A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India 0231190328, 9780231190329

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A GENEALOGY

of DEVOTION Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, ERH7YÁWQ in North India PATTON E. BURCHETT

A Genealogy of Devotion

A Genealogy of Devotion Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India Patton E. Burchett

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support for this book provided by Publisher’s Circle member Neil Krishan Aggarwal.

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Dean’s Office at the College of William & Mary, as well as the Columbia University Seminars’ Schoff-­Warner Publication Funds, in the publication of this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup​­.columbia​­.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Chapter 8 contains some material previously published in “My Miracle Trumps Your Magic: Encounters with Yogis in Sufi and Bhakti Hagiographical Literature,” in Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained Through Meditation and Concentration, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Chapter 9 contains some material previously published in “Bitten by the Snake: Early Modern Devotional Critiques of Tantra-­Mantra,” Journal of Hindu Studies 6, no. 1 (2013). Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Burchett, Patton, author. Title: A genealogy of devotion : Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India / Patton Burchett. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018036629 (print) | LCCN 2018043259 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231548830 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231190329 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Bhakti. | Sufism. | Yoga. | Tantrism. | India—­Religion. Classification: LCC BL1214.32.B53 (ebook) | LCC BL1214.32.B53 B87 2019 print) | DDC 294.5/43609545—­dc23 LC record available at https:​­//lccn​­.loc​­.gov​­/2018036629

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-­f ree paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Julia Kushnirsky

To Jack and To Michelle

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Notes on Transliteration and Translation xv

Introduction: Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in the Historiography of Bhakti 1

Part I

From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti 1. The Tantric Age: Tantra and Bhakti in Medieval India 29 2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs: Persianate Culture, Sufism, and Bhakti in Sultanate India 64 3. Akbar’s New World: Mughals and Rajputs in the Rise of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti 99

Part II

Yogīs, Poets, and a New Bhakti Sensibility in Mughal India 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti: Religious Sensibilities Among the Rāmānandīs of Galta 129

viii 9 Contents

5. Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas: Styles of Yoga and Asceticism in North India 169 6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti: Formations of Bhakti Community 195

Part III

The Devotee Versus the Tāntrika 7. Yogīs and Tantra-­Mantra in the Poetry of the Bhakti Saints 239 8. The Triumphs of Devotion: The Sufi Inflection of Early Modern Bhakti 276 Conclusion: Bhakti Religion and Tantric Magic 305 Appendix: List of Manuscripts Containing Compositions by Agradās 313 Notes 317

Bibliography 389 Index 413

Acknowledgments

T

his book is the culmination of more than a decade of study, research, and writing—­including two years spent in India—­a nd could not have been completed without the support of many individuals and institutions along the way. The origins of this project go back to the fall of 1997 in a classroom at Davidson College in North Carolina, where Professor William Mahony inspired me in ways he could not have imagined and thereby set me on a path that has led to a doctorate in South Asian religions, a tenure-­t rack position as an assistant professor, and now the publication of this book. Thus, the first of many thanks I want to offer goes to you, Bill. I also owe a great deal of thanks to my mentors in the Religious Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington, David Haberman and Rebecca Manring, who took in a rather clueless master’s student fresh out of the army and very unsure of his academic prospects, deftly transforming him into a young scholar of religion and South Asia with fundamental skills and perspectives necessary for success in my doctoral work at Columbia. After completing my PhD, I was extremely fortunate to spend three years in a postdoctoral position in the Religious Studies Program at New York University, where Angelo Zito and Adam Becker provided an unusually supportive and intellectually vibrant atmosphere and helped me to grow as a teacher and scholar in ways I do not think I otherwise would have. Since arriving at the College of William & Mary in 2015, I have received an exceptional level of institutional support. The college has awarded me two summer grants that were crucial to the final stages of writing and revising while also generously providing subvention funds vital for the publication of this book. I feel very fortunate to be a part of its Department of Religious

x 9 Acknowledgments

Studies, whose faculty members have guided and supported me while creating a remarkably positive and collegial working environment. In particular, I want to thank my colleagues Alex Angelov, Annie Blazer, Aaron Griffith, Max Katz, Mark McLaughlin, Oludamini Ogunnaike, and Chitralekha Zutshi. The advice, mental-­emotional support, and intellectual stimulation you have offered me have been more helpful than you know in completing this book. I am heavily indebted to the American Institute of Indian Studies for the gracious support it provided at several key points. It was in its Hindi-­language program in Jaipur that I received the intensive language training that allowed me to undertake much of the archival research and ethnographic fieldwork that my dissertation—­f rom which this book emerged—­required. Swami-­ji, Neelam-­ji, Vidhu-­ji, Rashmi-­ji, Anita-­ji, Rekha-­ji, Vivekananand-­ji, and Prem-­ji: as so many other American scholars of North India do, I owe you a great debt of gratitude. I am thankful for the institute’s Hindi Language Fellowship (2007–­ 2008) and for the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (summer 2009), which made my language training possible, and I am especially grateful for the institute’s Junior Research Fellowship (2010–­2011), which provided the necessary funding and organizational support for my dissertation research in India. For its support during my research in India, I want to express my gratitude to the institute’s office in Delhi, as well as to the staffs at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute in Jodhpur and the royal library of the Jaipur City Palace, whose patient help allowed me to attain copies of vital manuscript materials. Prem Singh Rajpurohit offered key guidance as I sat down to make initial sense of several of these materials. Chitranjan Dutt and especially Dinkar Rai, at the Landour Language School in Mussoorie, provided two weeks of crucial assistance as I worked through some difficult passages of Brajbhasha poetry later in the project. While in Jaipur, I was given crucial guidance and encouragement by Monika Horstmann, Dominique Sila-­K han, and Véronique Bouillier, who each (at different moments in the project) generously offered their time and local expertise to further my research in important ways. I am grateful to the Columbia University Seminars Publication Committee for the award of subvention funds necessary for the publication of this book. The Columbia University Department of Religion sponsored several summers of research vital to this book (in its dissertation form) and always provided an intellectually vibrant and supportive environment that offered numerous opportunities in which faculty members and graduate students were able to hear and comment constructively on aspects of my research and writing. My close friends from Columbia’s doctoral program have provided truly invaluable support—­intellectual and emotional—­ever since I met them. Joe Blankholm, Susie Andrews, Todd French, Matt Pereira, Greg Scott, Dan Vaca: the conversations,

Acknowledgments = xi

debates, and laughter I have shared with you and the memories we have made and continue to make have been absolutely essential to the successful completion of this book. I can say the same about a number of those from my South Asian studies cohort at Columbia. Hamsa Stainton, Tyler Williams, and Dalpat Rajpurohit: I have learned so much from each of you and cannot overstate my appreciation for the multitude of ways you have supported and encouraged me and the progress of this book in our informal conversations, our research trips together in India, and beyond. Tyler, I am especially thankful to you for the time and effort you gave to reading and offering detailed and remarkably insightful comments on drafts of several chapters. Dalpat, with regard to many of the translations of primary sources in this book, I am forever indebted to you for sacrificing hours of your time to sit with me and work through many challenging passages of Brajbhasha poetry. I am also incredibly grateful for all the feedback I have received and the insights and new ideas I have gained in the course of many conversations with my fellow Columbia-­trained South Asianist friends and colleagues, in particular Joel Bordeaux, Udi Halperin, James Hare, Jon Keune, Joel Lee, Simran Jeet Singh, Drew Thomases, Audrey Truschke, and Anand Venkatkrishnan. Personal conversations, academic collaborations, and informal email exchanges with a number of other scholars have also fueled this project. I want to express my gratitude to the following scholars, who each at some point offered inspiring ideas, thoughtful comments, or meaningful feedback that helped this project along in vital ways: Dean Accardi, Purushottam Agrawal, Peter Awn, Lisa Bjorkman, John Cort, Daniel Gold, Daniel Heifetz (formerly Daniel Cheifer), Linda Hess, Monika Horstmann, David Lorenzen, Philip Lutgendorf, Ann Murphy, Heidi Pauwels, Jason Schwartz, Sarah Pierce Taylor, Archana Venkatesan, and Robert Yelle. In researching and writing chapter 1, I ventured into some unfamiliar territory and thus was particularly dependent upon the assistance and critical feedback of those more experienced with and learned in medieval Sanskrit tantric and devotional source materials. Any inaccuracies in that chapter are entirely my own, but I could not have arrived at the final product without the generous help and critical, constructive comments on drafts (or sections) of the chapter offered by Dominic Goodall, Shaman Hatley, Florinda De Simini, Michael Slouber, and Anand Venkatkrishnan. In writing chapter 5, I relied significantly on both the groundbreaking research and the guiding hand of James Mallinson. Jim, I cannot thank you enough for our conversations and your generosity in sharing your own work, patiently answering my many long, question-­filled emails and commenting in detail on chapter drafts. There are a handful of people who deserve special thanks for their particularly significant contributions to this book. In its early (dissertation) form,

xii 9 Acknowledgments

Allison Busch, William (Vijay) Pinch, and Rachel McDermott each offered extensive, detailed comments on every chapter of the work. I am indebted to Vijay for more than this, as the core idea for my project was, in large part, sparked upon reading chapter  4 of his magisterial Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006). To Rachel, one of my PhD advisers, I also owe much more. Rachel, your unending kindness and encouragement, your always wise and sympathetic guidance, your uncanny ability for carefully structuring and clearly articulating ideas and arguments, and your talent for seeing and highlighting the big picture were all hugely important in the composition of this book. I am extremely thankful to Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press for believing in this book and to both her and Lowell Frye for their guidance and steadfast editorial support. Ramya Sreenivasan, one of the reviewers of my manuscript (who kindly revealed herself in order to address some of my follow-­up questions), provided me with extensive critical, constructive comments. Her many penetrating insights and thoughtful suggestions played an absolutely fundamental role in the revision of the book into its final form. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Christian Novetzke, who also reviewed my manuscript (revealing himself in order to carry on an extended dialogue with me regarding revisions), for the many pages of detailed notes, carefully considered critiques, and perceptive interpretations he gave me, as well as the time he invested in Skype calls and email exchanges, all of which helped me to see what my book was really about and to revise it accordingly. Over the long course of this book project—­which has seen, among other things, multiple lengthy trips to India, the awarding of a doctoral degree, my marriage, an anxious multiyear search for a tenure-­track position, and the birth of my two daughters—­the loving support and encouragement of my parents, Paul and Betsy, and my sister, Susan, have been unwavering and utterly necessary. Perhaps inevitably, mental and emotional stresses, doubts, and logistical challenges littered the path to this book’s completion. More than anyone else, my wife, Michelle, saw the darkest, most difficult moments of this process and carried me through them with the warmth of her love, the strength of her support, and the unfailing steadiness of her faith in me. Michelle, there is no way to properly thank you for the way you’ve been my rock through it all or for the many sacrifices you’ve made in order for this book to see the light of day, but as a small token of my appreciation I dedicate this book to you. My dear Ella and Cate—­how could I possibly leave you out? You and your mom are the light of my life and bring me a joy deeper, warmer, and sweeter than any I’ve ever known. I dedicate this book to one other as well: John Stratton Hawley. A better mentor and model I could not possibly imagine. In teaching me, connecting me with other scholars, providing me with pages upon pages of fastidious and

Acknowledgments = xiii

insightful comments on my written work, and constantly offering his time to respond to emails or meet personally, he has set an impossibly high standard for mentorship. I’ve saved you for last, Jack, because I think this book owes more to you than to anyone else. My guru and my friend, at every single stage of this project you have been there, offering an inestimable measure of emotional support, critical scholarly feedback and appraisal, and sincere encouragement and advice without which this book would certainly never have been possible. I am ever grateful.

Notes on Transliteration and Translation

F

ollowing the standard system for transliterating the Devanāgarī syllabary into the Roman alphabet, I have chosen to use diacritics for Sanskrit and Hindi titles, personal names, and key terms; however, I have generally not done so for location names (e.g., Vrindavan and Galta instead of Vṛndāvan and Galtā), language names (e.g., Brajbhasha and Hindavi instead of Brajbhāṣā and Hindavī), or certain familiar (in scholarly usage) Arabic and Persian names and titles (e.g., Shattari, Babur, and Timur instead of Shaṭṭārī, Bābur, and Tīmūr). In general, I have dispensed with diacritics for foreign terms that are well established in English (e.g., brahman, Sufi, sultan) and for the names of modern South Asian authors. When translating and discussing primary source materials, I have elected to insert the original text, in transliteration, in the main body only for primary source material that has never before been translated.

A Genealogy of Devotion

Introduction Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in

the Historiography of Bhakti

A

defining feature of the Hindu religious world in early modern1 North India was the emergence and rapid expansion of a diverse set of new devotional (bhakti) communities united by their focus on an all-­ immersing love for and an unmediated personal relationship with the Divine. This book seeks to understand the phenomenal rise of this bhakti religiosity in North India, circa 1450–­1750. What about this bhakti was new and why was it so successful at this particular time? How did early modern devotional communities define bhakti and themselves in relation to other religious approaches and communities? To answer these questions, this book explores bhakti’s crucial and historically shifting relationships with tantra, yoga, and asceticism over the course of many centuries. Sultanate and Mughal India is the primary context for this study, and thus the important role of Islam—­more specifically, Sufism—­in the development of bhakti is also at the heart of this book. As I show, bhakti’s multifaceted relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism are critical for an understanding of historical events and processes in the religious landscape of early modern North India. Since the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been told in terms of “the bhakti movement.” As typically conceived, the bhakti movement was “a transformatory avalanche in terms of emotional devotion and social reform” that began in Tamil South India between the sixth and ninth centuries with the Śaiva Nāyanārs and Vaiṣṇava Ālvārs and gradually swept its way across the subcontinent as a single, coherent movement.2 As A. K. Ramanujan once put it, “Like a lit fuse, the passion of bhakti seems to spread from region to region, from century to century, quickening the religious impulse.”3

2 9 Introduction

Appealing as they may be, such conceptions and their attendant metaphors (e.g., the passion of bhakti spreading like a lit fuse) have limited the historiography of bhakti by (1) conceiving bhakti almost exclusively in terms of emotion and affect, inattentive to its other varying community-­ and period-­specific meanings, and (2) obscuring the actual means (discourses, embodied practices, institutions) by which—­and the specific historical and regional contexts in which—­bhakti, as a lived mode of religiosity, spread. John Stratton Hawley, in A Storm of Songs (2015b), has brilliantly traced the complex history of the idea of the bhakti movement, the notion that between 600 and 1600 a vernacular, grassroots, socially inclusive, emotional bhakti connected and enlivened the culture of the entire Indian subcontinent, originating in the Tamil south, then making its way northward into Karnataka and Andhra, next traveling to Maharashtra and Gujarat, and finally entering into North India and Bengal.4 The recent (early twentieth-­century) term “bhakti movement” (bhakti āndolan) and the (considerably older) narratives tied to it are often central in popular understandings and nationalist tropes of Indian religious history; however, they are actually quite misleading in positing an illusory historical continuity and coherence to the development of bhakti, while glossing over significant qualitative differences in the form and style of bhakti practiced in various regions and at different points in Indian history.5 We would be better served to imagine that at different times, each of the various regions of India had its own distinctive, multivocal bhakti movement shaped by regionally and historically specific social, political, and cultural factors.6 In the following pages, I refer to specifically early modern North India’s bhakti movement using this convenient but imperfect term to denote the historical fact that, beginning especially in the sixteenth century, a variety of bhakti communities emerged and rose to prominence in North India, different from and competing with one another but sharing at least the following four key features. First and foremost, these communities were united by a distinctive focus on personal devotion to the Divine, as opposed to other traditional pillars of Indic religiosity such as knowledge, ritual, or the practice of yoga or asceticism. This devotion took place in the context of an intimate, loving relationship with the Divine in which caste, class, or gender typically were said to have no place. This was a bhakti that found its most characteristic expression in (a) the context of spiritual fellowship (satsaṅg) with other devotees (bhaktas), (b) the medium of song, (c) the idiom of passionate love (śṛṅgāra/mādhurya) or painful separation (viraha), and (d) the remembrance—­in meditation, recitation, chant, and song—­of the name(s) of God. Second, these new devotional communities of Mughal India7 were alike in their production and performance of devotional works, composed in vernacular languages, remembering the deeds of

Introduction = 3

God (especially Kṛṣṇa and Rām) and exemplary bhaktas. Third, important in all these communities was the performance and collection of songs attributed to renowned bhakti poet-­saints like Kabīr, Raidās, and Sūrdās. Finally, despite their many differences, the vast majority of bhakti authors and sectarian communities in early modern North India came together in articulating a devotional sensibility distinct from—­a nd often explicitly positioned in opposition to—­certain tantric paradigms of religiosity. It is this last point about the relationship of bhakti to tantric religion to which scholars have drawn all too little attention and that I therefore intend to highlight in what follows. The religious landscape of early modern North India saw the rise of a “vulgate Vaiṣṇava” devotional tradition among Hindus at both the elite and popular levels.8 This was a catholic Vaiṣṇava religiosity that included yet extended well beyond those affiliated with a Vaiṣṇava sampradāy (sect) and those whose worship focused on one of the forms of Viṣṇu. Thus, whether as initiated Vaiṣṇavas, worshippers of Rām or Kṛṣṇa with no clear institutional affiliation, or devotees of a God conceived as being without form or attributes, Indians from all social strata in Mughal India increasingly came to take on and participate in a loosely Vaiṣṇava sensibility, a shared set of bhakti values articulated in a Vaiṣṇava idiom utilizing the imagery, themes, myths, and names of Rām and Kṛṣṇa. Importantly, the rise of this vulgate Vaiṣṇavism was a phenomenon that often occurred at the expense of tantric Śaiva and Śākta religion. In the new social and political context that facilitated this change, an increasing number of Indians were starting to conceive of (Vaiṣṇava) bhakti as a type of religiosity distinct from and superior to (Śaiva-­Śākta) tantric religious forms. The religious literature of this period brings to light a noticeable tension between, on the one hand, bhakti’s shared ethical, emotional, and aesthetic orientation, and, on the other, the attitudes and values of tantric yogīs and ascetics. Especially in devotional poetry and hagiography, the bhakti approach of self-­surrendering, loving devotion to God is regularly positioned in opposition to depictions of the self-­asserting, power-­ focused perspective of tantric religiosity. These representations were often caricatured, but they carried persuasive force nonetheless. A new and distinctive bhakti sensibility was emerging among many Hindus in early modern North India, an outlook and disposition formed in contradistinction to several other religious modes but, perhaps most importantly, defined against the “other” of the tāntrika. Importantly, this bhakti sensibility had distinctive Sufi “inflections.” The great rise of bhakti communities in Mughal India, then, was closely intertwined with the growth of a new and Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility, itself largely dependent upon the stigmatization and subordination of key aspects of tantric religiosity.

4 9 Introduction

Rāmānandīs and Nāths In order to explore the development of bhakti sensibilities and communities in early modern North India, I focus on the Rāmānandī sampradāy at Galta in eastern Rajasthan. This Vaiṣṇava monastic community was pivotal in articulating and propagating a catholic vision of bhakti that would, in many ways, come to serve as a foundation for mainstream modern-­d ay Hinduism. The early Rāmānandīs at Galta were an incredibly diverse array of practitioners, and a study of them offers important insights into how a new bhakti sensibility emerged out of the interwoven threads of devotion, yoga, tantra, and asceticism. As the Rāmānandī community demonstrates, yoga and asceticism remained important dimensions of the devotional life for many in the sixteenth century, but a number of bhaktas at this time began to conceive their religious approach as quite different from the tantric asceticism and magic represented most strikingly and pervasively by the Nāth yogīs. The Nāths were an amorphous confederation of tantric yogīs united by their roots in the Śaiva (Kaula) and Siddha traditions and by a perspective oriented toward the attainment of siddhis (magical abilities), worldly power, and bodily immortality. In much early modern bhakti literature, the Nāth yogī is the “tantric other” par excellence, a foil against whom bhakti values and teachings are highlighted and defined. In fact, however, the Nāth yogīs had quite a bit in common with devotee-­ascetics like the Rāmānandīs. They were fellow participants and competitors in a common culture of charismatic asceticism and represented themselves (in part, at least) in shared idioms of vernacular sainthood. In examining bhakti portrayals of yogīs and tāntrikas, it is important to take up Jon Keune’s admonition that we distinguish between “discursive others” and “historical others” in bhakti sources.9 Bhakti authors often used alterity as a teaching device, a pedagogical tool for effectively conveying particular devotional messages, and we must not assume that their representations (of yogīs, Śāktas, etc.) necessarily offer reliable historical information about those “others.”10 Attending to the exaggerated, stereotyped “pedagogical otherness” of Nāth yogīs in bhakti texts will prevent us from misunderstanding the historical realities of Nāth religiosity, but it will also help us to see how bhakti authors (and presumably to some extent their audiences) perceived themselves and their religiosity as being meaningfully different from tantric yogīs like the Nāths and their religiosity. In exploring how devotional communities like the Rāmānandīs differed from and criticized the Nāths, yet also shared much in common with them, I show how broad social, political, and cultural changes in early modern North India manifested themselves in the religious landscape, particularly in terms of shifts in the perceptions, representations, and social positions of bhakti

Introduction = 5

and tantra. By comparing and contrasting the Nāth yogīs and the Rāmānandī bhaktas, this study seeks to bridge important gaps that separate the study of Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga in the field of South Asian religious studies, interrogating the crucial historical relationships that weave together these seemingly different genres of religiosity.11

Approaches to Bhakti in South Asian Studies Bhakti is most often translated as “devotion,” a word with a wide range of connotations, many of them Protestant Christian. If bhakti has, on the one hand, been vaguely characterized as a mode of personal devotion, on the other hand it has often (rather problematically) been described as a social movement seeking egalitarian social change while protesting empty and excessive ritual, blind adherence to orthodoxy, and caste discrimination.12 In either case, scholarly categorizations of bhakti almost always invoke a distinction between nirguṇ and saguṇ modes and traditions of bhakti. The term nirguṇ refers to the concept of a Divine without (nir) attributes (guṇ) or form, ultimately inconceivable, and accessible mainly through an individual’s cultivation of purified perception and inner experience, whereas the term saguṇ denotes the notion of a Divine in form and with (sa) attributes (guṇ), accessible within the realm of sensory experience.13 As Krishna Sharma has pointed out, our modern-­d ay conceptions of bhakti as “devotion,” whether nirguṇ or saguṇ, are heavily influenced—­a nd distorted—­by the Protestant Christian disposition of the Orientalist scholars (European Indologists, British colonial officials, etc.) who described bhakti as a type of Hindu religion.14 In recent years, a number of scholars have sought to counter this bias and to expand our conceptions of bhakti in several different ways. In the view of Karen Pechilis, “Academic discussions of bhakti that focus on the image of God, including monotheism and nirguṇa and saguṇa, and those that focus on social movements, including reform, revolution, and revival, tend to obstruct scholarly recognition of the pattern of concern with embodiment common to bhakti’s proponents and interpreters.”15 Pechilis’s scholarship presents bhakti as a history of active, embodied devotional engagements, an approach complemented by the work of Barbara Holdrege, who also emphasizes the crucial place of embodiment in bhakti traditions, both in their lived devotional practices and their proliferating constructions of divine embodiment (in which an abstract, translocal Divine takes localized, particular, material—­even corporeal—­forms). Holdrege highlights “the oral-­aural and performative dimensions of devotional

6 9 Introduction

practices,” stressing that the core practices of bhakti “are embodied practices—­ practices through which the bodies of bhaktas engage the embodied forms of the deity.”16 Christian Novetzke has also pushed for a reconceptualization of bhakti but takes a different approach, emphasizing the intrinsic sociality of bhakti. Novetzke argues that the category of bhakti should be understood neither as a social movement nor as a kind of personal devotion “but, rather, as an ongoing effort to construct publics of belief, maintained through intricate systems of memory.”17 He states that “all manifestations of bhakti are performances” that take part in and help to form “publics of reception,”18 social entities created through the reflexive circulation of bhakti discourse among diverse individuals and made coherent by “the metaphorical sharing of a common object, the object of devotional fervor.”19 Seeking a middle path between the extremes of bhakti as personal devotion and as a social movement, Novetzke argues that “bhakti connects the personal and the social, linking an individual to a shared social moral order (dharma).”20 While the individual is “the essential node of creation and transmission,” bhakti only really manifests itself when “ideas, materials, and memories circulate among individuals” and thereby form publics of reception.21 Here bhakti is conceived as inherently social; it is a shared flow of sentiment and memory circulating between poet-­performer, audience, and God that generates an interactive devotional community or public. Along similar lines, John Stratton Hawley has remarked that, at the level of the individual, when it comes to bhakti, “What matters is the heartfelt, intrinsically social sense of connectedness that emerges in the worshipper.”22 Hawley conceives of bhakti as a far-­reaching network—­or, really, “a complex network of networks”—­connecting people and places across regional, linguistic, and social boundaries through shared narratives, poetic genres and forms, and tropes (e.g., humility, love in separation, etc.). Looking out upon the vast history of bhakti traditions, he sees a “crazy quilt” of overlapping memories and multidirectional exchanges between different regions and social classes, a common, musical “bhakti grid” along which poems, poets, stories, and motifs circulate, interconnect, and often manifest themselves at more than one point.23 A central feature of scholarly attempts to conceive bhakti in more accurate and sophisticated terms—­and to displace Protestant-­biased notions of “devotion to a personal god”—­has been attention to (and emphasis on) the etymology of the word bhakti and the crucial associations its root, bhaj-­, has with notions of “sharing” and “participation.” As Hawley writes, “bhakti means devotion not in the sense of cool, measured veneration, but as active participation: the word bhakti derives from a Sanskrit root meaning ‘to share.’ ”24 Similarly,

Introduction = 7

Pechilis has sought to reframe scholarly discussions of bhakti “from its static definition of ‘devotion’ to a multidimensional characterization of it as ‘devotional participation.’ ”25 She argues that the most fundamental thesis of bhakti is that an embodied “engagement with (or participation in) God should inform all of one’s activities” and experiences in life.26 For Pechilis, the agency of the bhakti poets in their vernacular works is a crucial feature of bhakti religiosity in general: devotees actively participate in distinctive personal relationships with the Divine that are colored by their own language, geographical and sociohistorical setting, personal experience, etc., and that involve an emotional commitment through which “they are making God theirs.”27 While attention to bhakti’s Sanskrit root (and its links to “sharing” and “participation”) nuances our understanding of its meaning, John Cort has questioned too great an emphasis on bhakti’s etymology. As he argues, “We need to move beyond the standard academic definition of bhakti with its concern for the derivation of bhakti from notions of sharing and ontological interpenetration. . . . ​ Etymology does not tell us how a concept is understood in its actual usage.”28 Rather, Cort suggests we pay attention to the way diverse South Asian bhaktas—­ Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas, Śāktas, Sants, Jains, Buddhists, and others—­have understood bhakti, an approach that reveals it to be “a highly complex, multiform cultural category.” As he explains, “Bhakti is both something that one does and an attitude that can suffuse all of one’s actions. Bhakti can range from sober respect and veneration that upholds socioreligious hierarchies and distinctions to fervent emotional enthusiasm that breaks down all such hierarchies and distinctions in a radical soteriological egalitarianism. Bhakti is not one single thing.”29 Relatedly, Kumkum Sangari has remarked, “The ideological diversity and contradictory locations of bhakti are startling,” arguing that bhakti is “a product and partaker of a changing society,” able to either assist or resist particular hierarchical, patriarchal, and feudal relations and “can neither be understood solely in terms of its social content and ideology, nor evaluated separately from the social practices in which it is implicated.”30 Krishna Sharma has also stressed how bhakti cannot be understood as a “uniform set of ideas or beliefs” or “a specific religious mode” with any common ideology, while emphasizing how scholarship has often falsely opposed bhakti to jñāna (knowledge), when in fact the two have been closely intertwined through much of Indian religious history.31 For all these reasons, Jon Keune rightly suggests that in our attempts to understand Indian history, the term bhakti can obscure more than it reveals, since modern references to bhakti “tend to be historiographically over-­burdened, neglectful of how the term was reshaped over time.”32 As Keune remarks, “The term [bhakti] has taken on a deceptive aura of familiarity, although its precise

8 9 Introduction

definition is vitally rooted in the contexts in which it is used. These contexts (inflected by language, tradition, social location, and historical period) differ significantly from one another and exhibit a wide range of socio-­political dynamics.”33 Keune, Sangari, Sharma, and Cort remind us of the multiplicity of bhakti’s lived forms, the diversity of its historical expressions, and thus the corresponding caution and care required in deploying the term. With this in mind, rather than seeking to understand bhakti in terms of certain intrinsic qualities one may suppose it to possess, I propose to approach bhakti on the basis of its historically specific relationships with other key concepts, traditions, and institutions in the broader South Asian social and religious world. In other words, considering bhakti’s varying contextually rooted meanings it may be especially productive to approach the term relationally. To paraphrase Douglas Renfrew Brooks, whose methodological approach to discussing tantra somewhat mirrors my own to bhakti, since any general attributes that would seem to define bhakti are part of larger, context-­specific networks of social and religious relations in India, we can productively approach bhakti by seeking to understand the “oppositional social, political, and religious relations and structures” that help constitute it.34 While the field of relationships in which bhakti is situated at any given historical moment is infinitely complex, I argue that we can learn much by seeking to understand bhakti in terms of its crucial but historically shifting relationships with, specifically, tantra and yoga. The work of the scholars mentioned here—­Hawley, Novetzke, Pechilis, Holdrege, Sangari, Sharma, Cort, and Keune, among others—­represents an important shift in focus that has allowed scholars to highlight networks of interrelation and community among devotees, dimensions of memory, performance, embodiment, and emotional involvement in devotional participation, the diversity of forms and styles bhakti can take in different traditions and social locations, and the role of region-­specific languages, sacred sites, and saints in the embodied life of devotion, all of which are crucial components of bhakti religiosity not adequately accounted for in the earlier Orientalist, Protestant-­biased conceptions of bhakti as devotion to a personal god. This work has undoubtedly been a very positive development in our understanding of bhakti. Still, conceptions of bhakti have consistently continued to neglect tantric, yogic, and ascetic dimensions of its history and practice, fostering lines of separation that, historically speaking, simply did not exist—­at least not before the early modern period—­between bhakti and other “categories” of Indic religiosity.35 A critical exploration of bhakti’s vital but inadequately understood links to and interpenetrations with tantra, yoga, and asceticism is thus at the very heart of this book.

Introduction = 9

Bhaktas, Ascetics, and Monasteries Odd as it may seem, to provide a satisfying history of bhakti it is necessary to reflect on the history of asceticism in India—­more specifically, India’s ascetic lineages (parampara) and monastic institutions (maṭhas). The close relationship between bhakti and asceticism has rarely received the scholarly attention it deserves, in large part because the two are commonly seen as polar opposites. In the eyes of many scholars and Hindus alike, as John Carman puts it, “When passionate attachment to the Lord is stressed, bhakti is a striking contrast to yoga and other ascetic paths to salvation that stress detachment and the overcoming of all passions, positive as well as negative.”36 Jessica Frazier has also noted how “the renunciatory, inward-­facing, dispassionate practice of yoga” is regularly perceived “as a diametrically opposed state to the communal, sense-­ rich, passionate practice of popular bhakti,” yet she points out that in fact “the dichotomization of yogic dispassion and ascetic lifestyle from theistic devotion is ill-­g rounded.”37 Along these lines, Timothy Dobe has critiqued the scholarly tendency to define bhakti as “inner devotion” or “love” and thus “to present bhaktas (devotees) as anything but ascetics,” when in many cases “bhakti cultivates and is cultivated by embodied practices and rigorous, bodily discipline—­in other words, through asceticism.”38 Contrary to what some would assume, throughout bhakti’s history, asceticism and ascetics (and relatedly, yoga and yogīs) have actually been crucial elements in the life of devotion. The paradox I explore—­provocatively articulated in John Stratton Hawley’s essay “Asceticism Denounced and Embraced” (1983)—­is that, on the one hand, early modern North Indian bhakti literature regularly disparages renouncers, monastics, and yogīs while, on the other hand, when we look beyond this rhetoric to social realities, we find that professional asceticism and monastic institutions have been and still are important aspects of nearly every North Indian bhakti tradition.39 This book shows the ways in which, through most of Indian religious history, asceticism and yoga have been closely intertwined with bhakti, on both the level of personal practice (i.e., the ascetic qualities of devotional praxis) and the level of social and institutional interactions (i.e., relations between communities of devotee-­adherents and monks/yogīs). In the latter respect, I am particularly concerned with the figure of the professional ascetic—­the religious adept (usually but not necessarily a monk or yogī) who somehow in terms of spiritual commitment and authority sets himself apart from the rest of society. The lay populace has often looked upon such a figure as an ideal of spiritual achievement and power. Regardless of the religious tradition or sectarian context, these professional ascetics were crucial in everyday lay religious life as objects of devotion,

10 9 Introduction

as service providers (in temple worship, healing, protection, and well beyond), as spiritual guides and teachers (of doctrine, ethics, religious narratives), and as recipients (individually or on behalf of their monastic institutions) of gifts and patronage, in exchange for which they offered spiritual merit, cultural capital, and the teachings and ritual services alluded to here. This brings us to the role of the monastery, or maṭha. In order to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of the historical relationship between bhakti and asceticism—­a nd, importantly, also the ways that bhakti communities and ascetic orders influenced and were influenced by the larger social order and political economy—­it is imperative we attend to the maṭha. Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, sectarian ascetic orders rose in prominence and their monasteries came to dot the landscape of the entire Indian subcontinent. In the early modern period, the presence and sociopolitical role of maṭhas and their Sufi counterparts continued to expand. As the work of Indrani Chatterjee, Tamara Sears, and Valerie Stoker, among others, has highlighted, monastic teachers and their institutions across traditions—­Buddhist, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Sufi, Jain—­were central to the political and economic order in premodern India.40 They engaged with and connected political elites and diverse local lay populations (often acting—­symbolically or practically—­as instruments of the court’s authority) and served as key nodes in networks of pilgrimage, trade, military movement, and textual-­ideological transmission. As Chatterjee puts it, “These teachers and their disciples, students, and adherents constituted a basic unit of political society in precolonial India.” 41 Whatever their sectarian differences in ideology and ritual practice, maṭhas across the Indian subcontinent were similarly organized and administered and served similar religious, economic, and political functions, thus certain shared (translocal, transsectarian) forms of social organization—­a nd shared idioms of ascetic sainthood and power—­rose around them, facilitating shared religious worlds. In the pages that follow, as I trace shifts in the historical relationships between bhakti, tantra, and yoga I will show the continuity of monasticism as a South Asian institution—­w ith great social, political, economic, and religious importance—­over the longue durée, while also attending to important historical changes by means of which certain powerful monastic lineages and ascetic orders withered and new ones emerged. These changes were caused by newly arising popular religious currents, new forms of political organization, an expanding military labor market, and the shifting socioeconomic positions of key segments of the lay population. While attending to the significant ways in which ascetic lineages (Śaiva Siddhāntins, Nāths, Rāmānandīs, etc.) differed in their religious outlooks and sensibilities, their social makeups, and their levels of involvement with state power, it is important to notice the crucial ways that

Introduction = 11

all their monastic institutions shaped popular religious life by producing religious literature (philosophical, ritual, poetic, and hagiographical works), collecting and transmitting manuscripts, teaching, and facilitating popular devotional and ritual activities. At the same time, their own sustenance and success were fundamentally dependent upon—­even parasitic in relation to—­communities of lay adherents. The Rāmānandī lineage and its maṭha at Galta offer us an opportunity to explore the ways in which, even as bhakti songs critical of yogīs and ascetics circulated throughout early modern North India, monastic institutions were crucial in the growth of the bhakti public, particularly in their production and transmission of devotional literature and their relationships with state power.

