Modernity and ‘publicness’: The career of the Mysore matha, 1880–1940

Fin de siècle Mysore witnessed the gathering force of interminable rivalries of prestige between mathas (monastic institutions). Contests over the types and number of honours enjoyed by travelling gurus in Mysore became frequent, reaching a crescendo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By this time, the contests were also being adjudicated in courts, as the Mysore administration began to exert greater bureaucratic control over these institutions. The widening sphere of engagements of the modernising matha reveals that a new notion of publicness was taking shape, co-constituted by a triangulation of forces: on one side was the rapidly bureaucratising Mysore state which brought a different visibility and public accountability to the matha; a second side comprised the matha itself developing a new, socially purposive public life. Finally, the matha’s redefinition was aided and shaped by the adherents of the matha, emerging as a ‘public’ which both drew on and remained at a remove from its caste identity. This period of reform had enduring consequences, as the Mysore matha took on a supplementary state form after Indian Independence in 1947.