A Hushed Hindu Revolt against Dravidianism in Tamil Nadu

THE ANCIENT HILL-SHRINE of Sholingur still upholds its sanctity as one of the 108 Divyadeshams and is the home of the sacred Yoga Narasimha Swamy Temple atop its peak. 

As we ascend the steep steps, we're confronted with a melee of monkeys, whose population perhaps rivals the human inhabitants of the town. Their greedy focus is steadfast on the offerings of fruit and coconuts that the devotees take with them. Woe begone if the devotee's attention weans for even a fraction of a second. The term “pressure tactics” acquires a wholly new meaning on those steps.

And so it happened right before me.

A young, local lady was mobbed by quite a large bunch of these avaricious apes who climbed all over her and even after they took her bag away, they refused to clamber back to their places. They took their time inspecting it, strewing its contents all over the place. They didn’t scratch or hurt her in the least. 

On her part, she spoke to them, addressing them as if they were family: “Narasimha! Anjaneya! Return my bag! Now! The temple will close,” she said as she kept climbing. At a bend, three or four monkeys ran up behind her and flung her bag in front of her. Its fruity contents had been cleaned out and all that remained were some flowers, a garland and money. She picked it up, rearranged the flowers, and scolded them in mock anger, “Narasimha, if you do this again, I’ll beat you, Narasimha!” 

Then she paused, looked at them, did a small Namaskaram and continued to climb.

I’m sure you’ve also seen something similar. 

This incident occurred less than two years ago and to my mind, it counts as a sign of hope and optimism. Its significance lies in the fact that it is among countless such living proofs of an innocent and deeply evocative Bhakti intrinsic to the Tamil people. If this sounds unbelievable or exaggerated, let’s look at the negative evidence that proves this reality.

Tamil Nadu is a survivor of two cultural holocausts, both of which are intertwined.

The first germinated the second and continues to feed off and fatten on the second. The first quite obviously is the ongoing Christian missionary incursions, which originated about three centuries ago.  

Although the Christian Church as a political lobby wields enormous clout today, we need to place it in the proper historical context. Despite more than three centuries of unremitting effort, the success rate of the project of Christianising the whole of Tamil Nadu is truly pitiable. 

Almost since its inception, the evangelical apparatus has relied on fraud and deception to gain converts. As an Abrahamic cult, it could never convince the Tamil Hindu society

that Christianity was a valid spiritual path based on the strength of its independent merit. 

Fast forward to the recent widespread phenomena which continues to justly outrage the Hindus in Tamil Nadu: Jesus Sahasranama, Jesus Gayatri Mantra and building Dhvajasthambhas before churches in a calculated mimicking of Hindu temples.  

What do these things show? 

In blunt language, these are the latest manifestations of the perfidy at the core of the Conversion project. Until recently, the missionary machinery hadn’t dared to attempt such subversive tactics but is now brazening it out. The fact that the Church had long ago accepted spiritual and civilisational defeat at the hands of Sanatana Dharma is evident. But because its political and financial clout has grown to alarming levels, it has declared open war.

This meretricious facet of evangelism also has a fairly long history in Tamil Nadu. 

In the initial years, the Catholic Church, especially, succeeded in gaining a fair number of converts because of the aforementioned innocent Bhakti embedded in the DNA of the Tamil people. When Robert De Nobili donned his deceptive cloak and pretended to be a “Roman Brahmin,” it didn’t take long for the Hindu society to defrock him. Frustrated, he  quickly abandoned the perfidy and innovated. Instead of attempting to convert Brahmins, he now targeted the proverbial lower sections for en masse conversions. 

That was when he and his missionary cohorts discovered that the Bhakti-DNA in the Tamil people could be altered without their knowledge. He decided to divert their devotion towards Christ using subterfuge as the weapon of choice. 

When we cut to Bishop Robert Caldwell, his bogus work on “Dravidian grammar” came eminently in handy. This marked the well-known beginning of Tamil linguistic chauvinism working in tandem with the Dravidian separatist political ideology. When this lethal mix was inflicted upon the trusting and simple Tamil Hindu masses, it crafted a deadlier narrative that equated Jesus and Mary with Hindu Deities. This undeniably led to impressive successes.

One of the best methods to verify firsthand, this missionary sabotage is to read the Bible in Indian languages. The religious verbiage used is directly lifted off from Sanskrit texts: for example, there is no Christian equivalent for terms such as Paramatma, Deva Putra (i.e. Jesus), Deva Mata (Mary), Prabhu, etc. These Bibles and related Christian literature are used to first lure and then heighten the devotion of Hindu converts to Christianity. But this is a discussion for another day.

It is precisely this preexisting tradition of unsullied and innocent Bhakti that the Church continues to use as seed capital. 

However, in a post-globalised India, the Evangelical project has shed even the pretence of Christian “piety,” (a polite term for fundamentalism) and has emerged naked as a  multinational corporation whose charter is religious conquest. 