Bhakti and Tantra If most scholars have not adequately considered the interrelations of bhakti, asceticism, yoga, and tantric practice, enduring Protestant biases (regarding bhakti as “devotion”) are partly to blame, but there is another crucial factor at play. In the early modern period, bhakti traditions themselves began to conceive their identity and practice in increasingly exclusive terms, which often opposed or marginalized dimensions of tantric and yogic religious modes that previously had regularly interfused with devotional practice. This book explores this pivotal historical moment in North India and its impact on modern-­d ay understandings of bhakti and tantra. In the late Sultanate and Mughal periods, a major historical change was taking place in North India’s religious landscape as a new bhakti sensibility emerged and came to be shared among a diverse array of bhakti communities. This bhakti disposition and outlook was formed and performed by devotional poets and singers whose works often artfully deprecated or co-­opted other modes of Hindu religiosity, especially aspects of tantra and yoga. We find bhakti compositions criticizing, marginalizing, and satirizing tantric yogīs—­and tantric or yogic religiosity more broadly—­in manuscript sources from throughout the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and in places stretching across northern and central India and into Maharashtra (to the south) and Bengal and Assam (to the east) as well. In the following pages, sometimes this “anti-­tantric, anti-­yogī” perspective will be seen as an implicit element of didactic devotional verses encouraging their audience to take up a certain ethical and religious life (different from that espoused in tantric yogī circles), but it will also be revealed as a rather explicit polemical position articulated by bhakti “insiders” and “ideologues” against

12 9 Introduction

their opponent competitors. While these anti-­tantric, anti-­yogī perspectives in bhakti compositions would certainly have had influence on the members of their bhakti publics, it is not entirely clear to what extent they, or the larger populace of Mughal India, would have shared the perception of tantric religiosity found in this bhakti discourse. Nevertheless, as I discuss in the conclusion, the evidence clearly suggests that, over time, the devotional perspective expressed in early modern North Indian Hindu bhakti literature significantly influenced (and continues to color) mainstream attitudes toward “tantra” in modern India. While tantric notions and practices are actually ubiquitous in India today, they are seldom identified as “tantric,” since many modern Indians regard “tantra” as a disreputable sphere of hocus-­pocus trickery or a secretive, sinister realm of dark power. Widely held (though far from universal) among Indians today, negative perceptions of “tantra”—­often paired with generally positive understandings of bhakti as good, wholesome religion—­a re usually attributed to the influence of the British and Protestant Christian Orientalist scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Yet as I show, in the early modern bhakti literature of Mughal North India and its critiques of tantric religiosity we can see an important precolonial, indigenous basis for such modern Indian religious perspectives. While the British certainly exaggerated and added new dimensions to a particular view of (and distinction between) bhakti and tantra, the origins of prevalent modern-­day North Indian understandings of these two genres of religiosity lie squarely in the early modern flourishing of North India’s bhakti movement, circa 1500 to 1700—­well before the British had any significant presence.

Persianate Culture, Sufism, and Bhakti Unorthodox, transgressive ascetics had almost always been marginalized by the religious mainstream in South Asia (e.g., the skull-­carrying, cremation-­ground-­ frequenting Kāpālika is often mocked in medieval Sanskrit dramas),42 but in early modern North India we see a far broader critique of tāntrikas, ascetics, and yogīs of all stripes, one that takes on a new and bhakti-­centered tenor. Why does this happen at this particular time? And what exactly was new and distinctive about this early modern North Indian bhakti perspective? These are big questions that I explore over the course of this work, but at this juncture we can say that much of the timing of this historical development and much of the nature of this new devotional sensibility had to do with the increasingly powerful and pervasive presence of Sufi popular religiosity and Persianate political and aesthetic traditions in North India after the thirteenth century.

Introduction = 13

As noted earlier, scholarship on bhakti has all too rarely taken tantric religiosity into full consideration, and, until quite recently, it can also be faulted for its generally inadequate treatment of the role and influence of Islam and Persian culture. Sufism and Persianate literary and political culture were crucial factors in the rise of bhakti in early modern North India. As I discuss in chapter 2, the Central Asian Turks who took control of vast swaths of northern and central India in the thirteenth century brought with them the cosmopolitan culture of “the Persian cosmopolis,” to use Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s term, and its moral, aesthetic, and sociopolitical forms and norms.43 The gradual spread of Persianate sensibilities and institutions—­a nd the complex interactions between the Sanskritic and Persian literary-­cultural systems—­have not often been addressed in historical studies of bhakti, yet it is clear that they were crucial factors in early modern North India’s bhakti movement. Following Eaton and Wagoner, this book seeks to move beyond the narrow and inaccurate frame of “Hindu-­Muslim” encounter to one that sees the Sultanate and Mughal periods in terms of an often fruitful encounter between Sanskrit and Persian literary-­political systems or, even more broadly, an interaction of Indic and Persianate cultural traditions. If my focus here is nevertheless on “religion”—­on bhakti, tantra, yoga, and Sufism—­it is with the understanding that it is ultimately impossible to separate the “religious” from the intertwined social, political, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of this larger cultural encounter. One of my key concerns in this book is with the complex relationship of Islam and specifically Sufism to bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India. Aditya Behl has stated that, in representations of bhakti in history, “the greatest gap or silence is the role of Islam and Islamic religiosity in the formation of the bhakti movement.” 44 Similarly, Vasudha Dalmia and Munis Faruqui have noted that despite the fact that “the Mughal period can be seen as the golden age of bhakti literature in the many vernacular traditions of the subcontinent,” in contemporary scholarship, rarely “are bhakti and Muslim religious formations considered together, let alone as acting positively upon each other.” 45 Dalmia and Faruqui blame this lacuna especially upon scholars such as Ramchandra Shukla (1884–­ 1941), who, biased in part by “Orientalist scholarship with its mistrust of Islam,” presented “the emergence of the bhakti movement (in the singular) as a direct reaction to the alien Muslim presence on the subcontinent and the sense of despair and inwardness (udasi) that Muslim political dominance occasioned in Hindus at large.” 46 Entrenched historiographical perspectives such as this have too long obstructed both popular and scholarly understandings of bhakti. In fact, there should be no doubt that the rise of bhakti in early modern North India was, as Behl writes, “an intensely interactive and plural affair, with genealogies that have to include Islam in an historically complex way.” 47

14 9 Introduction

Recent work by scholars such as Behl, Francesca Orsini, Tony Stewart, and Thomas de Bruijn, among others, has highlighted the South Asian Sufi tradition’s critical interconnections with and influences upon bhakti literature, performance, and community.48 Drawing on and contributing further to this scholarship, this book highlights how early modern bhakti discourse resonates with (and was likely influenced by) Islamic literary and hagiographical tropes as well as Sufi conceptions regarding the nature of God and the proper relationship between humans and the Divine. As I show, Indian Sufi hagiographies and premākhyān (love story) literature display specific religious perspectives and literary strategies—­even particular metaphors and narrative motifs—­that bhakti authors adopt in their own writings and that marginalize tantric-­yogic goals, attitudes, and approaches while exalting the power of selfless love and humble devotion. It is for these reasons that throughout the book I refer to the bhakti sensibility of early modern North India as “Sufi inflected.” Given the incredible diversity in types of Sufis, just what do I mean by “Sufi ­inflected”? Early modern India was home to a vast array of Sufi initiates who might have been any (or a mix) of the following: establishment Sufis advocating strict Islamic orthodoxy; antiestablishment Sufi dervishes seeking spiritual ecstasy; Sufi literati (authors of Sufi mystical or popular literature); militant, warrior Sufis; wealthy, landowning Sufi political elites; or poor, yoga-­practicing Sufi ascetics. As Eaton has remarked, “it is simply not possible to generalize about the Sufis [of India] . . . ​as any unitary group relating in any single or predictable way to the society in which they lived. They clearly played a variety of social roles.” 49 The bhakti sensibility of early modern India that I describe was inflected most especially by the values of typically sedentary Sufi literati and their idioms of love and devotion, but certainly also by the perspectives of ascetic Sufi dervishes, who not infrequently composed literature themselves. I have neither orthodox (‘ulamā-­associated) Sufis nor warrior Sufis in mind here; rather, it is the ethical principles, aesthetic understandings, and emotional values of Sufi literati and contemplative mystics—­particularly (though not exclusively) those of the Chishti order—­that seem to have inflected expressions of early modern North Indian bhakti in important ways. In seeking to illuminate aspects of Sufi and Persianate contributions to North India’s bhakti movement, I draw attention to a simple but critical fact: the advent and eventual military-­political dominance of Persianized Turks in North India was, in important respects, just as disruptive to existing Indian religious and political paradigms and just as profoundly generative of new forms of Indian thought and practice as when the British came to dominate India in the late-­ eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this book I seek to counter a scholarly emphasis on British colonial impact that has sometimes led to the occlusion of

Introduction = 15

important continuities between premodern and modern Indian perspectives, especially perceptions of bhakti and tantra. Colonialism obviously occasioned real and important “ruptures” in India, but I wish to shift attention to the more distant yet equally important historical shifts brought about by the military and political conquest of northern and central India by Central Asian Turks and the subsequent penetration of Persianate cultural forms and Islamic perspectives. It was largely in response to and productive interaction with this new Persianate and Islamic presence that many of the unique features of North India’s bhakti movement emerged.

Theoretical Frames: Bhakti as a Public, Bhakti as a Sensibility In analyzing this process—­a set of changes specific to South Asian religious history—­I also engage three big-­picture intellectual questions of great interest across the humanities and social sciences. The first of these questions is, What happens in the encounter of different traditions and cultures? For our specific purposes, what happens in the encounter between Persianate/Islamicate and Sanskritic/Indic traditions? My approach here largely follows that of Finbarr Barry Flood, in that I frame this historical encounter as a multidirectional exchange, “a complex process of transformation unfolding through extended contact between cultures.”50 Acknowledging that prior to their encounter, Persianate and Indic cultures were “always already hybrid and in process,” I understand the transculturation process that occurred in Sultanate and Mughal India as one that took place “both between and within cultural codes, forms, and practices.”51 While Persianate and Sanskritic cultures resonated in important ways, they were fundamentally different. This difference was not constant or stable but rather a product of ongoing negotiations, a difference we should conceive of as “dynamic in its emphases, contingent in its expression, and variable in its meaning.”52 This brings us to a second broad question taken up by this book: historically, how does a social group’s “worldview” change? As I use it here, the term “worldview” is not meant to denote an intellectual, cognitive frame in the minds of individuals so much as a way of perceiving and understanding the world that is embodied in sentiments, habits, physical practices, and social institutions. In terms of this case study, how and why does the worldview characterizing medieval India’s Tantric Age—­its religious attitudes, ethical understandings, and cosmological conceptions—­give way among many social groups to an early

16 9 Introduction

modern bhakti sensibility in which certain tantric approaches and perspectives, once taken for granted, become increasingly questioned or marginalized? The historical shifts in worldview that this book explores are inseparable from changes in political economy, the growth of new communities, the rise of new discursive forms, and the emergence of new embodied sensibilities in Sultanate and Mughal India. This brings us to a third set of big questions that lie at the heart of this book: How do communities form and grow? How are ideas transmitted and what are the limits of their diffusion? How do group sensibilities change? Within the confines of this study, how does a transregional, transsectarian North Indian bhakti public develop? How do its ideas and values spread and lead to shifts in identity and sensibility? In order to address these questions and conceptualize the emergence of a broad bhakti social formation in early modern North India, I draw upon the work of an array of scholars who have productively theorized the nature of social groups and the process of community formation, particularly the crucial roles of discourse, aesthetics, emotion, and ethics in forming social bodies. Like Christian Novetzke, I find Michael Warner’s notion of “publics” useful in thinking about bhakti and the kind of expansive, participatory social entity that emerged in association with it in early modern North India. While Warner and most other scholars have understood publics as exclusively modern phenomena, Novetzke’s creative and original treatment of bhakti as public demonstrates the value of applying the concept in the premodern sphere.53 In Warner’s sense, a public is a social entity that comes into being in relation to discourse and its circulation; it is different from a crowd, audience, or group in that it is a community embracing otherwise unrelated people who all participate in the same discourse at different times and places.54 As Warner states, “Publics do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them.”55 The discourse of bhakti is one of poetry and narrative (about the gods and saints), and in early modern North India this bhakti discourse—­these devotional poems and stories—­were performed; they were sung. Put simply, bhakti “discourse” was bhakti song, and to participate in bhakti discourse—­a nd thus to be a part of the bhakti public—­ was to sing or hear (or, much less often, read) bhakti’s circulating stories and songs. From the mid-­sixteenth century on in North India an array of more tightly bounded bhakti sects (sampradāys) and institutions emerged within the larger embrace of the bhakti public. The distinct bhakti sectarian communities that proliferated at this time differed from one another in specific doctrines and practices and competed with each other for support, but all looked outward toward the larger social sphere of the early modern North Indian bhakti public,

Introduction = 17

a transregional community of belonging and participation limited only by the constraints of bhakti’s circulation in performance and text. Warner posits that a public’s members understand themselves as directly and actively belonging to a social entity that exists historically and has consciousness of itself. 56 In similar fashion, I argue that the bhaktas of Sultanate and Mughal India, whatever their sectarian affiliation(s), if any, may not have shared a common religious identity, or even a uniform social ideology, but did share a common sensibility and thus, in some sense, understood themselves as actively belonging to a larger “imagined community” sharing that particular aesthetic, emotional, and ethical disposition. Throughout this book, I frame the history of North India’s bhakti movement as the growth of a transregional, transsectarian bhakti sensibility. By this, I am suggesting the emergence of an expansive bhakti public—­a broad, imagined bhakti community—­in early modern North India that was united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense, and shared norms of emotional value and expression.57 Through the movement of manuscripts, itinerant ascetics, traveling singers and scholars, bhakti’s metrical verses spread across North India, sung and heard in public settings in which they conveyed and shaped a distinctive bhakti sensibility while fostering a consciousness of belonging to a translocal imagined bhakti community.58 If the bhakti public of Sultanate and Mughal India was an “imagined community” of sorts, then, like any imagined community, as Birgit Meyer has explained, “to become experienced as real,” it had to “materialize in the concrete lived environment and be felt in the bones” of its members. 59 Through their active participation—­singing and listening—­in the discourse of bhakti, members of the imagined community that was the bhakti public were able to experience its reality viscerally, in shared experiences and emotional sentiments. As Sara Ahmed has highlighted, sentiments are not private psychological states “residing” in people and things; rather, “emotions do things,” they circulate between people and work to bind individual subjects into a collective.60 As I demonstrate, the cultivation, celebration, and circulation of particular emotions was central to the bhakti public of early modern North India. In this respect, we might characterize the bhakti public as, in some sense, a broad “emotional community,” a term coined by Barbara Rosenwein to suggest the existence of a type of social formation “in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—­or devalue—­the same or related emotions.” 61 Rosenwein explains, “Emotional communities are groups,” which can be narrowly delineated (e.g., the Rāmānandī sampradāy at Galta) or more broadly conceived (e.g., the early modern North Indian bhakti public), “that have their own particular values, modes of feeling, and ways to express those

18 9 Introduction

feelings.” 62 Similarly, Bruce Lincoln has argued that social entities are “constructed from nothing so much as from sentiments.” These sentiments, he says, “constitute the bonds and borders that we reify” as social groups, and it is discourse—­in our case, bhakti songs and stories—­that “evokes the sentiments out of which [such social formations are] actively constructed.” 63 We might say that the bhakti discourse circulating through early modern North India was able to forge community so successfully because it appealed more to the heart than to the head. The social work of bhakti was accomplished in the cultivation of feeling—­the transmission of affect—­far more than in the conveying of theology and ideology. The bhakti public expanded and generated conviction among its members not through rational persuasion so much as through affective congruence, not by “winning minds” but by investing participants in deeper structures of religious feeling.64 As Ann Pellegrini has written, “the capacity of any particular religious rhetoric to speak to someone, to reach in and grab hold, is not about cognitive matching, but affective resonances.” 65 Or, in Donovan Schaefer’s words, religion “feels before it thinks, believes, or speaks.” 66 While theological lessons and doctrinal teachings certainly matter in important ways, it is especially through affect—­feelings and sentiments that exceed our conscious, cognitive capacities—­that religion ultimately moves people and binds them in collectivities.67 Throughout this book, I conceive bhakti as a sensibility in order to highlight this embodied, affective dimension of religious life and community formation. In doing this, I foreground the emotional, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of bhakti religiosity and understand them as inextricably interrelated aspects of an embodied disposition rather than as merely cognitive or discursive phenomena.68 To think of bhakti simultaneously as both sensibility and public is to focus attention on the ways in which bhakti religiosity, as a social phenomenon, grew via the deployment of a repertoire of technologies for the evocation and transmission of particular affects, and thus the shaping of a particular embodied emotional, ethical, and aesthetic temperament. Bhakti poems and stories were able to effectively mediate values and evoke sentiments, thereby successfully enabling community formation, and a large part of their efficaciousness in this regard comes from the fact that they were sung. Bhakti communicated in and through song (kīrtan, bhajan)—­t ypically in social settings (with active audience participation) and accompanied by music—­ and this gave it great affective power. As Linda Hess has stated, “A song is much more than its lyrics. A song is sound. A song is a mood, an environment of emotion—­bhāv in Hindi.” 69 The meaning and emotional experience of a poem or story change drastically when music is wedded to the words and when the words are not read but heard—­felt in the body—­a s song. As Tyler Williams

Introduction = 19

explains, the aesthetic effect of a performed bhakti song or story “could only take place through sound, and in time. Meter, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme and the various ‘special effects’ crafted by virtuoso poets . . . ​only worked when the poems were recited and experienced out loud.”70 The experience of song is an aesthetic event in which the values and sentiments expressed discursively in poetry are dislodged from the constraints of language such that they can be received by the senses in a more visceral fashion. For those participating in the performance—­the singing—­of the poet’s work, bhakti is imbibed, tasted, and digested as a fact of the body, not simply the mind.71 Repeated participation in these social contexts—­with their common aesthetic forms (types and styles of storytelling, singing, musical performance, etc.), repertoire of consistent bhakti themes and messages, and references to shared narrative heroes (gods and saints)—­would no doubt have induced certain “modes, and moods, of feeling together” and generated an “effervescent sentiment of sharing and taking part in a larger social ensemble.”72 Here we glimpse bhakti’s pedagogy of affect, wherein participants—­by singing and hearing bhakti songs and stories—­a re taught (at a prediscursive level) what bhakti feels like, and what it feels like to be bhakta-­jana, one of “the people of bhakti.”73 Whether singing along or simply listening, those who attended the performance of these bhakti compositions would have been shaped by their participation, their senses and sensibilities tuned in particular ways, with shared emotions mobilized among them. The songs and stories of bhakti not only evoked shared emotion and bound their participants into a collective but also imagined a social world and promoted particular ethical values and virtues. As Warner explains, “All discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”74 Along these lines, as I see it, the circulating songs and stories of bhakti elaborated a particular culture and its embodied way of life, encouraging the further circulation of—­a nd, more importantly, the realization of—­their outlook and sensibility. Drawing on the theoretical work of Charles Hirschkind (elaborated in his research on Islam, piety, and popular media in modern Egypt), we can say that the bhakti public promoted the cultivation of certain emotions, modes of expression, and aesthetic tastes, as well as certain ethical values, and thereby shaped the form of collective life and culture that its members would endorse and contribute to.75 Through repeated participation in bhakti song, story, and ritual, a certain pious disposition—­an emotional and aesthetic sensibility underlying ethical conduct—­would become sedimented in the character of the bhakta.76 In the historical context of early modern North India, then, it seems that the circulation of the aural media of bhakti songs produced a “soundscape” that animated and sustained the

20 9 Introduction

perceptual habits and embodied (emotional-­aesthetic-­ethical) sensibilities undergirding the larger bhakti public.77 I touch on these theoretical points throughout the book, but to briefly summarize, in the forthcoming pages I approach the early modern social world of bhakti in North India in terms of the growth of a bhakti public defined by the circulation of devotional compositions whose performance communicated and rendered bhakti ideas and values as a sensibility—­as facts of the body, not just the mind.78 Bhakti songs and stories evoked shared emotions and thereby generated an experience of participation in the larger bhakti public, an imagined community defined by the circulation of its discourse, yes, but also—­a nd just as importantly—­an emotional and aesthetic community materializing in concrete, lived environments and felt in the bones of its members. Importantly, the kind of emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility that characterized Sultanate and Mughal India’s bhakti public was one that was Sufi inflected and one that, in significant part, was formed in contradistinction to the sensibilities of yogīs and Śāktas.

Methodological Frames: On History, Categories, and Comparison From one angle, this book’s central intention is to offer a fine-­grained investigation of the content of early modern bhakti primary sources in order to understand the historical context, causes, and dynamics of the rise of bhakti idioms and communities in Mughal India. The most fundamental conclusions of this monograph emerged through the close reading and interpretation of bhakti primary sources in old dialects of Hindi (especially Brajbhasha, Avadhi, and “Sant-­bhasha”), many in unpublished manuscripts acquired over the course of multiple years of archival research in North India. Nevertheless, as these introductory pages should have made clear, this book attempts more than just a focused, philologically incisive analysis of early modern bhakti poetry and hagiography in North India. It is also a sweeping genealogical study of the historical origins of popular Indian conceptions of bhakti and tantra and a tracing out of bhakti’s changing, but always constitutive, historical relationships with yoga, tantra, and asceticism. In this respect, I have ventured far from the early modern period in order to construct a wide-­ranging historical narrative of South Asian religiosity with Bhakti as its central protagonist, Tantra as something of a costar, and Yoga and Sufism each also playing key supporting roles.

Introduction = 21

The historical sweep of the narrative I present is somewhat ambitious. Though I focus my attention primarily on the period from roughly 1450 to 1700, and on Hindi-­Brajbhasha sources of North India, I make an argument about major religious and epistemic changes stretching from medieval India (ca. 600–­1200) to the present day. It would have been easier to restrict the scope of this project to a narrower field, but I have deliberately sought to offer a broad-­strokes argument out of the conviction that such work is necessary—­i ndeed, absolutely crucial—­to advancing the scholarly conversation. On occasion, all the up-­close research on “the trees” conducted in our various subfields—­themselves subtly divided along lines of specialization in particular languages, periods, regions, methodological approaches, and research topics—­needs to be competently woven together in order to provide a new and improved picture of “the forest,” an updated, overarching historical frame within which more narrowly focused scholarship can be situated. Kathryn Lofton has noted “a diminishment of studies attempting to explain broad themes in religious history out of a fear that to do so may violate the granular greatness of any subject’s contradictory expression.” As she puts it, “We have become so worried that we will contribute to the bigotry of caricature that we have become lost in pointillist profusions. . . . ​We have become Borges’s cartographers, who, in their effort to map accurately the crevice of every mountain, created a map the size of the territory.”79 With this in mind, several of the major arguments of this book—­e.g., those about the relationships between bhakti, tantra, and Sufism—­a re meant to speak to broad themes in India’s religious history. While it is possible that fine-­g rained case studies of particular devotional, tantric, or Sufi authors or region-­specific communities might complicate the broad picture this book paints, I am confident that any such work cannot deny the overarching trends and relationships identified here. As historians know well, history is not “revealed” or “discovered” so much as it is constructed in the narratives we compose about it. From a huge, seamless, and only partially accessible historical reality, we fabricate manageable intellectual parts and perceptual frames, categories with which to talk about and make sense of the past. There are elements of genuine creativity and imagination involved in our crafting of history, particularly in the crucial act of bringing “coherence to the historical archive by identifying an organizing principle or theme.” As Christian Wedemeyer explains, this is an act that “involves using rhetoric to juxtapose two or more things, with the aim of illuminating the subject matter through comparison.”80 This book takes up, juxtaposes, and compares Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in a variety of ways in order to present a historical narrative that self-­consciously slices up and shapes an infinitely

22 9 Introduction

complex, obscure, and polyvalent historical reality into a story—­incomplete yet faithful to the historical record.81 The hope is that it brings new coherence to our understanding of a broad swath of Indian religious history. Bhakti, “tantra,” and “yoga” are indigenous terms with multiple, historically changing and contested meanings, but they are also scholarly categories. Conceptual categories like Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga allow us to wrap our heads around and make sense of the objects of our scholarly inquiry; they allow us to impose meaningful distinctions upon what is in actuality “a world of continuous shades of difference and similarity.”82 The categories we use should always be subject to interrogation and revision, changing as our understanding changes, but in fact, it is often our categories that mold our understanding rather than the other way around. We know, on some level, that “map is not territory,” but still the map very often comes to dictate the terms in which we understand the territory. In this sense, the conceptual categories that are our most important tools in the scholarly enterprise of understanding and explaining are also our most dangerous obstacles. For anyone trying to understand South Asian history and religion, there is no question that Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga are “historiographically over-­ burdened” conceptual terms that can obscure more than they reveal.83 One of this book’s goals is to challenge dominant scholarly understandings of Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga and to show how the currently accepted parameters of these academic categories (a) marginalize important dimensions of what bhakti, tantra, and yoga have been historically in South Asia and (b) neglect the important and changing historical interrelationships between these broad forms of Indic religiosity. Thus, in the forthcoming pages I assess, problematize, and nuance scholarly conceptions of Tantra, Bhakti, and Yoga, historicizing and reconceiving the tāntrika, the bhakta, and the yogī. In reality, these religious forms and figures are not entirely discrete, existing on a spectrum in which they may be far apart or may merge into one another completely. Upon this world of continuous shades here I postulate—­and then methodically manipulate—­a clear difference between them. In the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, I am “playing across the ‘gap’ in the service of some useful end.”84 In the end, as Peter Gottschalk has astutely observed, “the comparative methods we choose and the categorical reflexes that we discipline in ourselves determine what interpretations appear possible.”85 This book confirms that by adopting new comparisons—­by reflecting upon, juxtaposing, and comparing familiar categories in unfamiliar ways—­ new and enlightening interpretations of South Asian history and religion become possible.

Introduction = 23

Plan of the Work This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–­3) presents an overarching historical narrative of Indian religiosity from the early medieval age to the Mughal period, with an aim to provide the necessary historical background and context for understanding the rise of bhakti in early modern North India and the significance of that event. In order to see the full picture, in chapter 1 I look back to the medieval period in South Asia, when tantric religiosity was a mainstream tradition pervasive in public culture. As I describe the distinctive features, historical development, and sociology of tantric religiosity, I also explore its relationship with bhakti. In particular, I show how tantric monastic orders and their institutions became key players in an early medieval religiopolitical economy linking lay bhaktas, tantric yogīs, and kings in exchanges of economic, political, and spiritual capital. In the process readers will also learn how, during this period, bhakti was regularly subordinated or assimilated to tantric ritual or yogic values and practices. In chapter 2, I explore the ways in which the spread of Sufism and cosmopolitan Persianate culture during North India’s Sultanate period paved the way for the explosive growth of bhakti in early modern North India. In particular, I examine a series of interrelated historical developments in Sultanate India that proved crucial to the emergence of North India’s bhakti movement: the decline of tantra as a mainstream, institutionally based religiopolitical tradition; the spread of Persian cosmopolitan authority and the growth of a new shared Indo-­ Persian culture; the expansion of popular Sufism; and, relatedly, the emergence of a transreligious North Indian culture of charismatic asceticism and vernacular literary composition and performance. In the concluding sections of the chapter, I describe the new transregional, transsectarian bhakti public that was emerging in the later Sultanate period, the performative world in which its bhakti discourse circulated, and the distinctive ethical, aesthetic, and emotional sensibility cultivated within it. As will be seen, this bhakti sensibility resonated in remarkable ways with that of Sufism. In chapter 3, I sketch out the historical context of Mughal India in which bhakti institutions and literature came to flourish. I focus especially on Akbar and the dynastic ideology, multicultural projects, religious policies, political alliances, and administrative structures developed during his rule, examining how the sociopolitical environment of Akbar’s empire facilitated the successful growth of Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions. As I illustrate, under Mughal rule North India witnessed a broad shift in which rulers increasingly allied themselves with Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities and their institutional forms and symbols while

24 9 Introduction

moving away from those of tantric Śaivism and Śāktism. Through an examination of the Kacchvāhā rulers of Amer in Rajasthan and the ways they provided other Rajput courts with a bhakti-­centered model for political success, I show how new forms of courtliness and statehood initiated under the Mughal emperor Akbar were linked to the emergence of bhakti communities and bhakti literature. In part 2 of the book (chapters 4–­6), I move from broader historical considerations to a more focused study of the Rāmānandī bhakti community of early modern North India based on close analysis of manuscripts and other (never-­ before-­t ranslated) primary source documents. In chapter  4, the discussion focuses on the early Rāmānandī devotional community at Galta in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Examining the remembered lives of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī—­the founder of the community at Galta—­a nd his two primary disciples, Kīlhadev and Agradās, provides insight into several key dimensions of bhakti and the bhakti movement in early modern North India. In analyzing the Galta Rāmānandīs, I demonstrate that the religiosity of the bhakta often had more elements of asceticism, tantra, and yoga than has ordinarily been supposed, while at the same time showing how a new understanding of bhakti was emerging in early modern North India and these once rather tightly interwoven threads of religious practice were beginning to unravel into increasingly distinct strands of religious sensibility. As will become clear, the case of the early Rāmānandī bhaktas suggests the need for revisions to widespread conceptions of the scholarly category of Bhakti. In chapter  5, I compare and contrast the yogic-­a scetic stream of the Rāmānandīs with the tantric Nāth yogīs in order to explore the ways in which the distinctive bhakti religious sensibility that was emerging in early modern North India was coming into tension and conflict with certain aspects of the tantric tradition. How were tantric Nāth ascetics and yoga-­practicing Rāmānandī bhaktas similar and how were they different? To answer this question, I delve into the history of yoga, questioning and refining the category of “the yogī” itself. In contrast to many scholarly claims, the yogic practice of the Nāths was considerably different from that of the Rāmānandīs and was an expression of their tantric Kaula and siddha heritage. As reflected in the Rāmānandīs’ and Nāths’ respective attitudes toward supernormal powers (siddhis) in yogic practice, the early modern period in North India witnessed a widening gap between devotional and tantric conceptions of and approaches to the Divine. Indeed, at this time we see the emergence of a new bhakti sensibility constructed against the foil of attitudes and practices associated with the tantric yogī. In chapter 6, I examine the formation of early modern bhakti sensibilities and communities through a case study of the life and compositions of a particular

Introduction = 25

Rāmānandī figure, Agradās, the great—­but little studied—­sixteenth-­century poet-­devotee and founder of the Rām-­rasik tradition. Using never-­before-­ discussed manuscripts collected in the archives of North India, I demonstrate that the writings of Agradās teach us much about how bhakti communities in Mughal India went about defining their identities and competing with others for patronage, prestige, and power. Agradās inaugurated a vernacular literary project within the Rāmānandī community whose goals were to praise the deeds of great devotee saints and spread the saving message of bhakti in a manner that would simultaneously attract the respect of brahmanical orthodoxy, the recognition and financial support of elites, and the allegiance of devotee followers of even the lowest social classes. An entrepreneur in Mughal India’s religious marketplace, his literary project strategically bolstered the position of the Rāmānandīs while simultaneously expanding the circulation of a transsectarian, transregional bhakti aesthetic, emotional, and ethical sensibility. In part 3 (chapters 7–­8), I pan out from the Rāmānandīs in order to conduct a broader investigation of early modern North Indian devotional poetry and hagiography. These two chapters demonstrate most clearly how developing bhakti sensibilities contrasted with and opposed tantric, yogic, and ascetic religious approaches, and the ways in which these bhakti sensibilities were Sufi inflected. In chapter 7, I survey and analyze references to Nāths, Śāktas, yogīs, yoga, tantra, and mantra scattered throughout the poetry of major bhakti saints. Discussing poet-­saints who cover the spectrum in terms of sectarian affiliation, theological outlook, caste background, and geographical location, I show how a diverse array of bhaktas typically came together as one in positioning themselves against the “twofold tantric other” of the yogī and Śākta. In looking at the ways in which bhaktas contrasted themselves with tantric yogīs and Śāktas, we will achieve a better grasp of exactly what bhakti meant to devotees in early modern North India and how it was perceived as different from other modes of religiosity. In chapter 8, I explore the Sufi inflection of the early modern North Indian bhakti by engaging in a comparative analysis of Sufi and bhakti literatures. I begin by examining the presence of the tantric yogī in the Sufi premākhyāns and in the poetry attributed to Mīrābāī and Sūrdās, wherein yoga is subsumed by devotion and the yogī subtly co-­opted into the service of a message about the power of passionate love for God. I then turn to a consideration of miracle stories—­ especially involving spiritual competitions with yogīs—­in Sufi and bhakti hagiographies, where we see the articulation of a shared conception of God and appropriate religious behavior, one formed in clear contradistinction to tantric and yogic-­ascetic religious modes. In this penultimate chapter, I suggest important potential avenues of Sufi influence on North India’s bhakti movement

26 9 Introduction

while adding further evidence for how the formation of devotional sensibilities in early modern North India relied in part on the stigmatization of tantric and yogic religious approaches. In the final chapter, I suggest that widespread modern Indian conceptions of Bhakti and Tantra are not simply the products of British colonial influence and imported Protestant-­biased Orientalist understandings; rather, they have important continuities with the attitudes and values expressed in the compositions of early modern bhakti authors, themselves influenced importantly by Persianate literary and political culture and a Sufi-­i nflected religious environment.

