New Delhi: In 1888, Narayana Guru defied convention and consecrated a shivalinga at Aruvippuram, a village in South Travancore.
For an Ezhava—then treated as an untouchable caste whose members were not even allowed to carry umbrellas, let alone consecrate temples in 19th-century Travancore—his was an unthinkable act.
When asked whether he possessed the scriptural authority to perform such a sacred ritual, Narayana Guru’s reply was simple, “My consecration is of an Ezhava and not of a Brahmin Shiva.’’
Was this an act of emulating Brahmins, and therefore, a step towards Sanskritisation? Or was it a social protest that threatened to dislodge the entire Brahminical order itself?
The answers were not clear at the time. What was unmistakable, however, was that the young ascetic and reformer in his thirties was shaking up Travancore society like few had before him.
More than 130 years on, the answer to the question doesn’t just remain unresolved, but it’s also entangled in political and ideological battles in Kerala.
Last week, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan kicked up a political storm when he said that Narayana Guru was neither a propagator nor a practitioner of Sanatana Dharma. Instead, he was someone who tried to reconstruct Sanatana Dharma for the new age, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader said.
“There is now an organised effort to establish Sree Narayana Guru as an exponent and proponent of Sanatana Dharma. However, he was neither an exponent nor proponent of Sanatana Dharma,” Vijayan said.
“Rather, he was an ascetic who uprooted that dharma and proclaimed a new dharma for a new age.”
The BJP immediately seized on this comment, saying the chief minister was “insulting” Sanatana Dharma for votes.
Senior BJP leader from Kerala and former Union minister V. Muraleedharan, for instance, said, “Vijayan has insulted the entire Sree Narayaneeya community. Vijayan is of the view that Sanatana Dharma is despicable.”
The controversy has once again brought to the spotlight the dichotomy of Narayana Guru’s legacy, of having been—simultaneously and seamlessly—both a religious guru and a secular social reformer.
But who exactly was Narayana Guru? What was the philosophy behind his oft-repeated maxim, “One Caste, One Religion, One God”? What was the sociopolitical context in which his philosophy took shape? And why is he still an ideological puzzle for modern-day politicians?
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Born in a ‘lunatic asylum’
The Kerala where Narayana Guru was born in the mid-1850s—there is no clarity on the exact year of his birth—had famously been called a “lunatic asylum” by Swami Vivekananda due to the extensive and draconian system of caste discrimination in place.
Prohibitions on ‘lower’ castes weren’t just limited to restrictions on worshipping ‘higher’ Brahminical gods like Shiva or Vishnu, but also on carrying umbrellas, wearing shoulder cloths and even being seen on public roads.
An Ezhava, for instance, had to maintain a distance of 36 paces from a Nambudiri Brahmin and was not allowed to come within 12 paces of a Nair, as it was believed their proximity could pollute the ‘higher’ castes.
Narayana Guru was born into this so-called “polluting” caste in a lower middle-class matrilineal peasant family in Chempazhanti, a village six miles north of Thiruvananthapuram. Despite the social stigma, the family had a strong intellectual tradition—his father was a school teacher and his uncle was an ayurveda practitioner.
“Ezhavas were a marginalised community, but some of them had traditions in studying Sanskrit and Ayurveda,” says G. Mohan Gopal, former director of the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal, who now runs a small collective of academics focused on Narayana Guru’s philosophies.
“This could be because, during the time of Buddhism, some Ezhava families gained knowledge of Sanskrit and continued the tradition.”
Some Ezhava families were so rich that even though they were barred from going to government schools, they imported teachers from the Madras province, and started their own schools.
While not as affluent as some of the others, Narayana Guru’s family was as academically inclined.
In 1876, Nanu, as he was then called, went to an eminent scholar of Sanskrit, astrology, medicine and Vedanta for higher education. By the time he came back, he had a deep knowledge of Hindu philosophy, scriptures, grammar, poetry, logic, Sanskrit, astrology, medicine and Vedanta.
In 1881, much like his father, he started a school in his village, began to teach and got married. But neither his teaching career nor his marriage lasted long, and in 1884, Nanu left home “in search of truth”.
