The king, the law and the priests in a South Indian Temple1
Le roi, le droit et les prêtres dans un temple sud-indien
p. 149-175
Résumés
At the Mīnākṣī Temple in Madurai, Tamilnadu, the priests are divided into two ranked groups: the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas and Kulacekaras. Rights to perform different types of ritual belong to individual priests and are inheritable. In the late 19th century, a Kulacekara priest willed his rights to a man belonging to neither of the two groups. This will was judged legally valid and in the end some of the Kulacekara priest’s rights were inherited by priests of the Tirucculi group, who had no traditional connection with the Mīnākṣī Temple. The role of the Hindu king and his relationship with the deities and priests, as well as the modem law on priestly rights, are discussed in order to explain why the Tirucculi priests, although legally entitled to their rights in the Temple, are regarded by other priests as illegitimate usurpers by reference to the ’ traditional ’ kingly past. A conclusion sets the impact of the law upon the priests in its broader context and notes a paradoxical outcome.
Le clergé du temple de Mīnākṣī à Madurai (Tamilnadu) se répartit en deux groupes ordonnés : les Vikkira Pāṇṭiya et les Kulacekara. Les droits afférents à la célébration de certains rituels appartiennent à des individus et se transmettent héréditairement. Pourtant, à la fin du xixe siècle, un prêtre Kulacekara légua ses droits à un homme qui n’appartenait à aucun des deux groupes. Le testament fut reconnu juridiquement valide et eût pour conséquence l’entrée d’une nouvelle catégorie de prêtres, les Tirucculi, qui n’avaient aucun rapport traditionnel avec le temple de Mīnākṣī. Cet article discute successivement le rôle du roi hindou, sa relation avec les divinités et les prêtres, et la juridiction moderne des droits des prêtres. Il explique comment, par référence à la royauté traditionnelle, les prêtres Tirucculi sont encore considérés par les autres prêtres comme des usurpateurs. La conclusion évalue l’impact général qu’eut la nouvelle législation sur les prêtres et fait observer son effet paradoxal.
Texte intégral
The great temple at madurai, Tamilnadu, known as the AruỊmiku (’ grace-bestowing ’) Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Tirukkoyil (’ temple is dedicated to the goddess Mīnākṣī and her husband, the god Sundareśvara. Sundareśvara is a form of the Hindu ‘ high-god ’ Śiva and Mīnākṣī is a form of Śakti and Devī, the great goddess and consort of Śiva. Like all south Indian Śaiva temples, the Temple in Madurai is double, incorporating separate temples for Mīnākṣī and Sundareśvara, at whose centres are respectively the goddess’s main or principal image (mūla mūrti) and the god’s main liṅga (the phallic icon of Śiva), each housed in its own sanctum (garbha gṛha). In Madurai, however, it is the goddess rather than the god who is regarded as pre-eminent, and the temple is usually called the ‘ Mīnākṣī Temple’. Madurai was the capital of the ancient Pāṇḍya kingdom and, according to the Mīnākṣī Temple’s legend (sthalapurāṇa), the TiruviỊaiyātal, Mīnākṣī was a princess born into the Pāṇḍya dynasty, from whom the historical Pāṇḍya kings claimed descent.1 The princess grew up to be crowned the queen of Madurai and married Śiva, a union which established their joint sovereignty over the Pāṇḍya kingdom. To this day, it is widely believed in Madurai, Mīnākṣī and Sundareśvara remain the kingdom’s true rulers, and rituals celebrating their regality are amongst the most elaborate and popular in the Temple’s festival calendar.2
1From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Madurai was the capital of the Nāyaka kingdom. Nāyaka rulers were responsible for building much of the spectacular Temple that can now be seen, and a large part of the Temple’s ritual cycle appears to have been expanded or inaugurated during this period. The priests (Tam. paṭṭar ; Skt. bhaṭṭa) who now work in the Mīnākṣī Temple claim descent from men first appointed by the Hindu rulers who preceded the Nāyakas, but the latter confirmed them in their office and are believed to have granted them most of the lands that they held until the 1940s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Madurai came under the control of the English East India Company and was later incorporated into the Madras Presidency. One of the most significant British innovations in India was the establishment of a modem legal System, and this eventually had important consequences for the Mīnākṣī Temple priests. In this paper, I shall examine the relationship between the priests and the former Hindu kings, on the one hand, and the impact of the law upon the priests, on the other, in order to consider some implications of the changes that have occurred in this sphere during the last century or so. This paper is based upon a longer study, which provides more detailed data and discussion than can be included here, but I hope that compression will not entirely obviate the advantages of highlighting a particular theme.3
The Mīnākṣi Temple priests: some introductory remarks
2In July 1980, fifty-six priests were working more or less regularly in the Mīnākṣī Temple. There are a few others who are entitled to work there, but because they have alternative employment, they do not do so. The priests ail belong to the Ādiśaiva subcaste of Brahmans, which is traditionally ranked below the ordinary, non-priestly Brahman subcastes, and they are divided into two groups : Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas and Kulacekaras.4 Vikkira (correctly vikkirama, Skt. vikrama : ‘ valorous ’) and Kulacekara (Skt. kulaśekhara: ‘ head ornament of the tribe ’) are the names of two of the legendary Pāṇḍya kings (Nelson 1868, 3: 139). Ofthe fifty-six priests, thirty-three belong to the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya group and twenty-three to the Kulacekara group. The Vikkira Pānṭiya group consists of six separate patrilineal clans: that of the group’s ’ chief priest ’ (Tam. stāṉikar ; Skt. sthānika), together with five others named after the villages – Kannakkankudi, Manamadurai, Nettur, Tirupparankundram and Tiruvadavur – from which they originally came.5 The Kulacekara group consists of one large clan, divided into two branches with no traceable genealogical connection. The Kulacekara chief priests are members of this clan. However, some rights in the Temple formerly held by Kulacekara priests now belong to members of another clan, named after its ancestral village, Tirucculi. The Tirucculi priests, who came to work in the Temple relatively recently, are widely considered by Kulacekaras as outsiders who do not belong to their group, but I shall include them here, for simplicity’s sake. How the Tirucculi priests acquired rights in the Mīnākṣī Temple will be explained below.
3In the Mīnākṣī Temple, as in all others, the public worship (parārthapūjā) – i.e. the regular worship said to be performed ‘ for the benefit of the world ’ – may be broadly divided into the daily worship (pūjā) and the festivals (utsava). In the former, worship is principally conducted before the immoveable, stone images housed in shrines inside the Temple, which include the main image of Mīnākṣī and the main liṅga of Sundareśvara, as well as a large number of subsidiary images of Śiva, his consort and other deities. At most festivals, the central events are the processions of the moveable, metal ‘ festival ’ images (utsava mūrti), which are often taken onto the streets of the city. In both daily worship and festivals, however, the principal rite is worship (pūjā), as constituted by a series of rituals of offering or service (upacāra), of which four are seen as especially important in the Mīnākṣī Temple, although others are also performed. In the order of their performance, these four are bathing the image or liṅga (abhiṣeka), dressing and decorating it (alaṁkâra), offering food before it (naivedya) and waving lighted lamps towards it (dīpārādhana). Although this summary of the Mīnākṣī Temple’s very complex ritual cycle is obviously extremely brief, it should suffice for the purposes of this paper (cf. Fuller 1979 : 460-1 ; 1980).
