Arumuka Navalar

Arumuka Navalar (; 18 December 1822 – 5 December 1879) was a Sri Lankan Shaivite Tamil language scholar and a religious reformer who was central in reviving native Hindu Tamil traditions in Sri Lanka and India.

Navalar's birth name was Nallur Arumuka Pillai. With his knowledge of Christian theological premises, Navalar became influential in creating a period of intense religious rivalry with Christian missionaries, defending Tamils and their historic religious culture in India and Sri Lanka, preventing large-scale conversions to Christianity. such as by showing Shaiva Agamas (scriptures) prohibit animal sacrifice and violence of any form. which constitutes about 50% of the Tamil Hindus on the island nation. Historically, the Vellalars had been a part of the elites who owned lands, were literati, patrons of temples and monasteries. At the time of Navalar's birth, they were a part of the socio-political leadership in Jaffna Peninsula, a strip of land (40 by 15 miles) separated from South India by the Palk Strait. Navalar grew up in a literati Tamil Shaiva family. It was also home to the Jaffna Kingdom that had patronised this culture before it was defeated by the Portuguese colonials in 1621 CE. Nallur was also the capital of the defeated kingdom.

Arumugam's father Kandharpillai was a Tamil poet and provided a foundation in Tamil literature to Arumuga Navalar. His mother Sivakami was known for her devotion to supreme Saiva deity Lord Siva. Arumugam studied the Indian classical language, Sanskrit as well as Tamil grammar. Arumugam studied English in a Christian mission run school as a day student. After his studies, he was asked to stay on at the Jaffna Central College to teach English and Tamil.

Through his weekly sermons at Hindu temples, he also attempted to reform local Tamils of all practices that did not find sanction in the Hindu Vedas and Agamas. The lecture series and its circuit continued regularly for several years and produced a Saiva revival, helping informed piety grow among many Jaffna Saivas. This was a direct tactical response to confront what he called the "mockery" of the Hindus by Christian missionaries.

Background information

Tamil people are natives in Tamil Nadu. Tamilakam (ancient Tamil country) had followers of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The Hinduism, Tamil and Sanskrit has been spread by priests, traders to Southeast Asia. By the 12th century CE, the Tamils had an extensive network of temples, religious literature and pilgrimage sites dedicated to Shaivism and Vaishnavism Of these, the Shaiva samayam (religious tradition) was most influential in the Jaffna region. They held the Vedas and Agamas to be the bedrock of their beliefs. Navalar was born and raised in this background.

The 19th century Protestant missionaries from England and America in Jaffna believed that Hindu Shaivism was "evil" and in the struggle God and the Devil, they began to use publications such as The Morning Star to reveal the "falsity" of Hindu Shaivism and highlight texts such as the Skanda Purana in their schools for children. This angered the Shaiva community, who began their own efforts to counter the methods of the Christians.

While Arumugam Navalar was still working under Peter Percival and translating the Bible, he published a seminal letter in The Morning Star under a pseudonym in September 1841. It was a comparative study of Christianity and Hindu Saivism and targeted the weakness in the argument Christian missionaries had used against local Hindu Saiva practices. The missionaries had attacked the idol worship and temple rituals of the local Hindu Saivas as "devilish" and of "no value". Navalar, an avid reader of the Bible as he worked to translate it into Tamil, stated that Christianity and Jesus himself were rooted in the temple rituals of the ancient Israelites and that the reverence to the icons of Christianity such as the cross was akin to Shaiva's reverence for the icons of Hinduism such as the lingam. If Christians find their churches, rites and symbols as pedagogically useful, why shouldn't Shaiva Hindus have the same human rights and religious choices, argued Navalar. His letter admonished the missionaries for misrepresenting their own religion and concluded that in effect there was no difference between Christianity and Hindu Saivism as far as idol worship and temple rituals were concerned.

Circuit preaching

Using the preaching methods popularised by the Methodist preachers, he became a circuit preacher. His first secession was on 31 December 1847 at Vaitheeswaran Temple in Vannarpannai. It was a weekly event known as Prasangams on every Friday evening. In these secession he read from sacred texts and then preached in a manner that lay people understood. He was helped by his friend Karttikeya Aiyar of Nallur and his students from his school. The sermon topics were mostly ethical, liturgical, and theological and included the evils of adultery, drunkenness, the value of non-killing, the conduct of women, the worship of the linga, the four initiations, the importance of giving alms, of protecting cows, and the unity of God.

Emphasis on Agamas In his weekly sermons, he attacked Christians and criticized the benighted practices of local Hindus. He specifically reprimanded the trustees and priests of the Nallur Kandaswami Temple in his home town because they had built the temple not according to the Agamas a century ago as well as used priests who were not initiated in the Agamas. He also opposed their worship of Vel or the weapon representing the main deity as it did not have Agamic sanction.

