Paul Younger
Professor Emeritus
Department of Religious Studies
McMaster University
E/ younger.p@bmts.com
Tamil Hinduism in Indenture-based Societies
Saturday, June 2nd
| 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Between 1838 and 1915 indentured workers were taken
from Madras and Calcutta to Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Mauritius
and Fiji. In each location the Tamils formed distinctive worship
traditions that still thrive in the post-colonial situations. In each
situation a new worship tradition was formed and people are now fiercely
proud of that tradition and carefully teach it to their children. In
each case the Tamils maintained their own sense of community even as
they interacted with the North Indians, the colonial British and the
other colonized persons as they built a new society together. In the
circumstance, the social structure of the new worship traditions are
inventive adaptations of the local social patterns, but the traditions
lay out a set of symbols from the "homeland" as the basis of their
religious authority.
Guyana and Trinidad provide the most extreme version of the "new
homeland" pattern in that the Kali-Mai cult found there reflects the
close interaction the cult had with the Protestant-style sectarianism of
the Afro-Guyanese churches. The carefully defined ritual form in which
Mariyamman and the clusters of subsidiary deities are now worshipped is
a local invention, but it invokes a distant and mythic spiritual power
that serves as a counterweight to the openness of the shared
post-colonial society. Tamils in Mauritius, South Africa and Fiji were
not cut off from their roots to the extent those in Guyana and Trinidad
were, and the rigidity of the Guyana/Trinidad solution is not as evident
in those settings.
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Dr. Younger studied in Banaras Hindu University and Princeton University
and has taught at McMaster University since 1964. His main research has
been in South India, Sri Lanka and more recently a variety of "diaspora"
settings. His most recent books are
The Home of Dancing Sivan: The Traditions of the Hindu Temple in
Citamparan (1995) and
Playing Host to Deity: Festival Religion in the South Indian Tradition
(2001).