The non-English-speaking reformer
Through his travels, Narayana Guru grew intellectually as he moved from a critical reading of scriptures to the understanding that the Vedas were not the sole preserve of Brahmins, and from learning yoga to gaining familiarity with Bhakti traditions of Tamil Shaivite ascetics.
“The makeup of Narayana Guru’s intellectual world was thus based on traditional knowledge,” writes P. Chandramohan, author and former curator at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in a 1987 paper titled Popular Culture and Socio-Religious Reform: Narayana Guru and the Ezhavas of Travancore.
This was crucial for his politics, philosophy and general worldview. As someone who was not a product of modern western education and remained isolated from the mainstream intellectual life of 19th-century India, Narayana Guru did not internalise the reformist ideas of the time, which included a disdain towards idol worship and a dismissal of Sanskrit as the language of the Brahmins.
Chandramohan writes that Narayana Guru saw idol worship as “necessary for people in their earlier stages of their religious understanding before they could grasp the abstract truth embodied in spiritual philosophy”. He added that the guru very much sanctioned idol worship “as the nucleus around which an alternate form of worship could be evolved”.
He demonstrated similar unideological flexibility about language as he spoke in Malayalam when he addressed ordinary people and switched to Sanskrit in discussions with religious scholars and thinkers.
In 1913, Narayana Guru founded the Advaita Ashramam in Aluva “for the purpose of teaching and propagating the Advaita philosophy”, and in 1914 he built a Sanskrit school adjacent to the Ashrama to “restore the sanctity of Sanskrit”.
“It is because the guru was so firmly removed from the binaries of atheism and theism, idolatry and polytheism, modern and unmodern, that he consecrated an idol of Shiva for ‘lower’ castes, and actually seek to restore Sanskrit, as opposed to glibly criticising it for being Brahminical,” says a professor of political philosophy who wishes to remain anonymous.
“One can easily guess that he did not bother whether his actions were seen as radical or religious or secular or rational… If you ask me, he could possess this uniqueness because he did not speak or understand English.”
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Complex relationship with religion
Kerala in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed for religious conversions—often perceived by the ‘lower’ castes as an exit from life in the “lunatic asylum”.
In 1875, Christians accounted for 20 percent of the population in Travancore. By 1901, the number was up to 24 percent, and by 1941, it had reached 32 percent.
It was around the same time that Narayana Guru was going about Kerala consecrating Hindu temples—in the years following the Shiva temple in Aruvippuram in 1888, he consecrated some 64 temples in different parts of Kerala.
His story, therefore, is easily interpreted as one of saving Hinduism from Christianity.
His reforms within the Hindu community—exhorting Ezhavas to worship ‘higher’ gods like Shiva (as opposed to ‘lower’ gods to whom blood sacrifices were made), and give up ‘impure’ traditional professions like toddy tapping—were mostly on Hindu terms, argues historian Manu Pillai. He even exhorted lower castes to embrace vegetarianism.
“One can argue that there was a Sanskritising element here. This perhaps allows some on the Right to claim that he was a committed Hindu and that he prevented missionaries from succeeding with the Ezhavas,” he says.
For instance, an article published in 2021 in the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, hailed Narayana Guru as the “saint-reformer who saved Sanatan Dharm from extinction in Kerala”.
“After Sree Narayana Guru started his reform movement, conversion of Ezhavas to Christianity and Islam almost stopped,” the article said.
More recently, in an article in The Indian Express this week, Guru Prakash, a national spokesperson of the BJP, wrote, “Narayana Guru, without a doubt, remains a tall and popular figure who has enabled Hindu thought, religion, and culture to reinvent themselves. He is, therefore, a popular advocate of Sanatana Dharma.”
However, a closer look at Narayana Guru’s philosophy and actions reveals a more complex view of religion.
“He never preached to people what they should believe in. If they wanted a temple of Shiva or Vishnu, he would consecrate it for them without any questions because these were people who were excluded and prohibited from worshiping these gods,” says Gopal.
“That does not mean he was propagating Hinduism… he was enabling those who were excluded from it to access it.”
While he consecrated idols of ‘higher’ gods like Shiva, in later years, he is also known to have consecrated objects like a burning lamp or a mirror in some temples, showing an evolution in his approach. His follower and biographer, Kottukoyikkal Velayudhan, characterises this as a shift towards employing temples and idols as aids to enlighten the people.
