The Meeting of Opposites?. Andrew Wingate
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on the Trinity, and on a suffering Christ, and sharing in his sufferings for the sake of the world. One of her surprising conclusions is as follows, summarizing from her challenging concluding chapter:
Members of ISKCON perceived Krishna consciousness as expressing their awareness and encounter with Krishna in the world, whereas CSMV members increasingly perceived the practice of the presence of God as the religious life faithfully lived out in the convent with an accompanying withdrawal from social and community involvement.10
As a member of the clergy, what did Daphne herself learn from ISKCON? She is now Chaplain to the Archbishop of York. She learned of the need for clear structure and discipline in the search to encounter God, and that she has a responsibility for this search herself. She learned of the importance of the senses in that quest, including the richness of the devotees’ worship of the deity, and ‘the ecstatic, exuberant forms of devotion’, shown, for example, in kirtan and sankirtan, the former personal, and the latter congregational chanting to glorify God. This helps them to have confidence in their evangelism, and assured engagement with the world. They practise Krishna consciousness, whether in an ashram or outside in the world. She appreciates their devotion focused on the deity, in a way that could also be offered in her tradition around ikons, candles, the cross, statues. She is impressed with the concept of lila,11 not found much in Christianity, the transcendental playfulness of Krishna and the sheer delight found in worship. Clearly Pentecostal, charismatic Christian traditions come closest here.
Three bhakti movements in the UK, and Christianity: 2. South Indian bhakti movements through temples
I worked for a long time as a theological teacher in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Being in this most Hindu of Indian cities introduced me to Hinduism in all its complexity, in a way that books and lectures never could. I went for a six-month training programme in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and Lesslie Newbigin, who had been Bishop in Madurai, gave us teaching. But he wisely said that we would learn more in a week in India than in six months with him, not least from learning from Hindus themselves. This city of more than one million people was nearly 90 per cent Hindu, and a great centre for pilgrimage to its enormous city-centre Meenaakshi Temple, as well as to major temples in the region around, and to the thousand shrines and mini-temples on all street corners and village lanes. Apart from this, and most importantly, there was the religion of the home, where devotion was expressed at all kinds of levels, to all kinds of gods, on all kinds of occasions, routinely and daily, with prayer on the ‘good and bad occasions’ of life. And within all this, the focus on festival, of which there seemed to be a major one every week. An anthropologist friend researched the Meenaakshi Temple; he reckoned that on average, in a 12-month period, there were 10,000 people a day entering the temple, and probably three times as many for festivals. And the deities were not confined, but were taken out onto the streets of this amazingly busy and noisy city, for such occasions.
Whatever the philosophy or theology behind the classical dimensions of Hinduism – the Advaita Hinduism I had learned of in Selly Oak – what I encountered here was bhakti, or a kind of charismatic devotional practice, that had to be taken very seriously. Alongside it there was village Hinduism, as I encountered it on village visits, a kind of animism as I might term it, but which sustained people, in its marking of the stages of life and in giving an annual framework to their tough lives. I learned too of the faith and practice of Dalit Hindus, known then as ‘untouchables’, ‘scheduled castes’ or ‘Harijans’. Was this Hinduism at all? How did it relate to so-called Sanskrit traditions, or Brahminic traditions, which they felt very oppressed by? What of their oral traditions, and longing for liberation, to be free to be what God, not human society, made them? This was, and remains, an intense topic of debate and much more so in the seminary, and within the whole Christian community, 70 per cent of which was from Dalit background in the south, and 90 per cent in the north.
This chapter is about South Indian bhakti in the UK, and will focus upon two major temples, the Balaji Temple in the West Midlands, and the Murugan Temple in Manor Park, east London. I will also mention a new Tamil temple in Leicester, which is nearer in its development to how these major temples were in their origin. They are largely Tamil or Telegu in their administration, and in terms of devotees. But they are increasingly eclectic also, as other Hindus attend, particularly at festival times. I will also be reflecting on how they have related to the wider communities in which they are set, and to Christians in particular. What is evident throughout the British Hindu community is how few of them have a Dalit origin, particularly those coming from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Sri Lanka. Most Dalits are Punjabis, a proportion of whom have become neo-Buddhists in Wolverhampton, Birmingham or elsewhere.1 Some attend Guru Ravidas temples. This guru/god is on the border between Sikh and Hindu. There is a Ravidas temple in north Leicester.
There have been some studies of the South Asians as they have moved to the UK. One such study is Diaspora of the Gods,2 by Joanne Waghorne. She sees a movement to globalize what have been localized temple traditions. This applies particularly to the god Murugan, normally associated with Tamil Nadu, and with six hills there which house Murugan temples. These are Palani (the most important, in Madurai District, and second only to Tirupati, where the Balaji temple is on another hill, in Andhra Pradesh), Tiruchendur (by the sea in Tirunelveli District), Tiruparakundram (just five miles south of Madurai), Tiruttani (north of Chennai), Swamimalai (near Tanjore), and a sixth which is undefined, because Murugan is everywhere, and so this temple is found wherever there is a hill with a shrine to Murugan on its top. There are numerous candidates for this. They were not original national pilgrimage sites, but regional and local. These locations throughout the state help us to see how Murugan has become a symbol for Tamil religiosity, and also for the Dravidian consciousness that permeates culture and politics, where, since the 1960s, government has always been in the hands of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK – the Dravidian Progress Federation) or a split from this main party. Murugan is linked with the Sanskrit tradition, through his being the second son of Siva. There is a definitive study of Murugan by Frank Clothey, entitled The Many Faces of Murugan.3 The author’s conclusion is that many Tamilians see the god and the region as virtually inseparable. Murugan’s life has been mythically lived out in Tamil Nadu. Generic elements from both the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions have been fused with local and folk imageries in such a way as to make the god’s holy stead attractive to people from all walks of Tamil life. His exploits speak to all dimensions of the Tamil imagination – whether he is seen as teacher and philosopher par excellence, or the one who dispels misfortune; whether he is the giver of joy in life or release from it; be he the mischievous lover or ideal ascetic the full range of human needs and emotions are expressed in the contemporary mythology of Murugan.4
Clothey writes this before the development of the Murugan cult in the Tamil diaspora. Now this god is found globally, and Joanne Waghorne coins the phrase ‘transnational religion’. She quotes another sociologist, Susanne Rudolf, that ‘local devout groups through informal networks, keep alive these examples of religiosity in a new context, just as happens with the religion of Imams and Bishops.’ Another example: she looks at how worship of independent village goddesses is not found until the 1990s, being seen as low class and low caste. But now it has spread through London, including in the East Ham temple. This is a kind of neo-Hinduism and can be linked with Hindutva ideology. This British Hinduism has been described, by Burghart,5 as the perpetuation of religion in an alien cultural milieu. Recently, there has been another example, the wider development of the cult of Ayappan, a god normally associated with a major shrine on the top of a hill in Kerala called Subaramalai. This is a centre for an annual pilgrimage which involves much asceticism in preparation, and where pilgrims can be identified by their black clothes. I was surprised to hear of a doctor from the UK who was going on such a pilgrimage with his wife in 2014, normally engrossed as he is with the religion of the Tamil diaspora. This may be the next transnational import.
A major player in the development of Tamil religion in London was a Sri Lankan called Sabapathipillai, who felt a calling in the 1970s to unite all worshippers of Siva in the UK who were of Dravidian origin.