4In any Śaiva temple in south India, the priests who alone can perform the public worship have two particular qualifications: they are males belonging to the Ādiśaiva subcaste and they have been appropriately consecrated.6 In the Āgamas, the Sanskrit texts supposedly dictated by Śiva that, in theory, govern the ritual of south Indian Śaiva temples, including the Mīnākṣī Temple, it is said that only Ādisaivas (‘ first Saivas ’) are directly descended from Śiva and that only they, therefore, are competent to perform the god’s public worship in his temples. Moreover, only Ādiśaivas can undergo the consécration (ācāryābhiṣeka) that ritually qualifies a man to conduct public worship in the temples. In the Mīnākṣī Temple, as in other Śaiva temples in the region, it is also stipulated that a priest must have a living wife in order to carry out the public worship. A priest is consecrated accompanied by his wife and, if he is widowed, he must remarry or retire. This stipulation apparently has no sanction in any Āgamie text, although the idea that a man without a wife cannot conduct rituals properly is ancient and widespread in Hinduism.7 A full discussion of this issue, and of the other qualifications required of a priest, cannot, however, be attempted here. It is, though, important to note that, by themselves, the qualifications mentioned here would appear to permit any consecrated male Ādiśaiva with a living wife to perform the public worship in any Śaiva temple. This, indeed, does seem close to the position as laid down in the Āgamic texts, for the latter define succession to the office of priest in terms of a master-pupil line, without any suggestion that a pupil, who replaces his master when consecrated by him, should belong to the latter’s descent line.8
5In all major temples in south India, however, rights to perform the public worship belong to particular groups of Ādisaivas (such as the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas and Kulacekaras), and these rights are transferred hereditarily, although the principle of heredity is not absolute, as I discuss below. The existence of such rights means that in the temple cult, as it actually exists, particular groups of Ādisaiva priests only conduct the worship for the particular, ’ localised ’ forms of Śiva (and his consort) to whom is dedicated the particular temple in which they have their rights. Thus, for example, Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and Kulacekara priests are not the servants of the ‘ universal ’ Śiva and Śakti, but only of Sundareśvara and Mīnākṣī, the specific forms of the god and goddess in their Temple. As Śiva becomes ’ localised ’ in his different temples, so the Ādiśaiva subcaste is segmented and different priestly groups’ rights are specified.9
History of the Temple’s Priesthood
6To explain the basis for the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and Kulacekara priests’ monopolistic rights, I must now outline briefly their history.10 When the Muslim general Malik Kafur raided and sacked Madurai in 1310, the Pāṇḍya king abandoned his capital. The temples were plundered and the priests of the Mīnākṣī Temple are said to have closed it and fled to Nanjinad (now in Southern Tamilnadu). Before leaving, they placed a substitute liṅga before the sealed sanctum of Sundareśvara. The deities’ festival images were removed to Kerala. An independent Muslim Sultanate was eventually established at Madurai, but it was overthrown in 1378 by Kumāra Kampana, who incorporated Madurai into the newly-expanding Hindu empire of Vijayanagara. Legend has it that when the Vijayanagara commander entered the Mīnākṣī Temple, one Kulacekara Pěrumān opened the sanctum of Sundareśvara, whereupon it was discovered that the lamp left inside nearly seventy years before was still burning, the silk cloth around the liṅga was even then clean, and the sandalpaste and flowers had remained fresh. Seeing this miracle, Kumāra Kampana appointed Kulacekara Pěrumān the Temple’s chief priest. He was granted lands and, having been consecrated, he began with other members of his family to perform the rituals. The priests who had fled to Nanjinad never returned.
7A few years later, however, the Vijayanagara regent of Madurai, Kumāra Kampana’s son, became dissatisfied with the conduct of Kulacekara Pĕrumān and his kinsmen (the Kulacekara group), only one of whom was still working in the Temple. The regent therefore invited one Sadāśiva to work in the Temple. Sadāśiva was consecrated, given the title of Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and appointed the first chief priest of the Temple. Kulacekara Pĕrumāṉ became the second chief priest. Sadāśiva (or one of his kinsmen) also married a Kulacekara woman and was given a dowry of the right to conduct the public worship for seven days in each month, together with the associated émoluments, which presumably consisted of a share of the produce from the lands originally granted to Kulacekara Pĕrumāṉ. Sadāśiva then invited a priest from the Śiva temple in Nettur village to come to the Mīnākṣī Temple as his assistant, and later four more came from, respectively, Kannakkankudi, Manamadurai, Tirupparankundram and Tiruvadavur. From these five assistants are descended the five clans which, in addition to the chief priest’s clan (Sadāśiva’s descendants), comprise the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya group.
8Over the years, the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya group is said to have steadily increased its influence in the Temple. In the late sixteenth century, during the reign of Viśvanātha Nāyaka (c. 1529- 1564), who is usually regarded as the first independent Nāyaka king of Madurai, the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya chief priest took prasāda (offerings made to and ‘ received ’ back from the gods imbued with their ‘ grace ’) to the capital of the Vijayanagara emperor, who was still treated as the Nāyaka’s suzerain. When the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya priest returned, the Kulacekaras were unable to pay their share of his expenses and instead compensated him by handing over more of their rights in the public worship. Later, they tried to regain these rights and both groups attended the king’s palace, where their views on the claim were heard. In the end, though, the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas refused to return the rights. When Muttuvīrappu Nāyaka was on the throne (1609-1623), both groups intrigued in the palace and enmity between them steadily grew, so that eventually the members of each group were trying to prevent the consecration of members of the other. The king fixed the respective duties of the two groups and later Tirumala Nāyaka (reigning 1623-1659), the most illustrious of the Nâyaka kings, attempted once more to settle the matter by reallocating the rights between them. It is Tirumala Nāyaka who appears to have fixed definitively the division between the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas’ daily worship rights and the Kulacekaras’ festival rights, to which I shall return below. Despite his intervention, however, disputes, intrigue at the palace and efforts to block consecrations did not end; instead, conflict between the priests persisted to the end of the Nāyaka rule in the early eighteenth century, continued intermittently during the succeeding period of Muslim control and was still causing problems during the first decades of British administration.
9In the 1830s, both groups submitted petitions, setting out their respective cases, to the British Collector and his officials, asking for a ruling on their rights to be consecrated.11 The matter was also taken to court by the Kulacekara priests in an attempt to establish their equal right, with the Vikkira Pāntiyas, to undergo the consecration. The case reached the Sadr Adalat in Madras in 1861, where the plaintiffs lost, but it is unclear whether the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas exploited this judgment.12 At some stage, it appears that the Collector decided that both groups were entitled to equal rights, and that Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas should be consecrated before Mīnākṣī’s sanctum and Kulacekaras before Sundareśvara’s. This remains the pattern today and quarrels over consecrations seem to have ceased from the mid-nineteenth century, although animosity between the two groups has not entirely disappeared, for reasons to be outlined shortly.