Part I From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

1

The Tantric Age Tantra and Bhakti in Medieval India

I

n order to understand the rise of bhakti in early modern North India and its historical significance, we must first look back to India’s early medieval period (ca. 600–­1200), a time we can characterize as “the Tantric Age.”1 From roughly the seventh to the thirteenth century, the thought, ritual practice, and institutional presence of tantric traditions played a major role in the life of South Asians. As Gavin Flood remarks, “The cultural, religious and political history of India in the medieval period cannot be understood without Tantra.”2 Critically, however, tantra’s rise to prominence was inseparable from the growth of popular traditions of devotion, or bhakti, with which tantra forged symbiotic relationships. In this chapter, I examine the tantric tradition in early medieval India—­particularly its relationships with state power and popular forms of devotional religiosity—­in order to set the stage for the book’s consideration of the relationships between bhakti, tantra, and yoga that emerged in late Sultanate and Mughal India. Tantra first arose as an esoteric tradition for initiated elites seeking liberation (mokṣa) or extraordinary powers (siddhi), but it later became deeply involved with royal power and with India’s public temple cult (and the political and agrarian expansion linked to it), making tantric ritual, institutions, and ideals of sacred power—­epitomized in the figure of the tantric yogī/guru—­a fundamental part of mainstream Indian social, religious, and political life. Scholars have often emphasized the esoteric and fundamentally transgressive nature of tantra, yet transgression was quite marginal to the “mainstream” tantric tradition I focus on here. This mainstream tantra was simultaneously both esoteric and popular, brahmanical and folk. This chapter demonstrates how

30 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

tantric monastic orders and their institutions became integral players in an early medieval religiopolitical economy that linked lay bhaktas, tantric yogīs, and kings in exchanges of economic, sociopolitical, moral, and spiritual capital. In the process it reveals how, in sharp contrast to the bhakti of early modern North India, bhakti in this period is regularly subordinated or assimilated to tantric ritual or yogic values and practices ( jñāna, dhyāna, etc.).

What Is Tantra? The tantric traditions rest on the foundation of a vast body of tantric scriptures, primarily termed Tantras, Āgamas, and Saṃhitās, that were composed in Sanskrit between the fifth and ninth centuries—­i n Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Saura, Buddhist, and Jain contexts—­as well as on a number of other important (usually more exegetical) tantric works that were produced into the thirteenth century. 3 As several tantric studies scholars have made clear, these three designations—­Tantra, Āgama, and Saṃhitā—­were synonymous and interchangeable terms for tantric scriptural revelation, thus in the pages to come I follow common practice in using the term “Tantras” to refer to the tantric scriptures in general.4 In the earliest phase of the tradition, the Tantras were concerned primarily with the various ritual techniques used in the initiated practitioner’s individual quest for spiritual liberation or occult powers. Certain branches of early tantric scripture (e.g., the Bhūta Tantras and Gāruḍa Tantras) also concern themselves with protection against and treatment of demonic possession, poison, disease, and other dangers or misfortunes related to the health and livelihood of individuals and communities. In the later, post–­eleventh century development of the tradition in South India, many tantric scriptures came to focus on aspects of public religious and political life, such as the building of temples, consecration of kings, and conducting of public rites of worship. The earliest extant tantric Śaiva scripture that we know of is the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, the oldest sections of which were composed probably between 450 and 550.5 The text’s central innovation is the teaching that liberation (mokṣa) can be gained through tantric initiation (dīkṣā) itself. In this early scripture we can already see the core features that would come to characterize tantra more generally—­namely, (a) tantric initiation (a liberating initiation, given by an enlightened guru and available to householders and all castes); (b) the ritual divinization of the body (i.e., the “consubstantiation” of the practitioner with the deity “in a transforming infusion of divine power”);6 (c) the use

The Tantric Age = 31

of tantric mantras; and (d) a conception of the Divine as immanent, accessible power that can be employed for bhukti or mukti. The Tantras claim to be supremely authoritative teachings descended straight from the mouth of the gods. Medieval Hindu tantric communities typically recognized the Vedas as a legitimate but lower echelon of scriptural revelation that the Tantras include and transcend.7 In order to access the “higher” truths and practice the “more powerful” ritual methods taught in the Tantras, one first had to be initiated. Initiation into tantric teachings had great appeal because they offered new ritual techniques and potent tantric (non-­Vedic) mantras that were understood to be more efficacious in—­and, indeed, entirely necessary for—­ achieving the goals of spiritual salvation (mukti) or extraordinary powers and enjoyments (siddhi/bhukti). Certain initiatory forms of Śaivism preexisted tantra, but these Atimārga Śaiva traditions focused exclusively on the goal of liberation, demanded renunciation from initiates, and typically admitted only brahman males. Tantric traditions opened up initiation to all caste classes, and even women, and did not require the renunciation of family life and traditional social obligations.8 Hindu tantric traditions typically claimed that their major initiation ritual was unique in itself effecting salvation. In this tantric initiation rite, the guru uses the power of non-­Vedic mantras to destroy the previous karma of the initiate, purifying his soul of all impurities and stains (mala) and allowing him to identify with God and realize the power of the Divine. As Elaine Fisher explains, “The implications of this assertion—­that a mere ritual, in and of itself, possesses the means to sever the bonds that tie the individual soul to transmigratory existence—­radically recast the sociological implications of elite Indic religion.”9 In offering this ritual initiation to a wide array of social groups (i.e., not just brahmans and renouncers), tantric Śaivism “effectively circumvented the strictures of varṇāśramadharma, providing both kings and Śūdras with access to liberation.”10 The Śaiva Āgamas came to articulate four basic classes of tantric initiates: (1) the samayin, or entry-­level community member; (2) the putraka, who has received the primary, liberating initiation (nirvāṇa-­dīkṣā) and whose only goal is liberation; (3) the sādhaka, who is authorized to practice a special discipline in order to acquire extraordinary powers (siddhis) and heavenly enjoyments; and (4) the ācārya, or guru, a community leader granted the privilege and power to give initiations, perform temple worship (pūjā) and installations (pratiṣṭhās), and comment on tantric scriptures.11 In tantra, the guru is a spiritually realized adept in and through whom the Divine acts (i.e., who is the vessel of, or even nondifferent from, God) and who—­in a direct relationship with his disciples—­ transmits the knowledge necessary to conduct tantric ritual.

32 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

In most tantric systems, regular ritual action is required to maintain the purity and power attained in the main tantric initiation (nirvāṇa-­dīkṣā) and to thereby ensure liberation. The daily ritual worship (pūjā) of the tantric initiate involves the systematic use of mantras and intricate visualization meditations to purify and empower a subtle body understood to have homological connections to the rest of the entire cosmos and to be, at its core, inherently divine—­i.e., suffused with the same energy and pure consciousness as the Divine. Tantric ritual most differentiated itself from mundane brahmanical Śrauta and Smārta rites in offering a method for divinizing the body and infusing oneself with divine power through consubstantiation with a deity.12 As Alexis Sanderson has pointed out, this method is remarkably uniform across tantric traditions, as all forms of tantric religion share a single ritual system whose deeper structural unity is not significantly affected by differences such as the choice of deity invoked and the character of the visualizations, mantras, and maṇḍalas used.13 The general ritual structure found in the practice of all tantric traditions consists of (a) the purification (bathing) of the external, physical body (snāna), then (b) purification of the cosmic elements within the subtle body (bhūtaśuddhi or dehaśuddhi), followed by (c) the divinization of the body by placing mantras upon it (nyāsa), then (d) internal worship of the deity (antara/mānasa-­yāga) utilizing only visualization and the power of the mind/imagination, and, finally, (e) external worship (bahya-­yāga) of the deity with ordinary devotional offerings such as fruit, flowers, incense, and bells. As Gavin Flood has remarked, the notion “that to worship a god one must become a god is a notable feature of all tantric traditions.” More specifically, he has stressed that “the ritual construction of the body as the deity through the use of . . . ​mantras is prototypically tantric.”14 In both its soteriological aim and its ritual method, then, tantra was all about “becoming God.” It was especially in this goal (and its associated ritual technologies) that tantra “definitively shifted the paradigms of Indic religious practice and theology for centuries to come.”15 If initiation and the divinization of the self mark two essential elements of tantra, just as important to tantric religiosity is the mantra. The fundamental religious instrument of the tāntrika is the mantra, understood as the sonic form—­the sound body—­of a deity or aspect of the Divine. While mantras were important in other traditions of South Asian religiosity, the Tantras were unique in conceiving mantras as the vibrational forms of deities. As Shaman Hatley states, “This ontological identification of efficacious sonic formulae with divinities is distinctive to the tantric traditions.”16 It was the potency and agency of these non-­Vedic mantras that made tantric ritual so efficacious, thus the use of mantras is often considered the most fundamental component of

The Tantric Age = 33

tantric practice. Indeed, tantric works distinguished and described their teachings as “the Way of Mantras” (mantramārga or mantrayāna).17 In addition to the foundational features just discussed—­initiation, divinization of the self, and tantric mantras—­there is a particular understanding of the sacred and an assumption about the nature of the cosmos that seems to structure all tantric practice. In the tantric traditions, the Divine or sacred is conceived in large part as tremendous, immanent, and accessible cosmic power or energy. In tantric Śaivism and Śāktism, specifically, this power is typically understood as feminine in nature and identified as śakti, an awesome, infinite force (potentiality, capacity, energy) that pervades the universe in many forms—­ circulating throughout the human body, the social body, and the body of the cosmos—­a nd that can be harnessed for any variety of purposes.18 As André Padoux remarks, “the Tantric vision is that of a world issued from, upheld and completely permeated by, divine energy (śakti), which is also present in the human being who can harness and use it (her, rather) for worldly as well as ritual aims and for liberation.”19 Similarly, Douglas Brooks states, “The Tāntrika conceives of the world as power. The world is nothing but power to be harnessed.”20 For most medieval Indians, behind victories in battle, successful pregnancies, and good harvests, as well as illnesses, droughts, floods, and untimely deaths, was sacred agency of some kind. But this cosmic power typically was not understood abstractly; rather, it was usually conceived to manifest as the power of very specific divine or semidivine beings or energies. In practice, then, to harness divine power often meant to control, pacify, or gain the favor of specific invisible beings or forces so as to protect and further one’s own interests. The literature of the medieval period assumes a universe made up of a great spectrum of beings and energies—­ranging from great gods like Śiva and Viṣṇu to a vast array of goddesses, nature spirits, and malevolent demons to the śakti-­ charged life forces (e.g., prāṇa, kuṇḍalinī) within one’s own body—­whose power the tantric practitioner could realize, take hold of, and manipulate through the use of distinctively tantric mantras and ritual practices.21 Clearly, tantric ritual practices were not aimed simply at spiritual liberation; just as often they also—­or instead—­sought to control and employ divine power for this-­worldly, pragmatic reasons.22 With this in mind, it is important to note the importance that the quest for extraordinary powers, or siddhis, held in the tantric tradition. The pursuit of siddhis by practitioners of asceticism (tapas), yoga, and sorcery was a time-­ honored one, but one given a uniquely privileged place in tantra. Unlike orthodox traditions, tantra encouraged the pursuit of occult powers and heavenly pleasures as valued goals alongside the aim of liberation. In particular, the

34 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

sādhaka class of tantric initiates—­who aimed quite deliberately at the acquisition of siddhis—­m ight be considered as the tantric institutionalization of the age-­old path of the siddhi-­seeking ascetic-­yogī.23 India has an ancient and well-­k nown tradition of ascetics whose practices are believed to result in the possession of special knowledge and extraordinary powers. Indian epic and purāṇic literature is filled with ascetics who, through their tapas (ascetic “heat”), have earned the power to accomplish any desire, to give curses, grant boons, and even to coerce the gods. A fifth of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra is dedicated to the topic of siddhis—­understood to result naturally from yoga’s forms of intense mental concentration—­including invisibility; superhuman strength, hearing, and sight; knowledge of past and future lives; control over hunger and thirst; knowledge of the thoughts of others; becoming tiny or gigantic, light or heavy; entering into the bodies of others; reaching any place by willing it; and controlling natural elements and animals. The ascetics and yogīs thought to possess these siddhis often also played the roles of sorcerer (vidyādhara), shaman, and healer, offering services to the wider populace including protective amulets, generation of wealth, magical harming of enemies, love potions, exorcism/healing, and divination, among others. Siddhis, then, were more than mere entertainments or proofs of sanctity; ascetics and yogīs—­ who might be shaven-­headed monks as often as scantily clad, dreadlocked wanderers—­often relied upon the (perception of) possession of these “superpowers” to perform the variety of tasks desired by their patrons and employers. The powers that yogīs and ascetics were thought to possess garnered them the fear and respect of others, but more importantly they made them valuable service providers at every level of society who were sought out to ritually effect a fruitful harvest, a successful pregnancy, or a victory in battle. In other words, these ascetics’ occult powers could be employed to empower the actions, achieve the desires, and protect the health and well-­being of their clients, be they regional kings or village peasants. Much of tantra’s growth seems to have been a function of how tantric gurus and sādhakas came to “corner the market” in supernormal power and were widely sought out for their renowned ability to harness sacred power for pragmatic this-­worldly purposes. For those in search of extraordinary power, initiation as a tantric sādhaka offered access to a new body of uniquely efficacious techniques (centered especially on the repetition of powerful tantric mantras) for acquiring siddhis. Furthermore, since the Divine was conceived especially as power in the tantric traditions, the siddhis were not seen simply as a natural by-­product of—­but potential obstacle to—­one’s spiritual growth (as the classical Pātañjala-­yoga tradition would have it) but were considered by many tāntrikas as the very essence of that spiritual development, a sign of the unveiling of divine omnipotence

The Tantric Age = 35

within one’s self. The sheer amount of tantric literature dedicated to the sādhaka’s pursuit of siddhis indicates that tantric mantra-­centered rites became a very important practice among the power-­seeking ascetics of early medieval India. Marion Rastelli’s research on the tantric Vaiṣṇava (Pāñcarātra) scripture, the Jayākhya Saṃhitā (ca. ninth century), gives us a better sense of the religious life of the siddhi-­seeking tantric sādhaka. After many years of dedicated, isolated ascetic practice, the sādhaka comes to master his mantra, i.e., to possess and use its power (mantra-­siddhi).24 At this point, the sādhaka can perform rites for himself or others, specifically bhaktas (in this case Vaiṣṇava bhaktas) who have requested his help and are not themselves able to master a mantra.25 Here the text alludes to the important interaction of lay devotees and initiated tantric adepts, explored later in this chapter, with bhaktas seeking out the magico-­ religious services of professional tantric ascetics who themselves depended in significant part on patronage from the bhaktas. The sādhaka might use his mantra-­siddhi to provide a variety of services, including the performance of rites to exorcise, pacify, or protect against illness-­causing demons; to treat poison; to bring about good health, longevity, contentment (tuṣṭi), prosperity (puṣṭi), or dominion over other beings (including defeat of enemies); to prepare pills giving special powers like flight or invincibility; to cause or stop rain; to produce food; or to bestow fertility and good luck in pregnancy and childbirth.26 The intense demands of the sādhaka’s rituals must have ensured that few took up  this path; however, it is clear that this small group of tantric elites—­i n the services they provided and the possibility of extraordinary power they represented—­were a crucial part of tantra’s authority. Considering all of this, I am now in a position to concisely articulate this book’s approach to tantra. In the pages to come, I shall understand tantra as the tradition of specifically tantric ritual techniques used to worship, realize, and exercise sacred power. What makes these ritual techniques specifically tantric is that they are authorized by and taught in tantric scriptures, their practice requires tantric initiation, their primary effective instruments are tantric mantras (i.e., non-­Vedic mantras understood as the sound bodies of deities), and they typically involve the ritual self-­deification of the practitioner. This strict definition of tantra suggests an esoteric tradition consisting only of dedicated initiates and specialist ritual performers, but in fact, these individuals might be better understood as a single stratum—­though the earliest and most essential one—­in what would become a larger, popular culture of tantra whose rituals, institutions, and cosmological understandings pervaded much of the early medieval social world. Behind this larger culture of tantra lay a distinctly tantric outlook or sensibility whose central element, in White’s words, was “that

36 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

human practitioners can empower, and even deify, themselves to manipulate and dominate the entire spectrum of beings and energies that make up the tantric universe.”27 This tantric perspective and many of its associated practices would prove quite distasteful to the outlook and sensibility at the heart of early modern North India’s bhakti movement.

The Bhakti in Tantra and the Tantra in Bhakti What was the place of bhakti in medieval tantric religiosity? It is important to note that bhakti was not at all absent from the tantric ritual process I have been discussing, for devotion was often key in developing the closeness necessary for the practitioner to identify with the deity. As André Padoux notes, “Tantric texts often say that a given practice or rite is to be performed with devotion (bhaktyā),”28 and Sanderson describes the heart of medieval tantric religious life as “routinized ritual duty more or less qualified by the sentiment of devotion,” or bhakti.29 Yet in medieval tantric communities bhakti was generally understood not as passionate, emotional love so much as faith, reverence, and service and was typically subordinated to ritual actions, techniques of self-­empowerment, and the quest for liberating knowledge ( jñāna). When discussing the relationship between bhakti and tantra, Alberta Ferrario points out, it is crucial to recognize the diversity of tantric traditions (e.g., Pāñcarātra, Śaiva Siddhānta, non-­Saiddhāntika Śaivism), which did not necessarily conceive of bhakti in the same way, as well as the historical change within these traditions, since the conception and role of bhakti in certain tantric traditions changed significantly over time.30 The work of Sanjukta Gupta, Gerhard Oberhammer, and Marzenna Czerniak-­Drożdżowicz, for instance, demonstrates that the Vaiṣṇava tantric tradition of the Pāñcarātra gave a central place to emotional bhakti only in its later development.31 In the early (pre-­ ninth-­century) phase of the tradition, Pāñcarātra texts focus not on humble, passionate devotion but on ritual acts of worship and yogic meditation (on/ with mantras), tantric ritual practices that were only for initiates.32 Later, a devotion of emotional self-­surrender (prapatti) enters into the Pāñcarātra tradition, but it only very gradually (over centuries) comes to take a predominant position over and above ritual and yogic modes of worship. Similarly, it was only in the post-­t welfth-­century Śaiva Siddhānta of South India, under the influence of the Tamil devotional tradition, that bhakti took on a new and central role in the path to salvation, as well as a passionate, emotional quality absent in earlier Śaiva Siddhānta sources. 33 While the modern-­d ay Śaiva Siddhānta

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tradition understands the bhakti hymns of the Tevārām as a fundamental part of its canon, in fact these vernacular bhakti songs were not in any sense considered to be works of the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition in the period in which they were composed, or for several centuries afterward, being incorporated into the tradition only in the thirteenth century, nearly five hundred years after their composition.34 Ferrario’s research demonstrates that bhakti in pre-­t welfth-­century Śaiva tantric traditions was ordinarily conceived of as attitudes and actions of reverence, obedience, faith, and service but not as a cultivation or expression of emotion, passion, or love. When one examines the context in which the term is used in pre-­t welfth-­century Śaiva Tantras and exegetical works, she explains, it is clear that bhakti generally refers “to a devout attitude that manifests as the desire to receive instruction from a Śaiva teacher; faith in the Śaiva scripture; good disposition towards the Śaiva community; and the choice of Śiva as one’s deity.”35 In these tantric texts, the expression “devotion to God/Śiva” (deve bhaktiḥ; Śive bhaktiḥ) is usually found together with bhakti for the guru, the Śaiva Āgamas, or one’s fellow Śaiva devotees and carries a meaning “closer to the semantic field of terms including paricaraṇa (attendance, service), śraddhā (faith), and viśvāsa (belief, faith), rather than love and affection.”36 Ferrario also shows that in pre-­t welfth-­century tantric Śaiva sources, bhakti was typically not considered a means to salvation (as it is in bhakti traditions) but rather a sign of the descent of Śiva’s grace (śaktipāta) upon a person, which was a prerequisite for initiation. In other words, whether God’s power had descended upon individuals, awakening them to the potential of their true nature and thus making them eligible for full tantric initiation, could be inferred from the quality of their devotion.37 For full tantric initiates, even on the rare occasions when devotion was impassioned and ecstatic, it was viewed as a sign of—­or an affective experience bound up with—­realization of the Divine but was not conceived of as a method or path for achieving that realization. As Ferrario explains, even the uncommon mentions of passionate, emotional bhakti in the literature of tantric communities—­for example, in Utpaladeva’s Śivastotrāvalī (ca. tenth century) and some other stotra collections38—­conceive bhakti as an experience equivalent to (or concomitant with) the end goal of liberation, but not as a means to that goal. 39 While the bhakti of the lay devotional tradition seems to have seeped into tantric texts on occasion—­see, for instance, Jason Schwartz’s discussion of the Mataṅgapārameśvara (ca. 600), a supplementary Āgama associated with the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition40—­orthodox tantric exegetes clearly subordinated bhakti to the performance of ritual or the attainment of gnosis. In the dualistic tantric tradition of the Śaiva Siddhānta, ritual alone (namely, the soul-­cleansing,

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karma-­w iping rite of initiation) is the means to liberation, whereas in the nondual tantric traditions of Kashmir, in addition to ritual it is knowledge ( jñāna)—­of one’s identity with the Divine—­t hat has primary soteriological value. In both cases, as a natural result of tantric soteriology, bhakti becomes marginal and subordinate. At the same time that we note the “official” marginalization and subordination of bhakti in the (pre-­t welfth-­century) texts of these major tantric Śaiva traditions, it is important to remember that realities on the ground were undoubtedly different from what Sanskrit treatises on theology and yoga reflect, especially as tantric traditions opened up to admit a wider social world.41 As I discuss in the following pages, mainstream tantric Śaivism grew up in dependence upon and interaction with preexisting traditions of temple-­ based lay Śaiva devotion, and the early medieval religious landscape saw regular exchange between initiated tantric adepts and lay devotees. If tantric texts tend to present an idealized picture of tantric religiosity oriented to full tantric initiates and thus give a particular impression of bhakti (in which bhakti is marginalized and subordinated), communities of tantric initiates were nevertheless not far removed from a different world of bhakti, a lay community of bhakta-­jana whose religious lives centered on temple worship as well as the giving of material support to their fellow bhaktas and to the professional ascetics—­ yogīs and ācāryas—­who served them as teachers, objects of devotion, emblems of spiritual authority, and key service providers. My focus in this book is on North India, but it is instructive to briefly consider the ways in which the “emotional devotion” of early medieval South India was inflected by and linked to the developing tantric tradition. Drawing on Friedhelm Hardy’s classic, path-­breaking work,42 Radha Champakalakshmi argues that the concept of bhakti as an emotional, intimate personal loving relationship with the Divine was initially developed by the Tamil Vaiṣṇava Ālvārs and Śaiva Nāyanārs, whose poems drew on the love theme of Cankam poetry as they sought to carry purāṇic forms (dominated by northern, Sanskritic elements) “to the Tamil masses in their own idiom, namely an ‘intensely human religious awareness,’ and in the vernacular, namely Tamil.” 43 These early medieval Tamil bhakti traditions emphasized ritual worship and the temple as the house of God, features she says were “closely related to the teaching and ethos of the Āgama and Tantra.” 44 Bhakti in medieval South India was, in fact, “forged in dialogue with Śaiva Tantrism,” as Karen Pechilis has stated. Pechilis discusses how the Tamil bhakti saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār (ca. 550) intertwines bhakti and tantra in her poetry and describes her “nearest of kin” as the Śaiva tāntrikas.45 Relatedly, Indira

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Peterson’s research on early medieval Tamil Nadu has shown Śaiva bhakti’s close links with temple life and ritual worship as laid out in the tantric scriptures known as the Āgamas.46 While the early bhakti hymns of the Tēvāram emerged outside the tantric tradition, in them the Śaiva bhakti saints known as the Nāyanārs regularly praise the Āgamas and refer their devotion to Śiva to his wisdom and grace as manifested in these tantric scriptures. For example, Appar sings, “My tongue will continue to utter the Āgamas in the presence of its companion (the mind)” (129.1); Campantar states, “They are praising the Lord of Tiruvorriyūr who is the wealth of the Āgamas” (3.57.10); and Cuntarar says, “Indeed he is the mother, giving grace to one who preserves the wisdom of the Āgamas” (7.96.6).47 By the end of the twelfth century, the Āgamas would prescribe nearly all aspects of ritual religious life in South Indian Śaiva temples, a sign of tantra’s full integration with public devotional religion. The devotion of the Ālvārs, the early medieval Tamil Vaiṣṇava bhakti saints, also seems to have been closely linked to tantric scripture and ritual culture. Dennis Hudson has argued that the tantric liturgy and yogic-­meditational practices of the Pāñcarātra Āgama underlie the poems of the Ālvārs.48 In one essay, he discusses how the ninth-­century Ālvār bhakti saint Āṇṭāḷ “performed Tantric rites of the Bhāgavatas and described them in her poems.” 49 Similarly, the poetic corpus of Nammālvār (late eighth to early ninth century), most important of all the Ālvārs, includes many verses about yogic meditation and ritualized tantric visualization. In a poem from the Tiruvāymoli (I.9), for instance, Nammālvār seems to describe a tantric laya-­yoga visualization meditation, praising the Lord in a series of passages in which he describes Viṣṇu in ascending locations within his body (loosely corresponding with the cakras of the yogic subtle body): in his lap, within his heart, upon his shoulders, on his tongue, in his eye, on his brow, and finally at the crown of his head.50 With poems such as this in mind, Hudson describes Vaiṣṇava bhakti in medieval South India as, in general, a “disciplined devotion according to Bhagavata Tantra”—­that is, a surrendering to (taking refuge in) God combined “with the ceremonial activities of a Tantrika liturgical discipline.”51 By the tenth century tantric monastic orders had thoroughly integrated themselves into India’s booming temple culture, and devotional life thus had become “tantra inflected” in many respects. Throughout medieval India, brahmanical, temple-­ and monastery-­based forms of tantra “blended easily with” bhakti religiosity, “such that the two became indistinguishable.”52 Popular medieval devotion had considerably different emphases than the religious life of most tantric initiates, but by the twelfth century (if not well earlier), bhakti seems to have generally occurred within the frame of—­or in necessary interaction

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with—­fundamentally tantric principles, institutions, and ritual prescriptions. The forms of bhakti that arose in North India beginning in the fifteenth century would have a considerably different relationship with tantra than this.

The Tantric Age As Alexis Sanderson has demonstrated, Śaivism was unquestionably the most successful and influential religious tradition of early medieval South Asia. 53 While Buddhism and Vaiṣṇavism had flourished in the preceding centuries, between the fifth and seventh centuries Śaivism gradually emerged as the dominant religion of South and Southeast Asia.54 Sanderson terms this period (ca. sixth to thirteenth century) “the Śaiva Age,” showing how Śaivism rose to preeminence in early medieval South Asia and beyond as the principal beneficiary of royal patronage, a fact demonstrated “by the epigraphical record of pious donations, by the preponderance of Śaiva temples at this time, and by abundant evidence that Śaivism’s Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist, and Jain competitors developed systems of ritual observance during this period” closely paralleling that of tantric Śaivas.55 While Sanderson’s work forcefully demonstrates the dominant presence and impact of Śaivism—­especially tantric (or mantra-­mārga) Śaivism—­in the early medieval period, it is clear that Buddhism and Vaiṣṇavism each also had a large and influential presence in several areas of the subcontinent during this time, particularly in their tantric (Vajrayāna and Pāñcarātra) forms. Indeed, most of the religious communities of early medieval India—­ whether Śaiva, Buddhist, Vaiṣṇava, or Jain—­came to share a parallel repertoire of tantric rituals for initiation, installation (pratiṣṭhā), and regular worship while also sharing patronage relationships in which virtually the same powers and protections were offered to the same royal clients. 56 As Christian Wedemeyer has stated, “those communities centered around various Śivas, Viṣṇus, Buddhas, and (Jaina) Tīrthaṅkaras in the late first millennium (A.D.) participated mutually in a pan-­Indian religious culture, most of whose structuring assumptions were the same and in which a variety of ritual forms were shared and developed across traditions.”57 This pan-­Indian culture was in significant part a tantric one, and it was as much “political” as it was “religious.” The first major tantric system to emerge in South Asia seems to have been the Śaiva Siddhānta, a school that was well established in the subcontinent by the seventh century and by the tenth century had become a tradition “of pan-­ Indian scope enjoying close ties with the political order and often exercising decisive control over the principal religious and social institutions of the time.”58

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A number of Vajrayāna Buddhist traditions, with a repertoire of rites modeled on tantric Śaiva ritual forms and methods, developed at this time as well and received widespread royal patronage and competed with tantric Śaiva traditions, particularly in eastern India. The Vaiṣṇava counterpart of the Śaiva Siddhānta, the orthodox tantric tradition of the Pāñcarātra, was also an important presence in this period that, like Saiddhāntika Śaivism, became integral in the operations of royal power and public, temple-­based tantric devotional religiosity.59 While these tantric traditions, in which transgressive ritual played little to no role, were predominant religious communities of early medieval India, constituting a sort of tantric mainstream, scholars such as Shaman Hatley and Dominic Goodall have pointed out that “much of the scholarly literature has assumed an artificial distinction that, at times, goes so far as to exclude the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra and/or Śaivasiddhānta from the category of ‘Tantra,’ ” when, in fact, they are at the very center of the tantric tradition.60 While scholarship has tended to emphasize the esoteric and transgressive dimensions of the tantric tradition, here I want to focus attention on the “mainstream tantra” of India’s Tantric Age—­i.e., the tantric tradition as it manifested itself pervasively in medieval Indian social life, both in elite political and popular quotidian spheres. Drawing on Alexis Sanderson’s work, among others in the rapidly advancing fields of tantric studies and Śaiva studies,61 I argue that we should conceive tantra (at least by the tenth century) as a broad, pervasive mainstream tradition—­only marginally concerned with transgression—­whose institutions, cosmological assumptions, and ritual forms were key elements in the social life and religiopolitical structure of early medieval India. A significant amount of tantric literature does, of course, discuss radically transgressive rites,62 including the frequenting of cremation grounds, ritual sex with “untouchable” women, and the consumption of shit, piss, and sexual fluids.63 It would be absurd to sweep this corpus of tantric discourse under the rug as unimportant. Yet the crucial fact is that the texts concerned with these radically transgressive rites were directed toward a small minority of advanced tantric practitioners. The mistake we must avoid is taking the history and practice of a minority stream of professional tantric ascetics and sādhakas as the history and practice of tantric religiosity as a whole. While the dedicated tantric adepts who performed transgressive sexual and mortuary rites had a significance well beyond their small numbers, their story is but one piece of a tantric tradition that includes, more importantly, the preeminent religious communities of the medieval period—­Śaiva Siddhānta, Vaiṣṇava Pañcarātra, and Buddhist Vajrayāna—­a nd their pervasive institutional networks (which played a key role in the larger sociopolitical order), as well as a widespread community of tantric practitioners of healing, exorcism, and “practical magic” (i.e., various

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practices and rites intended to effect this-­worldly health, wealth, protection, or harming).64 Observing the historical development of the Hindu tantric tradition, we find on the one hand a set of more mainstream and orthoprax schools (e.g., Śaiva Siddhānta, Vaiṣṇava Pañcarātra) that generally avoided transgressive practices and operated within standard brahmanical purity codes and, on the other hand, a diverse array of heteroprax Śaiva and Śākta communities that gave a more central place to goddesses, transgressive behaviors, and impure substances in the ritual life of their sādhaka initiates. Unlike the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, these “non-­Saiddhāntika” Śaiva tantric cults—­based in the Bhairava Tantras of the Mantrapīṭha and Vidyāpīṭha—­were generally not involved in mainstream public and lay devotional (temple) religiosity but were oriented toward individuals performing rituals in the private domain for their own or their clients’ benefit.65 While these non-­Saiddhāntika tantric cults gave more importance to antinomian mortuary and sexual rites involving polluting substances (alcohol, blood, sexual fluids), they seem to have grown out of the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, accepting its legitimacy and assuming its ritual paradigms even as they claimed to offer more powerful methods to reach the common goals of liberation and siddhis.66 If the misplaced scholarly tendency to see tantra as synonymous with transgression (especially antinomian sexual and mortuary rituals) has been one factor making it difficult to conceive tantra as mainstream, there are other factors as well. In particular, one might reasonably ask how a fundamentally esoteric, initiatory tradition—­one that originated to serve the interests of only the most dedicated individual seekers of mokṣa and siddhis—­can be considered a mainstream, popular tradition integral to the larger religiopolitical order and pervasive in South Asian social life more broadly. In the following pages, I aim to explain just this.