The phenomenon of an entirely homegrown Tamil evangelist like Paul Dhinakaran has not only become normalised but aspirational. As of 2023, his net worth was estimated in the range of 5,000 crores, which exceeds that of several top-ranking businessmen in the US.

All this wealth “earned” by hawking the “message” of Christ to unsuspecting Tamil Hindus.  

Needless, there are hundreds of Paul Dhinkarans at various levels in the Evangelical food chain across India. Kerala perhaps represents the starkest case with pastors owning entire hills not to mention the infrequent eruptions of cases of paedophilia and rapes of nuns.

Comparatively speaking, the missionary apparatus has not taken over Tamil Nadu on this scale. The reason is, once again, the same: the Bhakti tradition in the Hindu community remains rather strong. For the longest time, this reality was deliberately suppressed in Tamil public discourse by a combination of ideologues and powerful sections of its media, which is almost wholly in the grip of the DMK. 

But over the last fifteen years or so, that grip has been steadily bypassed. 

IN RECENT TIMES, the most powerful challenge to the stranglehold of Dravidianism in Tamil Nadu has largely emanated from non-institutional forces — from a combination of passionate individuals pursuing full-time professions and jobs and from disparate groups concerned with the very survival of Sanatana culture in Tamil Nadu. The emergence of the Internet and social media as the modern public square has not only intensified the challenge but has made serious dents in the Dravidian citadel, and they are visible in the physical space as well.  

In 2019, an event in Kanchipuram made global headlines. It was neither new nor innovative. It was simply a continuum of an ancient, unbroken tradition of Hindu piety. It was the grand and gorgeous celebration of Atti Varadarajaswamy, an occasion roughly comparable to say, the Kumbha Mela. 

Once every forty years, the deity of Atti Varadarajaswamy is taken out of an underground chamber located inside the tank of the Varadaraja Perumal Temple and elaborate Puja is performed for an entire Mandala or forty-eight days. This is the only time that the public is allowed a Darshana of the deity sculpted out of the Atti (fig) wood. According to tradition, this deity was the original Moola-Murti (main deity) of the Temple which was concealed in order to save it from the recurring Jihads of Ala-ud-din Khalji, Malik Kafur, Muhammad bin Tughlaq and other deliverers of the message of peace. The current tradition of taking out the Murti once every forty years dates back to about four hundred years.

In other words, it is a continuous, living tradition throbbing in the DNA of practicing Hindus; only those Hindus sundered from their roots were shocked and surprised that something like this even existed; their ignorance would’ve remained undisturbed but for newspaper headlines. Like most such mass Hindu festivals, this too, needs no marketing and PR blitz in which the Church invests so heavily and gains such pathetic ROI. Which reveals the same truth that I mentioned in the first part of this essay series: the Dravidian - DMK chokehold on all avenues of information dissemination. The fact that this time the Atti Varadaraja festival made international news simply proves the erosion of this Dravidian chokehold.  

Something else also occurred in Tamil Nadu this time: both DMK and AIADMK MLAs, leaders, party functionaries, their families…indeed, the whole Dravidian ecosystem visited Kanchipuram in droves to have a Darshan of Atti Varadararaja Swamy. This motley crew of Dravidianists is the latter-day ideological and political offspring of E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, whose Hindu hatred sputtered to death precisely in the same Kanchipuram, which hosts his bust exactly opposite the Kanchi Shankara Matha with these spite-laden wordings: “He who created god is a fool, he who propagates god is a scoundrel, and he who worships god is a barbarian.”

The same E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker had proudly boasted that “it does not take much time for a Hindu to erect a mortar stone in the house and convert it into a great god by smearing red and yellow powders on it…I have...broken the idols of Pillayar [Ganesh] and burnt pictures of Rama.” 

But like Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Ala-ud-din Khalji, Timur, Babur, Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker too, forgot a fundamental impulse located in the depths of the Hindu Atman. While he could and did break and burn the Murtis and pictures of Ganesh, Rama, Krishna, Shiva or Devi, he could never break the eternal and indestructible impulse that manifests as these deities. Including Atti Varadaraja Swamy. Like the uncountable blades of grass bend under the violent onslaught of a storm only to rise again, this Sanatana impulse might bend but it never breaks.   

Which by itself reveals another story which had been kept hidden for so long that it is no longer a secret. As the maxim goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

This is the quiet but unstoppable resurgence of Hindu Dharma in Tamil Nadu over the last decade or so. The groundswell that the Atti Varadaraja festival attracted was in a way, a signal event that portended this resurgence. It can be argued that this festival was what the Hindu community in the state was awaiting. History shows that an epoch-altering episode is the coming together of seemingly disjointed forces operating randomly in the realms of space and time. A chance meeting over coffee might be the first brick in the edifice of a future world-empire. But the very participants in that meeting would have no way of knowing it at the time or in future or ever. 

Thus, the Atti Varadaraja festival might or not have been this chance meeting. At the moment, for all purposes, the DMK’s power seems solid — it has no serious opposition but its naked and visceral enmity towards Hindu Dharma might well prove to be its undoing. Much like how it undid Aurangzeb.