10The accuracy of the historical account that I have summarised is not beyond doubt, although there is little reason to query the main facts. However, its exactitude is not especially important here. It matters more that the account is set down in documents that are considered authoritative and, most vitally, that, at least in outline, it is widely known and generally believed in the Temple.13 In particular, all the priests aver that the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and Kulacekara chief priests were originally appointed by early kings and that the rights of the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas were acquired at the expense of their predecessors, the Kulacekaras, during the Nāyaka period. Vikkira Pāṇṭiya attempts to stop Kulacekara consecrations were probably intended, at least in later years, to exclude their rivals from the Temple entirely by denying them the qualifications required of a priest. Originally, the Kulacekaras appear to have had rights to perform all types of rituals, including both the daily worship inside the Temple and the worship during festivals. Today, however, as has apparently been so since Tirumala Nāyaka’s reign, only Vikkira Pāṇṭiya priests have rights to perform the daily worship inside the Temple, while the Kulacekaras’ principal responsibility is performing the bathing (abhiṣeka) and decoration (alaṁkāra) rituals for the images used in festival processions.
The pattern of priestly rights
11The character of the rights held by the priests to which I have been referring must now be considered, although the detailed data are complicated and can only be briefly summarised. Rights to perform different parts of the public worship are governed by several different rotas (Tarn, murai). These comprise one rota each for the performance of daily worship inside Mīnākṣī’s temple and Sundareśvara’s temple; one for the work of opening and closing the doors of the two main sancta ; three for different types of worship carried out at various sets of minor shrines; one for the work of bathing and decorating the festival images; and, finally, one governing the appointment of a single priest, known as the nampiyār (Tarn.), who has to take sole charge of all rituals during six major annual festivals and Navarātri (cf. Fuller 1980: 328-32).
12In the two daily worship rotas, only Vikkira Pāṇṭiya priests have rights and only they may be appointed as nampiyārs, whereas, as we have seen, the rights to bathe and decorate the festival images were allocated to the Kulacekaras alone, although some of the latter rights are actually now held by others, including the Tirucculi priests. Priests belonging to both groups have rights in the rota governing the opening and closing of the sancta doors. Details of the rights in the three minor shrines’ rotas are not entirely clear, mainly because the work entailed by them is no longer fully carried out, but this problem need not be discussed here.
13The important point for my present argument is that the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas clearly have superior rights; they alone can perform the type of public worship that is considered by all to be most important, the daily worship inside the Temple, and they alone can be appointed as nampiyārs. Moreover, only Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas are allowed to offer food (naivedya) and wave the lamps (dīpārādhana) before the images during public worship, the latter being the ritual in which the act of worship invariably culminates. The Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas justify their monopoly over the daily worship by claiming that only they may touch the main image of Mīnākṣī and main liṅga of Sundareśvara, which has to be done during the bathing and decoration rituals; if others, including Kulacekaras, were to touch them, the image and liṅga would be polluted. It is, I think, plain, as the Kulacekaras argue, that this assertion is a rationalisation, in the ubiquitous idiom of pollution, for the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas’ monopoly. Both groups of priests belong to the same subcaste, they regularly intermarry symmetrically (i.e. men of each group take brides from the other) and all of them undergo an identical consEcration. Therefore no criteria of relative purity or ritual qualification serve to distinguish them. Nor can the argument about purity really explain why only Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas may be appointed nampiyārs, or offer food and wave the lamps during the public worship. As Kulacekaras emphasise and Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas do often admit, the principal explanation for the latters ’ superior rights in the Temple is that they were granted them by the Nāyaka kings and have been able to keep them ever since. It is, however, equally important that Kulacekara objections to the Vikkira Pāntiyas’ superior rights – which are a main cause of much of the animosity still existing between the two groups – could also be voiced against the Kulacekaras’ own position, for it is also owed to royal appointment (as Tirucculi priests indeed point out).14 If Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas are not ritually superior to Kulacekaras, nor are the latter ritually superior to other consecrated Ādiśaivas into whose families they also marry.
14Although I have written above of the rights held by the two groups, I must make it clear that rights in the different rotas are not held collectively, but instead by individual priests or families of priests, with particular shares (Tam. paṅku) in those rotas. How shares are defined varies between the rotas. Two examples will suffice here. In the daily worship rotas, shares are defined by whole days in the Tamil month. Thus, for example, one priest might have the right to perform the daily worship in Mīnākṣī’s temple on the fifth day of each month and in Sundareśvara’s temple on the twentieth day of each month. Some priests have many more than two days per month in the two rotas, whereas others have less. In the rota governing the bathing and decorating of festival images, shares (which in this case may be fractions of a day) are defined by assuming that a festival lasts twelve days (the length of the longest festivals). One priest might, for instance, have rights on the first day of the festival, another might have the subsequent one and a half days, etc. If the festival lasts less than twelve days, shares are proportionally adjusted. Again, some priests have much larger shares in this rota than others. In all rotas, the principle of division is, in one way or another, by units of time, so that shares are always specified as fractions of some temporal period.
15In the past, all the priests held inām lands – the revenue term inām meaning ‘ grant ’ or ’ gift ’ – or rather, to be more accurate, they had rights, believed to have been granted to them by the former kings, to take a share (Tam. melvāram, ‘ upper share ’) of the produce or income from certain villages.15 Land grants to priests (and other Temple officiants) were made in perpetuity on condition only that their holders continued to serve in the Temple. If a priest failed to discharge the duties entailed by his rights in the public worship, he lost his rights to the inām lands that were regarded as inseparably linked to his public worship rights. The Mīnākṣī Temple priests had, in total, very extensive inām land grants, which appear to have generated a considerable income in the nineteenth century, when the first systematic record of inām lands was drawn up. In 1948, following legislation, their inām lands were confiscated and eventually the priests were paid compensation.
16Shares in the public worship and, in the past, in the inām lands associated with them, are and were partitioned and inherited like other types of immoveable property held by the priests, mainly according to the prescriptions of traditional, south Indian Mitakshara joint-family law.16 The simplest and commonest case is a partition between sons; if a priest has two sons, for example, all his shares in the different rotas (and in the past in inām lands) would normally be divided into two equal parts. The division of shares in the rotas may be done in different ways, but the principle is straightforward; if a priest has, say, one day per month in each of the daily worship rotas, his two sons might each receive one day in both rotas in every other month, although other methods of equal division are also permissible.
17If a priest who has separated from his brothers (or other agnatic kin) dies leaving no sons, natural or adopted, his rights normally pass to his widow or daughters and, in the next generation, to the daughters’ sons. If he dies leaving no children, his heirs are, according to some informants, his sisters’ sons, a curious matrilineal element supposedly part of the priests’ traditions. Other informants, however, firmly deny that this is so and state that the heirs are those next in line of succession according to Brahmanical Mitakshara law. The difference in opinion may stem, I think, from a number of cases in which priests without children have willed their rights to their sisters’ sons, one of whom has then acted as chief mourner at his uncle’s funeral. Conceivably, the divergent views also reflect a conflict between Brahmanical śāstric orthodoxy and an older, non-Brahmanical tradition. However, detailed discussion of these issues and also of the rules governing adoption and succession in exceptional instances, need not be pursued here. Two points only have to be stressed. First, if a female holds rights in the public worship, she must appoint a qualified priest as her deputy to carry out the ritual duties entailed by those rights on her behalf. The same applies if the rights devolve to a male who is unable to perform rituals (such as a young boy). If a deputy is appointed and perforais his duties, there is no objection, in custom or law, to rights in the public worship (and, in the past, in inām lands associated with them) being held by females or unqualified males. The second point is that because Mīnākṣī Temple priests often marry women from Ādiśaiva priestly families connected with other temples in the region around Madurai, the above rules and, in the case of childless priests, the possibility of testamentary succession, can mean that a Mīnākṣī Temple priest’s heir is someone without any existing rights in the Temple. In fact, this situation rarely arises because priests object to the devolution of rights to outsiders and therefore try to ensure that it does not occur. Only once in more than a hundred years has such a transfer to outsiders taken place, but this single case, which I shall now discuss, is particularly interesting and revealing about how the priests conceive of their rights.
Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar’s case and the Tirucculi priests
18In the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the branches of the large Kulacekara clan was divided into three sub-branches, labelled on Figure 1 A, B and C.17 The various rights in the public worship, and in the inām lands associated with them, that were held by members of this branch were divided between the three sub-branches in the approximate respective proportions of half to quarter to quarter. In May 1881, Chandrasekhara Bhattar (sub-branch A) died, leaving only a widow, his second wife. His elder brother had predeceased him, leaving no heirs. There had been no separation between the two brothers. In a will, Chandrasekhara bequeathed all his rights in the public worship and the associated inām lands to Raja Bhattar, his sister’s son. Raja’s parents were both dead and Chandrasekhara declared in his will that he had sponsored his nephew’s sacred-thread ceremony (upanayana) and arranged his marriage, and that he was ‘ very fond ’ of him. Raja, who was from a village called Kunnathur, belonged to neither the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya nor the Kulacekara group. In January 1882, he also died without issue. In the absence of a will, Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar, who was Raja’s closest living agnatic kinsman, claimed the latter’s rights. This claim produced a flush of law suits, begun by both Suppu Sokkaya (in an attempt to confirm his inheritance) and by various Kulacekara priests (named on Figure 1) belonging to sub-branches B and C (in an attempt to thwart him). These priests argued that Chandrasekhara’s will was invalid, that he could not legally alienate his rights by will, that even if he could the will was never given effect to because Kulacekara priests had continued to perform his duties in the Temple, etc. Almost any and every argument was tried against Suppu Sokkaya. Taken together, they were all intended to convince the courts that Chandrasekhara’s rights should revert to his nearest agnatic kinsmen. In the end, however, the courts decided that Chandrasekhara’s will was valid and that Suppu Sokkaya was in law the rightful holder of all his rights.
19In 1934, Suppu Sokkaya also died childless, bequeathing his rights to his three sisters’ sons: Saminatha Bhattar (whose brother was already dead), who performed his uncle’s funeral rights, and the two brothers Daivisikamani Bhattar and Raja Bhattar, who came from a family of priests with rights in a temple at Tirucculi, a village not far from Madurai. Saminatha belongs to the Manamadurai clan of the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya group and he was bequeathed approximately two-fifths of Suppu Sokkaya’s rights in the Temple and in his inām lands; the two Tirucculi brothers inherited the remaining three-fifths. One part of Chandrasekhara’s rights in the public worship thus ended up in the hands of Vikkira Pāṇṭiya priests and is now held by Saminatha’s sons, while the other part eventually went to the outsider priests from Tirucculi, whose clan includes eleven descendants of Daivisikamani and Raja now working in the Temple.
20To the best of my knowledge, Suppu Sokkaya’s will was not contested in the courts by Kulacekara priests, who presumably decided that they had no hope of winning a case to reclaim the rights. The priests today accept that the Tirucculi priests are legally entitled to their rights and there is no doubt that this is so. Legal argument in Suppu Sokkaya’s cases was in fact almost all about technicalities, and the Kulacekara priests’ lawyers naturally never tried to suggest that the law of succession was inapplicable. But that, I suspect, is what the Kulacekaras really wanted to argue, because their descendants assert it to this day. At the time of Suppu Sokkaya’s litigation, there were, of course, valuable inām lands involved, and there can be no doubt, particularly in the light of other legal disputes between priests, that material considerations were always important in sending priests into the courts. However, even now, years after the lands have all been confiscated, the case has not been forgotten. Irrespective of the law of succession, Kulacekara priests still contend, the Tirucculi priests remain illegitimate outsiders and usurpers, who should never have been allowed into the Mīnākṣī Temple because they are not descended from those originally granted their rights, or confirmed in them, by the Vijayanagara and Nāyaka kings. It is an argument that is evidently anachronistic, but to understand why it is still repeated, we must turn to the relationship between the king and the Temple.
Kingship and the Temple
21Kingship and the king were pivotal in traditional Hindu society. In the Hindu legal texts of the dharmaśāstra, writes Lingat (1973: 207), ‘ Kingship is regarded as an institution necessary to the maintenance of the social order established by the Creator for the good of creatures ’; it is a dogma of Indian thought that: ‘ A society without a king […] is not viable ’. Throughout the legal literature, according to Kane (1968-77, 3: 56), it is ‘ agreed that the first and foremost duty of the king is the protection of subjects’. Without a king, such protection cannot be provided and an ordered society cannot be preserved. The protection of religious institutions in his realm is also a duty of the king and one that ‘ rested on the basis of immemorial customs which were as sacred as written texts ’ (Mukherjea 1979: 29).18 All our sources make it plain, however, that the king could not fulfil his responsibilities only through action that we would, in modern parlance, describe as ‘ political ’, for the modem separation of ‘ religious ’ from ‘ political ’ is inapplicable here, as it is for most ’ traditional ’ kingdoms in all parts of the world. Whether Hindu kinship is properly described as ‘ divine kinship ’ is problematic and will not be discussed here. More pertinent to my discussion is that the king cannot protect his subjects by statecraft alone; he must also perform his ritual duties. He is, as Biardeau (1981: 62-63) states, the patron of the sacrifice, the ‘ sacrifiant ’ (yajamāna) par excellence: ‘ [il] doit offrir de nombreux sacrifices en rétribuant généreusement les brahmanes qui officient, et […], quels que soient son habileté et ses efforts par ailleurs, il ne saurait assumer la prospérité du royaume sans cela The royal function (kṣatra) is indispensable not only for the maintenance of the social order, but also, through sacrifice, for the cosmic order of which the social order is a part (ibid.: 20).
22In modern Hinduism, the rite of sacrifice has been transformed and in ‘ Brahmanical ’ temples it generally takes the form of nonviolent worship (pūjā) (Biardeau 1976: 138-140). However, the king remains the principal patron of this worship and thus still occupies the position of yajamāna in the transformed structure. This latter role cannot be separated from that of protector of the temples, for both oblige the king to ensure that worship is properly carried out. As Derrett (1970: 377-378) expresses it in a general way: ‘ Gifts for offering to a deity, worship and ritual, and the paraphernalia of a divine court on earth imitating the supposed divine court in heaven, must be maintained by kings because unless this worship is properly performed the supernatural health of the kingdom will fail ’. Expressing all this slightly differently, the crux of the matter is that the king, in order to perform his duties as protector and patron, must ensure that the rituals in his kingdom’s temples are properly conducted so that both the kingdom and the universe, of which the former is a microcosm, are preserved. Amongst all his kingdom’s temples, it is the main temple in his capital city, which with the palace represents the double centre of the kingdom (Biardeau 1981: 20), that is most important here, although at all the other temples as well the local groups controlling them were ‘ authoritatively constituted by, or in the name of, the king ’ (Appadurai 1981 : 70). For the Pāṇḍya kingdom, the capital’s principal temple was the Mīnākṣī Temple. In south Indian devotional Hinduism, the stream of Hinduism that is most important in relation to the Mīnākṣī Temple, the ’ grace ’ of the gods is seen as vital; if Śiva and his consort are properly worshipped, they will dispense their grace to the king and his subjects, and thereby ensure their preservation, as well as that of the cosmos. Conversely, if the king fails in his duties, the kingdom and the cosmos are endangered as the rituals necessary for their sustainment cease; the gods will become angry and take their revenge on the king and his people.19
23However, as we know, it is the priests who actually perform rituals in the temples on behalf of the king and his subjects. There are thus three main parties involved – king, priests and deities – who can, I suggest, be seen to be linked together in a triangle of indirect exchange relationships. Priests make offerings to and perform services for the gods; the gods preserve the king, the kingdom and his subjects; and the king protects the temple, provides the wherewithal for rituals and rewards the priests with gifts, of which the most valuable form, in the Mīnākṣī Temple (as in others, especially in south India), was the inām land grant. As it is represented in the orthodox picture, the king does not pay the priests as his own servants, but instead donates to the gods’ servants. Hence there is no direct exchange between king and priests, and the relationship between them is only comprehensible if the deities, the third party to the exchanges, are also incorporated into the scheme. We can thus see that the legitimacy of particular priests’ rights in a particular temple does not depend simply on the fact that they were granted by a king qua head of state. Rather, that legitimacy is logically contingent upon the relationship between king and deity that can only be properly established by the insertion of the priests into the network of exchanges.
