Sree Narayana Guru: Belongs to no caste—but to a great tradition

In India’s great renaissance of the last 1,500 years, beginning with the Bhakti-based reform movements that swept across the country, there are at least two iconic personalities who continue to be viewed largely through the prism of caste, even though both were proponents of humanity in the highest sense of the word: Sree Narayana Guru and Vidyadhiraja Chattampi Swami.

Even today, particularly in Kerala, celebrations of their birthdays, memorial events and discussions on their contributions are largely organised by caste-based institutions, with the separation determined by the castes into which they were born. Yet both, in a larger sense, were born into a caste but did not die in it.

This tendency to bracket great spiritual personalities primarily by caste deserves attention. It is particularly striking in Kerala, a society proud of its progressive credentials but still carrying remnants of caste consciousness and parochialism against which these very reformers sought to move humanity forward.

Consider the Nayanars, the great Shaivite poet-saints of Tamil country. The traditional list of 63 includes people from widely different social backgrounds—only a few out of the 63 were Brahmins. The 12 Alvars, who helped give mass expression to Vaishnavism, similarly came from diverse backgrounds. Their place in popular religious consciousness today is not determined by the caste into which each saint was born. Many major temples like the Madurai Meenakshi temple display all the 63 Saivite saints together. Nobody now even knows what caste they belonged to.

That is the important distinction. The ordinary devotee stands before the images of the Nayanars because they are simply saints. Why, then, should Sree Narayana Guru or Chattampi Swami remain primarily rooted in their caste as is the case in Kerala.

Their interventions against caste discrimination were central to Kerala’s social transformation. But reducing them to that social identity is to diminish the universality of his own message.

There is another tendency that is equally limiting: presenting the Guru as though he stood outside the Hindu or Sanatani spiritual tradition. His writings make that difficult to sustain. Atmopadesa Satakam, Advaita Deepika and Darshana Mala are deeply rooted in the philosophical world of Advaita and Indian spiritual thought. His corpus also contains devotional works addressed to Shiva, Subrahmanya, Kali and other familiar Hindu deities.He established about 50 temples, in all dedicated to Siva, Muruga and Devi. At the Sree Narayaneswaram temple in Ernakulam, he established a complex housing Shiva, Parvati, Vishnu, Ganesha, and Kartikeya together.

This does not make Guru less universal. On the contrary, it explains the intellectual and spiritual soil from which his universalism grew. His own speeches often referred to Advaita and he said: “ My Matham (opinion/view) is Sankara’s matham”.The same point applies to other Kerala figures—Chattampi Swamikal, Ayya Vaikundar and Ayyankali—who are too often placed in separate caste compartments. Ayyankali , more a social reformer, defined 5 pillars of success for the subaltern one of which was faith in God (sic). He worked inside the tradition of Hinduism, deliberately refuting conversion as an emancipatory route.

These great reformers should also be situated in the much larger Indian stream of spiritual and social renewal represented by Jnaneshwar, Tukaram, Mirabai, Tulsidas, Sankardev and countless others across centuries and regions.

Guru’s famous message of human unity cannot be reconciled with making him the property of one caste. Nor should rejecting caste identity require removing him from the Bharatiya civilisational tradition that shaped his philosophical vocabulary.

Kerala’s caste history was undoubtedly exceptional in its severity. Swami Vivekananda’s famous description of Kerala as a “madhouse” remains a powerful reminder of that past. But the answer to that history cannot be another form of compartmentalisation— each reformer being projected more by caste organisations or by irreligious Leftist intelligentsia who think projecting the Guru/others as not part of the Sanatana Hindu tradition is the way to counter “political Hinduism”.

As we observe Sree Narayana Guru’s Samadhi Day, perhaps the most appropriate tribute would therefore be to reclaim the full breadth of his identity: a social reformer, philosopher, spiritual teacher and universalist rooted in Advaita and Hindu traditions who challenged caste precisely because he believed human beings were something larger than the identities imposed upon them.

Guru does not become smaller by being located within the long Indian spiritual tradition. Nor does his universalism become any less universal because it emerged from that tradition. We do not have to choose between Guru’s universalism and his civilisational Hindu inheritance. The two are not contradictory; indeed, understanding one helps us understand the other.