post-colonial_translation

136 Vinay Dharwadker
assortment is a partial selection cutting across so many languages,
regions, social formations, cultural position and histories that it
cannot constitute a ‘whole’ in any familiar sense of the term. Many
pieces turn out to share a limited number of characteristics with
many other pieces, so that the heap can be arranged using multiple
paradigmatic criteria into numerous smaller constellations, and
some of the constellations can be placed provisionally into still
larger groupings, but no defining set of common characteristics
appears in every single piece in the pile. As a consequence, when we
wish to judge whether Ramanujan represented Virasaivism, bhakti
or Hinduism as monolithic, homogeneous or essentializable
phenomena, we need to go beyond a single poem or a single series of
comments, and examine all the material he produced on these
subjects.
When we do so, we find immediately before us a large quantity
of quotable and inspectable evidence that contradicts
Niranajan’s undocumented claims. Thus, in the Introduction to
Speaking of Siva itself we find Ramanujan reminding his readers
in detail that bhakti is divisible into at least four varieties (nirguna
and saguna, Vaisnava and Saiva); and, both in the commentary
and in the very organization of the book, arguing that Virasaivism is not
uniform, since even the four poets represented there – Basavanna,
Dasimayya, Mahadeviyakka, Allamaprabhu – despite their common
commitments are unmistakably distinctive. In Hymns for the
Drowning, Ramanujan deals with an earlier and very different bhakti
movement, concentrating on a single Tamil alvar, on the Srivaisnava
Tamil alvar tradition as a whole, on an explication of ‘the many-sided
shift [that] occurred in Hindu culture and sensibility between the sixth
and ninth centur[ies]’ (HD, 103), and on a demonstration of the
radically hybrid constitution of bhakti, far from any essentialist or
essentializable Hinduism:
Early bhakti movements [in Tamil and other languages], whether
devoted to Siva or to Visnu, used whatever they found at hand, and
changed whatever they used. Vedic and Upanisadic notions,
Buddhist and Jaina concepts, conventions of Tamil and Sanskrit
poetry, early Tamil conceptions of love, service, women, and kings,
mythology or folk religion and folksong, the play of contrasts
between Sanskrit and the mother tongues: all these elements were
reworked and transformed in bhakti.
(HD, 104)