Method · a question worth asking carefully
Secrecy was everywhere. The question is what each kind of secrecy was for.
Siddha practitioners are routinely described as secretive, and the description is used to explain why their texts remain unexamined. It invites an obvious question: was withholding peculiar to them, or ordinary? The answer is that secrecy about technical knowledge is close to universal — Egyptian workshops, Roman guilds, European alchemists, and living weaving communities in Banaras all practise it. But the uses are not the same, and the difference between them is the whole point. Some secrecy protects a livelihood. Some ranks the people who hold it.
Secrecy is not an Indian peculiarity.
the cross-cultural baseline
Before anything is concluded about siddhars, the ordinary background has to be established. Technical secrecy appears wherever specialised knowledge has value:
- Egyptian chemical workshops. Keeping the ingredients of discoveries secret "enhanced the prestige of craftsmen and implied an encoded and regulated transmission of knowledge" — a pattern later adopted by Greek alchemists, many of Egyptian origin, and by the Roman collegia of the arts, where secrets were transmitted within guilds.
- Medieval and early modern Europe. Craft secrets emerged as a category in the late Middle Ages, when urban guilds "first formed a concept of knowledge as intellectual property, and claimed monopoly ownership of it." Secrecy was maintained "either by relying on the oral transmission of recipes to a limited number of adepts or by compiling recipe books in a coded language."
- European alchemy. Practitioners used Decknamen — "cover-names," a deliberate secret vocabulary — so that written knowledge "could not be deciphered by laymen."
- And a caution from the same literature: alchemy is often associated with secretive practice, "although that secretiveness has also been exaggerated at times." The reputation for secrecy is not always proportionate to the practice.
"Siddha practitioners were secretive" is not, on its own, a statement about Siddha. It is a statement about how technical knowledge behaves nearly everywhere before modern patent systems. Presented as a distinguishing feature of one South Indian tradition, it does explanatory work it has not earned — and it conveniently supplies a reason for the tradition's texts to remain unstudied.
But secrecy has different functions.
three distinct mechanisms, all documented
| Kind | What it does | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Economic protecting a livelihood | Substitutes for the absent patent system. Provides an incentive to innovate and prevents knowledge dying with its holder, by transmitting it through apprenticeship. | European guilds; and in living memory, the Banaras silk-weaving cluster, where dense clustering means designs diffuse instantly and free imitation is "the key to innovation" — producing hyper-competition, "a culture of secrecy," and monopoly rents that dissipate almost at once. |
| Hierarchical ranking the holders | Creates an inner circle. The content matters less than the boundary it draws. | South Indian Tantra. Analysed comparatively with French Freemasonry, esotericism emerges as "by no means primarily a 'counter-cultural' or 'subversive' phenomenon" but "very often an elitist phenomenon, the province of highly educated, affluent and powerful intellectuals" who seek "not to undermine existing social structures, but rather subtly to reinforce them." |
| Positional managing belief | The secret's value lies in others believing something is being withheld. | Following Simmel and Weber: "the knowledge content of secrecy is less important than its social-psychological effects," and secrets are used "to manipulate the beliefs of their competitors and the larger public, and not necessarily to protect the knowledge that they hold." Withholding as "a structuring force of society and social hierarchy." |
Urban, H. B. (1997). "Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry." Numen 44(1): 1–38.
Vermeir, K. & Margócsy, D. (2012). "States of secrecy: an introduction." British Journal for the History of Science 45(2): 153–164.
Which kind applies to the siddhars?
a question the sources do not settle
A widely repeated statement holds that siddhars deliberately chose an accessible vernacular so ordinary people could receive the knowledge. That claim traces to the 1920s–30s advocacy narrative, not to a scholarly finding. The position the sources actually support is narrower.
| Claim | Standing |
|---|---|
| "Siddha practitioners were secretive" | Attributed to B. V. Subbarayappa (1997), a historian of science, who cites "the enigmatic nature of the texts and secretive attitude of Siddha practitioners" as reasons no systematic critical evaluation has been attempted. A real source, and stronger than the counter-claim usually offered. |
| "Siddhars wrote in Tamil to reach common people" | Not established. The statement circulates as tradition and as twentieth-century advocacy. Whether the historical siddhars had that intent is a question the sources examined here do not answer. |
| The texts are in Tamil verse | Established. But the fact of vernacular composition does not by itself reveal an intent about access — vernacular literature can be esoteric, and verse can be a mnemonic, a genre convention, or a restriction, as easily as an invitation. |
He is genuinely eminent. B. V. Subbarayappa (1925–2019): MSc, PhD; a chemist turned historian and philosopher of science; the first non-Westerner elected president of the History of Science division of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (1998–2001); Copernicus Medal from the Polish Academy of Sciences (1973); honorary doctorate, University of Bologna; elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India. And he did write on this subject: "Siddha medicine: an overview," The Lancet 350 (1997), 1841–44.
