ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a work, The Refutation of the False Songs of Divine Grace (Pōliyaruṭpā maṟuppu), a polemical work composed by Arumuga Navalar (1822–1879), a Tamil Śaivite luminary from Sri Lanka and a critic of Ramalingar. In a very public dispute between the two men ending in a court case, polemical literature played a decisive role in forging differing conceptions of Tamil Śaivism. We see that central to one version of Tamil religion was Navalar’s text that repudiated, through savage polemics, all that the early hagiographies on Ramalingar sought to achieve. This chapter calls this text an anti-hagiography, inasmuch as it questions and subvert the hagiographical assumptions and topoi discussed earlier through a comprehensive genre inversion and shows how it sought to interpret and marginalize both Ramalingar and his version of Śaivism in colonial modernity.