Kings and Gurus, Temples and Monasteries With the collapse of the Gupta dynasty in the mid-­sixth century and the end of the relative stability it had provided, India saw the emergence of multiple competing regional centers, which led to a culture of militarism and frequent warfare. As Ronald Davidson has explained, in this environment, warlords, “seeking legitimacy and identity, began to increase their patronage of literature and to strategize their support for religion, searching for religious counselors that could bolster their political and military agendas.” 67 Beginning in the seventh

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century, these aspiring rulers turned increasingly to the emerging tantric tradition and its rituals of empowerment. We have inscriptional evidence of at least three major kings taking Saiddhāntika Śaiva tantric initiation in the second half of the seventh century, and “during its first half the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (c. 600–­660) goes to the trouble of attacking the Tantric practice of initiation as a means to liberation.” 68 Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, tantra rose to prominence in South Asia as Hindu rulers increasingly embraced relationships with tantric gurus and their communities. 69 If rulers in early medieval India were turning more and more to tāntrikas, these tāntrikas were also turning to them, adapting to meet their needs. Within the tantric tradition, a new cadre of religious specialists developed who could ritually consecrate power-­seeking warlords with tantric mantras, “transforming them into divine kings and their conquered territories into equally consecrated maṇḍalas of royal power.”70 In order to extend their influence, tantric communities devised a new class of initiate, exemplified by the king, who, because of his demanding social duties, was given a special form of initiation, nirbījā dīkṣā (initiation without seed), which exonerated him from the time-­consuming program of daily rituals required of most full initiates (putrakas and sādhakas) while still ensuring liberation.71 Tantric gurus claimed that their initiation and consecration (abhiśeka) rites endowed kings with a power beyond that of their rivals, intensifying their brilliance, ensuring their victory against enemies, and allowing them to have long and distinguished reigns. These tantric dīkṣās and abhiśekas not only infused the king with a deity’s immense power but also offered access to a wealth of potent tantric mantras that could be performed on demand by tantric adepts to protect and benefit the realm, promote a royal patron’s success, and frustrate his enemies.72 At the same time, tantric traditions largely sought to accommodate and embed themselves within the orthodox brahmanical tradition that had sanctified and legitimated royal power in India for centuries. As Sanderson has shown, tantric traditions flourished, in significant part, by co-­opting brahmanism, taking over many of the positions, functions, and ritual services that had previously been exclusive to orthodox brahmans.73 In return for the empowerment and legitimation that tantric initiation provided them, newly made kings patronized their gurus’ sectarian communities, building and sponsoring monasteries, or maṭhas, for tantric monastic orders and promoting their interests throughout the kingdom. India’s early medieval period is well known by scholars as “the great era of Hindu temple building”74 and the time when “the temple became the dominant religious institution of South Asia,”75 but the key role of monasteries is not as widely understood. While temples—­big and small, urban and rural—­served as centers of religious community and devotion, symbols of royal authority, and key motors of economic

44 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

growth, agricultural development, political integration, and brahmanical cultural expansion,76 in many ways maṭhas became just as important in the early medieval religious and sociopolitical world. Tamara Sears has shown that “monasteries often not only preceded but also served as a stimulus for the development of larger temple towns.”77 Maṭhas were frequently built close to temples, and the members of these monastic communities played a key role in supporting ritual activity within the temple and facilitating the social and economic services offered at temple centers. Maṭhas were established in both the peripheries and hubs of the kingdom, together making up a network of interlinked monastic centers that effectively tied disparate localized communities into the kingdom’s central administrative and social framework.78 These maṭhas served as seats of brahmanical learning, dissemination centers of sectarian theology and philosophy, and sites supporting intensive, unhindered practice of meditation and yoga, sometimes through the establishment of hermitages for pilgrims or those seeking a base for isolated ascetic practices.79 By the ninth and tenth centuries, many organized monastic orders—­most of them tantric and/or Śaiva—­began to function also “as landed, self-­sustaining administrative institutions responsible for the collection and redistribution of taxes and agricultural revenue.”80 Some maṭhas even maintained armaments and served as sites for training and garrisoning military forces.81 Like temples, maṭhas were also crucial institutions in lay devotional life. Gurus and professional ascetics in monasteries “served as key agents in the growth of wide-­scale devotional activity, both through their role as temple priests and attendants as well as in their function as foci for ritual in their own right.”82 Initiated members of tantric communities were often expected to worship not only God but also their initiating guru (who was seen as not simply a respected teacher but also a revered manifestation of divinity and a vehicle for liberation), and it was at the maṭha that tantric gurus could personally receive such homage.83 As mentioned, medieval kings sought out these tantric gurus for the initiation and empowerment they could provide and, in exchange, rewarded them with maṭhas and land grants. In this fashion, some tantric gurus accumulated enough wealth and land that they were able to use their resources independently to establish new maṭhas, and even “to behave like royal patrons themselves, not only founding new monasteries but also bestowing land-­grants on Brahmins, rewarding poets, founding temples and new settlements, and providing the means of irrigation.”84 Certain tantric gurus, particularly of the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, actually “came to exercise a transregional authority whose geographical extent could be greater than that of any contemporary king.”85 Gurus and kings, temples and maṭhas, these were the key institutional figures and spaces that made possible the spread and sustenance of tantric ritual

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and worldview in early medieval India. Beginning in the seventh century, rulers increasingly looked to tantric rituals and gurus for empowerment and legitimation and sponsored the institutional growth of tantric communities. By the tenth century, temples (administered by tantric monastic orders) and maṭhas (housing professional tantric ascetics) had become vital economic, political, and religious hubs in the institutional network of medieval society.86 Of course, not all the temples and monasteries patronized by the kings and local communities of medieval India were tantric, but a great many were. These sites embodied, expressed, and widely disseminated tantric ideology and ritual; they were the institutions upon which mainstream tantra—­as a key player in the medieval religiopolitical order—­depended. This is important because in later centuries, when those institutions became threatened, damaged, or destroyed, the stage would be set for a major transformation in India’s religiopolitical landscape. In seeking to understand the significance of tantric Śaivism, and of tantra more broadly, in the early medieval period, we must keep in mind the presence and influence of popular lay traditions of devotion. While Sanderson’s work has centered on tantric Śaiva traditions, he makes the crucial observation that these traditions “were successful in no small measure because Śaiva devotion had become the dominant religious idiom in the population at large.”87 The rich and powerful of early medieval India were increasingly aligning themselves with tantric Śaiva initiatory lineages, in significant part because doing so was “particularly efficacious in the eyes of a predominantly Śaiva population, not only among the brahmins but among all social strata, down to and including the lowest.”88 In other words, it seems that tantric Śaivism achieved its great success largely because it “hooked onto” and was “parasitic” upon a preexisting, temple-­ based tradition of lay Śaiva bhakti, a tradition I now turn to.89

The Bhakti of the Śivadharma: Lay Śaiva Religion in Early Medieval India The traditions of tantra and bhakti grew up alongside and in dialogue with each other in the early medieval period. The massive success of tantric Śaivism, specifically, was dependent upon the vitality of a coexisting tradition of lay Śaiva devotion. A brief investigation of this tradition through its literature—­the Śivadharma corpus90—­is crucial to establishing the relationships between professional asceticism, popular devotion, and political economy in medieval India, and more specifically to understanding the relationship of bhakti, tantra, and

46 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

yoga during this period. The earliest texts of the lay Saiva tradition seem to be the circa sixth-­to-­seventh-­century Śivadharma (Śivadharmaśāstra) and Śivadharmottara, likely composed in North India but widely known throughout medieval India.91 These scriptures claim descent from Śiva and present themselves as an “easy, affordable set of teachings and rites that would allow common people to fulfill all their wishes,” in contrast to expensive and ultimately unprofitable Vedic rites.92 The lay Śaiva religion prescribed in these texts was open to śūdras, untouchables (cāṇḍāla), and foreigners (mleccha). The Śivadharma states, “The one who knows the four Vedas is not dear to me [Śiva]. Even a dog cooker who is my devotee, one may give to him or take from him. And he is to be worshipped just like I am (to be worshipped).”93 In key respects, this lay Śaiva religion centered on bhakti. As Śivadharma 1.29 states, “The essence of the Śivadharma is Śiva-­bhakti.” The question is, What does bhakti mean here? In a fascinating passage, somewhat incongruous with the text’s overall representation of devotion, the Śivadharma describes bhakti as having eight limbs, which Śiva characterizes as (1) affection (vātsalya) for my devotees (mad-­bhaktajana); (2) taking pleasure in (seeing) my worship (pūjā) (performed by others); (3) worshipping (abhyarcana) me oneself with bhakti; (4) exerting one’s body (with bhakti) for me (i.e., performing physical activity [labor] for my sake [mamārthe cāṅgaceṣṭanam]); (5) listening to my stories; (6) trembling (vikriya) of one’s voice, eyes, and limbs (on hearing such stories); (7) constantly remembering (anusmaraṇa) me, (8) always depending upon (living for) (upajīvati) me. The passage concludes, “In whomever this eightfold bhakti grows, even if a mleccha [foreigner], he is a chief of Brahmans, a glorious sage [muni], an ascetic renouncer [yati], and a learned man [paṇḍit].”94 While many scholars associate the sort of bhakti described here with later Vaiṣṇava traditions, here we find it expressed in a Śaiva scripture composed in Sanskrit around the sixth century.95 Of particular note here are the Śivadharma’s (a) stress on listening to the stories of God; (b) valuing of the embodied, affective dimensions of bhakti religiosity (its “modulations” of voice, eyes, and limbs); and (c) emphasis on caring for—­and celebrating the virtues of—­one’s fellow devotees (bhaktas), a community of devotion explicitly embracing all caste classes and even those outside the varṇa system. The Śivadharma’s stress on listening to stories of God is paralleled in the purāṇic literature that was proliferating at this same time and that, of course, was filled with such stories. Well known for their sectarian character, the Purāṇas seem to have been composed by and for the purposes of “the new sectarian theistic movements that were emergent in the early centuries CE: early Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas such as the Pāśupatas, Bhāgavatas and Pāñcarātras, operating on the frontiers of brahmanical orthopraxis” who, Travis Smith explains,

The Tantric Age = 47

were “combin[ing] Vedic orthodoxy with a new temple-­based devotionalism directed toward an expanded pantheon of deities (including most prominently Viṣṇu and Śiva).”96 It is quite likely the same group—­an educated lay Pāśupata community—­that authored both the Śivadharma texts and (many of) the Śaiva Purāṇas. The broader lay population would have heard and absorbed the teachings in these scriptures in particular ways. A cult of the book—­as part of “the gift of knowledge” (vidyādāna)—­was important in this period and involved the ritualized sponsorship (by kings or other laymen), worship, and public recitation of manuscripts containing sectarian religious teachings.97 In this context, listening (śravaṇa), devotion (bhakti), and scriptural knowledge (vidyā) were understood to depend on one another and to work together in dynamic relationship.98 Since the Śivadharma texts were composed for the laity, they were “generally written in undemanding Sanskrit that could be expected to be readily understood by a larger public”; nevertheless, there was clearly a concern that teachings and stories in Sanskrit would not be fully comprehended by the lay populace. With this in mind, the Śivadharmottara recommends “that it be taught to its audiences in the languages of their regions.”99 Thus, when the Śivadharma lists “listening to [Śiva’s] stories” as an essential feature of bhakti, we can imagine a world of oral vernacular translations and retellings of sectarian religious stories and teachings in Sanskrit texts that—­however little information we have to describe it—­must have been a vital dimension of the social and religious landscape of early medieval South Asia. The Śivadharma’s description of an embodied, emotional bhakti—­the trembling (vikriya) of one’s voice, eyes, and limbs (under the influence of bhakti)—­is especially striking, seeing as numerous scholars have argued that this sort of embodied, passionate, ecstatic devotion is first expressed in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, a text that was by most estimates composed roughly five hundred years after the Śivadharma. Among others, J. N. Farquhar, Jan Gonda, S. N. Dasgupta, Paul Hacker, and, perhaps most influentially, Friedhelm Hardy have asserted “that the passionate and ecstatic bhakti expressed in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa constitutes a distinctive new form of devotion that is markedly different from the more intellectual and contemplative forms of bhakti that find expression in different ways in the Bhagavad-­Gītā, the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, and Rāmānuja’s teachings.”100 Barbara Holdrege adds that what is perhaps most new and distinctive in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s representation of bhakti is “its embodied nature,” with “the bhakta’s internal ecstatic state . . . ​often described as manifesting through the external body, overflowing into the senses and limbs and erupting in spontaneous bodily manifestations such as the bristling of body hair, stammering speech, weeping, laughing, singing, and dancing.”101 We should not view a single verse in the Śivadharma describing and valuing “modulations of voice, eyes,

48 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

and limbs [under the influence of bhakti/stories of God]” as somehow equivalent in significance to the multitude of verses in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa that praise and describe in detail an embodied, emotional bhakti; nevertheless, the Śivadharma verse once again points toward the existence of a world of bhakti—­of vernacular storytelling and affective, embodied devotional experience—­that many scholars would not have imagined for this period of Indian history, or in this Śaiva context. At the very least, the Śivadharma should cause us to be far less confident in our current scholarly assumptions about bhakti, specifically regarding the historical origins of embodied, ecstatic, emotional expressions of bhakti. We might see here the danger of seeking out or claiming origin points and moments of genuine novelty, particularly when the available sources give us such a limited view of on-­t he-­g round historical realities. While further research on the Śivadharma corpus will almost certainly not uncover any such true origins, it very well may force a fundamental reassessment of our understanding of the historical phenomenon of bhakti. Also of special note in the Śivadharma’s passage on eightfold devotion is the very first component in Śiva’s description of bhakti: “affection [vātsalya] for my devotees [mad-­bhaktajana].” This verse clearly conceives a distinctive form of community united by its devotion to God—­“Śiva’s bhaktajana”102—­a community including śūdras, women, and even mlecchas.103 As the text states, “In whomever this eightfold bhakti grows, even if a mleccha, he is a chief of Brahmans, a glorious sage, an ascetic renouncer, and a learned man.” Timothy Lubin has shown how the Śivadharma redefines varṇa and āśrama categories in such a fashion that hereditary status “is subordinated to a ritually mediated spiritual kinship,” thereby enabling women and śūdras to “partake of the ritual entitlements otherwise identified with Brahmanical status.”104 Lubin is right to conceive this Śaiva community in terms of “kinship,” for a familial form of care and affection for one’s fellow bhaktas seems to be central to the Śivadharma’s understanding of bhakti. This becomes more tangible in chapter  11 of the text, which praises giving (material resources) and rendering service to fellow Śaiva bhaktas when they are tired, ill, or otherwise in need.105 The word I have translated as “affection” is the Sanskrit vātsalya, a word used especially to refer to a mother’s selfless love, tenderness, and care for her children. Thus, here we get the sense that the Śivadharma is envisioning (and perhaps even reflecting back the existence of) a community whose members attend to and care for one another in the intimate and tender manner of a family. This brings us back to one of the Śivadharma’s key opening remarks (1:29): “The essence of the Śiva-­dharma is Śiva-­bhakti.” It is worth reflecting on the very fact that in this verse dharma and bhakti are made virtually equivalent. What does this imply? Alf Hiltebeitel’s research on the Sanskrit epics offers insights

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here. Hiltebeitel points out that in the period of the epics—­not long before the Śivadharma’s composition—­“bhakti is to be mapped with dharma.”106 He shows that at the very heart of both dharma and bhakti in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa are the values of hospitality (ātithyam) and friendship (sakhya), both of which are crucial in the construction of community.107 Hiltebeitel’s comments on the epics, in combination with what we have seen in the Śivadharma, shed light on an understanding—­and a lived practice—­of bhakti anchored in significant part in a constellation of terms (e.g., vātsalya, ātithyam, sakhya) that all have to do with social ethics and the building and “upholding” of community. Just as important in this early medieval conception of bhakti as familial affection, hospitality, and friendship was the discourse and practice of the gift (dāna), whose supreme recipient, notably, is the Śaiva yogī. The Śivadharma’s eightfold bhakti offers some enticing suggestions about a world of lay Śaiva devotion whose existence in this period—­in its communal listening (to stories and teachings), embodied emotionality, and casteless ethic of care for fellow Śaiva bhaktas—­many scholars would not have imagined. Nevertheless, as the research of Florinda De Simini demonstrates, a closer study of the Śivadharma and Śivadharmottara illustrates that the devotional religiosity extolled in the Śivadharma tradition centers not on the cultivation of emotion but on faith in the spiritual authority of Śaiva scriptures and professional ascetics, and on practices of ritual worship and gift giving (dāna)—­in particular, offerings of material support to the community of initiated Śaiva ācāryas and yogīs.108 In the Śivadharmottara, probably composed in the seventh century (not long after the Śivadharma), bhakti is still important but seems clearly overshadowed by the term śraddhā, “faith” or “trustworthiness.” Indeed, śraddhā, a word with considerably less “emotional” and “participatory” connotations than bhakti, is conceived as “constituting the essence of all Śaiva teachings and the only means through which Śiva can truly be attained.”109 At the same time, the text claims that the power of these Śaiva teachings is embodied in the six-­syllable sectarian mantra oṃ namaḥ śivāya. Both the Śivadharma and Śivadharmottara extol the great benefits of uttering this mantra, with Śivadharmottara 1.38–­39 stating, “One in whose heart this mantra ‘oṃ namaḥ śivāya’ constantly dwells, he has learned [all] the knowledge that has been taught, and performed all [rituals],”110 a sentiment not too far removed from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s (and many other bhakti texts’) later stress on the power of reciting the name of God. Overall, the most common topics in these two earliest Śivadharma texts seem to be (a) instructions for and praise of the ritual worship of the liṅga (a sphere of devotional practice that would be adopted and adapted as the core of the tantric Śaiva ritual repertoire); (b) praise of (and merits accrued by) constructing and maintaining

50 9 Part I: From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

a Śaiva temple; and (c) rules, fruits, and proper recipients of dāna.111 Thus, the window that Śivadharma texts give us onto early medieval lay Śaivism suggests that, in fact, bhakti was understood most centrally as performing rituals of worship to Śiva (in the aniconic form of the liṅga) and as offering material support to (patronizing) the larger Śaiva community (especially its professional ascetics). These devotional practices were believed to generate sufficient merit to bring the Śiva bhakta (and their family members) success in this life, a long afterlife in heaven (śivalokaḥ), and a desirable rebirth in which they might then be able to attain final liberation.112 If the ritual worship of localized, material forms of God in temples, combined with gift giving, constituted the heart of the practice of this early medieval lay devotional tradition, its soteriology and spiritual ideals were focused squarely on ( jñāna-­and dhyāna-­) yoga and the yogī. In fact, lay Śaivas’ relationships with communities of professional Śaiva ascetics—­ namely, Pāśupatas and (later) tantric Śaiva yogīs—­seem to have been a key piece of their devotional lives.

Yogīs and Devotees in the Early Medieval Religiopolitical Economy All indications are that the texts of the Śivadharma scriptural corpus were probably composed by a lay segment of the Pāśupata Śaiva community.113 The Pāśupatas, whose cult centered on Śiva as Lord (pati) of Beasts (paśu), emerged in the second century CE114 as a “Hindu” response to Buddhist and Jain monastic traditions, an ascetic order—­exclusive to brahmans—­that proselytized low-­ caste and tribal populations while maintaining and propagating brahmanical values. Most scholars have narrowly identified the Pāśupatas with the system of lifelong renunciation and rigorous asceticism outlined in Kauṇḍinya’s fourth-­ century commentary on the Pāśupata Sūtra; however, as Peter Bisschop has demonstrated, celibate ascetics were in fact only one strand of a far broader tradition that developed to include a lay community of Śiva bhaktas (Māheśvaras) faithful to the Pāśupata ācāryas and teachings.115 The Pāśupatas were the first “Hindu” (non-­śramaṇa) ascetic group in South Asia to emulate and compete with the Buddhists’ zealous proselytization of marginalized Indian and non-­Indian peoples.116 Indeed, as Hans Bakker explains, “the Pāśupatas had had a good look at their Buddhist counterparts and had copied their formula for success, namely a standing organisation of professional religious specialists—­yogins, ascetics, and ācāryas—­supported by a following of ordinary devotees, the Māheśvara community at large, to whose spiritual needs it catered.”117

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The Pāśupatas arose in southern Gujarat as a Śaiva initiatory order of brahman ascetics. Over time they spread across India, integrating themselves into the temple-­based lay Śaiva devotional tradition118 and thereby successfully bringing together the realms of ascetic-­yogic Śaiva practice and popular-­level Śiva bhakti.119 As Travis Smith explains, the Pāśupatas “were able to establish a vast lineage-­based Śaiva network, loosely organized yet ideologically coherent. In each region, new monasteries were built and local ascetic and lay communities were gradually assimilated into the overarching Pāśupata worldview, spread through texts of the order and through the circulation of teaching lineages.”120 The available evidence suggests that lay Śaivas who were members of, or associated with, a larger (loose and weakly bounded) Pāśupata community probably composed not only the Śivadharma corpus but also the Īśvara Gītā121 and many of the Śaiva Purāṇas, including the sixth-­to-­seventh-­century Skanda Purāṇa. In significant part through these texts, they were able to skillfully accommodate and incorporate diverse “peoples and practices on the margins of elite society into the fold of Śaiva orthopraxis.”122 Clearly then, far from an antinomian ascetic order on the fringes of society, from the sixth to the tenth century, the Pāśupatas were an important part of the Indian religious mainstream, receiving considerable patronage from kings as well as local collectives of merchants, traders, and artisans,123 and operating monasteries and temples across India, but especially in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and the Gangetic valley.124 For the lay population of Śiva bhaktas, the professional Pāśupata ascetic—­the yogī—­was a crucial figure, a locus of spiritual authority and an object of devotion. As mentioned, Śivadharma texts extol the immeasurable fruits gained by gift giving, but both the Śivadharma and Śivadharmottara state repeatedly and emphatically that the best recipients of a gift “are those who are identified with Śiva and whose cult is thus equivalent to his own, that is the Śaiva yogins (śivayogin).”125 Indeed, according to Śivadharma 12.35–­38, at the very top of the hierarchy of beings stands the yogī—­namely, the Śivayogin.126 The text (12.31) defines the Śaiva yogī as “one who is endowed with knowledge and freedom from desires thanks to a mind pacified by Śiva” and who is “committed to the practice of the sixfold yoga.”127 It is clear in the Śivadharma tradition that, whatever the merits of (the ritual worship and gift giving that primarily constitute) Śiva bhakti, it is especially dispassion, knowledge ( jñāna), and yoga that lead one to liberation.128 As a passage from Śivadharma 10 states, “Detachment [vairgāya] comes from indifference to worldly things; the arising of knowledge [ jñāna] comes from detachment [vairāgya]; Yoga proceeds from knowledge [ jñāna]; and one obtains the end of suffering because of Yoga.”129 In early medieval India, not only the Śaiva lay community but also the Vaiṣṇava and Buddhist lay communities saw the professional ascetic—­the yogī

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(saṃnyāsi, bhikṣu)—­as the human religious exemplar. Notably, Śiva, Kṛṣṇa, and the Buddha (and bodhisattvas) all are regularly presented as masters of yoga (i.e., models of yogic dispassion, knowledge, and power/attainment) in the first-­millennium literature of their respective devotional communities.130 It is unclear whether the power, perfection, and charisma ascribed to Śiva, Kṛṣṇa, and the Buddha were theorized “in terms of powers already attributed to yogis” or whether the abilities and qualities credited to yogīs were modeled after the attributes of these divine figures.131 In either case, in the lay communities of all these traditions, the yogī emerges as an authoritative spiritual model worthy of respect, awe, and devotion. In the context of lay Śaiva religion, to give to yogīs (or ācāryas) was to give directly to Śiva and thus to receive the corresponding fruits/merit. All of this suggests an early medieval economy of spiritual and political power driven in large part by exchanges between lay devotees and initiated professional ascetics. Yogīs mediated spiritual knowledge and power to laypeople (while also providing a number of ritual and practical services) and gave sacred authority and political capital to kings and other political elites, while kings and other lay devotees provided for the yogīs’ material support. This same sort of religiopolitical economy would continue as a new form of initiatory religion burst onto the scene—­tantra. The success of Śaiva tantra (and thus tantra in general) was dependent upon the existing tradition of lay Śaiva devotion but also on the crucial role that communities of initiated Pāśupata ascetics had established for themselves in early medieval India’s religiopolitical economy, its particular system of exchanges in spiritual, political, moral, and economic capital. In a number of key respects, the activities of the Pāśupatas seem to have laid an ideological and institutional foundation for the rise of the first major tantric community, the Śaiva Siddhānta. In the ninth and tenth centuries, lineages of Siddhānta Śaivism “rather swiftly replaced the Pāśupatas as the most extensive and influential transregional Śaiva sect,” on the one hand by enticing patrons and followers with their novel and uniquely efficacious tantric ritual technology and the promise of liberating initiation for all caste classes and, on the other hand, by appropriating and building further upon the Śaiva networks and infrastructure established by the Pāśupatas.132 As Smith explains, the Śaiva Siddhānta community “assumed control over the administration of particular maṭhas and temples that were built and maintained by Pāśupatas”133 while also following the Pāśupatas’ lead in disseminating their ritual and doctrine through the popular textual medium of the Purāṇas. Evidence from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Kashmir, Maharashtra, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu attests to the fact that by 900, “a broadly extended network of interrelated Śaiva Siddhānta lineages [had] spread itself out over much of India, acting frequently as spiritual preceptors to

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kings, constructing and presiding over temples and monasteries, and propagating the teachings of the āgamas.”134 The members of Śaiva Siddhānta monastic orders took on the same roles as the Pāśupata professional ascetics had, serving as objects of devotion (and recipients of dāna), spiritual teachers, and service providers who also administered the temples and performed the temple worship rites of popular devotional religion. By offering initiation to householders and members of all castes, Śaiva tantric orders worked to tie the lay population even more closely to their communities of professional ascetics than had the Pāśupatas. This brings us to another important piece of tantra’s medieval success story, one oriented toward the tradition’s broad social reach. In order to explain tantra’s pervasive presence in the social life of both elite and nonelite populations, I turn to the manner in which the tantric tradition participated in the larger medieval process of agrarian and political expansion, incorporating cultural and religious phenomena on the frontiers into brahmanical culture.

The Social Dynamics of Tantra Tantra has regularly been described as a tradition centered on tribal, indigenous, pre-­Aryan religious practices and folk traditions of shamanistic possession, healing, magic, and the worship of goddesses, nature spirits, and spirits of the dead. At the same time, many scholars have stressed the brahmanical, conservative, elitist, esoteric, and scriptural aspects of tantra as its defining sociological features. Travis Smith has insightfully remarked that “while the debate between positing either an elite or a non-­elite origin of Tantra seems at first glance irresolvable, it may itself hold the key to the problem of identifying the fundamental characterization of Tantra.”135 Along these lines, rather than highlight either the “elite origins” or “nonelite origins” scholarly position, here I aim to demonstrate how tantra was simultaneously both brahmanical and folk, the product of a dynamic and mutually transforming encounter between a transregional Sanskritic, dharmic culture and a variety of unbrahmanized local Indian subcultures peripheral to state structure and settled agriculture. B. D. Chattopadhyaya has argued that one of the core elements in the transformation of early medieval India was “the appearance of state society in areas that had long been peripheral.”136 Similarly, Sanderson has explained that “the territorial expansion of brahmanical society into new regions . . . ​was one of the salient features of the early medieval period,” and one that was inseparable from the growth of tantra.137 During India’s early medieval period, forest regions of

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hunters and rudimentary agriculturalists on the peripheries of state power and Sanskritic culture were increasingly transformed into well-­i rrigated, settled agricultural regions under royal power.138 It is clear that a major factor in the growth of both tantric and purāṇic traditions at this time was the extension of brahmanical culture139 into rural, tribal, local areas alongside the expansion of state institutions and the growth of settled agriculture. Early medieval political integration and agrarian expansion were, then, inseparable from a religious assimilation—­seen in both the Purāṇas and the Tantras—­in which local cults, rituals, and deities were subsumed into more cosmopolitan, supralocal Sanskritic traditions. When a king expanded his realm into tribal or peripheral areas, to successfully integrate the people in the area into the kingdom, it was necessary to integrate local deities—­often goddesses—­who were the primary objects of worship, into the more cosmopolitan brahmanical religious order. Alternatively, when a local chief began to expand his power over a larger territory, in order to assume authority he would adapt his original religion, which may have been centered on the local goddess, to conform to the larger religious order.140 Clearly, a key factor in the success of tantric Śaivism was its ability to effectively incorporate the worship of the goddesses who were so popular among many South Asian people.141 Indeed, tantric Śaivism rose in conjunction with Śāktism, for many Śaivas were, in practice, primarily worshippers of the Goddess (theologically conceived as Śiva’s inherent power, or śakti), often in the form of various tutelary goddesses (kuladevīs) of land and clan.142 The role of the Purāṇas in the early medieval integration of new populations (through the assimilation of local deities, mythologies, and ritual practices) into a reenvisioned, transregional, brahmanical tradition is well known,143 but far less attention has been drawn to the important overlap between tantric and purāṇic traditions in this process. In his study of the Bengal Purāṇas, Kunal Chakrabarti remarks that “large chunks” of the Tantras’ ritual forms and practices—­e.g., tantric mantras and nyāsa procedures—­were incorporated into the ritual prescriptions of the Purāṇas.144 Sanderson similarly points out “the inconstant character of the boundary between [initiatory tantric] traditions and Purāṇic forms of religious observance,”145 noting that, in fact, “a substantial amount of Saiddhāntika [Śaiva tantric] ritual material has been propagated within Purāṇas.”146 Nirajan Kafle gives clear evidence that the Śivadharmasaṅgraha, a lay Śivadharma text composed in the ninth to tenth century, borrows heavily from both tantric and purānic sources.147 While much about early medieval religiosity is still quite murky, it seems that, on the ground, the realms of the “tantric” and “purāṇic” often blurred into one another, especially in lay religion. Drawing on Donald Davis’s pathbreaking historical research on Indian law, Jason Schwartz has argued persuasively that the growth of the tantric

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traditions must also be understood in connection with medieval legal practices.148 Schwartz argues that the principle of legal pluralism in medieval India—­e.g., the king’s protection of the right of different autonomous corporate groups to manage their own affairs in accordance with community-­specific values, codes, and customs—­was, in fact, the necessary precondition for “the defining feature of the medieval Indic religious landscape: namely the mass institutionalization of Tantric communities openly recognized and patronized by the state.”149 As he insightfully suggests, to become a tantric initiate was not simply to gain access to the benefits of specific tantric religious rituals and teachings but also to take on a new legal status, one in which orthodox brahmanical social codes often were no longer applicable. Samayin (entry-­level) initiates became subject to the distinctive, community-­specific laws (samaya) of the tantric community they were initiated into (e.g., nonrecognition of caste differences, the giving of a proportion of one’s material wealth for use by the community), with the guru—­over and above the state—­now their final binding legal authority.150 As noted, tantric traditions changed the rules of the game by opening up initiation (and its liberating benefits) to all caste classes and not requiring renunciation. Tantric communities likely grew especially by offering initiation to the increasing numbers of śūdras—­recruited from local populations—­who were essential in the cultivation of land in newly settled peripheral areas.151 While it seems safe to assume that the lay populace would have significantly outnumbered the community of tantric initiates, Nina Mirnig’s research has suggested that, in at least some cases, the modes of worship prescribed by the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition for entry-­level (samayin) tantric initiates were the same as those prescribed for lay devotees.152 Furthermore, epigraphic evidence suggests that tantric initiation (especially among heads of household) was considerably more common than many have assumed and was even conducted in semiregular, prearranged mass ceremonies. Sanderson discusses an inscription from Senakapāṭ in Chattisgarh that shows that, already in the seventh century, maṭhas were receiving endowments to perform tantric initiation in regular ceremonies on predetermined days (indicating a steady stream of people who would present themselves for initiation) and that it was typical to initiate multiple people in a single ceremony.153 According to the Senakapāṭ inscription, doctrinal teachings were to be expounded on these occasions, implying that the new and previous initiates gathered at these ritual events were not professional ascetics but householders living lives dominated by worldly concerns.154 Considering the unique spiritual (and even legal) benefits to which it provided access, the tantric initiation of householders would have generated a strong sense of debt and commitment to the guru and larger tantric community and called for a gift or

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investment of some kind in return. As Indrani Chatterjee reminds us, “All initiates paid for their learning and assimilation in some form,” even if “the quality, size and nature of these payments separated the humbler initiates from their wealthier counterparts.”155 Initiation fees and the contributions of initiated householder patrons (whether of wealth, labor, sustenance, or land)—­which were probably required by the community-­specific laws (samaya) one became subject to upon initiation—­provided a crucial economic foundation for tantric communities. Much further research is needed to better illuminate the historical relationships between professional tantric ascetics, initiated householders (samayins and putrakas), and uninitiated lay devotees, but what we do know suggests that the religious lives of tantric initiates and lay devotees were on something of a continuum and, at a general level, that initiatory tantric traditions and lay devotional traditions interacted with and influenced each other in vital ways. As brahmanical culture spread outward in connection with political and agrarian expansion, in the overlapping tantric, purāṇic, and Śivadharma traditions there was a reenvisioning of orthopraxy to accommodate new social groups and practices. In this process, a number of originally nonbrahmanical, “folk” religious practices—­possession, exorcism, nature spirit and goddess worship, etc.—­became important parts of the tantric tradition by being incorporated into tantric ritual forms and authorized in and by Sanskrit tantric scriptures. In this sense, we might understand much of tantra as brahmanical appropriations, translations, or domestications of folk religious practices and traditions. As Travis Smith states, “While many of the elements that make up Tantra were associated with non-­elite, marginal peoples and sects,” tantric practices were not “accurate representations of folk or non-­elite praxes, nor were they intended as such.” Rather, these elements “were bounded and transformed through a remarkably rigorous ritualization, leading to a profuse elaboration of precise rules for ritual conduct. . . . ​Tantric practices, it is clear, were not the actual practices of these groups, but deliberate transformations and elaborations of them.”156 In all likelihood, many tantric scriptures were composed in areas into which brahmanical state society had only recently entered, and some may not have been composed by brahmans at all, but in order for the texts to carry cosmopolitan authority they had to be in the brahmanical language of Sanskrit. As Flood remarks, many of the authors and redactors of tantric scriptures “were not completely at home” in an elite Sanskritic milieu but still “thought it imperative to locate these texts and traditions within the wider, ‘high’ literary culture of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.”157 The textualization—­i n the language of Sanskrit—­of what were in some cases originally vernacular, oral, nonbrahmanical

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traditions of knowledge and practice is one illustration of how the growth of tantra—­whatever its folk or tribal dimensions—­generally occurred in the hegemonic terms of brahmanism. Frederick Smith’s discussion of the relationship between folk traditions of possession and the core tantric ritual procedure of nyāsa (the tantric method for divinizing the body) offers further insights that may help to explain how folk traditions of practice were domesticated into more controlled, brahmanical modes as they were assimilated into the tantric tradition. As has been noted, the divinization of the body (through ritual imposition of mantras and visualization-­ based yoga) is a distinguishing feature of tantric practice. In tantric ritual, the self becomes divine, as Flood puts it, through the ritual “mapping of the body in tradition-­specific and text-­specific ways.”158 In other words, the tantric divinization of the body is not separate from its systematic entextualization. This paradigmatic tantric self-­deification typically occurs through the practice of nyāsa, the imposing of mantras on the body, with the practitioner touching the requisite part of the body and reciting the correct mantra. As Smith writes, “The intent of nyāsa is to impose or place the power of the mantras, and perforce the deities, and so on, which they inscribe, on or within various body parts, either one’s own or that of an image of a deity.”159 The divinization of the body is also a fundamental part of the folk practice of possession, but unlike nyāsa, it occurs in a manner that is nontextual, far less systematic, and far more spontaneous (though still typically following certain ritual protocols). Smith argues that the Tantras domesticated possession ritually and conferred philosophical credibility on it, “apparently sensitive to its historical prominence as a popular and legitimate mode of religious experience and expression.”160 He states, “Nyāsa, we can say, is brahmanical possession.”161 In the process of nyāsa, “deities, powers, and so on are invited to take possession of the body. But they are invited in a brahmanically programmatic, that is, ‘textual,’ way, one that emphasizes purity at the expense of spontaneity and danger.”162 Thus Smith provocatively suggests that, in nyāsa, we have a tantric brahmanical domestication of popular religious possession. From this perspective, nyāsa, one of tantra’s most distinctive practices, served to exercise “programmatic control” on the practice of possession while also conferring brahmanical legitimacy upon it. Thus, the process by which certain folk practices became “tantric” (i.e., became part of the tantric tradition) was inseparable from the process by which these practices became “brahmanical” and “Sanskritic.” A more specific example of the brahmanical nature of tantric practice and the tantric domestication of folk possession can be found in the practice of the tantric healer known as the gāruḍika described in the body of scriptures known as the Gāruḍa Tantras. Michael Slouber has conducted trailblazing research on the Śaiva Gāruḍa