Reformed school system The school he founded was called Saivaprakasa Vidyasala or School of Lord Siva's splendor. The school did not follow the traditional Tamil teaching system, in which each student worked on his own pace and the teacher pupil ratio was extremely low. Although this system produced stellar experts in subject matter but took too much labour and was inefficient compared to the western system used by the Missionaries. His press was set up in a building that was donated by a merchant of Vannarpannai. It was named the Vidyaanubalana yantra sala (Preservation of Knowledge Press).

Other notable texts published included The Prohibition of Killing, Manual of worship of Shiva temple and The Essence of the Saiva Religion. His first major literary publication appeared in 1851, the 272-page prose version of Sekkilar's Periya Puranam, a retelling of the 12th-century hagiography of the Nayanars or Saivite saints. This was followed by local missionaries attacking Sri Murugan as an "immoral deity" for marrying two women. As a response Navalar published Radiant Wisdom explaining how the chronicles embody differing levels of meaning and that numerous characters in the Christian Bible, like King David, who were being claimed as examples of good conduct by the missionaries, were being depicted as having multiple wives and sexual partners themselves. He also published literature of controversial nature, in a manner similar to how Christian missionaries were, in what Navalar called as "mocking" the Hindus. He along with Centinatha Aiyar, published examples of indecent language from the Bible and published it as Disgusting Things in the Bible (Bibiliya Kutsita). In 1852, he along with Ci. Vinayakamurtti Cettiyar of Nallur, printed the Kummi Song on Wisdom of Muttukumara Kavirajar. The local Christians called for the one-sided censorship of such criticism and to shut down these printing presses.

The seminal work that was geared towards stemming the tide of conversions was printed in 1854. It was a training manual for the use of Saivas in their opposition to the missionaries, titled "Saiva Dhoosana Pariharam". Navalar's legacy began in Jaffna, but spread more broadly to Sri Lanka as well as Southern India. Navalar active efforts to set up two centres of reform made him influential in the Tamil community. He started two schools, two printing presses and campaigned against Christian missionary activity in colonial-era Jaffna and Madras Presidency. He produced approximately ninety-seven Tamil publications, twenty-three were his own creations, eleven were commentaries, and forty were his editions of those works of grammar, literature, liturgy, and theology that were not previously available in print. With this recovery, editing, and publishing of ancient works, Navalar laid the foundations for the recovery of lost Tamil classics that other Tamil scholars such as U. V. Swaminatha Iyer and C.W. Thamotharampillai continued.

Navalar established the world's first Hindu school adapted to the modern needs that succeeded and flourished. While the school he established in Chidamharam in 1865 has survived to this day, similar schools seem to have spread only to two nearby towns. In Sri Lanka, eventually more than one hundred and fifty primary and secondary schools emerged from his work. Many of the students of these schools were successful in defending the Hindu Saiva culture not only against Christian missionary activities but also against neo-Hindu sects.

Arumuka Navalar who identified himself with an idealised past, worked within the traditions of Hindu Saiva culture and adhered to the Hindu Saiva doctrine. He was an unapologetic defender of Hindu Shaivism. Although he never cared much for his caste identity, as he considered all living beings as equal, his efforts led to the consolidation of traditional privileges of Hindu Saiva Vellala (farmers, landlords) and Karaiyar (warriors). Although Navalar did not show much interest in Tamil politics and kept his focus on defending the Hindu Shaiva faith in Sri Lanka and South India, his aggressive preaching of a Hindu Saiva cultural heritage contributed to the growth Tamil nationalism. The Tamil nationalist movement had an element that "Hindu Saiva Siddhanta preceded all others as the original Tamil religion", states Dennis Hudson.

Navalar and his followers have been accused by some such as Sivathamby of focusing on the religious literature "in their anxiety", and "openly keeping away" from the secular Tamil literature, as they opposed the Christian missionaries. According to David Shulman, however, Navalar was among the pioneers who first located and printed the predominantly non-religious Tamil Sangam literature in 1851 (Thirumurukaattuppadai, one of the Ten Idylls) and the earliest paper editions of a palm-leaf manuscript on the ancient Tamil grammar text, Tolkappiyam. According to Kamil Zvelebil – a Tamil literature scholar, Navalar was one of the key persons who identified, edited and published the secular and religious classical Tamil literature before 1879. He also inspired his fellow Tamils to publish Hindu texts and their translations. According to Peter Schalk, Navalar has also been accused of despising the Vaishnava and Jaina community.