One of the most vexing questions that has occupied scholars of South Asian religions for decades is how to conceptualize the category of Hinduism. As many scholars have noted, “Hinduism” is a term that only came into widespread use as a self-designation of religious identity during the colonial period. How, then, did the peoples who are now called “Hindus” identify themselves in preceding eras? In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher closely examines the works of South Indian Smārta Śaiva Brahmins from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century to better understand how they articulated the boundaries of their own community. In doing so, Fisher offers a useful paradigm for understanding the nature of religious identity in South Asia before the advent of colonial rule.

Hindu Pluralism is a sophisticated work of intellectual history in which Fisher examines how Smārta Śaivas of the early modern period constructed public and private identities in an environment in which multiple sectarian communities jockeyed for patronage. The existence of such multiplicity is what defines the pluralistic character of early modern Hinduism. As Fisher notes in her introduction, “Hinduism has historically exhibited a marked tendency toward pluralism—and plurality—a trend that . . . accelerated through the development of precolonial Indic early modernity” (p. 4). Furthermore, noting that scholarship on Hindu sectarianism has often too broadly categorized Hindu sects as either “Śaiva” or “Vaiṣṇava,” erasing the contextually specific ways in which these categories were constructed, Fisher argues that closer attention must be paid to how sects “function autonomously from one another as meaning-constituting systems, each individually re-introducing the religious institutions that endow participation in that community with sectarian-inflected religious identity” (p. 13). The implications of Fisher's argument are profound; rather than understanding “Hindu” sects as breaking away from or reacting against some larger community, signified by terms such as “Hinduism” or “Brahmanism”—as earlier generations of scholars assumed—Fisher draws attention to the fact that sects such as the Smārta Śaivas shaped an emergent public sphere in early modern South India through the discrete “meaning-constituting systems” that they produced.

In the religiously heterogeneous and competitive environment of early modern South India, members of these sects articulated viewpoints and reinterpretations of earlier works of theology and poetry to present their own views as consistent with a long and celebrated history of Sanskritic discourse. As Fisher's survey of early modern Smārta Śaiva literature reveals, members of that sect used literature to cultivate a sectarian identity predicated on personal devotion to the tantric goddess Tripurasundarī, while also maintaining a publicly expressed Śaivism. In order to articulate the theological boundaries of their community in such a way, Smārta Śaiva theologians creatively interpreted earlier strata of Sanskrit literature; thus, both the fourth-century poet Kalīdāsa and the eighth-century theologian Śaṅkara were—in an unprecedented fashion—recast as devout worshippers of the aforementioned tantric goddess. Furthermore, in order to compete with their sectarian rivals who were chiefly concerned with interpreting the Upaniṣads, Smārta Śaiva theologians argued that their views and practices were entirely consistent with the Vedāntic nondualism of Śaṅkara and with the ultimate authority of the Vedas more broadly—a move that signified a break from centuries of earlier Śaiva Siddhānta and Śākta tantric tradition.

The impact of such theological innovations was not confined to the private views of Smārta Śaivas. Rather, early modern South India witnessed the emergence of a public sphere in which textual critique was often used to navigate sectarian difference—a phenomenon that Fisher calls “public philology” (p. 101). Thus, for example, the poet and theologian Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita defended attacks against the textual integrity of Śaiva texts such as the Linga Purāṇa, which Śrīvaiṣṇava theologians argued contained too many interpolations to be considered authoritative. The key point, for Fisher, is that in the increasingly sectarianized public sphere of early modern South India, “the enunciatory context is not the traditional disciplines of text criticism but the sectarian polemical tracts themselves” (p. 112). In short, what was at stake in such debates was not simply the minutiae of how Sanskrit texts should be read, but the relative authority of the sects who upheld these variant scriptures and modes of reading. Such public textual engagement also manifested in material ways. Nīlakaṇṭha argued, for example, that Smārta Śaivas should decorate their foreheads with the tripuṇḍra—a pattern of three lines made with ash. Engaging in such public theology and indicating one's sectarian belonging through visible signs, Fisher argues, served to create a Smārta Śaiva public, and the sectarian age in South India saw the formation of many such sectarian publics.

Fisher concludes by examining the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam, a title applied to several Tamil poems describing the legends associated with Śiva's activities in and around the city; the most famous rendering of this story cycle achieved a great deal of popularity by the seventeenth century. Reversing the normal trend of translating Sanskrit works into the vernacular, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita composed a Sanskrit reinvention of the most popular Tamil version of this story cycle. Therein, Nīlakaṇṭha simultaneously decried “the passion of hicks for vernacular texts” (p. 165) while also breaking from more conservative strands of the Smārta Śaiva community by claiming that initiation into a Śaiva lineage nullified one's caste status (p. 174). Fisher points out that this simultaneous accommodation of and resistance to modes of religious discourse outside the traditional ambit of Smārta Śaivism reflects the emergence of “a multicentric discursive sphere that reconstituted the shape of social and religious communities” (p. 175). These stories were also given a public visual manifestation—in the form of paintings and sculptures housed with Madurai's grand temple to the goddess Mīnākṣī and her consort Śiva.

As Fisher elegantly demonstrates, in all of these ways—through the articulation of public and private religious identities, through debates with sectarian rivals, and through the production of texts that simultaneously spoke to the worlds of Tamil and Sanskrit literature—the Smārta Śaivas created a distinct “sectarian public.” This public existed alongside other sectarian publics, each of which was “defined dialectically against one another rather than as subaltern shadows of a single bourgeois Hinduism” (p. 23). In attending to the discursive strategies of sectarianization and to the contexts in which they were deployed, Hindu Pluralism thus offers a model of how we can understand the nature of religious identity in South Asia and beyond.