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Tantras, an important but understudied corpus of tantric scriptures focused especially on healing snakebite and curing poisoning, while also including broader material related to health care, astrology, possession, and sorcery.163 As a class of scripture, these texts were known as early as the sixth century, and by the tenth century the twenty-­eight Gāruḍa Tantras had been canonized as one the five “streams” of Śaiva revelation.164 The teachings of Gāruḍika medicine articulated therein were, like all the mantras and ritual methods in tantric scripture, considered to be divine in origin, with a chain of command flowing from “Śiva to Garuḍa [Lord of Birds and archenemy of snakes] to the Gāruḍika practitioner who embodies him.”165 The ritual divinization of the body characteristic of tantric practice—­ described by Smith as “brahmanical possession”—­is a crucial element in the gāruḍika’s healing ritual. The Gāruḍika practitioner ritually identifies with (becomes possessed by) Garuḍa in order to heal. Slouber explains that “ ‘becoming’ Garuḍa was the fundamental act of the ritual, judging by its frequent mention in the literature.”166 This procedure involved the “mental construction of the element maṇḍalas and their deposition on both the hand and body of the practitioner” and “the visualization of oneself as Garuḍa.”167 In other words, what likely was originally a nontextual folk tradition of practice, in which the healer became possessed by a locally specific deity, has here become a tantric practice of controlled and programmatic identification with a Sanskritic deity (agency and control lying not with the possessing deity/spirit but with the practitioner), authorized by and performed in accord with the prescriptions of Sanskrit tantric scripture.168 The tantric healer of snakebites is a figure that will be encountered again in early modern bhakti and Sufi literature and is worth a bit more attention here, particularly insofar as his ritual activities speak to the wide range of functions to which relatively standardized tantric ritual techniques could be applied. Gāruḍikas drew on the power of various (textually specified) mantras to heal snakebite, drive out snakes, and cure poisoning, but in addition to these functions, they made amulets and yantras (from mantra syllables) that could be worn on the body for protection from snakes, dangerous animals, or thieves, to ward off fear in dangerous places, to make barren women fertile, or to defend against possession by hostile spirits.169 Passages from the Jayadrathayāmala suggest that gāruḍikas were also involved in weather magic and crop protection, conducting tantric rituals and reciting mantras to ward off thunderstorms, lightning, and pests.170 The ritual practice of the gāruḍika gives us a sense of the more pragmatic dimensions of tantric religiosity and the ways in which tantra could be simultaneously esoteric and popular. As Lawrence A. Babb has discussed, in Indian

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religious life we often find, on the one hand, a “transcendental complex” concerned with the ultimate purposes of man, long-­term welfare, institutional continuity, and the stability of society, which is usually in the hands of hereditary brahman priests, and, on the other hand, a “pragmatic complex” concerned with local and personal welfare and desires, which is usually in the hands of typically nonhereditary and lower-­caste exorcists and shamans.171 The tantric ritual practice of the gāruḍika would seem to fall under the pragmatic complex, but what is far more important to highlight is that the basic ritual forms and techniques a gāruḍika would use to harness divine power for “pragmatic” functions were no different from those used to access and employ sacred power for “transcendental” purposes. Both “high” and “low,” elite and popular forms of tantric practice sought to harness divine power through essentially the same mantra-­focused ritual techniques. As a modus operandi, tantric ritual bridged the transcendental and pragmatic aspects of South Asian religious life in its ability to access and utilize cosmic power. Whether healing snakebite victims or consecrating kings, exorcising illness-­causing demons or installing temple images, practicing black magic or striving for liberated consciousness, worshipping bloodthirsty goddesses or pure, brahmanical Sanskritic deities, the same general ritual system and form—­with self-­divinization and the use of tantric mantras—­was utilized. Furthermore, this tantric ritual form was used across sectarian lines. While Gavin Flood has shown us that the tantric body was “mapped” in sect-­and text-­ specific ways, tantric ritual forms were incredibly similar regardless of the specific sect or text (and its cosmology and doctrine) informing the ritual perfomance.172 The Vajrayāna Buddhist monk and the Pāñcarātra worshipper, the Saiddhāntika Śaiva priest and the transgressive Śākta ascetic, the gāruḍika healer and the tantric rājaguru—­all seem to have moved and understood their bodies in remarkably similar ways in their ritual practice. Indeed, Sanderson has described the ritual of the various tantric sects—­Buddhist, Śaiva, and Vaiṣṇava—­as essentially different “dialects of a single ‘Tantric’ language.”173 The range of uses to which tantra’s transsectarian ritual techniques could be applied was remarkably wide; however, knowledge of the specialized ritual techniques themselves was of limited access and very time-­consuming to acquire. In the case of the gāruḍika, for instance, “patients would have known little about the operations of the specialist except that they were renowned as highly effective” and that “the power of the mantra to heal the envenomation stems from Garuḍa.”174 To use White’s apt metaphor, tantric scriptures were “classified documents” and their uniquely efficacious mantras and ritual techniques were “secret codes” given only to those with “top-­secret security clearance.”175 Though specialist tantric ritual knowledge was esoteric—­g uarded by a

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system of layered initiations—­participation in tantric religious life became a popular phenomenon in early medieval India, a period that saw pervasive faith in the power of tantric mantras and rituals to accomplish one’s desires, widespread access to and demand for initiated tantric specialists, and a public life in which tantric figures and institutions often played a key role. In sum, in conjunction with the expansion of state society and settled agriculture in early medieval India, a brahmanical tantric civilization extended into unbrahmanized tribal areas, beginning a multidirectional interaction in which both the tribal areas and brahmanical culture were transformed. The development of the tantric tradition occurred in this context and, in key respects, was characterized by the assimilation of local, nontextual, and nonbrahmanical traditions of practice (e.g., possession, exorcism, blood sacrifice) into the controlled, transregional, brahmanic, textualized ritual forms of tantra. These tantric ritual techniques served to harness cosmic power for purposes both spiritual and mundane, transcendental and pragmatic, with the same basic ritual technique used by tantric practitioners, be they Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, or Buddhist, rural or urban, high caste or low caste, orthodox or heterodox. The specialized, guarded knowledge and training required to effectively utilize tantric mantras and perform tantric rituals made tantra, at one level, essentially esoteric, but participation in the tantric ritual world, interaction with tantric specialists and institutions, and acceptance of tantric cosmological presuppositions and ritual logic were all so widespread that, in toto, tantra must be considered a popular tradition.

The End of the Tantric Age The preceding discussion has shown how tantra became a popular, politically powerful, mainstream tradition. It did so by allying with kings, by co-­opting orthodox brahmanism even as it assimilated frontier folk traditions, by disseminating highly esteemed (flexible but standardized) ritual forms and techniques, and by integrating itself with temple-­based lay devotional traditions. By the tenth century, the institutions and ritual networks of tantric monastic orders had achieved a huge and influential presence throughout India. The continued existence of these institutions and the tantric communities associated with them depended largely upon royal patronage and the existence of a religiopolitical environment in which transregional tantric ritual forms and Sanskritic aesthetic expressions were assumed as the shared mediators of sovereign power. Beginning especially with the Delhi Sultanate period (1206–­1526), this would no longer be the case in much of northern and central India. The political order and

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cultural world of India—­particularly North India—­underwent a major change at this time with the rise of new Persianate forms of state power, in which institutional tantric religion had no real place or authority. It would undoubtedly be a mistake to reduce the decline of mainstream, institutional tantra in late medieval India solely to the impact of Persianized Turks in India, though this was clearly a decisive factor in North India. Might the rising influence of Vedānta (especially in South India) also have played a role in the “decline” of politically influential, institutionalized forms of tantra? Further research is needed to determine if and how these two historical trends were related, but it is a question well worth asking. Beginning in the twelfth century, there was a proliferation of different Vedāntic philosophical systems in southern India, often integrated with new sectarian bhakti theologies.176 While mainstream, institutional tantra appears to have disappeared rather suddenly in North India, in South India the influence of public, royally sponsored tantra seems to have waned more gradually at the same time that the ideological and institutional presence of Vedānta—­most especially Advaita (nondual) Vedānta—­ was continually expanding. Over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods, the growing Vedāntic tradition seems to have assimilated or significantly impacted a variety of devotional and tantric-­yogic modes of religiosity.177 With some Indian social elites perceiving the traditional brahmanical social order to be under threat (whether directly or indirectly) from Persianate Turks, perhaps Vedānta offered something the tantric tradition could not: a scripturally based philosophical axis around which (and a shared conceptual language through which) a unifying, orthodox “Hindu” intellectual identity could arise and cohere.178 As Elaine Fisher has shown, in late medieval and early modern South India, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva traditions ceased to operate as independent religious systems (each with their own separate, sect-­specific ultimate scriptural authority)—­as they had in the Tantric Age—­and instead increasingly sought to position themselves, through Vedāntic exegesis, as ideal representatives of Vedic orthodoxy.179 The expanding influence of the Vedāntic tradition had its own internal logic and should not be viewed simply as “a direct response to Islam”;180 yet brahmanical perceptions of and concerns regarding the presence and expanding political influence of Central Asian “mlecchas” in India likely gave real impetus to developments already under way in the rising Vedāntic tradition, which in turn may have contributed to shifts in the position of institutional tantra.181 Whatever role Vedānta (and its rise) may or may not have had in the process, with the spread of Turkish power across North India beginning in the twelfth century, we see the rapid decline of the relationship between ruler and tāntrika—­ political authority no longer relying upon tantric ritual and institutions—­which

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brings about a significant change in the religious landscape. As White writes, “The rise and fall of Hindu Tantra as a religious ‘mainstream’ is directly linked to the rise and fall of its royal patrons. In north and central India, Hindu Tantra thrived as the royal cultus under the Kalacuri, Somavamshi, Chandella, Calukya, and other dynastic lines, until their lands fell into the hands of Muslim rulers in the 12th century.”182 While identifying these Turkish rulers first and foremost as “Muslim” is problematic (essentializing them in terms of religious identity when Indians at the time did not understand them in this light), White nevertheless hits on a crucial point. As he states, “For so long as [the] relationship between kings and tantric specialists remained in force, Tantra persisted as a sanctioned religious force in India, with the ceremonial life of the kingdom being conducted in a tantric mode. When that relationship was dissolved, as Hindu kings were overthrown or reduced to vassal status by Muslim [Persianate Turkish] rulers (or, from the 16th cent. forward, increasingly opted for a devotional religious style), Tantra disappeared.”183 Here White does not mean that all tantric religiosity vanished but that tantra as a mainstream, public tradition—­one held together as such by royal patronage and participation in an overarching politico-­religious ideology and institutional culture—­largely disappeared. Tantric religiosity in North India would live on, but it would do so primarily (a) in more private, secretive contexts among Hindu royal families now subordinate to Turkish rulers and (b) among lineages of tantric practitioners that were less dependent on the royally patronized institutional structure of temples and maṭhas. Tantric ritual forms would maintain a key place in North Indian Hindu religious life, but with the end of the Tantric Age these ritual procedures and techniques were often detached from tantric religiosity per se, persisting in new contexts (e.g., Vedāntic, bhakti, and yogic frameworks) not linked to sectarian tantric traditions or institutions. In the new Persianate political culture of Sultanate India, the infrastructure of mainstream, public, institutional tantra largely collapsed, and the sphere of tantric religion underwent a transformation and contraction into one constituted largely by less-­institutionalized lineages of yogīs, warrior ascetics, and rural tantric healers and “magicians.”

R

In this chapter, I have articulated an understanding of tantra as a broad religiopolitical tradition whose ritual culture, institutional figures and spaces, and cosmological presuppositions were pervasive in early medieval India. The rest of this book seeks, in large part, to explain the rise of bhakti in early modern North India and the concomitant marginalization of Śaiva-­Śākta tantra, a phenomenon that cannot be understood apart from two interrelated factors: (a) the

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spread and influence of Persianate political culture and popular Sufism in the Sultanate and Mughal periods and (b) bhakti authors’ and performers’ critique and attempted delegitimation of the tantric outlook. The Tantric Age comes to an end with the Delhi Sultanate, but tantric ritual technique would persist in and beyond the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, sometimes in new Sufi and bhakti contexts. The tantric outlook would also persevere, with tantric yogīs now as its primary representative. In the early modern period, however, tantric paradigms of thought and behavior—­no longer having the sociopolitical context and state support that had sustained them—­would often find themselves marginalized and subordinated to Hindu religious practices and perspectives that were more congenial to the new social environment and its increasingly prevalent Islamicate worldviews. In the next chapter, I explore this process, looking at the ways in which Sultanate political culture and the spread of popular Sufism paved the way for the emergence of the great bhakti poet-­saints of North India.

2

Sultans, Saints, and Songs Persianate Culture, Sufism, and Bhakti in Sultanate India

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he previous chapter pointed to some of the ways in which medieval bhakti—­in its varied forms and expressions—­was in close relationship with the scriptural authority, religious goals and sensibilities, ritual forms, institutions, and monastic representatives (yogīs, ācāryas) of tantra. My contention in this book is that the bhakti of North India’s own regionally specific bhakti movement, which arose in the late Sultanate and Mughal periods—­ though certainly continuous with aspects of earlier forms of bhakti—­was, in key respects, qualitatively distinct from the bhakti of the early medieval period. The bhakti of early modern North India grew up in conjunction with a set of cultural traditions and cosmological presuppositions considerably different from those dominant in the Tantric Age, for this was a bhakti inflected by the values, institutions, and perspectives of (a) Persian literary and political culture and (b) popular Sufism. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which the spread of popular Sufism and cosmopolitan Persianate cultural forms during the Sultanate period paved the way for the emergence of the bhakti poet-­saints of North India. These poet-­saints and the bhakti communities that drew inspiration from them cultivated a distinctive religious sensibility—­a n ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition—­remarkable in its similarities with key Sufi values and perspectives and in its divergences from certain tantric religious attitudes and approaches.

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Getting Beyond “Muslim Invasion”: Indic Encounters with the Persian Cosmopolis The historical shifts occasioned by the influx of Persianate peoples and Islamicate1 culture into the Indian subcontinent beginning in the thirteenth century were closely linked to the demise of mainstream, institutional forms of tantra and the rise of North India’s bhakti movement. If bhakti is best understood not in terms of its supposed intrinsic qualities but on the basis of its historically and geographically specific relationships with other key concepts and institutions in the larger field of Indian social and religious life, then, during the Sultanate period, we see many of those relationships shift in consequential ways. To understand the Sultanate period as a time of momentous historical change in India is hardly a novel position; however, the overwhelming majority of scholarly works highlighting Sultanate “rupture” have been deeply problematic in placing the religion of Islam at their very center as the fundamental agent of change. In the pages that follow, I seek to understand the history of this time within a more productive and sophisticated frame than that of religious identity. As Richard Eaton has stated, “Modern textbooks routinely characterize the advent of Persianized Turks in India as a ‘Muslim conquest,’ and the entire period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century as India’s ‘Muslim Era.’ ”2 From this all-­too-­ common perspective, “the agent of conquest is not a people as defined by their ethnic heritage or place of origin, but rather, a religion, the Islamic religion.”3 Rather than viewing Indian history in the “narrowly religious terms” of Hindu-­ Muslim encounter, here I follow Eaton and Phillip Wagoner in framing our understanding of the Sultanate and Mughal periods as, in part, “an encounter between civilizations defined by Sanskrit or Persian literary traditions.” 4 As they put it, “in place of competing religions, we see a complex and often fruitful encounter between two literary-­cultural systems, the Sanskrit and the Persian, each of which encompassed and transcended religious systems.”5 Through the encounter of these elite literary-­political cultures of Sanskrit and Persian, but also through more vernacular (often Sufi-­driven) interactions at the popular level, Islamicate cultural forms would gradually become interwoven into the fabric of North Indian society. Sanskrit cosmopolitan culture had been well established in South Asia since the fourth century and was intertwined in important ways with tantric religiopolitical paradigms in the medieval period. The Sanskrit cosmopolis—­so brilliantly elaborated by Sheldon Pollock6—­had existed for centuries when, in roughly the eleventh century, a cosmopolitan Persian culture clearly emerged in Central Asia. The roots of the Persian cosmopolis lie in the court of the

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Samanid dynasty (819–­999) in Khurasan (modern-­day Uzbekistan). Reasserting a rich pre-­Islamic Persian heritage that had been largely submerged in the Arab conquest of the Iranian plateau in the seventh century, the Samanids adopted Persian as “their language of administration and a vehicle for both high literature and political theory.”7 This literary language of Persian—­a nd the political, aesthetic, and moral ideals embedded in it—­would spread beyond Iran into Central and South Asia in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. As was the case with Sanskrit, the production of Persian literature came to be intimately linked to the expression of authority, prestige, and sophistication and the inculcation of shared moral and political ideals across a broad territorial expanse. For societies in the embrace of this transregional Persianate culture, governance was decoupled from Islam and instead grounded in pre-­Islamic Iranian notions of kingship. According to the political ideals of the Persian cosmopolis, society was to be upheld not by a pious caliph but by a just king, a sultan whose rule is divine in origin and who ensures the well-­being of diverse religious and cultural groups. This cosmopolitan Persian literature and political culture first made its way into South Asia with the Ghaznavids. Once subordinate to the Samanids, the Ghaznavids (a dynasty of Central Asian Turkic origin) established their own independent realm in the late tenth century, bringing Persian literary and cultural traditions with them to the east as they built centers of power in Ghazna (in eastern Afghanistan) and Lahore (in the Punjab).8 Beginning with the Ghaznavids (977–­1186), the Turko-­Afghan presence (or fear of it) would play an increasingly significant—­and disruptive—­role in North Indian social and political life. In the early eleventh century, Maḥmūd of Ghazna (971–­1030) undertook a series of seasonal raids on various cities in northwestern India, including Kanauj, which had been the capital of the Gurjara-­Pratihāra dynasty and the center of brahmanical culture in North India for more than a century. Heralding the destruction of the religiopolitical infrastructure that was to come, he infamously ransacked major religious sites such as Mathura and Somnath, looting temple treasuries and returning to Afghanistan with the plundered wealth. In 1186, the Ghurids (a dynasty of eastern Iranian origins) took power from the Ghaznavids but continued their enthusiastic patronage of Persian literature and culture. Led by Turkish general Quṭb-­ud-­dīn-­Aibak, the Ghurids conducted a major offensive into the heart of North India in 1192–­1194, defeating several Rajput houses and sacking both Kanauj and Varanasi. After the death of the Ghurid ruler Muhammad Ghūri in 1206, General Aibak declared himself the sultan of Delhi, thereby commencing the Mamluk dynasty, the first of the several dynasties that constituted the Delhi Sultanate, each dynasty representing a different segment of Afghan-­Turkish Inner Asian military lords and their clients.

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The “Delhi Sultanate” is typically understood to have lasted from 1206 to 1526 under the leadership of five major dynasties: the Mamluks (1210–­1290), the Khaljis (1290–­1320), the Tughlaqs (1320–­1414), the Sayyids (1414–­1451), and the Lodis (1451–­1526). In actuality, the Sultanate was only a centralized, tran­ sregional power until the late fourteenth century, when—­toward the end of Tughlaq rule—­multiple remote areas began to break away and form independent sultanates and some local Hindu Rajput dynasties in the north recovered power. Nevertheless, from 1206 to 1398, the Sultanate of Delhi was the dominant military and political power of North India. As Digby states, it “was a pan-­Indian realm, which at one time or another exercised control over an expanse of the subcontinent comparable to the realms of Ashoka and of the Mughal emperors in their heyday and only exceeded by the British colonial unification.”9 The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate marked several momentous changes in northern and central India. In this chapter, I highlight three key dimensions of this social and cultural change: (1) the decline of mainstream, royally patronized institutional forms of tantra; (2) the spread of Persian cosmopolitan authority and the growth of a new shared Indo-­Persian culture; and (3) the expansion of popular Sufism and, relatedly, the growth of a transreligious North Indian culture of (a) charismatic asceticism and (b) vernacular literary composition and performance. All of these were important factors in the emergence of North India’s bhakti movement. In the following I address each in turn.

The Decline of Mainstream Tantra As a number of scholars have demonstrated, Indians living in the Sultanate period generally did not understand their encounter with Persianized Turks in religious terms. The ruling Turks were not seen as “Muslims” but instead as “just one more ethnic group . . . ​in an already ethnically diverse region.”10 Rosalind O’Hanlon reminds us that “these were not simply alien outsiders”; rather, “the Persian culture, Islamic religion and central Asian military heritage that these warrior communities introduced in India added further diversity to societies that were already heterogeneous.”11 Nevertheless, the Turks’ military conquest—­ especially their destruction, desecration, or takeover of existing religious and political institutions—­t hough generally not religiously motivated,12 was extremely disruptive to India’s religious landscape. The new Sultanate rulers of northern and central India also brought with them a rich Persianate cultural heritage that put no stock in the Sanskritic traditions and tantric ritual culture that had for centuries served to authorize and express power in India.

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While anti-­Turkic sentiment certainly existed among Indians in the early Sultanate period, it seems not to have been based on any hostility toward the Turks’ Islamic religious beliefs or practices but rather to have resulted from their extraction of high revenues from local populations (to support the sultans’ military activities), their large-­scale destruction of existing sociopolitical networks (especially through temple destruction and desecration), and their general failure to uphold the traditional brahmanical social order.13 Carl Ernst explains that, for most Indians, the “religion” of the Turks was just another form of worship of the supreme being and did not distinguish them in any significant way; however, the Turks were demonized when they “violated the purity of sacred lakes and disrupted the traditional royal patronage of temples and brahmans.”14 Sultanate rule brought about a number of significant shifts, particularly with regard to the institutional structures that had long upheld the Indian sociopolitical order. As has become clear, mainstream tantra was closely linked to the interdependent institutions of the temple, the monastery (maṭha), the Hindu king, and the brahman, and in North India each of these religiopolitical institutions suffered dramatically at the hands of the Turks. During the Tantric Age, brahmans commanded great prestige and power, as well as considerable property and wealth, but under Sultanate rule patronage of brahmans seems to have declined and their influence was substantially diminished.15 Hindu kings and their royal temples often fared no better than the brahman establishment. In the early Sultanate period, as Michael Willis states, “the power and influence of the indigenous ruling elite that had built and endowed temples was increasingly circumscribed” and “temple building declined precipitously.”16 Andre Wink writes that “without the independent Hindu king, the intimate connection of kingship, temple building and Hindu religious worship was lost in the areas which were conquered. If the temples were not destroyed, patronage dried up, and few great temples were built in North India after the thirteenth century.”17 These developments had a major impact on institutionalized tantric communities and monastic orders. With military and political power in North India no longer predominantly in the hands of the independent Hindu dynasties that had supported them, many of these tantric orders struggled to survive. In this context, the most powerful of the medieval tantric communities, the Śaiva Siddhānta, “seems to have quickly disappeared as an identifiable school in northern India.”18 While some tantric ascetic lineages subsisted primarily on local community support and thus were able to endure, major tantric orders like the Śaiva Siddhānta were based in institutional networks of temples and maṭhas and heavily dependent on continuing royal patronage, thus these

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brahmanical, mainstream forms of tantric religiosity were “particularly vulnerable to this transformation of the North Indian political order.”19 In many cases, the monasteries of India’s ascetic orders, like temples, “formed centers of power that may have posed an impediment to the assimilation of new territories under sultanate control,” thus they frequently became targets of desecration or—­perhaps more often—­appropriation.20 As Tamara Sears has argued, at numerous locations in the expanding Sultanate domain, the maṭhas of tantric communities such as the Śaiva Siddhānta were transformed into military garrisons, with a mosque and tomb built in place of the maṭha’s accompanying temple.21 In this fashion, the Delhi sultans were able to take control of a site associated with a powerful local tantric institution, destabilize the tantric monastic community that had previously resided there, and transform the site into a marker of Sultanate political and military authority. Many of the maṭhas appropriated by Sultanate forces were on the frontiers of centralized power and Sears’s research suggests that they likely served as military garrisons for soldiers and new local authorities, places of worship, and educational centers facilitating the transmission of Islamic knowledge.22 Thus, while tantra had been a crucial part of mainstream medieval Indian religious and political life since at least the tenth century, by the beginning of the thirteenth century and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, the Turks’ military conquest and political dominance had resulted in the collapse of much of the infrastructure sustaining institutionalized (royally patronized), brahmanical forms of tantric religion in North India. Persianate Turkish political authority did not rely upon Sanskrit, brahmanical legitimation, or tantric rituals and institutions, and this simple fact would have profound implications for India’s religious landscape. In the new political context of the Sultanate, tantric religion certainly did not altogether disappear in northern and central India, but it largely shifted out of mainstream public settings, losing much of its prior institutional presence and political influence. Tantric ritual forms and techniques continued to be prevalent throughout Hindu religious life, but increasingly in nontantric (often devotional) contexts. Tantric religious goals and attitudes also persisted but found representation mostly among less-­institutionalized lineages of tantric ascetics and service providers. Indeed, even as formerly state-­sponsored institutional tantric forms withered in North India, this period saw the rise and flourishing of the tantric Nāth yogīs (the focus of chapter 5), who had roots partly in the medieval siddha tradition.23 Overall, though, in early modern North India and beyond, tantric paradigms of thought and behavior no longer had the sociopolitical context, institutional bases, or state support that had once sustained them, and consequently they were increasingly marginalized and

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subordinated to religious practices and perspectives better suited to the new social environment and its largely Persianate and Sufi-­inflected sensibilities. It was in the Sultanate’s new and culturally hybrid socioreligious atmosphere that North India’s bhakti movement would emerge.

The Spread of Persian Cosmopolitanism and the Growth of Indo-­Persian Culture If the demise of mainstream, institutional tantra and the corresponding weakening of a “tantric episteme” constitute one key dimension of the historical change occasioned by the entry of Persianized Turks into India, then the spread of Persian cosmopolitanism and the growth of a shared Indo-­Persian cultural life are related and equally crucial aspects of the social and cultural transformations ignited by Sultanate rule. Inheriting and continuing the legacy of Persian cosmopolitan literary-­political culture of the Samanids, Ghaznavids, and Ghurids before them, the Delhi Sultans based their rule primarily on Persian royal symbolism and generously patronized Persian scribes, writers, and poets. Nevertheless, the spread of Persian culture in South Asia might easily have been far more circumscribed had it not been for major historical events happening outside the Indian subcontinent. In the early thirteenth century, western Asia was the victim of devastating Mongol invasions that uprooted many Iranians and Persianized Turks from their homelands in Iran and Central Asia, driving them into the shelter and service of the newly formed Delhi Sultanate in India. The tens of thousands of refugees who migrated to North India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries “would contribute very significantly to the rooting of Persian cultural ideals in their adopted home.”24 Among these migrants were Persianate cultural elites—­members of distinguished ruling families, Sufis, and Muslim scholars (‘ulamā)—­who were patronized by the Delhi sultans with revenue grants of lands, often located in the Indian countryside where Sultanate presence was weak. In this way, explains Muzaffar Alam, a “gradual penetration of the small towns and rural centres began via this class of migrants” and “the life of north India became considerably marked, in various aspects, by the influence of Persian language and culture.”25 With the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century and the influx of elite Persianized migrants uprooted by the Mongol invasions, Persian cosmopolitan culture and its distinctive ethics, aesthetics, and political practices gradually took root in North India and, later, the Deccan, overlapping and interacting with the preexisting Sanskrit cosmopolis. The ideals of the

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Persian cosmopolis—­just like those of Sanskritic culture—­were not imposed but emulated or assimilated.26 Indian elites from North India to the Deccan plateau increasingly came to participate in the broad Persianate political culture of the ruling sultans, adopting certain Persianate cultural forms, social practices, and standards of taste, particularly in performative, public contexts. While many Indians came to embrace Persianate architecture, dress, courtly comportment, cuisine, and language, they typically maintained their traditional religious beliefs and practices and continued indigenous norms in the domestic, private sphere. As Wagoner’s research on the fourteenth-­to-­ sixteenth-­century Deccan state of Vijayanagar has demonstrated, cosmopolitan Persian culture came to inform the intertwined realms of Indian politics and aesthetics to such an extent that even independent Hindu kings could no longer rely solely on traditional Indic idioms. In order to be respected (by their subordinates and the rulers of other states) and to effectively wield power, it had become imperative to express and legitimate oneself according to Islamicate and—­more specifically—­Persianate models.27 After conquering lands through military force, the Sultanate exercised its authority and administered its territories largely through the iqtā‘ system. In this political and revenue-­collecting structure, the Delhi sultans gave a military officer or nobleman temporary rights of revenue collection over an iqtā‘, a particular province or unit of land. In order to accomplish the vital work of land clearance, agriculture, and military defense in their assigned provinces, iqtā‘ holders often recruited settlers, especially Sufis, who could sanctify their territory and attract more migrants.28 Local landholders in the province paid tributes or taxes to this Sultanate official, who might have his own smaller provincial court (modeled on the Persianate political-­aesthetic practices of the sultan’s court) and who would send part of the land revenue to Delhi while using the rest to train, equip, and pay soldiers responsible for garrisoning forts in the Indian countryside.29 As the Persianized Turks and Afghans of the Sultanate subjugated local Indian populations, a slow process of cultural and linguistic assimilation began, exemplified in the Sultanate elites’ “adaptation of local literary and artistic forms to express new poetic and religious agendas within a complex multilingualism of religious and symbolic vocabularies.”30 By the end of the thirteenth century, a significant part of the Sultanate aristocracy was Indian born and raised. Most would have been native speakers of Hindavi, the general vernacular spoken language of North India. The Tughlaq dynasty (1320–­1414) is known to have cultivated Hindavi verse, patronizing its musical and recitative performance, and the very first work of Hindavi literature—­a Sufi romance (premākhyān)—­the Cāndāyan, was composed in 1379 at a Tughlaq provincial court in Avadh. The Tughlaqs were also the first to make

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tentative attempts to bring Hindus into the Sultanate’s central ruling apparatus. While we can find the beginnings of significant cultural exchange and hybridity—­a simultaneous Indianization of Persianate traditions and a Persianization of aspects of Indian culture—­beginning in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries,31 it is especially after Timur’s invasion of India in 1398, and the fracturing of the centralized Delhi Sultanate, that a shared vernacular culture comes into full bloom, thereby creating the context out of which North India’s great bhakti saints would emerge.

The “Influence of Islam” While the expansion of Persianate courtly and literary culture represents a key dimension of the broader cultural change occurring in Sultanate India, related to this expansion, and just as—­if not more—­important than it, was the spread of Sufism. Even as we seek to avoid an anachronistic and inaccurate reading of the Sultanate period in the narrow terms of (“Hindu” vs. “Muslim”) religious identity, we still must acknowledge the importance of Islam, and particularly Sufism, in the societal changes that took place in late medieval India. The Persianized Turks who took control of northern and central India in the Sultanate period were Muslims, and the religion of Islam was a significant factor in their worldview and self-­understanding. To talk about Islam “entering” India and “influencing” the culture problematically posits Islam as a homogeneous, bounded, monolithic entity apart from other aspects of culture and social life and possessing an agency of its own when, in fact, it is none of these things. Nevertheless, it is true that with Sultanate rule and the influx of Persianized Turks into India, an array of theological doctrines, philosophical conceptions, historical narratives, ethical values, and embodied ritual practices that were part of the diverse and internally contested tradition of Islam—­as it had been localized in late medieval Persianate culture—­made their way into India. The cultural effects of this Islamic presence in India were quite significant, for Muslims and non-­Muslims alike. In seeking to understand these effects, I follow Tony K. Stewart and Richard McGregor by approaching the history of Islam as “a history of local innovations by Muslims in response to their surroundings,” a history of “how Muslims made Islam their own” in particular local contexts.32 In what follows, then, when I refer to Islam in Sultanate and Mughal India I am not discussing an entity so much as a process, a continuous activity in which Muslims creatively shaped their Islamic beliefs, practices, and self-­understandings in

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symbiosis with people of different ethnic and religious communities in the specific South Asian local environments in which they lived.33 In 1258, the Mongols destroyed the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, which had for centuries been the global center of Islamic power, thus many immigrants to India came to see it as the new center of the Islamic world, and elites often “equated ‘Muslim’ sovereignty in India with Islam itself.”34 For many elite Muslims, India was now “the sole remaining bastion of Islamic civilization,” and the Turkish sultan of Delhi was the savior of Islam and “the last defender of the faith against the pagan Mongol threat.”35 In this context, a number of India’s new Muslim elites—­particularly the poets and historians who formulated the Delhi Sultanate’s imperialist ideology—­highlighted their own Islamic identity in opposition to the “pagan” population within their new domain.36 As is well known, prior to this historical moment, the Persian term “Hindu” had served only as an ethnic designation, simply denoting those peoples living on the other side of the Indus River. In the writings of the Sultanate’s Muslim elites, however, non-­Muslim Indians “were for the first time seen in distinct and generically religious terms—­ unfavorable ones”; they were conceived of as idolaters or unbelievers, like the Mongols, “and their general designation as Hindu came to have a newly collective religious force.”37 While Turkish ethnicity and Islamic religious identity had great symbolic prominence for the Delhi Sultanate, “pragmatism was dominant over ideology,” and, despite the anti-­Hindu rhetoric found in the writings of Sultanate imperial poets and historians, in practice the regime patronized non-­Muslim religious institutions (or allowed Indian kings who were their tributaries to do so) and seems to have rarely interfered in the lives of (and much less to have persecuted) its non-­Muslim subjects.38 Nevertheless, the exclusiveness of India’s new Muslim elite seems to have gradually called forth the sense of an exclusive religious identity among Hindu elites as well. The work of scholars such as David Lorenzen and Andrew Nicholson suggests that, over the course of the Sultanate period, the perceived threat of Islam gradually led Sanskrit-­educated brahman elites (of different philosophical and sectarian backgrounds) to view themselves for the first time as a unified “Hindu” religious tradition.39 North India’s bhakti poets and sectarian traditions would respond in diverse ways to the gradual emergence of distinct “Hindu” and “Muslim” religious communities, with some disparaging both Muslim and Hindu orthodoxies, others freely mixing Hindu and Muslim elements in their religious lives, and others projecting a Hindu identity willfully ignorant of the existence of Islam in India. Nevertheless, in general terms, all these bhakti poets and communities were significantly and unavoidably influenced by the presence of Islam in Indian

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culture. When thinking broadly about “the presence of Islam” in South Asia, however, the crucial fact is that it was not so much insulated Muslim elites like imperial poets, historians, and members of the ‘ulamā as it was Sufi orders that rooted aspects of the Islamic worldview (particular understandings of the nature of and relationship between human beings, the Divine, and the world) in Indian soil. The form and style of “Islam” that flooded into India from Central Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was one largely defined by Sufism, and more specifically by a new brand of Sufism centered on popular devotion to the Sufi saint.

