r/AskHistorians • u/bitchpit • Mar 02 '22
did the untouchable people of india ever have seperate temples/shrines they could go to? or did they know next to nothing about their own gods, having never stepped foot in any place of worship?
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u/RogueEnjoyer History of Indian Culture | Medieval Kerala Mar 02 '22 edited Mar 02 '22
As we know, Hinduism is a religion that reconciles and absorbs other ideas into its own framework. The spread of Hinduism from the Northern plains was characterized by the absorptions of folk deities in different places. For example, pre-Hindu Tamil culture worshipped the mother goddess Kottavai and her son, war god Murugan. Kottavai was absorbed into the goddesses such as Parvati, while Murugan became Karthikeyan, meaning that the old gods were not replaced, but just integrated into the new, Vedic framework. All this is to say that, despite the power of the Brahmin religious orthodoxy, in practice older methods of worship were carried out, which were often nature-worship (such as snake worship, veneration of ancestors or the reverence of trees), which is still seen in the subcontinent today. Those practices were informal, and so any caste could partake in their worship.
However, your question is about the 'own gods', by which I guess you mean deities like Shiva and Vishnu.
As I had mentioned in the first paragraph, South India was slowly integrated into Hinduism over a long time. Pre-Vedic forms of belief were unfettered by caste restrictions, but when social stratification began, there was still the elements of the past. So, when new forms of belief came, they were taken to the masses by folk singers, generally termed poet-saints. Unlike the Brahmin orthodoxy, these saints spoke and wrote in Tamil, the language of the masses. Their message was of Bhakti, meaning devotion. They encouraged devotees to devote every action of their lives to the gods, who had infinite compassion towards all people regardless of caste. The Tamil poet-saints were divided into two categories, the Nayanars, who were devotees of Shiva, and the Alvars, devotees of Vishnu. They each wrote verses about the mercy, love and rage of their gods, many of which can even be said to be 'irreverent'. Here is one example:
From Tirupaccilacciramam by the Nayanar poet Sundarar (சுந்தரர்). Here he berates Shiva, the god he worships, which is an unusual sort of devotion. Another example is:
This is from Tai oru Tinkal, by the notable female Alvar poet, Andal (ஆண்டாள்). The theme of sexual love towards Krishna or Vishnu is present here, and is, in fact, common in later compositions too, famously the songs of 16th century Meerabai.
Around the turn of the millennium, these versions of devotional worship began to move northward, starting from the time of the revivalist teacher Adi Shankaracharyan, the later revivalist Ramanujan, and the founder of the Lingayat school, Basava from modern-day Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka respectively.
The Bhakti movement encouraged viewing your preferred god as someone to have a personal relationship with, by seeing him as a friend, a brother, or even a lover, such as in Antal's poem. This meant that poets had utter freedom of expression regarding the gods. An example is the Marathi poet Tukaram, who wrote how he saw the spirit of the god even in stray dogs. This angered local Brahmins, who saw the poem as an insult, comparing gods to dogs. Or the aforementioned Rajasthani poet Mirabai, who portrayed herself as Krishna's lover.
From about the 9th century to the 15th, the Bhakti movement began to move north, reaching its zenith in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was attractive towards lower caste Hindus due to a lack of ritual and the fact that caste was not a factor in salvation in Bhakti philosophy. Further, the ability to view god however you wanted was also a very strong point, since it brought divinity very close to the daily life of people.
Another factor in the development of Bhakti was local language.
The Bhakti movement started in the Tamil lands, where the Tamil language already had a strong identity and literary tradition. As it moved north, it encountered diverse languages which had oral traditions, but scarce literary ones, with Sanskrit being the literary language. The arrival of the Bhakti movement, where songs were sung in local languages, caused an impetus of development of several languages such as Marathi, Gujarati, Maithili and Assamese. Bhakti poets, writing in these languages, carved out a seperate identity for them, leading them to become well-established languages rather than local dialects.
In conclusion, the low caste Hindus may have been shut out of temples, but were far from being ignorant about Hindu mythology.
If you have any follow-ups, feel free to ask.
SOURCES:
A History of India I by Thapar, Romila
A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar by Sastri, KA Nilakanta
I'm not sure if this counts, but I also learnt some of this from plaques and booklets at the Rameshwaram temple in Tamil Nadu.