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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book examines the extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines, written by young Filipinos in the years preceding the Philippine Revolution. It seeks to explain how young colonial subjects could produce such scholarship, what appeal these scholarly pursuits held for them, and what political significance the writings had for their contemporaries. These writings show that the political meanings of scholarly and intellectual traditions are shaped by their content and methods, though not wholly determined by them. These young Filipinos drew on a set of scholarly practices—linguistics (philology), folklore, ethnology—that were part of European Orientalism and nineteenth-century racial sciences and, in turn, associated with European colonial pretensions.

This chapter provides a broad historical framework for the study by locating and grounding the neo-Saivite movement to the varied intellectual, socio-cultural, and religious responses to the colonial impact in the Tamil region, including the European Orientalist and missionary impacts. Furthermore, it distinguishes and differentiates the early-nineteenth-century neo-Saivite response in neighbouring Tamil Sri Lanka from the neo-Saivite revival movement in Tamil Nadu. The chapter locates the comparatively late neo-Saivite response in Tamil Nadu against the gathering neo-Vedantic and Vaishnavite revivalist currents at the time as well as in the context of the ‘contesting Orientalism’ over the centrality ascribed to the Aryan/Sanskritic sources of Indian civilization.

This chapter scrutinizes conceptions of modality in relation to emotionality and aesthetics by addressing written forms of knowledge on the eight ecclesiastical modes in Syriac chant. It begins by presenting basic terms in existing discourses on the subject, then it examines a number of written sources (touching on issues relevant to orientalism and European musicology). The chapter develops a critical narrative on the concept of mode in three ways. First, it extracts from written tracts on the subject information that corresponds with the author’s ethnographic observation of living practice. Second, it dissects the concept of mode in Syriac music scholarship by tracking its sources and employment. Third, it brings to light the significance of perception and experience as they coincide in inherited knowledge in this aural tradition. In showing at once the presence and the absence of physical and metaphysical thinking in these writings, the chapter brings the notion of spirituality to the study of emotion and the aesthetic.