Sufism in Sultanate India As noted, the Mongol invasions of Iran and Central Asia in the thirteenth century led to the immigration of thousands of Persianized cultural elites into India and also made India—­a nd Delhi—­the new center of the eastern Islamic world. In addition to these major impacts, the Mongol invasions also led indirectly to the rise of a new mass-­based Sufism throughout Asia, centered on devotion to charismatic Sufi saints. Prior to this, Sufism seems to have been primarily a personal form of piety not deeply integrated into either political culture or popular religious life, but during the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the sociopolitical devastation caused by the Mongols, Sufi brotherhoods in Iran and Central Asia “began breaking out of their monastic shells and reaching out to the masses.” As Azfar Moin explains, in the post-­Mongol centuries, “Sufi orders absorbed local saint cults, Sufi shrines became important centers of pilgrimages and social life, and Sufi leadership became hereditary. The result was a tremendous increase in the material, cultural, and martial resources commanded by Sufi leaders, their kin, and their devotees.” 40 In post-­Mongol Asia, Sufi orders and shrines were not simply key features of a changed religious landscape but also constitutive elements of a new sociopolitical order. Sufi sainthood came to inform the institution of kingship in fundamental ways, with the authority of kings and Sufis thoroughly intertwined and interdependent. In Sultanate India, a ruler’s sovereign power depended upon the blessing and spiritual authority of a Sufi shaikh, who was usually understood to have divine jurisdiction (wilāyat) over a specific territory. As Richard Eaton puts it, “in the Perso-­Islamic literary and cultural world of the day, spiritually powerful Sufi shaikhs, not sultans, were understood as the truly valid sovereigns over the world. It was they who leased out political sovereignty to kings, charging them with the worldly business of administration, warfare,

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taxation, and so forth.” 41 In a relationship that had clear and important structural parallels with that between tantric ācāryas (and their monastic orders) and early medieval Indian kings, Sufi saints legitimized and spiritually anointed Sultanate rulers, who in turn patronized the Sufi institutions at the heart of popular Islamic religiosity. Sufi communities and their hospices depended on the financial support of rulers in the form of tax-­f ree land grants (madad-­i ma‘āsh) and regular alms (futūḥāt). While the rhetoric of orders such as the Chishtis stressed their noninvolvement in political matters and their avoidance of the rich and powerful, in fact the historical records of these land grants and gifts show important and regular interaction between rulers and Sufi orders. In general, Sufi shaikhs were considered “ideal Muslims” who—­as evidenced by their behavior and personal qualities—­had fully submitted to God’s will and received God’s grace, maintaining an intimate relationship with God that made them authoritative conduits for the flow of divine power. They were typically renowned for strict orthodoxy and mastery of Islamic doctrinal or Sufi texts; the practice of austerities; the working of miracles (without vulgar display of them); displays of divine ecstasy; caring for and accommodating the needs of disciples, visitors, and other dependents; and, importantly, a refined musical and poetic sensibility.42 These Sufi saints, even after their deaths, were understood to possess a spiritual power (baraka) that enabled them to act as intermediaries between God and devotee, interceding with God on behalf of the devotee. The lodges, hospices (khānqāhs) and tombs (dargāhs) of Sufi saints thus became important shrines and pilgrimage centers where Indians of all religious backgrounds went for divine aid in their personal affairs. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, seemingly in conjunction with the disruption and decline of North India’s tantric institutions and temple-­based religion, new networks of these Sufi holy places began to expand across the Indian landscape.43 As Sultanate power spread outward from Delhi, Sufis played a key role in extending settlement and cultivation, with provincial communities often centered on the establishment of Sufi hospices and tomb shrines.44 In the fourteenth century, the Chishti order,45 in particular, became dominant throughout the Indian subcontinent, in no small part because of the profound influence of the great Chishti shaikh Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā’ (1242–­1325). The foremost Sufi saint of his generation, Nizām al-­Dīn was preeminent in Delhi at a time when the capital city was at its peak and the Delhi Sultanate’s literary, cultural, and institutional traditions had spread throughout much of the subcontinent. Since his spiritual jurisdiction (wilāyat) extended over the Delhi area, Nizām al-­Dīn and his Sufi piety were linked not only to the well-­being and good fortunes of the capital city but also to the entire, expanding Sultanate realm over which it held sway.46 His numerous disciples spread the Chishti order—­a nd popular Sufi

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religiosity more generally—­all over India. In this regard, it is worth noting that the centerpiece of Chishti religious practice was samā‘, the evocation of the Divine via singing or listening to music in the company of others, a practice that had important resonances in popular traditions of bhakti religiosity. Through most of the fourteenth century, the Chishti order had an especially important impact on the development of Sufism and, more broadly, “Indo-­ Muslim” culture in South Asia, but other Sufi lineages (silsilahs)—­including the Suhrawardi (the Chishti’s primary competitors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), the Naqshbandi, the Mahdavi, the Shattari, and the Qadiri—­would also establish networks of influence throughout the subcontinent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.47 While all these Sufi orders consisted of initiated disciples dedicated to devotion, remembrance of God, asceticism, scriptural study, and meditation, their Sufi shrines and hospices were also centers of popular religiosity. People came to receive teachings, to experience and access the spiritual power of the Sufi saint, to obtain amulets (which protected from evil, brought good fortune, cured disease, etc.), to eat at the khānqāh’s public welfare kitchen (langar-­khānā), to listen to ecstatic Sufi singing (qawwālī), and to partake in dhikr, the remembrance of God (typically through the recitation of the names of God), or samā’ sessions of Sufi music and poetry. Association with a particular Sufi dargāh or khānqāh did not demand exclusive allegiance or even personal commitment to the Sufi way of life; rather, for much of the populace, the Sufi order served “more as an organization for collective religious experience and moral guidance in everyday life, and as a point of contact with a person of manifest holiness, the leading shaikh of the order.” 48 The practices and symbols of this mass-­based Sufism, based on the cult of the Sufi saint, would be far more important in molding Indian worldviews than the texts and traditions of doctrinal Islam. As Moin remarks, with the rise of saint-­focused popular Sufism, “Islam came to be experienced by most people in early modern Iran and India—­Muslims and non-­Muslims alike—­ through the mediation of holy men and their bodies.” 49 In a similar vein, Eaton has shown that for most Indians—­i lliterate or non-­A rabic speakers—­t he Quran was not a particularly compelling source of sacred authority; rather, it was Sufis—­their words and actions—­that served as the representatives, the embodiments of Islam.50 Sufi shrines and the rituals conducted at them “made Islam accessible to non-­lettered masses, providing them with vivid and concrete manifestations of the divine order, and integrating them into its ritualized drama both as participants and as sponsors.”51 Centered around the charisma of Sufi saints, the shrines and hospices associated with South Asia’s different Sufi orders spread across the subcontinent and together functioned

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to incorporate local cultural systems into a larger Indo-­Persian, Islamicate culture that would have a clear impact on developing bhakti sensibilities.

Sufism and Tantra, Sufism and Bhakti Framing the cultural changes of the Sultanate period in terms of a dynamic encounter between the Sanskrit cosmopolis and Persian cosmopolis is an extremely useful approach; however, it tends to shed far more light on elite spheres of power and politics and the interaction of sophisticated literary and court cultures than it does on the popular sphere. While Sufis were crucial in the dissemination of high Persianate literature and cosmopolitan cultural forms, Sufism also operated at the level of local, vernacular religious life. Sufis offered Indians “ritualistic, tactile, and performative” ways to engage the sacred, a sacred “grounded in geographies and embodied in personalities that were local, concrete, and highly visible.”52 In this respect, an important aspect of the spread of Sufism through the subcontinent during the Sultanate period was the way in which it interfaced with the embodied, local, pragmatic dimensions of popular tantric religiosity. Tantric religiosity and its ritual idioms permeated mainstream Indian society prior to the Sultanate period. Though specialist tantric ritual knowledge was esoteric—­guarded by a system of layered initiations—­participation in tantric religious life was a popular phenomenon in early medieval India, a period that saw pervasive faith in the power of tantric mantras and rituals to accomplish one’s desires, widespread access to and demand for initiated tantric specialists, and a public life organized in significant part around the institutions of a distinctly tantric religiopolitical culture. People of all backgrounds sought out initiated tāntrikas as embodied sources of sacred power whose performative rituals offered not only potential transcendence but also the achievement of their pragmatic, worldly, personal goals. In some respects, Sufis may have been so successful in South Asia because of their ability to mirror, compete with, and replace the forms and sociological functions of this embodied tantric religiosity. The traditions of Sufism and tantra had much in common. On the one hand, both Sufism and tantra were esoteric cultures based on initiation, a master-­ disciple relationship, and intensive individual ascetic and meditative discipline, but on the other hand, both were popular forms of religiosity in which people sought out the embodied sacred presence and power of the tāntrika or

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Sufi for mundane concerns such as protection, healing, and good fortune. Sufi shaikhs and tantric gurus both legitimated sovereign rulers, infusing the political order with their spiritual authority. Furthermore, the manner in which medieval tantric maṭhas operated seems to have had clear parallels with the operation of Sufi khānqāhs. These were places, respectively, where tantric gurus and Sufi masters could receive devotion but also places of communal worship activities. In fact, the work of Tamara Sears has suggested that many tantric maṭhas were taken over and utilized by Muslims—­likely Sufis—­as military and cultural outposts on the expanding frontiers of Sultanate political authority.53 While more research is needed to confirm the details, it seems likely that, as many tantric communities’ sources of political and financial support evaporated under Sultanate rule, Sufis were in certain respects able to occupy (sometimes quite literally, as Sears’s work indicates)—­or at least compete for—­the place that tāntrikas had long held in Indian society. This process was facilitated by the continuity between the Sultanate and early medieval (Tantric Age) religiopolitical economies. After the Mongol invasions a new spiritual-­political order arose in Central Asia in which Sufis became crucial elements of state power, with the authority of Persianate rulers often dependent upon the support of charismatic Sufi saints. This Persianate spiritual-­ political economy had substantial parallels with the system of exchanges in economic, political, moral, and spiritual capital that existed among early medieval India’s rulers, lay devotees, and professional (often tantric) ascetics. While I have stressed the social, political, and religious change brought to India by Persianate Turks and the key differences between the Tantric Age and the Sultanate era, here we see an important instance of continuity: monasticism as an institution remains a central pillar of India’s social life, religion, and political order. In Sultanate and Mughal India, monasticism does not die out; rather, old ascetic lineages (e.g., Śaiva Siddhānta ones) wither as new lineages (e.g., Sufi, Vedāntic, and Vaiṣṇava bhakti ones) emerge to fill very similar structural roles and functions in relation to popular devotional life and the legitimation of rule. Even as the institutional, mainstream religiopolitical tradition of tantra was largely destroyed in North India, less-­institutionalized communities of tantric ascetics, in particular those commonly known as the Nāth yogīs, actually came to flourish in the new religious culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I will defer a proper introduction to the Nāth yogīs until chapter 5, but here it is important to note the remarkable number of ways in which the Sufis resembled these tantric ascetics. Sufis and tantric yogīs had overlapping interests in asceticism and psychophysical yogic techniques, and both presupposed a subtle physiology that served as the focal point in meditations involving syllabic formulas, visualization, and breath control. Both Sufis and Nāth

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yogīs practiced burial (rather than cremation), and both possessed very liberal attitudes toward caste and brahmanical purity restrictions. As Carl Ernst observes, “The similarity between yogis and Sufis extended to the point that the heads of Nath yogi establishments became known by the Persian term pir, the common designation for a Sufi master.”54 Relatedly, Charlotte Vaudeville states that, over time in Sultanate India, “the tantric yoga current and the Sufi current, which were at first parallel, tended to converge in the minds of the masses,” a confusion that may have been “carefully cultivated by the Sufis themselves” to gain popular support.55 Perhaps most interesting, sociologically the religiosity of Sufis and Nāth yogīs functioned in very similar ways, with “elite” and “popular” forms feeding off each other’s mystique.56 Tantric yogīs and Sufi saints represented an esoteric tradition—­ requiring initiation and intense meditative and ascetic discipline—­that could result in the acquisition of extraordinary powers. At the same time, the prestige and social capital that possession of such powers brought to individual Sufi saints and tantric yogīs made them staples of popular religiosity, sought and worshipped as wonder-­workers, protectors, and healers. Altogether, Sufism’s similarities with tantra—­a nd especially tantric yogīs—­ may have allowed Sufis to successfully compete for and take over some of the roles left vacant in the world of popular religiosity by the disintegration of institutionalized tantra in the wake of the Persianate Turkish invasion. Undoubtedly, these similarities also allowed for a vibrant exchange between Sufis and Nāth yogīs in the Sultanate and Mughal periods. As Behl has remarked, the Sufis’ “closest contacts, competitors, and collaborators were the yogis.”57 A number of scholars have discussed the ways in which Indian Sufis in the Sultanate and Mughal periods adopted and adapted the yogic concepts and practices of the Nāth yogīs. Behl explains that the Shattari order, for instance, “took from the Nāths general concepts and forms of yogic practice such as the cakras, inverted meditation (ulṭī sādhanā, taken over by the Sufis as namāz-­i ma‘kūs), and the cleansing of the body through prāṇāyāma or breath control (Persian, ḥabs-­i dam), [but] they often emptied out the specific instructions within these frameworks and replaced them with Sufi concepts and terminology.”58 Sufis saw practical, functional value in Nāth yogic practices but typically placed them within fully Islamic doctrinal frameworks and thus gave them entirely new meaning. Simon Digby has shown how the Chishti Sufi shaikh ‘Abd al-­Quddūs Gangohī (1456–­ 1537), in his Rushd-­nāma (ca. 1480), incorporated the ideas and practices of the Nāth yogīs in his teachings for Sufi disciples, allegorizing and refining unorthodox tantric yogic concepts and techniques in order to bring them “within the confines of a learned (though profoundly Indianised) Muslim orthodoxy.”59 Shaman Hatley’s study of Bengali Sufi appropriations of tantric yogic practices

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similarly demonstrates “a consistent concern for framing Tantric yoga within the Sufi praxis regimen and Islamic view of the sacred,” with “Islamic spiritual beings and dhikr formulas almost entirely displac[ing] Tantric deities and mantras.” 60 Similarly, Carl Ernst discusses the Baḥr al-­ḥayāt (The ocean of life) of the Indian Sufi shaikh Muhammad Ghawth Gwāliyārī (d. 1563), in which famed yogīs such as Gorakh, Matsyendra, and Chaurangi are identified with prophets of Islam.61 While Ghawth (Ghaus) questions or criticizes Nāth doctrinal understandings, he approves of their yogic practices, seeing them as effective spiritual techniques that “can be successfully integrated into the overall worldview of Sufism.” 62 Sufi interactions with (and borrowings from) tantric yogīs in late medieval and early modern India helped to forge what Dean Accardi has called a “shared but not syncretic grammar of asceticism,” a culture in which there was a general acceptance of—­and a mutual respect for—­the techniques of, and extraordinary powers acquired through, asceticism, as well as a shared belief in the existence and possible control of spirit beings.63 This common Sultanate-­Mughal culture of asceticism and occult power did not erase religious differences or bring theologies into question but allowed for shared ascetic technologies (differently framed and interpreted) and the reverence and emulation of ascetic saints across religious boundaries. Moreover, it was not only Sufis and tantric yogīs who took part in this shared grammar of asceticism and used its “shared idioms of vernacular sainthood” 64 but also bhaktas like the Vaiṣṇava ascetics of the Rāmānandī sect, the focus of subsequent chapters. Overall, the Sufi “Islamization” of yoga was, of course, about Sufis taking an indigenous Indian technology and “making it their own,” but it is important to stress that this process was not a superficial one meant simply to make a set of heterodox practices acceptable. Rather, the ways in which tantric yogīs approached the Divine—­their motivations, attitudes, and religious idioms—­were foreign to the religious disposition of most Sufis and needed to be reframed in a fashion that made intuitive sense and accorded with the sensibilities of Persianate Sufi Islam. All this is to say that while Sufis and tantric yogīs had important similarities and engaged in productive exchange with one another, there were also real differences between them; differences that I believe were, in many ways, more significant than their similarities. The primary religious goals of the Nāth yogīs were achieving bodily immortality and “becoming God”—­i.e., ontologically divine. For Sufis, both these goals were generally considered heretical, being fundamentally at odds with Islamic understandings of the respective natures of (and the proper relationship between) God and human beings. While Sufis and tantric yogīs shared yogic-­ ascetic techniques, were thought to possess certain similar extraordinary powers, and functioned in some sociologically analogous ways, there was a

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critical divide in their conceptions of and approaches to the Divine. The primary idiom of Sufi religiosity, the primary Sufi conception of God, and the primary Sufi motive in religious life can all be boiled down to a single word: love.65 Humility before God and a passionate love and longing for God—­whose own nature was that of pure love—­characterized Sufi religious approaches at their most fundamental level, while tantric yogīs expressed an attitude of self-­ assertion and a yearning for empowerment, conceiving the Divine primarily as sacred amoral power to be realized. In the eyes of many Sufis (and bhakti poets as well), it would seem that, as William Pinch puts it, tantric yogīs “were not remarkable for their intense love for God, and did not seek to bask in the glow of God’s special love for them. Rather, they aspired to become gods on earth.” 66 In contrast to the often haughty (and sometimes vulgar) Nāth yogīs, Sufis did not conceive the sacred to be amoral at all; rather, they trusted in a God whose nature and activity defined moral righteousness and ethical virtue. This understanding seems to have translated into a major Sufi interest in the ethical life that was not a serious concern of tantric yogīs. While Sufi hagiographical works stress the Sufi saint as a humble exemplar of morality, the same cannot be said of the hagiography of Nāth yogīs.67 What is most striking in this is the way in which the differences between tantric yogīs and Sufis mirror those between tantric yogīs and the bhaktas of early modern North India. Put differently, it is remarkable how similar Sufi and bhakti communities (as well as Sufi and bhakti saints) appear to be in the ways their religious perspectives and approaches differed from those of tantric yogīs like the Nāths. Early modern Sufis and bhaktas seem to have shared a basic approach of humble, loving devotion as well as an analogous emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility. In these key respects both seem to have differed substantially from the Nāth yogīs. As Tony Stewart points out in his research on the popular Bengali saint Satya Pīr, who has both Hindu (Vaiṣṇava bhakta) and Muslim followers, “The proper conduct common to both the Vaiṣṇava and Islamic God . . . ​ hinges on humility and benevolence.” 68 In the tales of Satya Pīr, “Śaivas, Śāktas, Nāthas, and members of other Hindu sects are often vilified in opposition to Vaiṣṇavas and Muslims.” 69 Stewart thus observes a “Vaiṣṇava alliance with Muslims” and discusses how, in early modern Bengal, tantric yogīs and Śākta traditions of blood sacrifice appear as anathema to both Vaiṣṇava bhaktas and Sufis.70 I elaborate on these observations later in this book. A central argument of the present volume is that, in early modern North India, a transregional bhakti social formation arose, and with it a new and Sufi-­ influenced bhakti sensibility that by and large defined itself especially against the pedagogical “other” of the tantric yogī. As will become clear, bhakti authors of many different persuasions, from many different regions—­Punjab, Bengal,

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Malwa, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and the Gangetic Plain—­were united by a common critique of the religiosity of tantric yogīs (or at least caricatured tantric yogīs), particularly the Nāth yogīs, who were in many respects the primary public representatives of tantric religiosity during the Sultanate and Mughal periods. Much of what follows is dedicated to demonstrating this Sufi-­inflected bhakti understanding of tantric(-­yogic) religiosity and exploring the ways in which early modern Sufis and bhaktas tended to share a basic approach of humble, loving devotion as well as an analogous emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility. The preceding observations bring us face-­to-­face with a major historiographical issue at play in this chapter and throughout the entire book: the role of Islam in the bhakti movement. Considering the nationalistic character of India’s bhakti movement narrative, as John S. Hawley has noted, “the question of Muslims’ participation in the great sweep of the bhakti movement is key.” While “certain ideologues, both Hindu and Muslim, have wanted to deny [a] common bhakti religiosity in favor of a Hindu-­Muslim split they hold to be intractable, perennial,” others—­a s a seeming counterpoint to such communalist perspectives—­have presented bhakti as a “people’s movement” that fused with Sufism.71 My perspective is no doubt clear by now: in North India, at least, Sufism and Persianate culture played enormous roles in the emergence and overall development of the bhakti tradition. I am hardly the first either to comment upon the similarities between Sufism and Hindu bhakti or to make a case for some form of Sufi influence on North India’s bhakti movement.72 Diana Eck, for example, notes “a certain commonality of spirit linking Sufi to Hindu bhakti piety” in which both “stressed the inner life of devotion and love, not the outer world of ritual and practice.”73 Shahabuddin Iraqi remarks that “the various trends of spiritual thought that developed under the Bhakti and the Sufi movements drew much from each other, consciously and unconsciously” and goes on to say that “the nature and scope of the [bhakti] movement was almost the same as that of Sufism.”74 Along the same lines, Satish Chandra states, “The Muslim emphasis on monotheism, on the role of the pir, and on mystic union with the ‘beloved’ coincided with many aspects of the Hindu thinking and, by a process of symbiosis, quickened the heterodox movement in that direction. The remarkable similarity in the thinking of the sufis and the popular monotheistic [bhakti] saints, including their opposition to the orthodox elements belonging to the two faiths, was both a cause and an effect.”75 Aziz Ahmad asserts that in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, “the Bhakti movements rose as a popular Hindu counter-­challenge to the proselytizing pull of Sūfī humanism,” and adds that, in early modern North India, bhakti “came in contact with Islam, was inspired by its monotheism and stimulated by its challenge, and developed

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against it a system of self-­defence and self-­preservation for Hindu spirituality by borrowing Islam’s monotheistic egalitarianism.”76 While numerous scholars have made vague remarks such as these (often unsupported by any detailed evidence), in this book I hope to provide a more specific and nuanced account of the role of Sufism in North India’s bhakti movement and the relationships between Sufi and bhakti religious sensibilities. It was only in the later Sultanate period, after the invasion of Timur, that the conditions for the emergence of North India’s great bhakti poet-­saints truly came into existence. We need to understand the literary-­performative environment that arose during this period and, in particular, the role that Sufis played in forging a certain emotional-­aesthetic culture that resonated powerfully with, and was influential in, the development of bhakti in North India.

Language, Literature, and Religion in the Later Sultanate (ca. 1398–­1526) Sufism and Persianate literary-­political culture spread gradually through the Indian subcontinent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; however, it was not until the fifteenth century, in the new social and political environment following the invasion of Timur in 1398, that North India’s famous bhakti poet-­saints burst onto the scene. By the mid-­fourteenth century, the Tughlaq conquests had reached their limits and the Delhi Sultanate was forced to face the challenges of scale, with the sultans often at major pains to prevent the rise of local bases of power. In the latter half of the fourteenth century, Delhi’s authority began to decline, with regional governors becoming wealthier and more autonomous. Already tottering, the Tughlaq dynasty received a crushing blow with Timur’s invasion in 1398, which ensured the fragmentation of the centralized Delhi Sultanate into various regional sultanates.77 Timur (ca. 1330–­1405) was a Central Asian Turk who claimed descent from the Mongols and who became the most powerful ruler in the Islamic world of his time and was seen by many as a messianic figure who would inaugurate a new era. Timur was a lavish patron of the Persian arts who supported classical traditions of Islam but practiced norms of comportment based in the traditions of ancient Iran and the Mongol heritage of Chinggis Khan, while also relying in important ways upon occult sciences and the cosmopolitan intellectual tradition of astrology.78 The thirteenth-­century Mongol invasions had destroyed the structure of the Islamic caliphate as well the ideological authority of the caliph

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as anointed deputy of God, thereby opening up radical new possibilities of sovereignty for Muslim rulers.79 In the new post-­Mongol Persianate religiopolitical environment (ca. 1300–­1700), sanctified power gave proof of sovereign authority, and the practitioners and symbols of occultism (e.g., lettrism, astrology, geomancy)80 offered important avenues for accessing and displaying that power, a fact that explains the Persianate ruling class’s interest in certain Indian tantric practices.81 Timur, in his use of occult symbols and power, as well as his stress on Persian aesthetic refinement and his mixing of Islamic, Chinggisid, and ancient Iranian norms and customs, offered a lasting ideal of sovereign power in post-­Mongol Islamic Asia. The following chapter examines how this “Timurid” style of kingship served as a foundational model for the rulers of India’s Mughal Empire. Here what is crucial to note is Timur’s sacking of Delhi in 1398, which significantly altered India’s political and cultural landscape. With the capital city’s authority destroyed, regional governors took the opportunity to strike out on their own, and “the turbulent process of the ‘state-­formation’ of the ‘provincial sultanates’ ensued.”82 In the fifteenth century, Delhi became just one of many regional power centers as a series of independent sultanates arose in Bengal in the east, Jaunpur in the mid-­Gangetic region (between Delhi and Bengal), Gujarat in the west, Malwa in central India, and the Deccan, along with the emergence of several Rajput kingdoms in Rajasthan.83 In all these regional kingdoms, new artistic ventures, literary styles, and cross-­religious collaborations flourished. Regional rulers patronized new forms of poetry and arts at their courts as part of the project of establishing political legitimacy. At the same time, the overall decentralization of power across North India meant the increased prominence of rural gentry, local warlords, and merchants who provided local resources to regional rulers and who (like those rulers) also sought to assert their status and authority by patronizing poets, scholars, and performers.84 In this environment, there was widespread demand for literary specialists (many of whom were Sufis), who utilized prestigious Persian and Sanskrit conventions while adapting their works—­in style, narrative content, and theme—­to the distinctive concerns of their patrons to produce sophisticated new vernacular literary works.85 While the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have been characterized as “the twilight of the Delhi Sultanate,” in fact, as Francesca Orsini notes, this was “a period of considerable regional political, cultural and religious dynamism” and “the beginning of the widespread vernacular literary production in north India.”86 Moreover, the emergence of North India’s bhakti movement was tied to the development in the latter (post-­Timur) Sultanate of this new vernacular literary and performative culture, in which Sufis played a major role.

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Orsini explains that in the fifteenth century circulation and trade across North India was “easy and intense” and that “while north India was not a homogenous region in political terms, it seems to have been a fairly well-­connected cultural and linguistic region.”87 North India’s “high”88 languages at this time were Arabic, Sanskrit, and particularly Persian, which spread through sultanate administration, madrassa education, and Sufi religious culture, eventually being taken up even among Hindu elites and artisanal classes.89 Operating alongside these languages was the generally intelligible common tongue of Hindavi. A composite indigenous North Indian language, Hindavi, or bhākhā (bhāṣā), was a generic spoken vernacular—­a “proto-­Avadhi-­Braj Bhasha”90 —­that could be written in multiple scripts (Persian, Kaithī, Devanāgarī, etc.). Locally produced compositions in Hindavi—­primarily stories (kathās), songs, and poetic couplets (dohās)—­“could travel and be understood over the whole of north India” and were performed in regional and subregional courts, Sufi khānqāhs, and in the “open, ‘Bhakti public sphere’ of towns and villages.”91 Thus, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, North Indian society was a multilingual and multicultural one in which the growth of vernacular Hindavi literary forms was happening in conjunction with the spread of Persian language and literature.92 It was in this diverse and interactive socioreligious context, with its emerging vernacular literary-­performative culture, that the age of the great bhakti saints of North India began with figures such as Nāmdev,93 the tailor from Maharashtra, a devotee of Kṛṣṇa’s as Viṭṭhal and master of devotional song and performance; Kabīr, the iconoclastic weaver from Benares whose fierce rhetoric criticized Muslims and Hindus alike for not truly loving God but getting lost in egoistic concerns, ritual obligations, and doctrinal details; Raidās, the “untouchable” leatherworker, also from Benares, who was a model of humility in his devotion to a nirguṇ God that cherished the troubled and lowly as much as anyone; Narasī Mehtā, the poor but ever-­generous brahman Vaiṣṇava devotee from Gujarat; Pīpā, the Rajasthani king who abdicated his throne to serve God and the community of bhaktas; Nānak, the great Punjabi nirguṇ bhakta who founded the Sikh community; Sūrdās, the artful (and supposedly blind) poet and Kṛṣṇa devotee of Braj; and Mīrābāī, the Rajasthani princess and passionate devotee of Kṛṣṇa. The exact dates for most of these important bhakti figures are disputed, but the key point is that these poet-­saints—­who all composed in the vernacular—­ all seem to have flourished in the culturally dynamic period stretching from the fifteenth through the mid-­sixteenth century (i.e., post-­Timur and pre-­ Jahāngīr). Furthermore, this list of saints demonstrates the social and geographic reach of the emerging bhakti movement in that they came from all social backgrounds (from brahman to “untouchable”) and from places across the

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breadth of North India (from Gujarat, Panjab, and Rajasthan to Braj and Benares). During Akbar’s reign and throughout the seventeenth century, important bhakti poets and community leaders would continue to emerge and flourish, including figures such as Tulsīdās, the brahman devotee of Rām and author of the famous vernacular Hindavi rendition of the Rām story, the Rāmcaritmānas; Dādū, the nirguṇ devotee who started a bhakti community in Rajasthan known for its prolific literary production; and Agradās, the founder of the Rām-­rasik bhakti sect and a major focus of this book. As John S. Hawley has stated, these bhakti figures (particularly Kabīr, Ravidās, Nānak, Sūrdās, Mīrābāī, and Tulsīdās) “have contributed more to the religious vocabulary of Hinduism in north India today than any voices before or since. In its style of worship, in its institutions, even in its political ramifications, modern Hinduism sings their tune.”94 A key aim of this chapter is to understand the historical context in which these influential bhaktas lived and composed their works, and particularly to explore how they and the bhakti communities that drew inspiration from them (a) participated in a larger Indo-­Persianate literary and performative culture and (b) forged a certain emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility that had great resonance with Sufism and, simultaneously, significant dissonance with certain key aspects of tantric religiosity. While these renowned bhaktas are most often known as poet-­saints, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries their vernacular poetry was generally not read but sung. While written literature would become more important to the life of North Indian bhakti communities beginning in about 1600, prior to this bhakti seems to have been essentially an oral and performative tradition of song and music experienced in social gatherings. As Christian Novetzke has remarked, most people did not want to read a bhakti poem, “they wanted to see it, hear it, experience it displayed before them.”95 At this time, the performance of devotional song “was the nexus of the public culture of bhakti, and of public entertainment in general.”96 Indeed, as scholars such as Francesca Orsini have shown, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries bhakti stories and songs were performed by groups of singers, wandering ascetics, resident swamis, and Sufi shaikhs and could be heard in urban centers, at fairs, at Sufi samā‘ gatherings, and in private worship.97 These songs and stories held aesthetic and emotional resonance, as well as entertainment value, for people across traditions and communities, even if theological and technical meanings often had to be skillfully adjusted based on the specific audience.98 North India’s early modern bhakti movement, as a literary and institutional phenomenon, was closely linked to the rise of Hindavi (and by the end of the sixteenth century, specifically Brajbhasha) as a vernacular language of artistic sophistication, culture, and status, a development in which Sufis played a major

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part. Behl has shown that in late Sultanate India and throughout the Mughal period, Hindavi compositions were popular “among groups of cultivated listeners in courts, Sufi hospices (khānqāhs), and other spaces where poetry was sung or recited.”99 Indeed, in North India it was actually Sufis who inaugurated the literary use of vernacular languages. By the fifteenth century, most Indian Sufis would undoubtedly have spoken an Indian dialect as their mother tongue, thus it should come as no surprise that Sufis in North India appreciated and composed poetry in their own vernacular of Hindavi.100 Orsini explains that, for North Indian Sufis, “Arabic was the scriptural language, Persian was the textual language of exposition and poetry, and Hindavi was comfortably the local language of Islam and a parallel poetic language to that of Persian. . . . ​Whereas the textual world of North Indian Sufism appears to have been overwhelmingly Persian, its oral and oral-­literary world must have been more substantially Hindavi.”101 While India’s traditional Sanskrit-­based literary culture did not encourage the use of vernaculars for literary purposes, Sufis were not enculturated into (and thus not bound by) the codes of Sanskritic tradition and were therefore well situated to lead the way in transforming the spoken idiom of Hindavi into a courtly language and a literary tradition. In this regard, it is particularly important to discuss the new and uniquely Indian genre of the premākhyān, or Sufi romance. The Indian Sufi romances were composed in Hindavi, generally followed the conventions of the Persian masnavī (a long romantic, martial, or didactic poem written in rhyming couplets), incorporated the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, and utilized regional Indian narratives and imagery. This Muslim-­penned genre actually constitutes “the first substantial body of devotional and narrative literature in pre-­modern Hindi.”102 The major premākhyāns are Maulānā Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan (1379), Qutban’s Mirigāvatī (1503), Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (1540), and Manjhan’s Madhumālatī (1545). As Aditya Behl has so masterfully shown, these Hindavi Sufi romances took Persian concepts and poetic forms along with Islamic models of piety and re-­presented them “in Indian dress,” using local Indian aesthetics, imagery, religious practices, and narratives to communicate Sufi cosmology, metaphysics, and devotional sensibilities.103 The cultural and literary impact of this vernacular Indian Sufi literature—­particularly upon North India’s burgeoning bhakti tradition—­was significant. Indeed, one of the signature literary achievements of the bhakti movement and arguably the most popular religious text in North India today, Tulsidās’s Rāmcaritmānas, composed in Hindavi in 1575, adopted and adapted the language, narrative technique, and meter of the premākhyāns, thereby bringing a Sufi tradition of expression “into the center of north Indian Vaishnava devotionalism.”104 The premākhyāns participated in a “double system of circulation and performance,” in which, on the one hand, they were performed orally in the courts of

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nobles and rulers, at Sufi shrines and hospices, in bazaars, and privately in the homes of the affluent and, on the other, they were “circulated across great distances in manuscript form and became the object of artistic virtuosity and courtly connoisseurship.”105 These premākhyāns were crucial in making a place for Hindavi as a language of written literature, fit for performance at court, and, relatedly, in making a place for Hindavi manuscripts as material forms of status and power in the Indo-­Persian aesthetic and political culture of the day. As I discuss in chapter 3, while bhakti compositions were initially circulated almost entirely through oral channels, around the late sixteenth century—­following the lead of the Sufis—­bhakti communities began to produce thousands of handwritten manuscripts of vernacular bhakti literature that would circulate throughout North India, connecting bhaktas far and wide to each other as well as to the halls of Mughal and Rajput power. In their hybrid content and style, the literary genre of the premākhyān offers us clear evidence of the diverse, complex, and interactive socioreligious environment and literary-­performative culture of North India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As Behl states, “It is only when groups of people share the same cultural landscape that we have mixed or boundary-­crossing literary and devotional traditions of poetry. . . . ​The formation of creolized or mixed literary genres [like the premākhyān] implies a world of conversion and conflict, dialogue and intermingling.”106 The Sufi authors of the premākhyāns were “competitors and conversation partners” with the Nāth yogīs, the nirguṇ bhakti poet-­saints commonly known as the Sants, and the burgeoning sectarian traditions of Vaiṣṇava (especially Kṛṣṇa) devotion and were able utilize the multivocal symbols of these traditions to express their own distinctively Sufi message of love for Allah.107 In addition to the premākhyāns, other Indian Sufi works such as Gangohī’s Rushd-­ nāma (ca. 1480) and Bilgrami’s Haqā’iq-­i Hindī (1566, a Sufi interpretation of terms found in Vaiṣṇava devotional songs) illustrate that this was a social world in which many of the same symbols, images, and narratives—­including especially those of the Nāth yogī tradition and the Kṛṣṇa bhakti tradition—­circulated among multireligious audiences but could and did take on different meanings in these different interpretive communities.108 Samira Sheikh has characterized this environment as a “religious marketplace,” in which competing communities “used simple poetic verses dealing with similar issues to convey their message, differentiated only by sectarian motifs that would be recognizable by adherents. This allowed them to simultaneously disseminate difference and similarity with other sectarian beliefs and customs.”109 Communities of Sufis, yogīs, nirguṅ Sants, and saguṅ Kṛṣṇa and Rām devotees all competed with each other for followers and patrons in the religious marketplace of late Sultanate and early Mughal India, marking

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their distinctiveness while operating in a world of largely shared images, words, themes, and narratives. Put in different terms, beginning in the fifteenth century North India was the site of a competitive religious economy “in which the adaptive logic of the market led different religious firms to borrow each others’ ‘tools’ while simultaneously differentiating their ‘products.’ ”110 While the language of “markets” and “competition” helps to illuminate important aspects of North India’s religious environment at this time, it may occlude others. If the early modern religious world was, in many respects, a competitive marketplace, we might also consider it a giant chorus, a vast ensemble of saints, poets, performers, and communities each contributing their own voice, their own timbre, to the contrapuntal motions of a complex musical performance. In other words, the religious landscape of late Sultanate and Mughal India was not merely a competitive religious economy but also a polyphonic network of song. The bhakti communities of interest in this book operated in this larger context. My primary case study, the Rāmānandī bhakti community, is, in fact, situated at the nexus of several of the historical developments described in this chapter. Like others, the Rāmānandīs competed for followers and patronage in a crowded religious marketplace, while contributing to the expansion of a broad bhakti public and sensibility; they took part in a vibrant transreligious culture of song and performance; they participated in a shared grammar of asceticism and pragmatic power (embodied in charismatic saints); and they engaged in new aesthetic trends and the expansion of vernacular Hindavi beyond the oral and popular realms into the written and literary-­courtly spheres. Before turning to the topic of bhakti’s development in the Mughal period—­the focus of the remainder of the book—­it is important to discuss in more depth the nature of the bhakti public that emerged in late Sultanate India and its relation to Sufism.

