Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018) pp. 1486–1541. C  Cambridge University Press 2018 doi:10.1017/S0026749X17001044 Public Space, Public Canon: Situating religion at the dawn of modernity in South India ELAINE FISHER Stanford University Email: emf@stanford.edu Abstract What is ‘early modern’ about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic ‘Other’ that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the ‘Sacred Games of ´ Siva’ as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India. Introduction By what process does a text—a product of the written word—depart from the materiality of a palm-leaf manuscript to enter, irrevocably, into the domain of public culture? What does it mean for a religious text, a compendium of sacred mythology, to ‘go public’—seamlessly traversing the boundaries of local publics defined by caste, religion, and even language? These are questions about the sheer dynamics of circulation—the material factors facilitating the spread of knowledge, on the one hand. But, on the other, these self-same questions interrogate the very nature of the public itself in early modern India— of space and its relation to the public religious culture that enlivens it with a shared sense of significance. 1486 use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X17001044 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stanford Libraries, on 26 Sep 2018 at 19:36:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of