One of the fascinating aspects of the Srivaishnava tradition in which I was raised is that it regards Sanskrit and Tamil as languages of equal theological stature — a revolutionary claim that, to the best of my knowledge, is one of the earliest of its kind in the subcontinent. Why this assertion of equality was made and how it was justified and upheld are deeply interesting questions, to which I don’t have good answers. I mention this point merely to bring up one of its most important effects/causes (depending on how you choose to answer the two questions above): the existence of a large corpus of Tamil devotional poetry that is described within the tradition itself as the “Tamil Veda.” The Srivaishnava tradition goes to great lengths to justify this title, and tries to prove the equivalence of the Tamil corpus to the Vedas.
How is any of this relevant to my blog post? I’ve been thinking about two other discussions happening on other posts here, on dharma(s) and on the (non?)necessity of belief in God, and find it darkly illuminating that both of these discussions pivot around the same, fundamentally unexplored, center: what is our source of scriptural/ethical guidance today, and why is whatever our source is in fact our source? I think this really does speak to a transformation/epistemological rupture/whatever-you-call-it in the practice of what we call Hinduism today over the last couple of hundred years, in which traditionally unquestioned, unquestionable sources have been quietly pushed away into a dark corner.
The reason I found the Srivaishnava innovation so thought-provoking was that this particular South Indian movement had managed to deal with a similarly disorienting displacement in religious thought in South India over a millennium ago in such an new-yet-age-old way. The movement appealed to a wide base of Tamil speakers through its adoption of a corpus of beautiful Tamil devotional poems; and yet by maintaining an equally strong affiliation with Sanskrit the movement’s theologians were able to engage in dialogue with intellectuals from other traditions all over South Asia. Furthermore, the movement’s seemingly egalitarian step of declaring the Tamil corpus a “Dravidian Veda” is in fact a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that, in those times at least, only the Vedas had the power of canon, of unquestionable scripture.
This historical example is of value to us modern Hindus in two ways: First, it demonstrates that in the past the notion of a “scriptural canon” has been flexible (if heavily contested), which suggests the lesson that we modern Hindus can potentially coalesce into smaller, more particularized (and dare I say more coherent?) communities around particular scriptural sources of knowledge—whatever these may be.
Second, it demonstrates that there was an “acceptably Hindu” way of investing such a canon with authority (in other words, of canonizing a particular scripture), by establishing an equivalence of the scripture to the Vedas. This is a little trickier to translate into modern terms, because we first have to ask ourselves the question “why the Vedas?” I don’t know the answer, but it strikes me that an answer that has nothing at all to do with the Vedas will end up meaning a religion that is no longer “Hindu” in some deep sense of the word. (Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong in this position, of course — there is no reason why we have to allow ourselves to be bound by historical particularities.)
However, regardless of what text or texts we may regard to be the unquestionable center, I think the existence of such a center and of equivalences with that center is nevertheless valuable. (And it could be argued that a work like the Vedas, whose actual content we are growing less and less attached to over time, is for this precise reason the kind of center that can hold a diverse set of groups together.) This way, a number of more cohesive (and coherent?) religious communities can nevertheless recognize the existence of other Hindu communities and thus recognize their own participation within a broader Hindu religious/cultural framework.
Apologies for what is a not entirely coherent, cohesive post (rather like this tradition!). I guess the questions I’m trying to ask are:
- Does this framework of innovation in the guise of traditionalism hold true for Hindu movements in the past?
- Should such a framework hold true for the future? And supposing it should, then:
- What (sorts of) texts would be good points around which communities could rise?
- Should we continue to rely on the Vedas being the unquestionable, unquestioned center of the framework, or should we consider different texts (at the cost of no longer being Hindu in a sense)?
- Where could such a framework go wrong if we use it with an eye towards the future? What could possible alternatives be?
These are hard questions, but then where would we be if we stayed away from all the hard questions? 
And just to spice things up a little, I’d like to suggest tentatively that this community we have at Swadharma already satisfies the first condition in a matter of speaking: instead of a common textual source we are bound by a common commitment to think our way through these questions.
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