Song and Sensibility in Bhakti and Sufism The world of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India was one primarily of song and performance. By reflecting in more depth on the importance of song and music in bhakti we can gain more insight into the distinctive character of early modern North India’s bhakti public and the religious sensibility developed among its members. Song and singing were vital to and inextricably intertwined with bhakti religiosity in at least three important ways: soteriology, community, and ethics. Let us briefly examine each one.

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As Hawley has observed, from the bhakti perspective, “the act of making contact with God and participating in a divine interaction has something intrinsically to do with the realm of song.”111 Indeed, the word for devotional song, bhajan, is in form the action noun that implies “the doing of bhakti”; thus, to “do bhakti” is, at one core level, to sing to and of God. The bhakti poets themselves extolled the salvific power of song. Kabīr is remembered to have said, “You won’t reach it without singing; if you don’t sing, it’s far. But when you sing with deep feeling, God is right where you are!”112 Sūrdās, in one of his poems, states, “Songs to Hari work great wonders. They elevate the lowly of the world, who celebrate their lofty climb with drums. To come to the feet of the Lord in song is enough to make stones float on the sea.”113 Concluding another poem, he pleads, “Sūr says, unless we sing to the Lord, we’re camels and asses—­that’s what we are.”114 Passionately singing one’s devotion to God, hearing and chanting the name of the Divine, listening to and reciting the stories of the gods and great saints—­these were fundamental religious practices of bhakti that offered a path to spiritual experience and even salvation. As Tyler Williams explains, bhakti poems “themselves encode the logic that liberation (mokṣa) from the world of saṃsāra and from the cycle of birth and death depends upon hearing the praise, stories, or words of the Divine . . . ​a nd singing them oneself. The soteriological efficacy of these texts therefore depended upon their oral performance and aural reception.”115 The salvific value of bhakti songs and stories was linked to their performance in social settings. Indeed, bhakti songs were meant to be sung and heard in “the company of good people” (satsaṅg). Bhakti performances were social events. The soteriological power of a bhakti song was magnified when sung or heard in the company of other bhaktas, a fact that the bhakti poets emphasized in their compositions. But communal song was not only a valuable tool for achieving liberation; in bringing people together and evoking shared sentiments among them, song was also crucial in the formation of bhakti community. It is not hard to imagine the powerful aesthetic effect of the structured, pitched sounds of bhakti song and music reverberating in the body, one’s own voice merging with voices of fellow bhaktas, and one’s ego self temporarily lost in a larger social entity. In this way, participation in bhakti song could generate a powerful shared emotional experience that provided a tangible sense of community. Furthermore, in a social setting in which people have gathered in order to sing to God, the sense of community generated is rather naturally one in which “the considerations of boundary, location, and propriety that govern the dhārmik conception of society fall into the background.”116 Hawley has described the distinctive musical character of bhakti community as following from a shared assent to the “truth” of bhakti song,

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which is not speech so much as it is music. He explains, “Though songs have words, of course, they depend for their power on a level of truth that is not just propositional. . . . ​Music requires assent at a more primordial level than speech does. To find it true is to have been pulled naturally into a community of others who make the same assent—­who ‘appreciate’ the music, we say. If one finds it false, one is by that token outside the whole discourse, and outside the community that it establishes.”117 Here a particular aesthetic sensibility—­ linked to the evocation and circulation of emotion—­goes hand in hand with bhakti religious community. Whether singing along or listening intently, those who attended the performance of bhakti compositions in early modern North India were molded by their participation, their senses and their aesthetic and emotional sensibilities tuned in particular ways that would unite them as a community. Bhakti songs were essential in forming not only the aesthetic and emotional sensibility of the larger bhakti public but also its ethical sensibility. As noted in the introduction, the songs and stories of bhakti evoked shared emotion and bound their participants into a community, but they also imagined a social world and promoted particular forms of ethical behavior. Drawing on the work of Charles Hirschkind, I discussed how bhakti songs and stories cultivate emotional and aesthetic dispositions that underlie a particular type of ethical conduct. If the circulation of bhakti discourse in Sultanate and Mughal India brought a bhakti public into being, using Hirschkind’s language, we can say that this bhakti public existed in large part as a framework for particular kinds of ethical action. Bhakti songs and hagiographies were intended to facilitate the development and practice of virtues esteemed by and in the bhakti public.118 While semantic meaning could be subordinated to the aesthetic and emotional force of sound in bhakti performances, the words of the songs still mattered a great deal and were often ethical in content. Indeed, the ethical messages and teachings conveyed in these songs often would have possessed more weight and delivered a greater impact because they were sung to music. Hawley has observed that in the bhakti hagiographical tradition the great saints are remembered not only for their devotion and musicianship but also because they exemplify certain virtues such as fearlessness, generosity, and community service. In the life stories of the bhakti saints (which themselves were also sung), “it becomes clear that song is to be understood not only as an antidote to a life of moral and devotional laxity but as a partner, defender, and shaper of the ethical life.”119 In other words, in the life of bhakti, song and morality are closely bound; it is those very individuals who dedicated their lives to singing to the Lord who are also the exemplars of bhakti’s most cherished ethical virtues. It is as if, in and through singing to and of God, these saints were able to

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empty themselves of fear, greed, and ego and fill themselves with love and compassion. As I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, North India’s bhakti movement was in many respects a Vaiṣṇava movement. However, to be a Vaiṣṇava did not necessarily mean to be a saguṇ devotee of Viṣṇu (i.e., nirguṇ Sants could be Vaiṣṇava as well), though it probably did presume dedicated recitation of the Vaiṣṇava name(s) of God (such as Rām or Hari). Françoise Mallison has discussed how in late Sultanate India to be a Vaiṣṇava often meant above all to follow a certain code of ethics; namely, compassion, humility, tolerance, control of passions, not lying, stealing, or committing adultery.120 In other words, a broad, vulgate Vaiṣṇava bhakti identity seems to have been closely correlated with valuing and striving to uphold particular forms of ethical virtue that were celebrated in bhakti poetry and hagiography. If bhakti songs expressed (and helped to inculcate) a certain moral disposition, that ethical sensibility was “distinctive not merely in terms of the sort of nobility it celebrate[d], but also in terms of the sort of baseness it condemn[ed]; its vices [were] as stylized as its virtues.”121 As will become clear, the baseness and vice that the bhakti public stylized and condemned was especially that associated with tantric yogīs and Śāktas. The preceding discussion of bhakti song and performance in early modern North India has brought to light the close interrelationships of aesthetics, emotion, and ethics in the life of—­and the sense of community generated within—­the bhakti public. To use the language of Clifford Geertz, the performed poems, stories, and rituals of bhakti conveyed, “for those for whom they [were] resonant, what [was] known about the way the world is, the quality of the emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave while in it.”122 In other words, participation in bhakti discourse attuned one to a particular worldview and a particular emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility. What is remarkable is the extent to which this bhakti sensibility resonated with that of Sufism. I have touched briefly on a common interest in the ethical life among bhaktas and Sufis and a shared understanding that humility and benevolence are at the heart of proper conduct. A brief comparison of specific Sufi and Vaiṣṇava bhakti compositions can give us a better sense of the parallels between their ethical visions. The fifteenth-­century Gujarati bhakti saint Narasī Mehtā (Narasiṃha Mahatā) is remembered to have composed the following poem, famous in India for having been Gandhi’s favorite prayer. He alone can be called a true Vaiṣṇava, who understands the sufferings of others, who helps them in their miseries and has no conceit.

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He greets everyone and despises none, he is firm in speech, deed and mind: blessed, blessed is his mother. He regards all equally and is free (tyāgī) from all desire, he sees a mother in another man’s wife; he does not utter untruth nor does he grab the wealth of others. Attachments and illusions don’t overpower him, his mind knows stern detachment (vairāgya); he is absorbed in the name of Rām and he embodies all places of pilgrimage within himself. Free from all greed and fraud, he has gone beyond passion and anger. Narasi says: The sight of such a man may emancipate one hundred and one generations.123 The ethical ideals celebrated in this bhakti song are echoed closely in the teachings of the great Chishti shaikh Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā’ (1242–­1325), as seen in Fawā’id al-­Fu’ād (Morals for the heart), a text composed by his disciple, the poet Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlawī, which inaugurated the new genre of the malfūzāt, the recorded conversations and teachings of the Sufi master.124 One of the basic moral and spiritual principles laid out in Nizām al-­Dīn’s teachings is service to mankind: showing affection to people, striving by whatever means to help fellow human beings, removing the misery of others, bringing consolation to distressed hearts, and assisting the downtrodden. Throughout Fawā’id al-­Fu’ād, he also stresses “living for the Lord alone,” rejecting materialistic attractions, completely trusting in God, and abandoning greed and egoistic motivations.125 These teachings clearly resonate with the bhakti-­inspired moral message seen in Narasī Mehtā’s poem that the true Vaiṣṇava should understand the sufferings of others and help them in their miseries; be kind to all; remain free of desire, passion, and greed; and show firm detachment from worldly attachments. In addition to the similarities in their ethical ideals, for both bhaktas and Sufis to be a great devotee was, in many ways, to be a great poet, and to be a poet usually meant to be a singer of songs. Piety and aesthetic sensibility were intimately linked in both bhakti and Sufism. Simon Digby has described the Sufi shaikhs of pre-­Mughal India as “leaders in fashions of religious sensibility, in which piety is with difficulty distinguished from aesthetic reaction to literary and musical forms.”126 Both the bhakti saints and Sufi saints of North India attracted followers by exhibiting a religiosity defined not only by its passionate devotion and asceticism but also by its musicality and poetic sensibility. Participation in—­and aesthetic appreciation of—­poetry and music was, then, central to both Sufi and bhakti religious life. Katherine Butler Schofield has argued that there was “experiential common ground between Persianate and Indic ontologies of music—­that is to say, what

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music is and what it does—­a nd particularly music’s central role in both traditions in mediating the various moods of love.”127 She explains that in both Persianate Sufi and Sanskritic aesthetic discourses (appropriated by North Indian bhakti traditions), music was considered “the direct aural manifestation of sentiment” and, in particular, “the sonic embodiment of love,” and in both its purpose was “to move the listener’s emotions” and especially “to arouse feelings of love in the listener.”128 Furthermore, Persianate aesthetic theory shared with Sanskrit aesthetics an emphasis on the audience; that is, an understanding that a work of art (music, poetry, literature, etc.) succeeds or fails not so much on its own terms as in the degree to which it evokes emotion and aesthetic experience in its audience. This also meant that audience members and, in the case here, the initiates of both Sufi and bhakti religious orders were expected to possess a certain aesthetic sensibility, a cultivated emotional-­spiritual awareness and preparedness.129 Clearly, then, the experience of the Divine, in both Sufism and bhakti at this time, was closely intertwined with the experience of emotion, an emotion that could be evoked through participation in and aesthetic response to poetry, song, and music. In particular, Indian Sufis and bhaktas in Sultanate and Mughal India both celebrated the erotic sentiment and the emotion of love—­a passionate love exceeding all bounds and drawing the self outside itself130 (‘ishq/prema)—­while both also gave special emphasis to impassioned human longing for the absent beloved (viraha/firāq) as a metaphor for—­and a vehicle to the experience of—­pure love for the Divine. In order to express a religious vision and to evoke a religious experience so closely tied to emotion and art (poetry, song, music), early modern Sufis and bhaktas both drew on the popular aesthetic concept of rasa (literally, “taste,” “juice,” or “essence”). The term rasa refers to the sweetness of aesthetic experience, the essential flavor of an artistic work or, put differently, the purified ego-­f ree experience of emotion evoked by and during absorption in art.131 Classical Indian aesthetic theory posited eight rasas, of which the one that came to be celebrated above all others as “the king of rasas” was śṛṅgāra rasa, the erotic sentiment. Jayadeva’s twelfth-­century Gītagovinda, a Sanskrit lyrical poem describing the love play of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, was crucial in correlating the aesthetic experience of śṛngāra rasa (erotic human passion) with the religious experience of bhakti (devotional love), suggesting a jointly devotional and aesthetic goal of transmuting baser emotion and desire into an experience of pure divine love.132 On the heels of this work came Vopadeva’s Bhāgavatamuktāphala (ca. 1300), seemingly the first text to conceive the various emotional attitudes a devotee can have toward Viṣṇu in terms of rasa theory, while also first developing (along with Hemādri’s contemporaneous commentary, the Kaivalyadīpikā) the idea that the canonical rasas are in fact simply aspects of a

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single “devotional rasa.”133 It was not until the sixteenth-­century Vaiṣṇava bhakti sampradāyas, however, that bhakti theology became explicitly anchored in Sanskrit rasa theory, a feat accomplished (especially in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu of 1541) by the replacement of śṛṅgāra rasa with bhakti rasa as the pinnacle of aesthetic-­spiritual experience.134 Sheldon Pollock explains that this was not “another new interpretation of aesthetic response” but a “new aesthetics of religion, a new understanding of religion as aesthetic action, which encompasses and transcends what had hitherto been thought of as the aesthetic.”135 What is especially interesting here is that, as Behl has insightfully observed, in some respects Indian Sufis actually anticipated this move in the premākhyān genre, which made the most of the considerable resonances between Persianate and Sanskritic aesthetics and conceptions of love to offer certain innovations in the increasingly intertwined realms of Indian religion and aesthetics.136 The goal of the Sufi romances—­as shown in the stages of the hero’s quest to reunite with his Beloved—­was to awaken and gradually purify base human desire (shauq/kāma) into divine love, which they characterized not as the physical, erotic passion of śṛṅgāra rasa but as the more selfless, excessive (and potentially transcendental) love of prema rasa.137 A passage from the first premākhyān, the Cāndāyan, illustrates this well. Composed by Maulānā Dā’ūd in 1379 at a Tughlaq provincial court in Avadh, the Cāndāyan was a Sufi rendition of the popular regional folktale of Lorik and Cāndā. Dā’ūd adopts the terminology of rasa and prema in the following scene, which depicts Cāndā pining for her absent beloved and asking her nurse, Biraspati, to tell her a story of love to soothe her pain. Cāndā called Biraspati to her, “Come and tell me a tale of love, full of love’s savor, its taste, that I may forget my mind’s insipid state, and light the lamp of rasa in my heart’s niche. Give me the food of rasa, do not tire, only rasa can put out the flames of separation. I have tried many medicines and powders, now tell me a story full of flavor and juice. In its rasa, the night will pass quickly, and sweet sleep will come to my eyes. O Biraspati, speak sweet words of rasa, sweeten my bitter mind—­ divert me with an hour of rasa, that this pain, this burning and agitation, may go!” [C 172]138

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As Behl explains, here Dā’ūd appropriates a classical Sanskrit term into the poetics of a new vernacular Hindavi genre while presenting the rasa of purified, unconditional love (prema, not śṛṅgāra) “as the remedy for the existential condition of viraha or separation. Just as savoring the rasa or juice of a story is what gives a reader pleasure in a text, so savoring the rasa of love [prema] removes the burning pain of separation between lovers.”139 This idea—­that the only adequate remedy for the suffering of separation from the Beloved is the taste of love of and for God, which can be experienced in the aesthetic relish of literature, articulated here in a late fourteenth-­century Indian Sufi text—­would be a fundamental theme in many compositions of North India’s early modern bhakti movement. The traditions of bhakti and Sufism in Sultanate and Mughal India were quite different—­divided by differing theologies, ritual forms and obligations, religious authorities, and collective memories, among other key differences—­but they grew up in conversation with each other and resonated on numerous levels. As noted, bhaktas and Sufis drew on a shared pool of images, symbols, narratives; offered similar modes of participation in their religiosity; circulated their discourse in similar forms and contexts; and celebrated and sought to mobilize similar sentiments. The fact that Sufis and bhaktas valued the same emotions, aesthetic styles, and ethical ideals is significant. While they were certainly not part of a single tradition or even a single public (though it seems clear that the bhakti and Sufi publics would have shared a number of members),140 might we consider the Sufis and bhaktas of early modern North India as part of a common “emotional community”? As stated in the introduction, Barbara Rosenwein defines an “emotional community” as a group “in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—­or devalue—­the same or related emotions.”141 She explains that emotional communities (in their discourse) “offer exemplars of emotions belittled and valorized” and develop characteristic emotional styles that “depend not only on the emotions that they emphasize—­a nd how and in what contexts they do so—­but also by the ones that they demote to the tangential or do not recognize at all.”142 Sufis and bhaktas alike valorized selfless love and emphasized passionate longing for an absent Beloved while criticizing hubris, envy, hatred, and greed. Moreover, they used similar aesthetic styles to express and evoke the emotions (as well as the ethical ideals) they valued. While I am hesitant to consider Sufis and bhaktas as part of the same community, the preceding discussion has made clear that they often shared a very similar emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility. Emerging from the same historical context and participating in many of the same historical trends—­the demise of mainstream, institutional tantra; the encounter between Persianate and Sanskritic cosmopolitan cultures; a shared grammar of charismatic

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asceticism and, relatedly, the key role of monastic lineages and their institutions in political society; and the rise of vernacular literary composition and performance—­bhakti and Indian Sufi religious sensibilities held important elective affinities and developed in dialogue with each other. It is in this sense that, throughout this book, I describe the bhakti sensibility of early modern North India as Sufi inflected. Nonetheless, we must not forget the obvious fact that not all bhaktas were alike, nor were all Sufis (nor were all tantric yogīs). It is useful to speak about a general (early modern North Indian) bhakti sensibility only if we acknowledge from the outset the incredible diversity of interests and religious-­aesthetic proclivities that the members of the bhakti public would have had and the vast number of ways such a general bhakti sensibility might have manifested in the lived reality of particular geographic, sectarian, and familial contexts.

R

I began this chapter with a discussion of the social and cultural changes occasioned by the establishment of Sultanate rule in North India. India’s military conquest by Persianate Turks ended an era in which tantric religiopolitical paradigms and institutions had been an important feature of the subcontinent for centuries. This shift in the sociopolitical order resulted in new patterns of circulation, encounter, and exchange that would, in time, create the conditions for the emergence of new bhakti sensibilities, communities, and forms of literature.143 The Sultanate period was a time of cultural translation; a complex, dynamic, and extended encounter of Persianate-­Islamicate and Sanskritic-­Indic cultures. In this new historical context, traditional, accepted, and customary tantric institutions and paradigms of thought waned in importance, while new bhakti social formations emerged, along with new discursive instruments sustaining and mobilizing those social formations.144 The remainder of the book examines these bhakti social formations and discursive instruments and, particularly, the way in which they articulated a Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility in contradistinction to core aspects of tantric religiosity. In this chapter, my larger aim has been to understand the significant role Persianate cultural forms and Sufism had in the development of North India’s bhakti movement. I have also sought to understand the character of this new transregional, transsectarian bhakti public, the performative world in which its discourse circulated, and the Sufi-­inflected ethical, aesthetic, and emotional sensibility cultivated within it. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a social and cultural environment arose that allowed for the spread of bhakti throughout North India, but it was not until the rule of Akbar, beginning in

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1556, that bhakti communities, institutions, and literature really began to flourish in North India, something that happened in large part because of the patronage of the Mughal emperors and nobles as well as that of Hindu Rajputs. During Akbar’s reign, Mughals and Rajputs forged a political alliance that would prove to have far-­reaching consequences. In the next chapter, I discuss how this alliance led to the development of a Mughal-­Rajput court culture and religiopolitical idiom in which Vaiṣṇava bhakti institutional and literary forms became valuable cosmopolitan symbols of power and deportment for aspiring Hindu rulers and thus Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities became the beneficiaries of extensive patronage.

3

Akbar’s New World Mughals and Rajputs in the Rise of Vaiṣṇava Bhakti

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orth India’s bhakti movement began in the specific social and cultural conditions of the later Sultanate, but it was during the Mughal period that bhakti became a major institutional and literary phenomenon in North India. In this chapter, I explore the Mughal-­Rajput sociopolitical context that allowed bhakti institutions and literature to flourish in early modern North India, focusing in particular on the reign of the third Mughal emperor, Jalāl ud-­Dīn Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–­1605), or Akbar the Great. Under Akbar, the Mughal Empire became the largest and most bureaucratically sophisticated political entity that India had ever seen. The religious policies, political alliances, and administrative structures developed during Akbar’s rule were crucial in facilitating the successful growth of Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions. Akbar and his allies constructed “a new corporate and inclusivist ideology of service to emperor and state” that successfully drew together a disparate range of ethnic groups in the leadership and administration of the Mughal Empire.1 The Rajputs—­a politically powerful, ethnically diverse, and geographically widespread Hindu status group often associated with warriorhood 2—­ played an especially vital role in these political and administrative innovations but also in the formation of a joint Mughal-­Rajput court culture whose cosmopolitan codes and symbols of virtue, deportment, and aesthetic sophistication contributed to, and were intertwined with, the rise of Vaiṣṇava bhakti. In order to investigate the crucial part played by Rajputs, I focus on one particularly important Rajput clan, the Kacchvāhās of Amer, and their involvement in the Mughal policies, practices of rule, and literary-­aesthetic understandings that provided fertile conditions for the spread of bhakti traditions in early modern

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North India. The Kacchvāhās critically influenced, contributed to, and participated in new Mughal forms of courtliness and statehood that were intimately linked to the emergence of bhakti communities and their literature.

Babur, Humāyūn, and the Timurid Model of Sacred Sovereignty In 1526, Babur defeated the Afghan Lodis, the last dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, at the Battle of Panipat, thus inaugurating the Mughal Empire. Babur (r. 1526–­ 1530) was a Chaghatay Turk and the great-­grandson of Timur. As proud descendants of Timur, and thus also of Chinggis Khan, Babur and the Mughal emperors who followed him considered themselves heir to a unique prestige and world-­ conquering destiny. As Azfar Moin explains, “Even as they became an inseparable part of the Indian landscape, the Mughals continued to trace their dynastic origins from Timur and practice the norms of comportment of Chinggis Khan.”3 The Mughals, then, did not enter India as orthodox Sunni Muslim kings seeking to establish “another Muslim dynasty”; rather, they came as inheritors of a Timurid style of kingship that had developed in the extremely diverse socioreligious world of Iran and Central Asia.4 The Mughals inherited the inclusivist vision of Islamic law of Nasīr al-­Dīn Tūsī (d. 1274), who felt that it was a king’s duty to ensure the harmony and well-­being of all the diverse groups in his kingdom, not just Muslims.5 As Muzaffar Alam writes, “While there were certainly Indian Muslims who desired the total dominance of Muslims and the humiliation or destruction of infidelity and infidels, the Mughal rulers and most Sufis felt the central task of Islamic law was to ensure the balance of conflicting interests of groups and communities, with no interference in their personal beliefs.” 6 As noted in the preceding chapter, the Timurid model of sacred sovereignty practiced by the Mughals involved especially (a) support for Sufi institutions and close relationships with charismatic Sufi saints (and other figures embodying sacred power); (b) elite occultism—­i.e., reliance upon astrologers, lettrists, geomancers, and other sources of occult knowledge (including even yogīs); and (c) patronage of—­and cultivated sophistication in—­Persian arts. It was especially through Sufi orders, and particularly those firmly entrenched in the Indian landscape such as the Chishtis and the Shattaris, that the early Mughals sought to engage with and establish themselves within local networks of influence. Babur began this process, but since he died just four years after conquering India, it was especially his son and successor, Humāyūn (r. 1531–­1540, 1555–­1556), who carried it out by forging a close relationship with the Shattari Sufi order. The Shattaris were known for their wonder-­working abilities and their occultist

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and yogic inclinations. Humāyūn became an initiate of the Shattari Sufi brothers Shaikh Muhammad Ghawth (Ghaus) and Shaikh Phul (Bahlul), the latter of whom was known by contemporaries for his “great interest in the occult sciences, and a passion for invoking prayer spells and spirits.”7 It is no coincidence that Humāyūn gravitated toward this particular Sufi order, for he was keenly interested in the occult and made Islamicate traditions of astrology and alchemy an important element of his rule. Humāyūn’s occultist predilections and his relationship with the Shattaris—­much like the well-­documented contacts that subsequent Mughal emperors (Akbar, Jahāngīr, Aurangzeb) had with Indian yogīs and ascetics—­should be understood in connection with the broader post-­Mongol Persianate/Timurid interest in embodied sacred power and occult knowledge.8 The occult sciences (al-­ʿulūm al-­gharība) had become fundamental to the construction of imperial ideologies in post-­Mongol Asia. Humāyūn styled his own sacred sovereignty in competition with the contemporary Safavid king of Iran, Shāh Ṭahmāsb (r. 1524–­1576), a serious student of the occult sciences (especially geomancy) who presented himself simultaneously as the sovereign of Persia and the pious leader (and greatest living saint) of the Safavid Sufi order.9 While the Mughal period officially begins with Babur’s victory over the Lodi sultans in 1526, this standard periodization obscures the fact that Afghan families with roots in North India continued to battle Babur and Humāyūn for years. Indeed, the Afghan Sher Shāh Surī defeated Humāyūn in 1540 and took control of the empire. Humāyūn fled India and, after wandering about in poverty, eventually submitted himself before his Safavid rival, Shāh Ṭahmāsb, in order to receive refuge in Persia.10 Back in India, Sher Shāh (r. 1540–­1545) and his son Islām Shāh (r. 1545–­1554) instituted a number of changes to centralize power and make civic and military administration more efficient—­including a new network of roads and hostels and an effective revenue-­collection system—­thus paving the way for Akbar’s successful consolidation of the empire. Upon Islām Shāh’s death, Humāyūn returned from Iran to reconquer India for the Mughals in 1555. However, less than a year after retaking the throne in Delhi, he fell down the staircase from his library, hit his head, and died three days later. His son, Jalāl ud-­Dīn Muhammad Akbar, only thirteen years old at the time, succeeded to the Mughal throne on February 14, 1556.11

Akbar’s Empire There is a vast and ever-­growing body of scholarship on Akbar (r. 1556–­1605) and the Mughal Empire under him and his seventeenth-­century successors:

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Jahāngīr (r. 1605–­1627), Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–­1658), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–­1707). Here I offer only a brief and selective introduction to the intriguing historical figure of Akbar in order to sketch the all-­important sociopolitical context of bhakti’s development in Mughal India. Akbar’s inventive form of Indian kingship was built upon Timurid and Safavid understandings of sacred sovereignty, whose institutional and narrative forms “were flexible enough to adapt to the requirements of the Indian milieu.”12 In accord with the Timurid-­Safavid style, Akbar’s imperial rule gave an important place to Sufism, occultism, patronage of (and connoisseurship in) Persian arts, and bold messianic (and millennial) claims. Early in his reign, Akbar’s devotion to the Chishti Sufi order was a foundational element of his rule. He not only patronized Chishti institutions but also personally sought out the blessing and prophecy of a Chishti shaikh (Shaikh Salīm Chishtī, d. 1571) regarding the birth of his male heir, built (and frequently visited) a Chishti Sufi shrine at the heart of his new capital in Fatehpur Sikri (active 1571–­1585), and traveled on foot each year to the tomb of the Chishti founder (Khwājā Mu‘īn al-­Dīn Chishtī), d. 1236) in Ajmer. Through these actions, between 1568 and 1579 Akbar performed the message that “royal heirs, royal victory, and royal authority flowed from devotion to the Chishti saints.”13 There were strategic elements to Akbar’s relationship with the Chishtis. They were India’s largest and most widespread Sufi order, one deeply embedded in local networks of influence throughout northern and central India. Furthermore, the Chishti order grew up in the Indian subcontinent and practiced a form of Islam tailored to and inseparable from Indian culture. Eclectic and accommodating in their religiosity, the Chishtis bridged Indic and Islamicate cultural fields and exemplified Akbar’s “willingness to embrace the multi-­ethnic and multi-­ religious nature of his empire.”14 Akbar was interested not only in the Sufis, of course. Religious questions and occult possibilities clearly fascinated him, and during the 1570s while based at Fatehpur Sikri, he began holding lengthy discussions with Muslim theologians, Hindu brahmans, Parsis, Jains, Christians (Jesuit priests), and yogīs. In the course of these personal spiritual inquiries, in which he learned about a diverse array of religious ideas and practices, Akbar seems to have become less enchanted with orthodox Islam and increasingly moved away from it, though he continued to publicly support Islamic institutions and to make occasional gestures to appease the powerful body of Muslim scholars and jurists. With resistance mounting from the ‘ulamā to his liberal policy decisions, some of which seemed to increasingly place Muslims and non-­Muslims on an equal footing, Akbar and his closest advisers—­particularly his dear friend and courtier Abu al-­Fazl (Abu al-­Fazl ibn Mubārak)—­began formulating a new dynastic ideology that would

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generate a broad-­based political appeal independent of the institutions of orthodox Islam. Munis Faruqui has argued persuasively that Akbar’s early imperial self-­ presentation and religious policy decisions were fundamentally influenced by the threat posed by his Kabul-­based half brother, Mīrzā Muhammad Hakīm. For two decades, from roughly 1560 to 1580, Mīrzā Hakīm bitterly opposed Akbar’s imperial claim, proving himself a formidable threat by invading Mughal territory twice, taking in Mughal political refugees, regularly opposing Akbar’s political initiatives, publicly criticizing Akbar for abandoning his family’s Central Asian roots and legacy, and presenting himself as an orthodox Sunni alternative to Akbar’s heterodox religious positions.15 As Faruqui explains, “As long as Mīrzā Hakīm posed a serious politico-­religious threat, Akbar was seemingly forced—­perhaps against his better judgment—­to occasionally play the ‘Islamic card’ even as he desperately searched for ways to assert his authority over the religious establishment.”16 Akbar’s relationship with the Chishti Sufi order would seem to illustrate this point quite well. While he had been closely affiliated with the Chishtis since the 1560s—­u ndertaking regular pilgrimages to the great Chishti shrines in Ajmer, Punjab, and Delhi—­once the threat posed by Mīrzā Hakīm was permanently ended in 1582, Akbar never undertook another such pilgrimage for the rest of his life and showed complete indifference toward the Chishti order.17 The death of Mīrzā Hakīm and the capture of his sons in 1585 seem to have marked a key moment in Akbar’s reign. As Faruqui states, “No longer would opponents within the ranks of either the Mughal nobility or the ulema have an axis around which to focus their opposition to Akbar’s political and religious initiatives. Once rid of the menacing shadow cast by Mīrzā Hakīm, Akbar no longer felt compelled to tailor his imperial initiatives to woo disparate political and religious constituencies.”18 Akbar was thus freed to pursue the new vision of empire he had formed with his close adviser Abu al-­Fazl. In 1579, just months after warding off a threatened invasion by Mīrzā Hakīm, Akbar issued an imperial decree declaring himself the supreme authority over religious affairs in the empire, with a power above that of the ‘ulamā in deciding disputed matters of religious doctrine. Then, in 1582, shortly after Mīrzā Hakīm was conclusively defeated at the Battle of Kabul-­K hurd, and at the moment of the Islamic millennium as heralded by a Saturn-­Jupiter conjunction, Akbar “revealed” himself “as the Perfect Man, the saint of the age, who would formally accept his subjects as devotees.”19 In the new imperial dynastic ideology, presented by Abu al-­Fazl in his Akbarnāmā, Akbar appeared at once a perfected Sufi saint, a pedigreed Mongol sovereign, a battle-­tested epic hero, and an astrologically predicted messiah. According to the Akbarnāmā, he was in possession of a hidden divine light that had passed down from Adam and the

