An illustrated talk by Dr.Srilata Raman on
"Self Surrender (Prapatti) to God in Srivaishnavism"
Tamil Cats and Sanskrit Monkeys

at Apparao Galleries, III Street, Wallace Gardens, Chennai.

The tilaka, Vaishnavite ritual mark, painted on a temple wall (South India. Contemporary): Ritual Art of India Ajit Mookerjee

Srilata Raman is a Ph.D. in Indology, University of Tubingen, Germany, whose areas of research are medieval South Asian/South Indian religion, bhakti, historiography and hagiography, religious movements in early colonial India from the South, Ritual, neo-Hinduism, post-colonial studies and modern Tamil literature.

"Self-Surrender (Prapatti) to God in Srivaishnavism: Tamil Cats and Sanskrit Monkeys (London & New York: Routledge 2007) is the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the theological dispute and cultural difference of the two schools of the South Indian religious tradition of Srivaishnavism. These two schools, which eventually became two "sects", have been associated with an emphasis on salvation through grace alone (the so-called "Cat" school) and salvation with some effort on the part of the devotee (the so-called "Monkey" school). The book shows that these conceptions of the theological dispute emerge very late and are in fact the result of Orientalist scholarship during the colonial period. To accept these distinctions as true of the religious tradition in the pre-colonial period would be to permit the historical evidence of modernity to tyrannize the medieval evidence. Thus, the book concentrates on the medieval evidence to show a much more naunced theological development. It shows that sectarian formation in the period, in its theological dimension, is a fluid and ambivalent enterprise, where conflict and differentiation are pressed on "sharing". whether of a common canon, a common saint, a common corpus of rituals or the "meta-social" arena of the temple itself.