But look at what the claim actually is. In the Lancet piece he writes that no systematic attempt has been made "either by Tamil savants or by Siddha medical practitioners, to render with critical evaluation even the major texts into English," giving two reasons: the enigmatic nature of the texts, and the secretive attitude of practitioners.
Three things follow. The stated problem is absence of translation into English — a particular framing of what would count as the texts being available. The secrecy reason is an attribution offered in passing in a four-page overview, not the finding of a study of practitioner behaviour. And Subbarayappa was a Kannadiga historian of science, not a Tamil scholar of this tradition — eminent, but writing from outside it. Credentials establish that he is worth taking seriously. They do not convert a passing attribution into a demonstrated fact, and a passing attribution is not sufficient to close this question.
The comparative point survives, and it is the only strong claim on this page: secrecy about technical knowledge is near-universal, so singling out one tradition for it is a characterisation rather than a finding, and it should be tested against a baseline rather than repeated.
Everything beyond that is open. Siddhar practice is deep and internally varied — alchemical, yogic, medical and soteriological material with genuinely restricted transmission certainly exists within it, alongside widely circulated verse. A single verdict on "were they secretive or open" is the wrong shape of question for a tradition of this complexity. Determining the actual pattern requires reading the texts against each other, which the platform has not done and which — as Subbarayappa notes — largely has not been done at all.
Causes of inaccessibility that are documented.
whatever the original intent was
- Family custody. Palm-leaf manuscripts held privately, some kept for the family's own use. Whether this is closer to the guild pattern or the esoteric one is not established here — both remain consistent with it.
- The broken teaching chain. Plant identification and preparation were taught orally, in the field, by demonstration. When that chain breaks, the written verses alone cannot recover the knowledge — the same failure that leaves 12,000 Sanskrit plant names in the Ayurvedic corpus unidentifiable today.
- Unedited verse. The texts are difficult enough that even Tamil scholars require annotation. Difficulty is not concealment.
- Economic pressure. Practitioners with falling income and status have an ordinary commercial reason to withhold what remains proprietary — precisely the Banaras mechanism.
What is established: secrecy is near-universal in technical traditions; its functions differ and are separable; the siddhars are documented as choosing an accessible vernacular; and the later obstacles to access have identifiable non-esoteric causes.
What is NOT established, and is not claimed here: that siddhar secrecy was a deliberate defence against Brahmanical appropriation. That hypothesis is plausible — this platform documents absorption of śramaṇa thought, of indigenous cults, and of local heroes, so a knowledge-holding community with reason to expect the same would be rational to withhold. But no source examined states that motive, and the platform does not assert motives its sources do not give. It remains an open question, recorded as one.
Why this matters beyond one tradition.
the general lesson
"They were secretive" is one of the most efficient ways to explain away an unstudied body of knowledge. It locates the reason for neglect inside the community rather than in the institutions that never funded the work — the same move this platform tracks in excavation priorities and in the forty years of uninvestigated Harappa injuries. Before accepting it, three questions are worth asking:
- Compared to what? If every technical tradition on earth guards its methods, singling out one is a characterisation, not a finding.
- Which function? Protecting a trade and ranking an elite are opposite politics wearing the same word.
- Who benefits from the explanation? "Their secrecy is why we know nothing about them" removes the obligation to find out.
Limits.
what is and is not claimed
- Cited: Egyptian workshop and Roman collegia secrecy; Pamela Long on guild craft secrets as proto-intellectual property; alchemical Decknamen and the note that alchemical secretiveness has been exaggerated; Urban on South Indian Tantra and Freemasonry as elitist esotericism; Vermeir & Margócsy on Simmel/Weber and secrecy as social ordering; Basole on the Banaras silk cluster's "culture of secrecy"; and the documented siddhar preference for an accessible vernacular style.
- NOT claimed: that siddhar withholding was a defence against appropriation. Plausible, unevidenced, and recorded as an open question.
- NOT claimed: that South Indian Tantra and the siddhar tradition are the same thing. They overlap historically and are frequently conflated, but Urban's finding concerns Śrīvidyā Tantra and should not be transferred wholesale to siddhar practice.
- NOT claimed: that no siddhar text is esoteric. Alchemical and yogic material with restricted transmission certainly exists; the argument is about the tradition's characteristic direction, not about every text in it.
- Comparative caution: the European guild and history-of-science literature is used to establish a general mechanism, not to describe South Asian institutions directly.