Leslie Orr, Concordia University

Renunciation and Celebration:

Ascetics in the Temple Life of Medieval Tamil Nadu

The Tamil inscriptions of the ninth through thirteenth centuries (the Chola period) provide us with a somewhat unexpected picture of the roles of ascetics in the life of the temple.  Individuals and groups who are referred to by various terms cognate with the Sanskrit tapasvin appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons and as pilgrims coming to celebrate festivals, and -- unlike their contemporary counterparts in Karnataka -- are more often depicted as participants in temple worship than as performers of austerities.  The inscriptions tell us that these “ascetics” were active in Saiva, Vaisnava, and Jain institutions, that they were women as well as men, and that their status (e.g. as renouncers of householdership, or as persons who had undergone initiation or ordination) and functions (e.g. as priests, teachers, or inmates of mathas) were various and frequently ambiguous.  The religious literature contemporary with the inscriptions introduces further complications into the picture of medieval asceticism, with, for example, the revisioning of tapas as devotion in the Saiva Periyapuranam and the modification and elaboration of the ideal of sannyasa in Srivaisnava treatises and hagiographies.  My effort in this paper will be to explore the activities and circumstances of various kinds of ascetics in Chola period temple life, and to trace the historical shifts over time -- and the processes of masculinization, hierarchization, and politicization -- that, by the fifteenth century, had produced the well-defined sectarian lineages and celibate institutions which are today associated with South Indian Saiva Siddhanta and Srivaisnavism.