24Despite the emphasis placed by Mīnākṣī Temple priests on their hereditary rights, it is plain that the principle of heredity is redundant in the triangular scheme outlined above. In it, a priest’s rights are legitimate because he is involved in an exchange relationship with the king, not because he is the descendant or heir of a previous royal appointee. In practice, formal confirmation of priests’ rights by each king was probably rare and hereditary succession has almost certainly been customary for a long time. Nonetheless, the king’s right to discipline or dismiss a priest appears never to have been gainsaid and there is some evidence that Nâyaka kings did occasionally intervene in the Mīnākṣī Temple to deal with officiants (priests or others) guilty of misconduct or other failings, as had happened to Kulacekara Pĕrumān, it is believed, in an earlier period.20
25Throughout India, kings have now lost their constitutional authority. In many parts of the country, however, royal families still exist and are recognised by the common people. Often, members of these royal lines continue to play important roles in the temples of their former kingdoms. In Madurai, by contrast, the last Hindu dynasty, the Nāyakas, has entirely disappeared and there are no pretenders to the throne. However, as I have implied in my discussion of Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar’s case, the kings of the past do still figure in the Mīnākṣī Temple priests’ conception of the legitimacy of their own rights, even though inheritance disputes are now settled by reference to the law, to which I must now give attention.
The law on priestly rights
26Today, the Mīnākṣī Temple priests regard their rights in the public worship as property, strictly comparable to other types of property, such as land or houses. Their view accords with, and possibly derives from, the legal conception, which has developed in broadly the following way.21 In the modem law of religious endowments, priests are considered to be the appointees of the managers or trustees of a temple. In this respect, there is a clear continuity between the position of managers or trustees, and the former kings. However, managers and trustees are themselves subject to a whole body of law defining their rights and duties, and the law relating to priests closely follows the latter. It has been clearly established in the courts that whenever rights in a temple involve significant economic benefits for managers, trustees or officiants – as they normally do – the rights are in law not merely those of office, but also of property. Therefore, they are generally governed by the appropriate rules of inheritance, partition, etc. At the same time, there is always a limitation on the proprietary right, because the latter is inseparably bound up with the duty to discharge the obligations attached to it. This limitation is normally understood to imply a general debarment on alienation, lease or mortgage of the ‘ property ’, although certain exceptions are permitted. For the Mīnākṣī Temple priests, as for the hereditary priests of many other great public temples, the economic component of their rights in the public worship plainly lay primarily in the valuable land grants attached to them. Now that inām lands have been confiscated, the economic component would presumably lie in the fact that only rights in the public worship (for which no payment is made) entitle a priest to do the remunerative work of ‘ private ’ worship, i.e. making offerings on behalf of individual devotees. However, this argument, to the best of my knowledge untested in the courts, must remain rather hypothetical.
27Given the power of managers and trustees to dismiss priests who do not carry out their duties, it is plain that the principle of heredity is now, as in the past, not absolute. The priests, however, as we have seen, tend to think otherwise, asserting the inviolability of their hereditary rights (Tam. mirācu) and the vital necessity of being born into the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and Kulacekara groups. Their views, though, do not accord well with the law. The custom of heredity has been recognised by the courts as valid, always subject to the crucial proviso that hereditary officiants may be dismissed for misconduct. Nevertheless, as the Madras High Court ruled many years ago, the custom of heredity must be clearly made out and should not be merely assumed to exist.22 In 1970, the Tamilnadu government introduced an Act to abolish the hereditary priesthood. The Act was challenged on the grounds that it violated the ‘ freedom of religion ’ clauses of the Indian Constitution, and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court in 1972. The Court ruled that hereditary appointment was a ’ secular ’ usage and that the Act was therefore valid, although its interpretation of the Āgamie rules governing priests’ qualifications did, in practice, put a stop to the government’s plans.23 This case raises a variety of interesting issues (which I cannot discuss further here), but the relevant point in this context is that, in relation to priests, the ’ secular ’ custom of heredity now seems to be exceptionally difficult to defend in the courts, despite the weight still attached to it by priests, and other hereditary officiants, in the Mīnākṣī Temple.
The king, the law and the legitimacy of the priests’ rights
28Much more could be said about the law governing temples and their officiants, but the brief outline above will suffice for my discussion. How does the situation today differ from that in the past? At first sight, it may look as if little has altered because, in particular, the power vested in managers and trustees to dismiss incompetent or otherwise unsatisfactory priests appears very similar to that enjoyed by the kings. Thus, the priests’ position vis-à-vis the ultimate ‘ protectors ’ of the Temple seems scarcely to have changed. Indeed, there are significant continuities and it is true that the British did, in the early years of their rule, consciously take over the role of ‘ protector ’ of the temples from the kings whom they had displaced. Modern Indian governments claim for themselves the same role, and the Tamilnadu government’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE) Department, which now has most of the major temples in the state (including the Mīnākṣī Temple) under its control, is quite consciously seen by its apologists to be fulfilling the royal function of ‘ protection This ideological continuity is not unimportant. Nevertheless, there have been important changes, which I will now discuss.
29Much of the case law pertaining to temples that grew up in the nineteenth century was made with reference to the frequently inappropriate English law of trusts. Relevant Indian legislation was largely lacking (Mukherjea 1979: 41). As court judgments established precedents, the law became – as conventionally, modem law should be – increasingly certain and uniform. A decision in the Madras High Court would be a precedent for an apparently similar case from another temple years later, and might well be cited in the Bombay or Calcutta High Courts, or vice versa. Sometimes, individual customs of different groups of people, such as the priesthood in a particular temple, would be recognised by a court. But such a recognition itself established a precedent and the admissibility of exceptions was inevitably limited.