Gopal said that apart from consecrating temples for those excluded from worshiping gods like Shiva or Vishnu, Narayana Guru also wrote prayers for marginalised communities.
“Similarly, if those from marginalised communities went to him, and asked him to write prayers in praise of Shiva for them, he would do it with the passion of a poet,” he said.
“But that came from his deep empathy for people. While Guru never spoke about his own personal faith, if he had any, he shared the faith of diverse spiritualities. What we do know is that he facilitated them with utmost empathy.”
While some argue that he was propagating Hinduism, it is “an absolutely false conclusion”, Gopal argues. “He was making Hindu temples because it was the Hindu temples of the ‘higher’ castes in which those from marginalised communities could not enter. Muslims and Christians did not face this in their mosques and churches, so there was no need for him to construct them.”
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‘There is no such religion as Hinduism’
On the surface, Narayana Guru was a quintessential Hindu monk. He built dozens of Hindu temples, sought to propagate Sanskrit and wore saffron robes. However, his views on Hinduism were extremely nuanced.
“There is no such religion as Hinduism,” he famously told C.V. Kunjuraman, a noted literary critic and journalist, who asked him about conversions in Kerala.
“The residents of Hindustan were named Hindus by foreigners. If the inhabitants of India are Hindus, then what about the native Christians and Muslims?”
Present-day Hinduism, the guru further argued, was simply a “group name” for the religions that originated in India, except foreign religions like Christianity and Islam.
If all religions that have originated in India can be termed ‘Hinduism’, the guru argued, “it is not unreasonable if all religions that advocate the ultimate goal of salvation are called ‘one religion’”.
“He did not even wear saffron robes for the longest time,” Gopal says—a claim made by other scholars too. “B.R.P. Bhaskar, the editor, once told me that Guru was persuaded by his followers to wear saffron robes so that he looks like a saint, and all the wealth that has been given to his ashram is not usurped by any private individual,” he said.
Moreover, in a widely cited conversation between Narayana Guru and Gandhi, the latter asked him for his views on conversion.
“Some are of the opinion that religious conversion is needed and that’s the true path to freedom. Would the swamiji agree?” Gandhi asked.
The Guru responded arguing, “It can be seen that people who’ve converted are gaining freedoms. When people see that, they can’t be blamed for saying religious conversion is good.”
When Gandhi further asked him if Hinduism was enough for the soul to attain moksha, Narayana Guru responded, “Other religions also have a path to moksha, don’t they?”
Not your modern-day secularist
The fact that Narayana Guru’s views do not align with modern-day Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma does not, however, mean that they correspond with modern-day secularism either.
He was, after all, as argued by Japanese philosopher and teacher Sengaku Mayeda, a follower of the tradition of the Advaita Vedanta advocated by Shankara, even as he differed considerably from the latter on the issue of caste and religion.
Narayana Guru studied not only studied religion deeply, but also encouraged others to do the same.
For instance, he wrote, “If there should be an end to religious quarrels, all religions should be studied with a free mind; and then it will be discovered that in essentials they do not differ considerably. The discovery so made is the ‘one religion’.”
His was, therefore, a secularism derived from and not pitted against religion.
As argued by Mayeda in a paper titled ‘Sankara and Narayana Guru’, far from dismissing religion, Narayana Guru believed that religions serve as the “signposts for the seekers after truth”.
However, it is “no longer authoritative for the one who has already attained truth, for he himself is the author of religion”.
“Secularism and Sanatana Dharma are binaries and historically speaking, the guru’s work cannot be reduced to such binaries,” Pillai argues. “By rejecting caste, he stood up to and resisted the traditional Hindu order of society in Travancore. He was a radical.”
But at the same time, he did not deny Hindu philosophy or its religious substance—a fact that can be used to interpret his philosophy as a defence of Hinduism.
“But to pick and choose is to oversimplify and reduce the guru to an instrument of present-day politics. That is unfortunate,” Pillai added.
“His work is more layered, more complicated and cannot be understood through simplistic binaries.”
This is an updated version of the report
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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