Arumuga Navalar, Saivite sermons, and the delimitation of religion, c. 1850

Abstract

This article considers the production of the Tamil sermon in Christian and Saivite practices in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon, and the fateful entailments of oratory to far larger realms of practice. I will discuss a series of Saivite sermons delivered by Arumuga Navalar (1821–79) in the late 1840s and early 1850s in terms of their antecedents in Christian sermons. I will also consider the role of communicative practices in the production of what we understand today as ‘religion’. The discussion will begin with an orientation to the role of communicative genres within religion. I will then move to an account of Arumuga Navalar and his times, provide some rather detailed descriptions of the events in question, and close with the sig-nificance of shifts in speech genres to transformations of larger-scale socio-cultural and political-economic organization.