30In its ideal uniformity, the ethos of the modem law differs fundamentally from traditional Hindu law. As Lingat shows, the decisions of Hindu kings did not really produce the equivalent of modem case-law, for they were specific to their contexts and did not establish precedents. ‘ Even though [the king’s] judgments are really law-in-action, they remain singular and unrelated, staccato, without any future ’ (1973: 259). For the British judge, on the other hand, the ‘ principal concern was to search out the legal solution. In other words, in his court legality became substituted for authority, a concept which did not and could not have any meaning for him […]. His only possible course was to determine the law as he found it ’ (ibid.: 263, emphasis original). For traditional Hindu law, the ultimate authority was the religio-legal corpus of the dharmaśāstra, and the king’s decisions ‘ left the authority of the law intact, always available thereafter for new interpretations ’, whereas those of the British judges ‘ fixed interpretation once and for ail ’ (ibid.: 264).24
31It must not be inferred from this that in practice the new legal System was inevitably revolutionary in its impact. It is tempting to presume that every group of priests used to have its own peculiar customs, doomed to obliteration by the burgeoning modem judicial apparatus. For such a presumption, there is, however, no evidence; on the contrary, at least amongst the officiants of temples belonging to one sect within one region, such as Śaiva temples in Madurai and adjoining districts, there was undoubtedly a major measure of uniformity. Sometimes, though, the law could produce results which were unsanctioned by custom and were therefore not seen by all parties as truly legitimate, irrespective of their juridical legality.
32The case of the Tirucculi priests illustrates this clearly. All the priests in the Mīnākṣī Temple today accept that the Tirucculi priests are legally entitled to the rights that they hold and that this is in accordance with the laws governing inheritance. Nonetheless, many Kulacekara priests, as I stated above, still maintain that the Tirucculi priests are illegitimate usurpers, because they are not descended from royal appointees. Significantly, Kulacekara priests do not object to the transfer, via Suppu Sokkaya, of some of Chandrasekhara’s rights to a branch of the Vikkira Pāṇṭiya Manamadurai clan, whose members cannot be denounced as illegitimate outsiders. To put it in a nutshell, in this case the modem law produced a result that, albeit legal, is still not seen as legitimate on the grounds that, supposedly, the court did not comply with the edicts of former Hindu kings.
33The crux of the matter is that the priests – in flat opposition to the Tamilnadu government’s HRCE Department – do not accept that there ever has been a legitimate successor to the Nāyaka dynasty, neither the British nor independent Indian governments, nor their various branches and agencies, such as the courts and the HRCE Department. As we have already seen, the Hindu king’s role as protector of the temples was inseparable from his role as patron of the worship, or yajamāna, and his relationship with the gods was believed to be critical for the preservation of his kingdom and the cosmos. But this was not true for the British rulers of India. Although they took on some of their royal predecessors’ functions and did regard themselves as their legal successors, nobody seriously believed, of course, that British dominion depended upon any relationship with the Hindu gods (cf. Appadurai 1981: 105).25 In other words, whereas the authority of the Hindu king was ideologically defined or legitimated by his relationship with the gods and their temples, that of the British was not. For contemporary, secular governments in modern India, the situation is hardly different. I have heard some people in the Mīnāksī Temple, mainly elderly priests, blame contemporary India’s political and economic troubles on Śiva’s anger over misperformance of public worship in his temples, but the notion is not prevalent that present-day governments are in particular danger if they do not ensure that all is well in the temples. The idea that the people as a whole may suffer is more widely expressed, but this is perhaps only right in a democratic polity in which governments are presumed to derive their power from the people or, at least, to maintain it owing to insufficient popular resistance.
34All this means that the triangular ideological scheme that I described above has lost its viability. Modem governments, whether British or Indian, cannot replace the Hindu king in the triangle of exchange relationships that linked him, the priests and the deities, because the link between god and ruler has been broken, and the circle of exchanges between the three parties has been cut. Though this formulation is evidently my own abstraction, it does, I believe, underlie the priests’ understanding of the contemporary situation. As far as they are concerned, the Nāyaka kings were the last legitimate rulers and protectors of the Mīnākṣī Temple. The old order was not transformed, but destroyed, at the close of the Nāyaka period. Legitimate rights, therefore, can only now be established by tracing hereditary descent from those whose rights were stuly legitimate because they actually were royal appointees.
35But hereditary descent, as we have seen, was not an intrinsic component in the kingly ideological scheme and it seems quite probable that the British were partly responsible for the insistence on hereditary rights that we find today.26 The law, with its emphasis on the rules of joint-family succession, probably helped to reinforce the importance attached to heredity as well, despite the ‘ illegitimate ’ anomalies that it could engender. Almost certainly, the influence of the law has contributed to the contemporary priests’ idea that their rights in the Temple are ‘ property ’ in the modem sense of that term. All in all, therefore, when some priests object to their Tirucculi colleagues or, more generally, when all of them insist upon the legitimacy of their monopolistic possession of the hereditary rights to work in the Mīnākṣī Temple, the kingly past to which they appeal is most probably in part an historical fiction from a more recent age. That, of course, in no way diminishes the relevance of the past for the priests themselves. Moreover, if in certain respects their views are anachronistic and historically ill-founded, they are certainly not entirely illogical, for the ‘ traditional ’ Hindu king did have a vital significance for the Temple, as the Temple did for the king. With a contemporary secular government, that is no longer true.
Concluding remarks
36The authors of several essays in this collection have studied temples in which kings do continue to play a role, and they can therefore discuss the relationship between royalty and the temples as it actually exists. Furthermore, the evidence that they can bring forward is, in general, likely to be much firmer than that from which I have sometimes made inferences in this paper. It is probable that many royal families still existing in India will survive for a long time and there is no reason to imagine that kingless cities like Madurai must represent the future.
37In this connection, it is also relevant that governmental control over temples and legislative reform affecting them have been far more extensive in Tamilnadu than in most other regions of India, although the laws governing priestly rights do, of course, apply throughout the country. As we have seen, a vital feature of the law is its striving for uniformity. In Tamilnadu, because of governmental control and extensive legislation, the pressures towards uniformity and a centralised, bureaucratic regime are very considerable in all temple affairs, and are not restricted to the specific issue of the priests’ rights. A temple’s traditional customs (Tam. māmūl) – whether they are genuinely unique to it or not – count for much less than they used to. In the Mīnākṣī Temple, a series of important legal decisions in the 1940s, following the priests’ protests against the admission of Harijans, clearly established the governmental administration’s right to act in contravention of such customs under a range of circumstances (Fuller, 1983). The Mīnākṣī Temple legal cases have probably been exceptional, but the trend towards uniformity and centralisation does appear to be general throughout the state.
38This trend is not, however, confined to the sphere of temple administration and organisation. It is also apparent in the reformist demand for ritual centralisation: rituals in all Śaiva temples, for example, should be brought into line with the directions of the Āgamas, the only true standards for ritual practice because they alone embody Śiva’s commands. Elsewhere (Fuller 1982 ; 1984 : ch. 6), I have discussed certain aspects of this reformism and tried to show that in many respects it is misconceived and cannot become a coherent policy for temple reform. I shall not repeat that argument here, save to note that the quality of the priesthood has been one major and persistent cause for complaint. Mostly, attention has been focused on the alleged incompetence and Āgamic ignorance of the priests, but the issue of their recruitment has also been relevant. As we have seen, hereditary rights are neither easily defensible in law, nor compatible with the Āgamas’ rules about succession to the priestly office. In fact, following the 1972 Supreme Court case mentioned above, it seems that it would be legal to appoint Ādiśaiva priests from one Śaiva temple to work in another, but the HRCE Department has not attempted to do this.27 It is ironic that in the Mīnākṣī Temple the only serious subversion of the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas’ and Kulacekaras’ monopolistic, hereditary rights was the decision in Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar’s case, which eventually led to the transfer of some rights to the Tirucculi group. Although that case had nothing to do with Āgamic reform, but was solely concerned with the inheritance of ‘property’, it actually did more to undermine the Temple priests’ hereditary monopolies – unrecognised in the kingly model of legitimacy and unwarranted by the Āgamas – than any modem reformist pressure has so far done.
