This article seeks to pluralize current scholarly perceptions of what constitutes Advaita Vedānta in colonial India. It suggests, in particular, that the tendency to concentrate on the so-called “neo-Vedānta” of a handful of cosmopolitan reformers has obscured other kinds of innovative Vedānta-inspired discourses that have significantly shaped the formation of modern Hindu consciousness. These discourses are indebted, in ways that are only beginning to be understood, to religious traditions rooted in particular regions and vernacular languages. The article illustrates this argument (...) with reference to the Kōvilūr Ātīṉam, a Vedānta-affiliated monastic institution in Tamil-speaking South India founded by Mutturāmaliṅka Ñāṉatēcika Cuvāmikaḷ. Examining the significance of this figure’s life story for the wealthy Nāṭṭukkōṭṭai Ceṭṭiyār merchant community that comprises the Ātīṉam’s social base, the article explores how social aspirations, traditions of monastic authority, and vernacular Vedāntic literature contribute toward a colonial project of caste self-fashioning that I refer to as “Ceṭṭiyār Vedānta”. (shrink)

This article seeks to pluralize current scholarly perceptions of what constitutes Advaita Vedānta in colonial India. It suggests, in particular, that the tendency to concentrate on the so-called “neo-Vedānta” of a handful of cosmopolitan reformers has obscured other kinds of innovative Vedānta-inspired discourses that have significantly shaped the formation of modern Hindu consciousness. These discourses are indebted, in ways that are only beginning to be understood, to religious traditions rooted in particular regions and vernacular languages. The article illustrates this argument (...) with reference to the Kōvilūr Ātīṉam, a Vedānta-affiliated monastic institution in Tamil-speaking South India founded by Mutturāmaliṅka Ñāṉatēcika Cuvāmikaḷ. Examining the significance of this figure’s life story for the wealthy Nāṭṭukkōṭṭai Ceṭṭiyār merchant community that comprises the Ātīṉam’s social base, the article explores how social aspirations, traditions of monastic authority, and vernacular Vedāntic literature contribute toward a colonial project of caste self-fashioning that I refer to as “Ceṭṭiyār Vedānta”. (shrink)

This article seeks to pluralize current scholarly perceptions of what constitutes Advaita Vedānta in colonial India. It suggests, in particular, that the tendency to concentrate on the so-called “neo-Vedānta” of a handful of cosmopolitan reformers has obscured other kinds of innovative Vedānta-inspired discourses that have significantly shaped the formation of modern Hindu consciousness. These discourses are indebted, in ways that are only beginning to be understood, to religious traditions rooted in particular regions and vernacular languages. The article illustrates this argument (...) with reference to the Kōvilūr Ātīṉam, a Vedānta-affiliated monastic institution in Tamil-speaking South India founded by Mutturāmaliṅka Ñāṉatēcika Cuvāmikaḷ. Examining the significance of this figure’s life story for the wealthy Nāṭṭukkōṭṭai Ceṭṭiyār merchant community that comprises the Ātīṉam’s social base, the article explores how social aspirations, traditions of monastic authority, and vernacular Vedāntic literature contribute toward a colonial project of caste self-fashioning that I refer to as “Ceṭṭiyār Vedānta”. (shrink)

This article seeks to pluralize current scholarly perceptions of what constitutes Advaita Vedānta in colonial India. It suggests, in particular, that the tendency to concentrate on the so-called “neo-Vedānta” of a handful of cosmopolitan reformers has obscured other kinds of innovative Vedānta-inspired discourses that have significantly shaped the formation of modern Hindu consciousness. These discourses are indebted, in ways that are only beginning to be understood, to religious traditions rooted in particular regions and vernacular languages. The article illustrates this argument (...) with reference to the Kōvilūr Ātīṉam, a Vedānta-affiliated monastic institution in Tamil-speaking South India founded by Mutturāmaliṅka Ñāṉatēcika Cuvāmikaḷ. Examining the significance of this figure’s life story for the wealthy Nāṭṭukkōṭṭai Ceṭṭiyār merchant community that comprises the Ātīṉam’s social base, the article explores how social aspirations, traditions of monastic authority, and vernacular Vedāntic literature contribute toward a colonial project of caste self-fashioning that I refer to as “Ceṭṭiyār Vedānta”. (shrink)

With a textual record spanning dozens of languages—to say nothing of its oral histories—Advaita Vedānta’s multilingual archive presents obvious and daunting challenges for scholars of South Asian intellectual and religious histories. The papers in this issue build on recent multilingual and contextual approaches to South Asian intellectual history by reading a rich corpus of Advaita Vedānta material in Persian, Marathi, Tamil, Sanskrit and Braj Bhasha. In bringing these sources and their authors into conversation with one another, this issue acknowledges Advaita (...) Vedānta’s broad appeal in early-modern and colonial South Asia; but it also attests to Advaita Vedānta’s heterogeneous, textured, and even contested historical development. The following papers chart Advaita Vedānta across five unique social, linguistic, intellectual, and geographical spaces from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. While no single issue could contextualize something as historically recalcitrant as Advaita Vedānta, we see this special issue as a step on the long and necessary road to historicizing Vedānta, broadly, and Advaita Vedānta, specifically. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās (ca. 1791–1863), whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar (“The Ocean of Inquiry”) was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s (...) major influences: Sundardās (1596–1689), a well-known Hindi poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl (d. 1604). Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās, whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s major influences: Sundardās, a well-known Hindi (...) poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl. Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās, whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s major influences: Sundardās, a well-known Hindi (...) poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl. Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of modern Indian philosophy. It examines three engaging articulations of the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge or brahmajñāna provided by three prominent Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, namely, Badrīnāth Śukla (1898-1988), Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975). Particular attention is paid to the existing relation between their distinctive conceptualisations of liberating knowledge and the doxastic attitudes that these authors professed towards the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia and the presence of the Western (...) Other. In the main, it argues that the profound differences to be found, on the one hand, in Śukla’s elucidation of this key Advaitic notion and, on the other, in Bhattacharyya’s and Radhakrishnan’s take on the same, betray their commitment to two radically different doxastic attitudes. Classifying these into (a) non-dialogical and (b) dialogical in relation to the Western Other as well as into (c) exegetic and (d) hermeneutic in relation to the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia, it contends that, in comparison to the conceptual scheme and the parameters of intelligibility that shaped and underpinned the precolonial Advaitic discourse on brahmajñāna in Sanskrit, there is a certain kind of epistemic discontinuity in the dialogical cum hermeneutic stance taken by Bhattacharyya and Radhakrishnan that is not to be found in the non-dialogical cum exegetic engagement enacted by Śukla. It suggests that this particular sort of discontinuity, absent as it is from Śukla’s elucidation of the process of knowing Brahman, reflects the far-reaching commitment of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to appropriate the precolonial Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge hermeneutically and to conceptualise it in the face of Western modernity, that is, rendering it meaningful in terms and within the parameters of intelligibility of the Western Other in order to contest what they took to be a troublesome predicament of Western modernity. By examining their ways of engaging with the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge, this dissertation contributes to the on-going debate about the nature and the driving forces of modern Indian philosophy. (shrink)