speaking peoples was marginal. By the late sixteenth century,
however, Christian missionaries had begun to influence
Tamil letters and lifestyle more actively: Enrique Enriquez,
a Portuguese Jesuit who was in southwestern India from
1546 to 1600, sought to prepare catechisms and grammars
in Tamil in such a way as to make a permanent impact on
the development of Christian Tamil theological vocabulary
and to create a Catholic fishing community. Roberto de No-
bili, a Jesuit who spent much of his life in Madurai after ar-
riving in Goa in 1605, sought to present Christian scriptures
and thought as extensions and fulfillments of Tamil Brah-
manism. Constantine Beschi, a Jesuit who was in Madurai
from 1710 to 1747, made original contributions to Tamil
literature.
The first of the Protestant missionaries was Bartholo-
maus Ziegenbalg, who arrived in Tranquebar in 1706. He
wrote relatively sympathetic manuscripts on the religious life
of South India and continued the process of translating the
Bible and Christian ideas into Tamil. Christian Schwartz,
who arrived in 1750, served an important role as mediator
between local rulers and British officials. Others, such as Jo-
hann Fabricius, who died in 1791, and the nineteenth centu-
ry’s Bishop Caldwell, were instrumental in developing a dic-
tionary and comparative Dravidian grammar respectively,
implements that increased the exchange of ideas between the
English and Tamil worlds. In the nineteenth century G. U.
Pope’s translation of Ma ̄n:ikkava ̄cakar and Henry White-
head’s description of Tamil village religion helped make ele-
ments of the Tamil religious landscape better known to
Tamils as well as to the English-speaking world, even though
the work of neither was free of the Western/Christian bias
of the authors. This sort of interpretive work continued into
the twentieth century with the scholarship of C. G. Diehl
and others.
An indigenous Tamil Christianity emerged during these
centuries that included not only the conversion of large
groups of people from the lower strata of the social order in
specific villages or districts, but also the development of such
articulate Tamil spokesmen for the “new” religion as H. A.
Krisna Pillai, Vedanayagar Sastriar, and A. J. Appasamy.
Christian hospitals, schools, colleges, orphanages, and press-
es dotted the Tamil landscape and influenced the shape of
Tamil Hindu responses.
Quite apart from the attempts at Christianization that
accompanied the European presence were other forms of
westernization that influenced the shape of religion in Tamil
country. On the one hand, there were those Westerners who
romanticized the Hindu tradition. Most notable of these was
Annie Besant (1847–1933; active in India between 1894 and
1920), who established the international headquarters of the
Theosophical Society in Madras and became both an active
defender of Hindu values and a crusader for reform. On the
other hand, there were tendencies to criticize or undermine
traditional patterns of life and religion in the area. These in-
cluded a range of activities from the relatively virulent
“preaching missions” sponsored by missionaries to the more
subtle acts of discrimination and exploitation associated with
colonialism.
Still another dimension of religion evident in the pre-
modern period that had an impact on current religious life
was the continuing practice of indigenous village and folk
forms of worship. Encouraged by the relative eclecticism of
the Vijayanagar period, folk forms of religion became in-
creasingly apparent and influential on the more literate forms
of religion. Local deities designed to protect village and field
and representing the social stratification of their worshipers
have been an important part of the Tamil religious landscape
even into the present century. These include such deities as
Aiyana ̄r, who has been a protector deity of Tamil villages
since at least the eighth century; Karappaca ̄mi, the black “ser-
vant” god, and various regional viran
̄s (hero-warriors). Such
deities as these are sometimes ascribed exploits of resistance
to British forces in local mythology. Local goddesses such as
Mariamman
̄are considered personifications of the world’s
natural forces and hence are propitiated lest pestilence or na-
tional catastrophe befall. During the mid-twentieth century
many such deities have become linked to the “great tradi-
tion” of Hinduism, particularly as those strata of society for
whom these deities were paradigmatic have been integrated
with the larger social order.
THE PRESENT. The Tamil religious response to the impact
of the West has been expressed in a great variety of ways.
Some of these have been characteristic of neo-Hinduism
throughout India. There has been some adaptation of strate-
gies (e.g., the use of preaching missions and the development
of benevolent institutions) and of ideas from British and
Christian sources. There has been the syncretistic combina-
tion of ideas drawn selectively both from within the tradition
and from Christian or Western sources; most commonly,
these “mosaics of religion” have been created by individuals
and by certain gurus and their groups. Sarvepalli Radhakrish-
nan (1888–1975) may be the best known of those southern
thinkers of the twentieth century who have reaffirmed ele-
ments of the Hindu tradition in ways that interweave West-
ern ideas.
However, the last century and a half has been character-
ized by a rebirth of Tamil self-consciousness. The discovery,
translation, and interpretation of Tamil languages and litera-
ture by Westerners has encouraged a resurgence of regional
and ethnic pride among Tamils. Classical Tamil texts have
been recovered and republished. Tamil devotional literature
has been memorized and is invoked as the standard of ideal
religion, albeit interpreted and used selectively. Shrines have
been renovated and their mythical antiquity extolled. Often,
regional traditions and myths assume precedence over na-
tional ones. Thus even though brahmanization continues to
occur as folk and village culti are Hinduized, and although
various Anglicizations have been accepted as normative, the
Tamil and non-brahman roots of religious practice are per-
petuated and practiced with fervor. As Tamils, especially8978 TAMIL RELIGIONS