Bibliographie
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References
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Appadurai, A. and C. A. Breckenridge (1976), The south Indian temple: authority, honour and redistribution, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), 10, pp. 187-211.
Biardeau, M. (1976), Le sacrifice dans l’Hindouisme, in Biardeau and Ch. Malamoud, Le sacrifice dans l’Inde ancienne. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Biardeau, M. (1981), L’Hindouisme: anthropologie d’une civilisation. Paris, Flammarion.
Breckenridge, C. A. (1976), The Śrī Mīnākṣī Sundareśvarar temple: worship and endowments in south India, 1833 to 1925. Thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison.
Brunner, H. (1963), Somaśambhupaddhati, pt. 1: Le rituel quotidien (trans. and comment.). Pondichery, Institut Français d’Indologie.
Brunner-Lachaux, H. (1964), Les catégories sociales védiques dans le Śivaïsme du sud, Journal Asiatique, 252, pp. 451-472.
Brunner-Lachaux, H. (1968), Somaśambhupaddhati, pt. 2: Rituels occasionnels I (trans. and comment.). Pondichery, Institut Français d’Indologie.
Brunner-Lachaux, H. (1977), Somaśambhupaddhati, pt. 3: Rituels occasionnels II (trans. and comment.). Pondichery, Institut Français d’Indologie.
Collection of papers relating to the Inam seulement in the Madras Presidency 1906. Selections from the records of the Madras Government, New (Revenue) series, No. 1. Madras, Govt. Press.
Derrett, J. D. M. (1963), Introduction to modem Hindu law. Bombay, Oxford University Press.
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Derrett, J. D. M. (1970), A critique of modern Hindu law. Bombay, N. M. Tripathi.
Dessigane, R., P. Z. Pattabiramin and J. Filliozat (trans. and comment.) (1960), La légende des jeux de Çiva à Madurai. Pondichery, Institut Français d’Indologie.
Devakunjari, D. (n.d.) [1979], Madurai through the ages: from the earliest times to 1801 A. D. Madras, Society for Archaeological, Historical and Epigraphical Research.
Filliozat, P.-S. (1975), Le droit d’entrer dans les temples de Śiva au XIe siècle, Journal Asiatique, 263, pp. 103-117.
Francis, W. (1906), Madura (Madras District Gazetteers). Madras, Govt. Press.
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Fuller, C. J. (1982), The attempted reform of south Indian temple Hinduism, in J. Davis (ed.), Religions organisation and religions experience. London, Academic Press.
Fuller, C. J. (1983), The government and the temple: the Madurai Mīnākṣī Temple priests, 1937-1930, in. K. Ballhatchet and D. Taylor (eds.), Changing South Asia: religion and society. Hong Kong, Asian Research Service.
Fuller, C. J. (1984), Servants of the goddess: the priests of a south Indian temple. Cambridge, University Press.
Fuller, C. J. (n.d.), Initiation and consecration: priestly rituals in a south Indian temple, in R. Burghart and A. Hayley (eds.), Indian religions. London, School of Oriental and African Studies, Forthcoming.
Hudson, D. (1977), Śiva, Mīnākṣī, Visnu – reflections on a popular myth in Madurai, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14, pp. 107- 118.
Iyengar, S. S. (1916), Land tenures in the Madras Presidency. Madras, Modem Printing Works.
Kane, P. V. (1968-1977), History of Dharmaśāstra. Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
Kulke, H. (1978), Chs. 7, 8, 11, 17 and 18 in A. Eschmann, H. Kulke and G. C. Tripathi (eds.), The cult of Jagannath and the regional tradition of Orissa. New Delhi, Manohar.
Lingat, R. (1973), The classical law of India. Berkeley, University of California Press.
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Mukherjea, B. K. (1979, 4th ed.), The Hindu law of religions and charitable trusts. Calcutta, Eastern Law House.
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Saletore, B. A. (1938), The sthānikas and their historical importance, Journal of the University of Bombay, 7, pp. 29-93.
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Notes de bas de page
1 The Tiruvilaiyāṭal, the story of the sixty-four ‘ sports ’ (līlā) of Śiva at Madurai, is in a French summarised translation by Dessigane et al. (1960).
2 The Cittirai and Avani Mūla festivals are particularly important in this connection; see Fuller 1980: 343-345; Hudson 1977. An analysis of ‘ regal ’ rituals would be essential for a fuller understanding of the traditional conception of sovereignty in Madurai, but that task is not undertaken here.
3 See Fuller 1984, which incorporates the material in this paper and also includes more extensive bibliographie references than are given here.
4 See Fuller 1984: ch. 3 for discussion of the problem of the Brahman priests’ status; for a brief outline of it, see Fuller 1979: 462, 471-472.
5 Stānikar is usually translated as superintendent ’ or ‘ manager ’ of a temple; he is a ‘ high official ’ clearly distinguished from ’ an ordinary priest conducting the worship ’ (Saletore 1938 : 40). However, Saletore’s description, if generally applicable, implies an administrative rôle that the Mīnākṣī Temple stāṉikars do not have. ‘ Chief priest ’, if vague, nonetheless seems more appropriate than obvious alternatives. The five villages listed are ail within a radius of approximately 50 km. from Madurai.
6 For the Āgamic material on Ādiśaivas, see Brunner’s definitive article (1964) or her shorter summary (Brunner-Lachaux 1963: xxiv), and on the initiation and consecration of priests, see Brunner-Lachaux 1977 : xxx-xlv, 1-426, 455-97 and 1963 : xxiii-xxiv ; 1968 : xv-xvi. On consecration in the Mīnāksī Temple and its relation to the textual prescriptions, see Fuller (n.d.).
7 Brunner (pers. communic.) told me of the absence of any Āgamic sanction; the question of the priests’ wives is discussed at greater length in Fuller (n.d.a.).
8 According to Brunner-Lachaux (1977 : xxvii-xxx, xliv-xlv, 486- 491, n. 47), a master (ācārya ; guru) should retire after consecrating his pupil because he thereby transfers his powers to his successor. This rule is not observed in contemporary temples (cf. Fuller n.d.).
9 Some Mīnāksī Temple priests do have rights in other temples as well, but this does not affect the general principle that a priest is only a servant of the deities in the temple (s) in which he has rights.
10 Historical data on the Temple come from several sources. The Temple has a chronicle, the Śritâla book, which was apparently available to Nelson, who thought it was written at the beginning of the nineteenth century (1868, 3: 2, 72). Devakunjari (n.d.) and Palaniappan (1970) also used this chronicle. I have been unable to consult it. Two manuscripts, the S. Muthu Bhattar family Ms. and the Madurai sthānikar varalāru (History of Madurai stāṉikars), are very similar and probably derive from the Śrītāla book. The story of the Muslim invasions and Vijayanagara conquest, and the appointment of the chief priests, can mostly be read in Nelson 1868, 3: 80-82, or Devakunjari n.d.: 166-168, or Palaniappan 1970 : 119-124. The story of the miracle is well-known in the Temple and quoted in many sources. For the priests in the Nāyaka period, see Palaniappan as cited; detailed evidence on the Nāyaka kings’ intervention in the Mīnākṣī Temple is thin, but seems to be reasonably certain: see Devakunjari n.d. : 298, 300; Nelson 1868 : 3, 162 ; Taylor 1835, 2: 155. Breckenridge (1976: 180-187) also summarises the Nāyaka period and deals as well with the priests during the British period, mainly using the two Mss. referred to above.
