UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation examines the life and works of a nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Tamil yogi named Sri Sabhapati Swami (Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī, Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, ca. 1828–1923/4), specifically the “translocalization” of his unique vernacular literature on a system of yoga known as Śivarājayoga (Tamil: civarājayōkam), or the “Royal Yoga for Śiva.” Sabhapati’s translocalized literature had a significant impact on the development of Early Modern Yoga, and there is a growing number of authors who have written about him over the past decades, even if he remains largely forgotten today both in India and abroad. His works introduced elements of Tamil Śaiva cosmology to North India (especially British Punjab and Bengal), and he pioneered a yogic system that—on the surface—anticipates one later popularized by Swami Vivekananda. Yet Sabhapati, whose first work was published over fifteen years before Swami Vivekananda’s Rājayoga, was also a major figure in a larger movement to publish and disseminate editions of yogic texts in Indic vernacular languages as well as English in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. Through his editor Shrish Chandra Basu he was known to the Indologist Max Müller and, in addition, he had close contacts with some of the founding members of the Theosophical Society who later distanced themselves from him. His yogic techniques were subsequently integrated into the thelemic “Magick” of Aleister Crowley as well as books by Franz Hartmann and William Estep. This dissertation therefore fills a major gap in scholarship by providing a meticulous examination of the contents of Sabhapati’s teachings and publications both in their local South Indian settings and abroad in their new mesolocal and translocal contexts in North India as well as internationally. The methodology behind this dissertation is historical-critical, and offers a solution to the problem of Sabhapati’s neglect in scholarly literature by centering the discussion on Sabhapati himself and his own writings. The research methods are accordingly qualitative, and the claims are constructed based on Sabhapati’s primary texts, secondary academic literature, biographical accounts, archival data, ethnographic fieldwork and recorded interviews, photographic evidence, nineteenth-century temple epigraphic inscriptions, colonial-era geography, religious art history, and other related sources. To adequately treat on all these levels of Śivarājayoga’s local and mesolocal contexts, translocalization, and relocalization, the dissertation is divided into seven thematic chapters: 1) A biographical account of Sabhapati and his students as gleaned from his textual sources, library and archival records and my ethnographic field work at extant sites of relevance to Sabhapati’s yoga, including an analysis and historiography of his web of relationships, with special attention to his collaboration with his Bengali editor Shrish Chandra Basu (S.C. Vasu); 2) A philological treatment of the three main textual “streams” of Sabhapati’s writings, their terminology, and their translations, with special reference to his vernacular works and translations in Tamil, Hindustani, and Bengali; 3) A comprehensive treatment of the Śaiva cosmology outlined in Sabhapati’s literature, including an analysis of its sources in North and South Indian milieus, and his philosophical engagement with other religions and with Atheism; 4) A thorough analysis of Sabhapati’s system of Śivarājayoga, including an overview of the role that subtle physiology such as the Tantric cakras plays in his literature; 5) An analysis of Sabhapati’s aesthetic integration of music, mantric chanting as well as an evaluation of his use of visual diagrams; 6) An evaluation of the role of “science” in Sabhapati’s literature, including a Bengali prologue by his translator Ambikacharan Bandopadhyay that engaged the Victorian naturalist worldview, and a consideration of his literature’s relevance to the cognitive science of religion (CSR); and 7) An analysis of several late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century occult authors who met with Sabhapati and/or published his work, such as Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, Franz Hartmann, Aleister Crowley, and William Estep, as well as of Sabhapati’s legacy.

To these are appended: 1) a never-before translated alternative account (T2) of Sabhapati’s life found in his Tamil work MCVTS; 2) a lexicon in table-form that compiles some archaic variants and Roman transliterations of technical terms used in his work; 3) a critically-edited passage that refers to his innovative technique of Śivarājayoga, which included visualizing the yogic central channel as a lithic “pole” ; and 4) a never-before translated introduction to the Bengali prologue to his work BRY, which includes his engagement with Victorian naturalism and also a song composed in Bengali in a folk metrical style that exemplifies Sabhapati’s works’ relocalization even within various regions of India itself.