A Gem of Many Facets: Religion, Ethics, and History in the Reception of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the Cīvakacintāmaṇi (“Cīvakaṉ, the Wish-Fulfilling Gem)”, a circa tenth-century narrative poem written in Tamil, has played a significant role in Tamil literary culture, especially in the late-nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in classical literature. Despite robust evidence of its wide readership in premodernity, contemporary scholars have labeled this text as propaganda or have interpreted it largely as a piece of Jain didactic literature. This tension between the dynamics of its wide popularity and the narrow reception of it as sectarian literature provokes questions about the nature of religious identity as a factor in literary production and reception. In the dissertation, I challenge the tendency in modern scholarship to read Jain-authored literature only through a sectarian lens. Instead, I argue that Jain-authored literature, particularly the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, was at the center of a multi-religious literary culture in which sectarian concerns were not the primary driver for literary consumption and circulation. What I show is that our contemporary understanding of the strict boundaries of religious identity and the centrality of sectarian polemics to the literary sphere do not support an accurate or nuanced interpretation of this text specifically or of this literary culture more broadly. As I demonstrate, readers and receivers of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi in premodernity viewed it as an important literary and ethical exemplar, an important text to the broader Tamil tradition, and a key text about liberation, regardless of their own religious affiliations. This importance of religious identities for readers and the related insistence of seeing this text through a sectarian lens increases in the mid- to late-nineteenth century in the context of heightened scholarly attention to both Jain traditions and the Dravidian language family. As a result, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi is relegated for the first time to the zone of minority-authored religious literature in contradiction with the longue durée of its reception history. I make these arguments using Tamil literary, literary theoretical, and commentarial sources from the tenth century through the late-fifteenth century, as well as Tamil- and English-language writings by missionaries, colonial administrators, and European and Tamil scholars of Tamil literature from the mid-seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries. Additionally, I offer a new interpretation of the work itself to illustrate the payout for reading through a lens wider than the author’s religious affiliation in our reading practices. Structured around key questions rather than organized chronologically, the dissertation sets out to answer the following: First, what are the origins of the contemporary scholarly approach of foregrounding the erotic content, Jain authorship, and didacticism in reception of the Cintāmaṇi? Second, how was the Cintāmaṇi read and received historically? Third, what role, if any, did the Jain affiliation of the work play in the reception by non-Jain readers? Fourth, what interpretive possibilities emerge by following the general lead of readers who did not receive the text as having a specifically Jain purpose? Chapter One examines the reception of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi from the mid-eighteenth to late-nineteenth centuries, showing the factors that contributed to its contemporary reception as a Jain doctrinal text. Chapter Two focuses on the only extant premodern commentary written by prolific Śaiva scholar, Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar, showing how he positions the work as an authoritative classical text and as an exemplary text about a king’s path to liberation. Chapter Three examines how the Cīvakacintāmaṇi serves as a literary exemplar and source of moral instruction for Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, and Christian commentators and scholars. Chapter Four offers a new interpretation of the work in conversation with the readers analyzed through the rest of the dissertation to highlight the payout for rethinking how we approach reading Jain literature, with attention to what can be learned from following the lead readers across time.