Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism

6 A Hindu Response to the Written Torah

6 A Hindu Response to the Written Torah D. Dennis Hudson In January of 1854, in the midst of a busy life opposing Christian missions to the Hindus in northern Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Arumuga Navalar (1822-79) published a major refutation of Protestantism. He wrote it in Tamil prose and printed it on his own press. The booklet, The Abolition of the Abuse of Saivism, was reprinted in Madras in 1868 and again in 1890 and has appeared various times since.1 It, and the vigorous career of its author, were decisive factors in the growth of a Hindu-specifically a Saiva-self-consciousness that has fed opposition to missionaries among the Tamils since the latter half of the nineteenth century until today. This essay will explore one element in Arumuga Navalar's opposition to the missionaries: his response as a devout worshipper of Siva to the written Torah as recorded in The Abolition of the Abuse of Saivism.2 Navaler encountered the written Torah in the form of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, which he studied with Methodist missionaries from Britain. His written response was occasioned by the severe verbal attacks that Christian preachers and teachers in Sri Lanka and India had made for years on Siva and his worship in temples. Siva, they stated baldly, is a demon. His worshippers are ignorant heathens. To refute such painful attacks, Arumuga Navalar used his extensive knowledge of the books that compose the Old Testament to show that far from being heathenish, the worship of Siva is fundamentally 55 56 D. Dennis Hudson similar to the worship of God prescribed in the Old Testament and followed by Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem.' Now, Navalar's argument in The Abolition of the Abuse of Saivism is intended to refute Protestants, not to discuss comparative religion. Yet it reveals the way a learned, articulate, and devout worshipper of Siva in the middle of the nineteenth century actually did respond to biblical religious practice as he encountered it Tanakh-the books of Moses, of the prophets, and of the canonical writings-as embodied in the English Christian Bible. Although his response was to the written Torah within the context of Protestant interpretation and not in the interpretive context of the oral Torah (Talmud), his response nevertheless began what could be an interesting conversation today between Saivas and Jews. Because he did respond to the written Torah in a nineteenth-century Protestant context, I will retain his use of terms born of that context, for example, Jehovah as the name of God. What emerges in the booklet is a sophisticated analysis of Saiva and Jewish temple cults that argues for strong similarities between the two. Since there are such similarities, Navalar asks, what justification do the missionaries have for opposing the worship of Siva in temples? After all, Jesus himself worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem, which means that he worshipped in many ways like a Saiva. By denying that temple worship as prescribed by the Old Testament is of fundamental authority, the missionaries, he asserts, have abandoned central biblical precepts without any warrant from the teachings of Jesus found in the New Testament and built a false religion that is not even supported by their own sacred books. By sneeringly and ignorantly judging Saiva worship as devilish, they do not see the similarities between the Temple in Jerusalem and the Siva temples in India and Sri Lanka. If they did, he concludes, they could not reasonably assert that the worship of Siva is ignorant heathenism. The effect of Arumuga Navaler's work was notable. Hindu preachers and teachers used the analysis of the Old Testament and New Testament in The Abolition of tile Abuse of Saivism to oppose Christian preachers vigorously in public. Indeed, Protestant missions in northern Sri Lanka never fully recovered from the results of Navalar's lifetime of work to purify and revitalize the worship of Siva among the Tamils.~ Arumuga Navalar's extensive knowledge of the Old Testament derived from his work during an eight-year period (1841-48) assisting with the translation of the Christian Bible into Tamil. Peter Percival, principal of the Wesleyan Seminary in Jaffna where Navalar had studied , was a British Methodist and a noted Tamil scholar. When Navalar A Hindu Response to the Written Torah 57 completed his studies at the age of nineteen, Percival employed him to teach Tamil...