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5 October 1823—30 January 1874

Breaking through Caste

For centuries, the caste system in India rigidly segregated unevenly privileged groups of people. Supposedly established by the god Krishna, the system imposed a kind of apartheid that divided people into various hereditary castes that defined their positions in society, whom they could marry, and what sorts of occupations they could pursue. The castes ranged from an elite aristocracy to a large group of “untouchables,” members of the lowest caste considered so unworthy that mere physical contact with them required ritualistic cleansing.

The nineteenth-century Tamil saint who came to be known as Vallalar, or “Great Giver,” waged a campaign against the caste system that earned him the love of generations of untouchables. Born Ramalinga Swamigal and orphaned while still a child, Vallalar was given into the care of his elder brother, a respected scholar. His learning soon surpassed his brother’s.

In a series of mystical encounters with Lord Muruga, a popular native deity, Vallalar was inspired to become a solitary at the age of thirteen. Several years of meditation convinced him that compassion and mercy are the only genuine paths to God and that the cruelty of the caste system was an abomination in God’s eyes. Dismissing formal religion because of its defense of caste—Vallalar disdainfully referred to temple worship as “a darkness”—he taught that feeding the poor was a more worthy form of homage than rituals. He opened a “feeding house” in 1865 in the city of Valadur and opened its doors to people of any and all castes. The institution still provides free food to the needy today. The feeding house was associated with the Society for Pure Truth in Universal Self-Hood, an organization established by Vallalar that advocated equal treatment of people across the castes. It exemplified his conviction that spiritual liberation or moksha is achieved through self-denying service to others.

One sort of food that Vallalar’s feeding house didn’t offer was animal flesh. He believed that the conventional moral divide between humans and animals was just another manifestation of the caste mentality, and he refused to go along with it. “When I see men feeding on the coarse and vicious food of meat,” he wrote, “it is an ever recurring grief to me.”

Vallalar denounced the caste system in thousands of poems, many of which later inspired Indian resistance to British colonial rule. British authorities encouraged traditional caste segregation, seeing it as a deterrent to social unrest, and repeatedly attempted to discredit the cult of Vallalar and its criticism of the caste system. But Indians venerated him as a saint and prophet of social justice both during and after his life.