirding their thesis is an impressive and meticulous body of research which establishes, quite conclusively, that the higher the dose in which austerity was administered in a country, the more people died or deteriorated health-wise. Relying on their findings, Stuckler and Basu point out that countries, which have suffered recessions but yet have continued to maintain governmental spending on health care have managed to avoid deterioration in their citizens’ well-being. Notwithstanding the frequent recourse to statistics in the book, the authors have managed to produce, to their credit, an eminently readable book that is rich in analysis and insight but thankfully un-polemical in its tenor.

The Sacred Image in Hindu Religious Thought

The ritual worship of sacred images occupies a central role in the religious practice of many of Hinduism’s devotionally-oriented traditions. Indeed, Hinduism’s rich and diverse iconography often distinguishes it from other great world religions, who, notwithstanding certain exceptions, tend to view the practice of image-worship with severe disapproval. These latter traditions have often conceived, thought and spoken of image-worship in largely denunciatory terms seeing it, for example, as a theologically ill-informed departure from ideal norms of devotional conduct. The practice was also attacked for the metaphysical connotations it seemed to engender: it was argued that portraying God in an image was to suggest that God could be described or defined; to do so however was to imply an unthinkable limitation on the part of God.

My intention in this post is not to study these critiques in any great detail but simply to bring to light the ways in which these critiques are themselves sustained by certain assumptions and metaphysical positions that cannot be said to be of universal applicability. I would like to suggest that these critiques derive their cogency, in part at least, by operating within or by reference to certain ontological and/or metaphysical theories that end up shaping the way discourse around the issue of image worship is expressed or conducted within those respective traditions. If what I am suggesting is true then, it seems to me, a number of implications follow. First, it suggests that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Second, and more pertinently for the purposes of this post, it indicates that understanding the practice of image-worship requires an intimate understanding of the ways in which that practice is informed by and operates within the cultural matrices of that particular tradition. The job of the theologian, then, is to render transparent or intelligible the cultural matrices that shape and inform a particular set of religious practices.

Many of the ideas and arguments that I express in this piece are developed and expressed far more systematically by Peter Bennett in a tremendously insightful article that he wrote for the Journal of Vaisnava Studies many years ago. (I would be more than happy to provide access to Bennett’s piece for those readers so interested). He alerted readers at the outset of his piece to a simple but all-too-often forgotten point about the nature of religious practice and its relationship to conceptual orientations more generally and urged readers to remember that ‘attitudes towards divine images are inextricably bound up with ideas about the universe held by their worshippers’. As such, ‘the philosophical premises underlying the relationship between humankind, the world and the divine, [in Indian religious traditions] are fundamentally different from those of the Near-Eastern monotheistic traditions [and so] it is all too easy to misunderstand devotees’ statements about their beliefs if they are interpreted using categories borrowed from alien systems of thought.’

To understand the ways in which attitudes towards divine images are shaped by a (potentially prior) commitment to a set of cultural or philosophical assumptions, a study of the status of sacred objects in Western thought is vital. Bennett argues that sacred objects in the West (and certainly in the East as well) have been conceptualized in terms of their communicatory potential: they straddle the boundary between the human and the divine and thereby create the means by which communication between the two realms can be effectuated. Importantly, this agent of communicatory potential is ‘revered not for itself, but for the entity for which it stands’. In this sense, Hindu devotional traditions differ in their conceptualizations of the sacred image insofar as they are far more likely to describe their sacred images as being actual manifestations of the Deity. In this sense then, and this is an important issue to which I shall return, discoursing about sacred images in ways that maintain a strict categorical distinction between the image and the Deity seriously misrepresents the nature and significance of the image in as it is conceived in such traditions. 

