Shaiva Siddhanta, Jains and Buddhists, and a Diaspora

Tamil religious history is not only Hindu. Jain and Buddhist communities were substantial in the Tamil country during the first millennium, produced major literature in Tamil including the epics Silappadikaram and Manimekalai, and were then pushed to the margins in part by the bhakti movement itself, whose hymns are frequently polemical against them. A Jain presence continues in northern Tamil Nadu.

Shaiva Siddhanta developed as the philosophical school of Tamil Shaivism, working in Tamil as well as in Sanskrit, and it remains the framework of temple theology across the region and in Sri Lanka. Islam arrived early through Arab trade on the Coromandel coast, and Tamil speaking Muslim communities produced their own literature. Christianity is old here too, with the Saint Thomas tradition on the coast and later Catholic and Protestant missions.

Indenture and migration then carried Tamil religion around the world, to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean. Carl Vadivella Belle's study of Thaipusam in Malaysia describes a festival at Batu Caves that draws well over a million people and has become a marker of Tamil identity in the diaspora rather than only a devotional occasion. Tamil is one of very few languages whose classical literature is still recited in the temples that commissioned it.