11 Breckenridge 1976: 182-187, particularly considers the dispute over consecration in the nineteenth century, which I look at from a different angle in Fuller (n.d.).
12 Subbapattar v. Sadasiva Pattar, Rulings of the Court of Sudder Udalut 1858-1862, compiled by S. Vejia Ragavooloo Chetty (Madras 1865), 343. The Madras Sadr Adalat, or Sudder, ‘ chief ’, Court, was superseded by the High Court in 1861.
13 These documents include in particular the Śrītāla book and the Mss. derived from it; seen. 10 above.
14 During the dispute over Harijan entry into the Temple in 1939- 1945, most of the rituals were performed by priests from the Tirunelveli Śaiva temple, brought in to replace the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas and Kulacekaras. The Tirunelveli priests had to leave again after settlement of the dispute. Some Vikkira Pāṇṭiya and Kulacekara priests do assert that the Tirunelveli priests polluted the images, but it is the fact that they came very close to losing their ancient rights in the Temple altogether that was and is, for the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas and Kulacekaras, the more vital consideration. On the temple entry dispute, see Fuller 1983; 1984: ch. 5.
15 Literature on inām lands – and land tenure in Tamilnadu more generally – is extensive, and much of that produced during the British period most probably misrepresents the ‘ traditional ’ System (Reiniche 1978); Stein 1980: 192, for instance, specifically points to British reinterpretation of the term melvāram. However, in this paper, I have largely assumed the conventional view – not least because it is now generally that of personnel in the Temple – as outlined in ‘ official ’ sources such as Collection of papers… (1906) or Iyengar 1916: 95-99. Details of the priests’ and other officiants’ inām lands are recorded in the Fair Inam Registers for the various taluks ; information on different types of land grants to the Mīnākṣī Temple and its officiants are in Nelson 1868, 4 : 119-123, 133-152, mostly reproduced more concisely in Francis 1906 : 262-283. The abolition Act is the Madras Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act (26 of 1948).
16 See, e.g., Derrett 1963: 244-345, 364-442, passim.
17 The major part of the genealogy is constructed from genealogies and other evidence presented in the Exhibits attached to the record of Suppa Bhattar v. Suppu Sokkaya Bhattar, A. S. 280 of 1913, kept in the Madras High Court Archives. (The case is reported at A. I. R. 1916 Mad. 465.) Additional data corne from informants and the Fair Inam Registers. Relative ages suggest that in sub-branch A one generation may be missing. Priests’ names are spelt as in the court record.
18 Material on the king’s role in relation to temples and other religious institutions is rather scattered and, in many respects, insubstantial. Important sources include Kane 1968-1977, 2: 910-4, Lingat 1973: 208- 223 and Mukherjea 1979: 27-29, 455-456, who cites Nelson 1868, 3: 162, as well as Appadurai 1981: 50-52, 63-74, 105-6 and passim; AppaDurai and Breckenridge 1976: 206-207; Biardeau 1981: 20-21, 61-66; Derrett 1966 : 320 ; 1970: 377-378; Kulke 1978 ; Mahalingam 1955 : 11-31 and ch. 2 passim, 372-373; Stein 1980: 23-24, 275-285, 383-392, 481-482 and passim.
19 In the Āgamic literature on reparation rituals, the consequences of faults are normally said to fall on the king, generally named first, the priests and the community at large (Brunner, pers. communic.). Much the same is stated in the Āgamic text on different castes’ rights of entry into the temple discussed by Filliozat 1975: 116.
20 See n. 10 above.
21 I mainly depend on Mukherjea 1979: 201-243, the authority on the law of religious endowments, but see also Derrett 1963: 498-507. In legal terminology, the manager of a temple is a shebait (from Skt. sevā, ‘ service, worship ’), although dharmakarta is sometimes used for south India. Archaka. or pujari refers to the priest.
22 See Iyengar 1916: 150, who cites a case from the Mīnākṣī Temple, Ananthanarayana Iyer v. Atimuthu Iyer, A. I. R. 1915 Mad. 311, in which one of the judges repeated his ‘ rather strong view that Courts should always hesitate to recognize hereditary rights in temple offices ’.
23 The 1970 Act was to amend the Madras Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act (22 of 1959). The case is Seshammal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1972) 3 S. C. R. 820; for discussion, see Presler (1978) and remarks in Fuller (1982; 1984: ch. 6).
24 Lingat’s discussion is also central to Appadurai’s argument (1981: 68-71), which has helped me to formulate my own. It may also be noted here that modem Indian governments and their agencies, such as the Tamilnadu HRCE Department, are themselves subject to the law, whereas the checks on the king’s power were different and ‘ cannot be called constitutional in the sense in which that word is used in modern times ’ (Kane 1968-1977, 3: 98).
25 British withdrawal from direct control over Hindu temples in the mid-nineteenth century (which in fact was only partly achieved) was mainly a reaction to pressure from various groups, mostly those supporting Christian missions, opposed to British involvement in ‘ idol-worship ’. But I doubt if even the most vehement critics actually thought that the government’s power or authority depended upon its relationship with Hindu deities.
26 At least in the earlier years of their rule, the British were always keen to record and codify the ancient hereditary rights that they believed to be ubiquitous in India. Nelson referred to the ‘ perfect mania for the discovery by exhumation of Mirasi rights ’ (1868, 5: 11) and gave it as his entirely credible opinion that the term mirācu was introduced into Madurai District by the British; its ‘ meaning… is generally taken to be hereditary right or privilege, but what the right or privilege consists in, it is by no means easy to ascertain ’ (ibid.: 13).
27 The Supreme Court declared that it would be contrary to the Āgamas, and unconstitutional, for a law to permit the appointment as temple priests of persons not belonging to the appropriate ‘ denomination ’ (Seshammal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1972) 3 S. C. R. 820, pp. 825-6). Though the exact meaning of the term ‘ denomination ’ is not absolutely plain, it appears to mean an entire group (such as the Ādiśaivas) and not particular clans or clan groupings (such as the Vikkira Pāṇṭiyas or Kulacekaras). Consequently, any suitable member of the Ādisaiva ‘ denomination ’ could be legally appointed a priest in, say, the Mīnākṣī Temple, but as the government of the day had planned to open the temple priesthood to non-Brahmans, it was presumably uninterested in merely redeploying Brahmans.
Notes de fin
1 Field research in the Mīnākṣī Temple was conducted for 12 months in 1976-1977, supported by the Social Science Research Council, and for another 2 months in 1980, supported by the British Academy Small Grants Research Fund in the Humanities. I thank both organisations for their financial support. I also thank my informants and assistants in Madurai, Jean-Claude Galey and Penny Logan for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, as well as those who discussed another version presented in seminars in the anthropology departments of the Universities of Illinois, Chicago Circle; California, Berkeley; California, Riverside; Gothenburg and Stockholm.
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