The deeply ambiguous manner in which sacred objects have been regarded or conceptualized in Western thought can be brought out somewhat effectively by examining, if only very briefly, the theological debates that took place in the later patristic period in the Eastern Byzantine Church. The image or ‘icon’ was understood by the Eastern Church as capable of acting as a window through which the devotee could catch a more intimate glimpse of the divine realm than would otherwise be possible. However, a faction known aptly as the ‘iconoclasts’ spoke and wrote derisively of the practice, condemning it for its role in seeking to juxtapose the sacred to the profane. Those defending the practice, however, often did so on explicitly theological grounds. The grounds they sought to rely on were many but one of the more cogent set of arguments they used to countenance the practice relied for its efficacy on ‘incarnational logic’, the same sort that was used to explicate Christ’s position in earlier Christological debates. A particularly compelling example of the use of such arguments is best provided by the important eighth century thinker, John of Damascus. John of Damascus argued that the theological fact of the incarnation of Christ provided a powerful foundation for the employment of images and icons in religious and devotional practice. In defending the use of sacred images for liturgical and devotional purposes, John employed a unique incarnational approach, asking first where the impropriety lay in using physical materials to depict or convey divine truth. The use of physical materials to depict divine truth cannot itself be the problem, surely, John argued: after all, bibles used paper and ink (material substances no less) to depict divine truth. Moreover, Christ himself died on a wooden cross to save the world- in which case, material objects were themselves implicated in the salvation of the world. Indeed, Christ’s incarnation itself was the greatest and most forceful expression of the immaterial assuming material form. And, of course, notwithstanding their transubstantiated status, were not the bread and the wine physical substances, and yet capable of mediating divine truth through their employment in the Eucharistic Sacrament. John argued that the same logic, therefore, applied to the use of icons: notwithstanding their materiality, they were capable of conveying divine truth and therefore to proscribe their use in devotional expression would be to preclude an important way of apprehending the divine world. As an aside, this recourse to incarnational logic to countenance the practice of image worship is mightily fascinating since it resembles the approach adopted by the Sri Vaisnava tradition in their attempt to develop a theology of the sacred image.

What the aforementioned discussion does, I hope, is to alert readers to the type and sort of vocabulary and grammar employed in talking about sacred images in devotional worship in the West. I am going to argue that the sort of assumptions and underlying principles that engender the use of such vocabulary are in certain important respects foreign to the cultural matrices that shape and inform image worship in Hindu devotional traditions. In other words, the monotheistic, dualistic tendencies that inform the interpretation of sacred objects in the West are ‘less than useful as they stand for understanding the internal dynamics of Indian beliefs and practices.’ In a remarkably perspicacious passage on this issue, Bennett writes: ‘In contexts where the subject and object of worship are not opposed in a binary way, but are seen as manifestations of the same entity, then the appropriateness of dualistic analysis is open to question for it tends to place an undue emphasis on categorical dichotomies at the expense of understanding categorical overlapping, merging, and ultimate categorical identity.’

Conceptualizing the sacred image exclusively in terms of its communicatory or mediatory potential overlooks the sense in which for some Hindu traditions, the significance of the sacred image lies not so much in its alleged mediatory potential but rather in its status as an object of devotion itself, ‘that is as [a] viable, tangible manifestation [of] divinity.’ In other words, the mediatory potential of the image then lies not so much in its ability, if at all, to symbolize the divine either didactically, representationally or analogically, but rather in its capacity to manifest the divine.

In other words, in contrast to Western religious traditions wherein the distinction between the sacred image, the devotee, and the deity are reducible to categorical and absolute dichotomies, Indian religious philosophy entertains the possibility of such distinctions being dissolved in view of the fact that the devotee, the image and the deity are particularized aspects of divinity, manifestations then of a single entity. This understanding then forms part of Hinduism’s cultural matrix and therefore informs the practice of image worship within Hindu communities.

The issue here, to be clear, is not so much about the status or reducibility of the aforementioned dichotomies but rather the extent to which they problematize discourse in this area. So, for example, an Islamic critique of image worship is itself shaped by a set of philosophical and theological premises that view the universe in dualistic terms, based invariably on ‘dichotomies of humane-divine, earth-heaven, profane-sacred and material-abstract’, assumptions that are then intrinsic to that system itself and not therefore necessarily applicable to alternate systems of thought. I suggested at the outset of my essay that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Thinking theologically then, as a member of a Hindu devotional tradition, I may grant that the Islamic objection to image-worship makes sense and works at least on its own terms- however, I would then go on to argue that under altered premises, the critique loses much of its cogency and effectiveness. If Hinduism shared the philosophical premises of Islam, the Islamic critique of image-worship would be fatal- but given that it doesn’t share such premises, the latter critique cannot be said to add or detract meaningfully from Hindu understandings of the status of sacred images.

