Amongst one of the greatest religious personalities of India, Ramanuja has an enduring reputation of a social reformer who dared to defy the Brahmanical orthodoxy of his times by democratizing temple worship for the marginalized castes of society. One of the radical steps he is supposed to have taken in this direction was to shout out the dvaya mantra, exclusively meant for the brahmins, from the top of the temple tower at Tirukkottiyur so that everyone, irrespective of their caste status, could hear, learn and recite it. Thus, such occurrences in the life of Ramanuja have delineated him as a rebel saint who dissented against the Brahmanical convention, caste hierarchy and political order of the day, and simultaneously evolved the Vishishtadvaita exegesis, developing a structure of devotion that involved large sections of society in the attainment of salvation and direct accessibility to the divine.

Hence, the association of Ramanuja with dissent and devotion has been the central belief of the Shrivaishnava community of South India, for whom Ramanuja was the founder, who organized the community and gave it an exegetical basis through the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta. Thus, one knows about Ramanuja's life, his beliefs, his catholicity and compassion. We know what his biographers tell us: in this case, the hagiographies whose authors were located in a particular context and, through Ramanuja's attitude of dissent and devotion, were putting forward a certain vision for the Shrivaishnava community and attempting to create a particular kind of collective consciousness within the community.