Much of the same could be said for the Christian objection to image worship in Hinduism. In Christian ritual and religious art, the image is conceptualized in an intellectual environment that shares many of the premises that inform Islam’s understanding of image worship. The acceptance of a dualistic universe and the dichotomies referred to above shape the way in which the image is reflected upon in the Christian setting. It’s function has primarily been conceived of in functional or symbolic terms: that is, the symbol’s value lies either in its didactic function (e.g. an image that stimulates devotion in the devotee) or in its status as representing and thereby participating in the reality of that for which the symbol stands. Bennett writes that ‘in the latter sense its meaning reflects an influential Neoplatonic strand in Christian thought which treats divine images as symbols and hence as gross forms standing for an abstraction and only partly fathomable reality, ever vulnerable to misinterpretation by the ignorant who might take the imperfect reflection for the reality’. Christian critiques of image worship then tend to focus on the devotee’s tendency to elide the image and its prototype. However, again, this critique works only if the premises underlying it (e.g. dualism and enduring dichotomies) are true. As Bennett writes: ‘But surely in a universe where the apparent gulf separating the two worlds is unreal, then the reverse might hold true. Enlightenment might only occur when image and prototype, material and abstract, man and divine, signifier and signified, are experienced in their underlying unity.’

In contrast to the tendency ever-present in western philosophical traditions to treat the sacred image as at best a symbol standing for a higher, more intangible reality, Hindu devotional traditions have evolved an understanding wherein the material image and supreme divinity are ultimately undifferentiated: that is, ‘the symbol is that which it symbolizes’. As Bennett writes then, to call the image a symbol in a Neoplatonic or Aristotelian sense would be to devalue its inherent sanctity and thereby to misrepresent the nature and significance of the sacred image in Hindu devotional traditions.

So as to conclude, I tried to argue at the outset of this piece that conceptualizations of sacred images are deeply rooted in a set of philosophical premises that shape and inform the way the sacred image is spoken or written about. I have sought to argue that an understanding of the role of sacred images in Hindu religious practice requires an understanding of the cultural matrices that shape Hindu religious thought and practice. Theologizing about the sacred image in Hinduism then is best achieved, as Bennett writes, by rejecting the imposing categories of western thought in favour of terms indigenous to the Hindu devotional traditions. The assumptions and prejudices that we bring to bear in our discourse on this area has for too long obscured our understanding of the status of sacred images in the Hindu setting and precluded us thereby from deeper engagement with the theological issues at play in the debate. As Bennett’s important summation points out: ‘it is necessary to expose the inappropriateness of those theories which presume universal relevance and yet, in their binary and dualistic frameworks, remain steeped in the cultural universes wherefrom they are derived.’ Hindu devotional traditions operate within a different cultural universe, with different beliefs and practices. ‘Western categories would serve only to disguise its underlying principles, impose significant issues of its own, and misinterpret the dynamics of the relationship between human and divine.

Book Review: Modern Hindu Personalism: The History, Life and Thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati

Sardella's 'Modern Hindu Personalism' is a fantastic work of scholarship, providing as it does, a deeply insightful and highly lucid account of the life and thought of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, a key theologian of the Bengal School of Vaishnavism. The author contextualizes Sarasvati's contribution by situating it within a taxonomy of modern Hinduism: this is useful since it sheds important light on the way in which the subject's work interacted with alternate strands of Hindu thinking. Moreover, by juxtaposing Sarasvati's life and work with other leading thinkers of the Bengal Renaissance period, Sardella offers us a valuable insight into the methodologies employed by various leading thinkers of the period in their attempt to negotiate the colonial predicament that they all perceived their religion to be experiencing. By offering arguably the first systematic, scholarly, and critical account of the subject's 'history, life and thought', this book fills an unfortunate lacuna in the scholarship on this period. Moreover by presenting readers with an intimate portrayal of the various complexities experienced by Sarasvati in the his attempt to successfully revive the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition, this book offers us a unique insight into the nature and politics of religious institution-building in colonial societies. Finally, by situating Sarasvati's work within the broader intellectual, cultural and political milieu of the time, Sardella offers us a penetrating glimpse into the various strands that contributed and continue to contribute to Hinduism's encounter with modernity. A fine work of scholarship, indeed!