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biblical prophets to Chinggis Khan and Timur and eventually to Babur and Humāyūn, arriving finally at Akbar himself, in whom it found its perfection.20 This articulation of Akbar’s “true” identity borrowed directly from the Illuminationist (Ishraqi) philosophy of the great Persian mystic Suhrawardī (d. 1191), whose work had successfully infused Islam with Neoplatonic and pre-­Islamic Iranian (Zoroastrian) strands of thought. If Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist form of Islam was one key source of Akbar’s new dynastic ideology, it was one closely tied to traditions of occultism that had been rising in importance in the Persianate political world since the fourteenth century.21 Indeed, Matthew Melvin-­ Koushki has argued that “Akbar’s imperial identity is perhaps best described as talismanic: his sacralised body as astral-­letter-­magical device marrying heaven to earth in order to rule the whole. His infamous aristocratic court ritual, furthermore, should be understood in the first place as an astral-­magical operation, using tried and tested procedures to harness celestial powers for specific, constructive ends.”22 A cornerstone of Akbar’s new imperial ideology was the celebrated ecumenical policy of ṣulḥ-­i kull, in which all were to be treated equally and respectfully; i.e., non-­Muslims were officially accorded the same rights as Muslims. While the term ṣulḥ-­i kull is often translated as “universal toleration” or “universal peace,” Rajeev Kinra suggests it be rendered as “complete civility.” He points out that the term ṣulḥ did not refer simply to generic peace between and tolerance toward the other but “also to the balance and compromise necessary to maintain the stability and peaceableness of the social order within a ruler’s dominions,” which “involved the promotion of intra-­community harmony, even among different ethnic or sectarian categories of Muslims, just as much as it required the promotion of respect towards the non-­Muslim other.”23 The Mughal doctrine of ṣulḥ-­i kull seems to have been inspired in part by a particular strand of Persian millennialist occultism (lettrism) developed by the Iranian Āzar Kayvān (1533–­ 1618), itself closely related to Suhrawardian Illuminationism. Daniel Sheffield has argued convincingly that Akbar’s policy of “absolute civility” likely derived from the Islamo-­Zoroastrian Āzarī doctrine of āmīzish-­i farhang (mixing of cultures). Āzar Kayvān and his followers (Āzarīs) believed that “each of the religions of the world was a translation of the same fundamental truth.”24 As Sheffield states, “This belief in the underlying unity of the world’s religions engendered a form of religious practice in which Āẕarī disciples were to treat members of different religious communities equally, a practice which seems to have been a direct antecedent for the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s policy of ṣulḥ-­i kull (Universal Civility).”25 Indeed, the Dabistān-­i Mazāhib (ca. 1658) states that Akbar and Abu al-­Fazl wrote letters to Āzar Kayvān asking him to come to India and that he sent them a book of his writings expressing the idea that just as all

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languages derive from a single source (a celestial language), so all Indian, Persian, and Islamic intellectual and religious traditions also “all reflect a single essence.”26 Akbar’s adoption of this open-­m inded, tolerant perspective as the basis for his imperial religious policy was one key factor—­a mong others, such as especially his alliance with Hindu Rajputs (discussed later in this chapter)—­ that helped to produce a sociopolitical environment in which bhakti communities and their institutions would flourish in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the importance of Persian thought (e.g., Suhrawardī and Āzarī) to Akbar’s new dynastic ideology suggests, Persian intellectual and literary culture became foundational aspects of Akbar’s Mughal Empire. While the various regional sultanates of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had continued to promote Persian and to use it as a cosmopolitan language of Islamicate rule and culture in India, during the latter Sultanate period the overall role of Persian in the subcontinent diminished slightly because of the new emphasis on regional vernacular literary cultures (e.g., Hindavi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu). However, under Akbar and the Mughal emperors who followed him, India witnessed “its most productive—­perhaps even incomparable—­efflorescence of Persian literary culture. Indeed, Mughal literary culture has been celebrated primarily, if not exclusively, for its extraordinary excellence in Persian poetry and prose.”27 As Alam has noted, Akbar had an “unusual interest in promoting social, cultural, and intellectual contacts with Iran,” and his “efforts to engage Iranian literati received an encouraging response from Iran.”28 During the reigns of Akbar and Jahāngīr, there was a great migration of Persian literati to Mughal India. Some came fleeing Safavid religious or political persecutions, but most came simply because “the Mughal Empire commanded far greater financial and human resources and consequently offered far better opportunities for patronage than its Safavid counterpart,” especially considering “the immense prestige enjoyed by Persian culture in Mughal India.”29 As war raged between the Safavids, Uzbeks, and Ottomans in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, “Akbar’s India earned distinction as the place of refuge, an abode of peace (dār al-­amān) where the wise and the learned received encouragement.”30 Under Akbar, Persian became “the language of the king, the royal household, and the high Mughal elite,” as well as the formally declared language of government administration at all levels, including that carried out by indigenous Hindu communities.31 The importance accorded to Persian under Akbar and his successors has led many scholars to view the Mughals as an exclusively Persian-­language dynasty; however, as Audrey Truschke has stressed, in fact “the Mughals cultivated a notably multilingual and multicultural courtly environment that included royal support of Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit.”32 She emphasizes that the

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Mughal court’s cross-­cultural activities—­including Persian translations of the Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata, and Harivaṃśa—­were not mere “sideshow curiosities”; rather, “multiculturalism was foundational to the imperial dispensation.”33 Truschke shows how the Mughals understood their multicultural literary, artistic, and intellectual pursuits as crucial to their construction of power.34 In other words, in Akbar’s India, power derived in large part from aesthetic practice, with political influence often exerted and acquired through literary, intellectual, and cultural endeavors. Corinne Lefèvre has remarked upon the enormous political significance and prestige associated with cultural and literary-­artistic activities in Mughal India, not just at the imperial court but also among subimperial nobles and nonstate actors.35 Particularly noteworthy is Mughal support of Brajbhasha and the self-­ assertive literary activity in Brajbhasha at subimperial Mughal courts and in devotional communities of the period. The trailblazing work of Allison Busch has shown how Brajbhasha “functioned as a zone of sociolinguistic contact, a medium that the Persian-­using Mughals and the Sanskrit-­proficient Hindu literati had in common.”36 As she explains, the vernacular of Brajbhasha “had the innate ability to foster the participation of multiple groups and linkages between them. In contrast to Sanskrit and Persian, . . . ​Brajbhasha was readily intelligible to most North Indians from Gujarat to Bengal and . . . ​was a marvellously adaptable linguistic resource because writers could manipulate registers to suit diverse literary contexts and patrons.”37 Beginning at the end of the sixteenth century there would be an unprecedented explosion of Brajbhasha literary activity, much of it driven by emerging bhakti communities that, in the Mughal cultural environment, increasingly sought patronage and power—­a nd forged their sectarian identities—­through their literary practices and products. Under Akbar, the Mughal Empire tripled in size as successful military campaigns brought Malwa and Gondwana in central India, the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal (including modern-­day Bihar and Orissa), Kabul, and Kashmir under Mughal imperial control. The administrative systems, political alliances, imperial ideology, and religious policies developed during Akbar’s rule brought these diverse and far-­flung territories together into a coherent, stable, centralized state.38 These same Akbar-­era sociopolitical innovations and developments were crucial in facilitating the successful growth of Vaiṣṇava bhakti institutions and literature. Before giving attention specifically to bhakti and the role played by the Mughal rulers and their Rajput allies in its development, we must understand the political and economic context that shaped the development of religion more generally in Mughal India. The research of Irfan Habib, among others, suggests that the institution of a new land-­revenue system in the Sultanate period helped to establish an economy in which (in at least some key areas) agrarian exploitation—­the systematic

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appropriation of agricultural surplus by the ruling class—­f ueled urban growth and, correspondingly, an expansion in craft production and commerce. In the Mughal period, the basic character of this economy seems to have continued and to have reached an even more developed form.39 The growth of merchant and urban artisan classes and the dispossession and disempowerment of (at least certain segments of) the peasantry that occurred in the Sultanate and Mughal periods were likely related to the rise of both devotional communities and soldiering (warrior-­ascetic) groups that we see in North India beginning in the fifteenth century, if in ways that are not yet fully understood.40 Vasudha Dalmia and Munis Faruqui identify three other interrelated historical-­material phenomena that had particularly significant effects upon religious life in the Mughal Empire.41 First, the gradual absorption of northern India’s post-­1398 regional kingdoms within a single imperial state—­the consolidation of Mughal authority from Kabul to Bengal, Kashmir to the northern Deccan—­created a political context that no ambitious religious group could ignore. Second, a network of roads and related facilities (stepwells, roadside hostels, etc.) were built in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, greatly improving communications and the ease of travel, facilitating commerce and the expansion of economic networks. Third, the growing wealth of India beginning in the late fifteenth century—­a n increase in gold and silver coming into India from its many exports (cotton and silk textiles, spices, manufactured goods, agricultural products)—­spurred great economic development. In the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire possessed greater wealth and manpower than all other early modern Islamicate empires, including those of the Safavids, Uzbeks, and Ottomans.42 As Dalmia and Faruqi state, “This wealth not only enhanced the military and administrative capacities of the Mughal Empire” but also provided resources that would lead to “widespread temple and mosque construction, the expansion of old pilgrimage sites, rising numbers of Hindu and Muslim pilgrims, as well as increasing religiously oriented textual production.” 43 We really begin to see the effects of these historical developments—­political consolidation, improved transportation and communication, and rising wealth—­on India’s religious landscape in the reign of Akbar, and these conditions would persist through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century.

North India’s Early Modern Shift from Śaivism to Vaiṣṇavism I turn now to the incredible growth of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in early modern North India. In order to explore the Mughal-­R ajput sociopolitical context in which bhakti flourished, I examine the Kacchvāhā Rajput clan, their religious

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patronage, and their special relationship with the Mughal emperor. Up until the middle of the sixteenth century, the Kacchvāhā clan of eastern Rajasthan (or Dhundhār) was just one royal kṣatriya family among a host of others in North India, meriting no special distinction in the annals of history. Threatened by the expanding Marwar and Mewar states and plagued internally by feuds over succession to the throne, in 1562 this minor local power forged a marital alliance with the new Mughal emperor Akbar that would change its fortunes in an unexpectedly powerful way, profoundly influencing the history of North India in the process. The story of the Kacchvāhās, their relationship with the Mughal Empire, and their impact on bhakti religious formations must necessarily be told in parallel with the story of the rise of the new religious communities at Galta and Vrindavan, which served as two of the most important institutional locations for the spread of bhakti across Mughal India. In the early sixteenth century, the Kacchvāhā ruler Pṛthvīrāj shifted his allegiance from the tantric Nāth yogīs to the Rāmānandī bhakti community, becoming a disciple of the Rāmānandī devotee-­ascetic Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and the chief patron of the monastic community he founded in nearby Galta. Pṛthvīrāj adopted an image of Sītā-­Rām brought by Payahārī as the Kacchvāhās’ dynastic deity, thereby inaugurating a close, centuries-­long relationship with the Rāmānandīs at Galta. Pṛthvīrāj’s move was emblematic of a trend we see beginning in this period in which rulers across North India increasingly allied themselves with Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities and their institutional forms and symbols while moving away from those of tantric Śaivism and Śāktism. As Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot have written, “Although elite Hindus in previous centuries had primarily focused on Shiva as the object of their worship . . . ​ the situation changed from c. 1500 onward, after a wave of devotion toward Vishnu became more widespread.” 44 William Pinch similarly states that “the major Rajput clans underwent what might be deemed a kind of ‘conversion’ process, from Shaiva and Shakta cult affiliations in the early 1500s to more ‘orthoprax’ Krishna and Rama devotion by 1800, and . . . ​this occurred in tandem with participation in the overarching framework of the Mughal imperium.” 45 There is plentiful evidence for this broad shift toward Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Samira Sheikh has discussed the rise of devotional Vaiṣṇavism in Gujarat in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in association with a decline in Śaivism, which had been dominant there for centuries.46 She explains that “the transition to Vaiṣṇava bhakti,” beginning in the fifteenth century, “seems to have happened in some important instances at the expense of Śaivism,” something that “was also true of the rise of Vaiṣṇavism in other South Asian regions.” 47 Orsini and Sheikh have noted how, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “Rajput groups formerly associated with goddess or Shiva worship began to link up their genealogies with

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Krishna.” 48 As I describe in chapter 4, popular oral traditions from Rajasthan, Panjab, and the Kullu Valley (Western Himalayas) each relate the defeat of tantric Nāth yogīs and the subsequent conversion of the local ruler and populace to Vaiṣṇava devotional sensibilities in the early modern period. Charlotte Vaudeville has demonstrated that Śaivism and Śāktism dominated Braj prior to its takeover by Vaiṣṇava (Kṛṣṇa) bhakti in the sixteenth century.49 Relatedly, in her study of Rāmāyaṇa-­related pilgrimage sites that became popular in the early modern period, Diana Eck has shown how early modern Vaiṣṇava bhakti movements in North India took over, and were superimposed upon, what had long been Śaiva religious territory.50 Heidi Pauwels has drawn attention to the move by the Bundelā rulers of Orchha from Śākta-­centered religious practice to that of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in the sixteenth century.51 Kathleen Erndl has discussed evidence for the predominance of Śāktism in Panjab prior to the emergence of devotional Vaiṣṇavism there in the seventeenth century.52 Pika Ghosh has documented the rise of new, devotional types of temple construction in association with the rise of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­century Bengal and its challenge to brahmanical tantric institutions and goddess cults there.53 As Vaiṣṇava bhakti grew in popularity and influence in the early modern period, Śaiva-­Śākta tantric communities were supplanted, marginalized, or forced to adapt to the newly dominant devotional culture. Patricia Dold has discussed the ways in which, already in the sixteenth century, the rise of bhakti in Bengal and Assam had put Śāktas there on the defensive, as we find them writing apologetic works seeking to demonstrate the compatibility of their tantric traditions with the growing Vaiṣṇava devotional movements of Śaṅkaradeva (ca. 1449–­1568) and Caitanya (ca. 1485–­1533).54 Rachel McDermott has shown how the influence of bhakti in Bengal led to a “gradual decline in knowledge about and sanction of things Tantric” and a radical change in—­a nd softening of—­Bengali Śākta worship in the eighteenth century in which the dangerous, bloodthirsty tantric deity became a compassionate, loving mother.55 Similarly, the work of Ann and Daniel Gold has demonstrated the “devotionalization” of the Nāth yogīs of Rajasthan, who, for the most part, seem to have held considerably more tantric sensibilities prior to North India’s bhakti movement.56 Plainly, there is no shortage of evidence for a general historical shift from tantric Śaiva-­Śākta religiosity to devotional Vaiṣṇavism in early modern North India; however, there are three important caveats. First, this was a shift, not an erasure. Tantric Śaivism and Śāktism in no way disappeared; rather, generally speaking their role—­especially their public presence—­d iminished and often became subordinate to the ideologies, institutions, and symbols of devotional Vaiṣṇavism. Second, as significant as it was, this shift was in some tension

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with—­a nd cultivated considerably different sensibilities from those promoted within—­another major historical development happening at the same time: the expansion, since roughly 1450, of North India’s military labor market and the related rise in soldiering groups whose religious orientations were more ascetic and in many (though not all) cases distinctly tantric, often Śākta, in nature.57 Third (and as the previous point suggests), this shift toward Vaiṣṇava bhakti was not a universal fact but an incomplete and uneven process, occurring at different times and fashions in different locations and varying in impact among different social strata.58 Very generally, the early modern shift to institutionalized forms of Rām-­or Kṛṣṇa-­focused devotional Vaiṣṇavism seems to have occurred especially among North India’s rulers, aristocracy, brahmans, and merchant class and to have been less widespread among peasant and pastoral castes. In some areas, such as the Western Himalayas, while saguṇ Vaiṣṇava bhakti was taken up by the ruling class, it does not seem to have held much appeal or to have spread widely among the broader populace.59 Even in Braj (the Vrindavan-­ Mathura area), the beating heart of early modern North India’s rising Kṛṣṇa devotional movement, the region’s indigenous peasant and pastoralist inhabitants tended to be excluded from or marginalized within the major Kṛṣṇa bhakti sampradāys and to maintain earlier traditions revolving around the worship of goddesses and nature and the pragmatic services and occult powers offered by locally renowned charismatic ascetics.60 Indeed, the Braj region’s dominant peasant caste, the Jāṭs, seem to have held an “intense hostility” toward, and to have been in active conflict with, the rapidly growing brahmanical Vaiṣṇava (Gauḍīya and Vallabhite) establishments based in the area.61 This is not to say that the spread of bhakti in early modern North India was only an upper-­caste affair or one that served simply “to endear the dominant to the subordinate and thereby justify servitude,” 62 for it occurred at all social levels and, as Kumkum Sangari has shown perhaps better than anyone, it involved the empowering of low castes and women and the subversion of traditional structures of dominance even as it often perpetuated the inequities of status quo caste, class, and gender relations.63 Lower-­caste (peasant, pastoralist, artisan) groups more often participated in nirguṇ-­oriented bhakti communities (e.g., the Sikhs, Dādū ­Panth)64 or less brahmanical, if still saguṇ-­friendly, Vaiṣṇava sects (e.g., the Rāmānandīs).65 Of course, to be a part of the expanding bhakti public of early modern North India did not necessitate formal association with any institutionalized sectarian bhakti community. At the popular level, it could just as easily mean unaffiliated participation in a spreading, transsectarian “vulgate Vaiṣṇava” bhakti ethos, sensibility, and practice—­most especially the singing and remembrance of the divine Name.66 Sectarian devotional communities (patronized especially

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by rulers, wealthy landowners, and merchants) provided institutional nodes crucial for the production and spread of bhakti teachings and manuscripts, but bhakti songs and stories themselves—­embodying and expressing the ethos and sensibility I speak of—­circulated and were performed not only within these institutional settings but in the vast spaces between and around them as well. In making sense of the various dimensions of bhakti’s rise in early modern North India, the trend among Rajputs and other political elites of taking up the symbols and allying with the institutions of saguṇ devotional Vaiṣṇavism (often to the detriment of previous Śaiva-­Śākta loyalties) is particularly important because of the new patronage, prestige, and public visibility it afforded to Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Importantly, these Hindu rulers would not typically have considered the matter as an either-­or choice between tantric Śaiva-­Śākta religion and Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Since the power and appeal of sacrifice-­demanding clan goddesses and the reputations of charismatic tantric yogīs were typically quite localized in nature, rulers often continued to give them a measure of local support that was meant to complement the cosmopolitanism of Vaiṣṇava bhakti, which increasingly came to serve as the more public face of Hindu kingdoms, able to link rulers into a larger empire-­w ide network of shared values and symbols of authority, purity, and virtue. Mahesh Sharma’s work, for example, shows how rulers of the Western Himalayan kingdom of Chambā in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attained “consent-­to-­r ule” from subjects in their core area by appropriating and supporting local symbols and sacred centers linked to goddesses and Nāth yogīs while simultaneously legitimating their authority and fostering “an association with the subcontinental cosmos” by publicly adopting and formally associating themselves with devotional Vaiṣṇavism.67 Even the Kacchvāhās, who were major patrons of bhakti and great devotees of Govindadev (Kṛṣṇa) and Sītā-­Rām, also continued to place themselves under the protection of their tutelary goddess Jamvai-­m ātā and the guardian of the royal territory, the tantric goddess Śilā-­devī.68 As Jason Schwartz has suggested, it seems likely that Śākta tantra was present behind the scenes at several major sites where Vaiṣṇava bhakti was being publicly trumpeted in Mughal India, including the Kacchvāhā court.69 Thus, it appears that some Hindu rulers in Mughal India supported locally esteemed tantric cults of worship or sought out tantric (Śākta) empowerment in private, esoteric settings at the same time that they openly espoused Vaiṣṇava bhakti and publicly displayed its cosmopolitan symbols.70 As the following chapters reveal, North Indian bhakti poets and communities did not view their own devotion in such strategic, political terms and were typically far less accommodating to the religiosity of Śāktas and tantric yogīs.71 The politics of rule, however, necessitated

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a degree of accommodation to all forms of religion, even if Hindu kings in North India were increasingly finding it most strategically advantageous to express their virtue and power through formal association with and patronage of devotional Vaiṣṇavism.

Mughal Imperial Service and Vaiṣṇava Devotion: Ideological Parallels Why this broad shift to Vaiṣṇava bhakti? The influence of devotionally inclined Rajputs like the Kacchvāhās was one crucial factor. As Pinch has remarked, “Love of God (bhakti) itself was not new. But the harnessing of [Vaiṣṇava] bhakti to Mughal imperial expansion, or more precisely, to the widely dispersed Rajput clans . . . ​who provided the lion’s share of the military manpower of the Mughal state, was.”72 Generally speaking, as Orsini and Sheikh propose, it seems that “Vaishnavism offered a devotional vocabulary that did not pose the political threat of royal Shaivism or goddess worship” while also providing “a rather open vocabulary for sectarian interpretation and investment.”73 In fact, it was a constellation of many factors, all of which are not yet fully understood, that led to Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s new popularity in early modern North India. Undoubtedly, one of the most crucial of these factors in the rise of bhakti religiosity in Mughal India was the particular sociopolitical environment inaugurated under Akbar. Just as tantric religiosity emerged in and reflected a certain medieval feudal political environment (as Ronald Davidson has demonstrated),74 bhakti’s rise at this time in North India also must have been related to a resonance between Mughal imperial ideology, with its “patrimonial-­bureaucratic” political structure, and the ideology of Vaiṣṇava devotion. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the birth of a new and “powerful dynastic ideology . . . ​given dramatic public expression in the ceremonial of the imperial court” that “glorified Akbar as the living embodiment of the Empire itself, and focus for the direct personal devotion of the imperial nobility.”75 While the regional sultanates had been structured by horizontal ties (of both marriage and military give-­and-­take), things changed with the Mughals—­ especially under Akbar—­as they successfully “open[ed] up a hierarchical chasm between themselves and those whom they ‘commanded,’ ” in which the emperor was “the single source of political legitimacy and authority.”76 There are fascinating similarities between the devotion, loyalty, and service that Mughal officials gave to the emperor and that offered by Vaiṣṇava bhaktas to God. As Kumkum Chatterjee has stated, “The intensely personal, unquestioning bhakti that

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underlay the phenomenon of Vaishnava devotionalism in northern India during this period, constituted a parallel, at least at the conceptual level, with the cult of devoted imperial service and devotion” to the Mughal emperor.77 She notes, for instance, the striking parallels between the Mughals’ royal ceremonies (such as the custom in which the emperor appeared on the palace balcony to give his darśan, or “viewing,” to gathered subjects) and the daily rituals of bhakti temples (such as the awakening of the deity and its ceremonial darśan by devotees at specific times of the day).78 As John Richards has demonstrated, Akbar and his advisers established “a degree of paramount spiritual authority for the Emperor unprecedented in previous Indo-­Muslim experience,” a glorification of the emperor that “provided a basis for more intense, emotive ties with imperial nobility.”79 This new Mughal system succeeded because it synced with and helped to transform the values of high-­status warrior-­aristocrats like the Rajputs, assisting in a “shift from personal, lineage, or sectarian pride—­that of the ‘free’ warrior chief—­to a more impersonal, imperial pride—­that of the ‘slave’ warrior-­administrator.”80 Intriguingly, this shift would seem to mirror that from tantric paradigms of domination and personal empowerment to devotional paradigms of humble submission, service, and loyalty. During Akbar’s reign, the Rajputs came to support and adhere to the Mughal throne. As Norman Ziegler explains, “This support and loyalty rested primarily upon a basic ‘fit’ between Rajput ideals and aspirations” and the “Mughal policy of support for local rulers, of alliance through marriage, and of granting lands in return for service and allegiance.”81 Rajputs in this period saw loyal service (to a military-­political superior) “as a form of worship, expressed through acts of devotion and self-­sacrifice, which involved both a willingness to support a superior and to offer one’s life in battle in his behalf.”82 Within Mughal imperial culture, honor thus came to be understood in terms of dedicated service and obedience to the emperor and empire while advancement and promotion meant a “movement nearer to the person of the Emperor.”83 Again, this conception of honor as selfless service and obedience, in conjunction with a desire to be near the presence of the emperor, is striking in how closely it mirrors the values of Vaiṣṇava bhakti and the relationship between the devotee and the Divine. Indeed, Ziegler has noted that Rajput bardic traditions often equated Akbar with Rām and understood service to the emperor or his subordinates as no different from service to God (or from service to a local ruler or ṭhākur).84 The association of Akbar with Viṣṇu (especially Rāmcandra) seems to have been quite common. Keśavdās (1555–­1617), the great Brajbhasha poet of Orccha, described Akbar as “dūhū dīn ko sahib (the master of both religions), possessing the attributes of the Hindu god Vishnu.”85 The writings of the Mughal historian and translator Badā’ūnī attest “that the royal court was familiar with the claim

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that Vishnu was Akbar’s divine identity.”86 In the 1580s, Akbar ordered the first full Persian translation of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, while also ordering that coins bearing the image of Rām and Sītā be minted in his realm.87 As Audrey Truschke explains, “Akbar idealized Rama, an avatar of Vishnu’s and the hero of the epic, as a model Indian monarch. Imperially illustrated manuscripts of the translation overtly parallel the two men and suggest what other Sanskrit texts state explicitly: Akbar was another incarnation of Vishnu.”88 Badā’ūnī mentions the introduction of Sanskrit works predicting Akbar’s rise to power as Viṣṇu’s avatar and remarks on how brahmans told the emperor “repeatedly that he had descended to earth, like Ram, Krishna, and other infidel rulers, who, although lords of the world, had taken on human form to act on earth.”89

The Kacchvāhās of Amer and the Growth of Vaiṣṇavism in Vrindavan and Galta Considering the aforementioned parallels between Vaiṣṇava devotional ideals and Mughal imperial values, as well as the popular association—­even identification—­of Akbar with Viṣṇu, it is no wonder that Hindu rulers increasingly forged relationships with Vaiṣṇava devotional institutions during the Mughal period. Yet as interesting and meaningful as these parallels and associations are, we should not construe them as the cause of Hindu rulers’ shift to Vaiṣṇava bhakti. More likely, upwardly mobile Rajputs were increasingly patronizing Vaiṣṇava maṭhas and temples and using Vaiṣṇava devotional idioms because this allowed them to legitimize their rule among a broad, diverse array of communities and to propagate an ideology and an ethic that helped uphold the particular religiopolitical economy in which their dominance was rooted. One of the most important of the relationships between rulers and bhakti communities in early modern North India was that between the Kacchvāhās and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas of Vrindavan in Braj. In the early sixteenth century, just as a new bhakti monastic community was beginning in Galta, a profoundly influential bhakti center was also developing in the region of Braj. This area had long been known as the mythical land of Kṛṣṇa’s youth, but—­largely because of the efforts of the Gauḍīyas (and those of Vallabha and his followers)—­it was now beginning to transform from a sparsely inhabited semiwilderness into a major pilgrimage site and the home of several important devotional communities. Sent by their guru, Caitanya (1486–­1533), the charismatic brahman who began a movement of enthusiastic Kṛṣṇa devotion in Bengal,90 Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmī arrived in Braj circa 1517–­1519 and gradually established sites for the worship of Kṛṣṇa and a literary and theological foundation for the burgeoning

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Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava movement.91 Four other devotees joined Rūpa and Sanātana in Vrindavan, forming a group known as the Six Gosvāmīs,92 who “began to compose treatises in Sanskrit with the intention of providing the movement with a systematic theology based upon authoritative scriptures.”93 In the 1530s, Rūpa built the initial temple of Govindadev, an image of Kṛṣṇa that would soon take on special importance in relation to the Kacchvāhā family. By 1552, the area had developed into an important enough religious destination that Nārāyaṇ Bhaṭṭ saw fit to compose his Vrajabhaktivilāsa (The devotional enjoyments of Braj), the first detailed and systematic itinerary of all the sacred pilgrimage places of Braj.94 This massive text catalogued “every conceivable forest, grove, or ford in the Braj countryside, connecting each with a deity or character in the life of Krishna, and instructing potential visitors about the mantra to be uttered at each place and the time that would be optimal for offering such an utterance.”95 The early bhakti developments at Vrindavan and Galta occurred in the waning years of the Delhi Sultanate—­during the reigns of Sikander Lodi (r. 1488–­ 1517) and his son Ibrahim Lodi (r. 1517–­1526)—­and in the early (pre-­A kbar) years of the Mughal Empire (ca. 1526–­1540). We have seen how the Kacchvāhā king Pṛthvīrāj (r. 1502–­1527) inaugurated an important relationship with the new Rāmānandī bhakti community at Galta. Later Kacchvāhā rulers would play a crucial role in the development of bhakti in Vrindavan, owing largely to their close alliance with the Mughal emperors. In 1562, Akbar and the Kacchvāhā clan forged an alliance that would prove hugely influential, not only for the development of bhakti in North India but also for the long-­term success of the Mughal Empire as a whole. In the first half of the sixteenth century, however, when the bhakti communities of Braj and Galta were in their earliest stages of existence, the Kacchvāhās would have seemed extremely unlikely candidates for such a history-­changing alliance. In March of 1527, Mahārājā Pṛthvīrāj fought under the banner of his father-­ in-­law, Rānā Saṅga (Rānā Singh) of Mewar, against Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, at the Battle of Khanua. Less than a year before, in April 1526, Babur had brought an end to the Lodi dynasty, coming from Central Asia and defeating the last Lodi sultan, Ibrahim, at the Battle of Panipat.96 The Sisodiya clan of Mewar, ruling from the great fortress of Chittor, was the most powerful and prestigious Rajput kingdom in Rajasthan at this time and united the other Rajputs against Babur and the invading Mughals. Babur’s victory over the Rajputs at Khanua would prove critical in consolidating his control over North India and establishing the Mughal Empire. Pṛthvīrāj died just six months after the Battle of Khanua, and following his death a certain amount of turbulence and infighting seems to have ensued in Amer during the short reigns of the Kacchvāhās Pūraṇmal (r. 1527–­1534), Bhīm (r. 1534–­1537), and Ratan Singh (r. 1537–­1547). When Bhārmal Bihārīmal), the fourth son of Pṛthvīrāj, ascended

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the throne in 1547, it marked an important turning point in the history and fortunes of the Kacchvāhā clan. Seven years earlier, in 1540, the Afghan upstart Sher Shāh Surī had expelled Babur’s son and successor, Humāyūn, from India and begun to rule from Delhi. Sher Shāh’s death in 1545 left power in the hands of his son, Islām Shāh Surī. Bhārmal aligned himself with Islām Shāh upon taking the Kacchvāhā throne in 1547. Early in his twenty-­six-­year reign in Amer (1547–­1573), Bhārmal would witness a constantly shifting political landscape. In 1555, Humāyūn returned to power in Delhi (after Islām Shāh’s death), only to die one year later and be succeeded by his young son, Akbar, in 1556. With Akbar but thirteen years old, chaos broke out in the empire as old servants of Sher Shāh Surī’s dynasty moved aggressively to take land from the Mughals. At this time, Rāja Bhārmal of the Kacchvāhās provided valuable assistance that saved the lives of the Mughal garrison under Majnun Khan Qaqshal. Akbar later sent for Bhārmal and rewarded him in Delhi for his loyalty. Abu al-­ Fazl’s Akbarnāma (ii, 69–­70) comments that “the steadiness displayed by [the Kacchvāhās] pleased the lofty glance of His Majesty and he made inquiries about the Rajah [Bhārmal] and told him ‘We will cherish you.’ ”97 It is with this event, and the inauguration of Akbar’s reign as Mughal emperor, that a new chapter in our story begins. When Akbar took control of the Mughal Empire in 1556, the Kacchvāhās of Amer were hardly a power to be reckoned with, even within Rajasthan.98 At this historical moment, they were but one of a number of Rajput kingdoms established in the region, smaller and weaker than Rajput principalities such as Mewar, Marwar, Jaisalmer, and Bikaner.99 In 1562, with his Kacchvāhā kingdom under threat of invasion and annexation by the stronger forces of Mīrzā Muhammad Sharfuddin Husain (Akbar’s governor of Mewat), Bhārmal appealed to Akbar for protection. The emperor was on a pilgrimage from Agra to Ajmer (only about eighty miles from Amer), site of the tomb (dargah) of Khwājā Mu‘īn al-­Dīn Chishtī, the famous founder of the Chishti Sufis, North India’s most popular Sufi order, with whom Akbar was then closely involved. As this important pilgrimage route went directly through Kacchvāhā lands, Bhārmal found it an opportune time to request an audience with the emperor, and at their meeting, hoping to forge a defensive alliance, he offered Akbar his eldest daughter, Hīra Kunwar (sometimes popularly known as Jodhābāī), in marriage.100 Impressed by the Kacchvāhās’ previous show of loyalty to him and his father, among other considerations, Akbar consented, and the two were married on February 6, 1562. Given the official title of Mariam-­uz-­Zamānī (Mary of the Age), the first woman to bridge the Mughal and Kacchvāhā families—­and Akbar’s first Rajput bride—­ would become the mother of his heir, Salīm, the future Jahāngīr. The historical implications of this Mughal-­Kacchvāhā alliance were enormous. While the giving of Hindu princesses in marriage to Muslim kings had

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long been in practice, this particular case “introduced in its effect a complete revolution in the policy of the Muslim monarchy in India” because for the first time such a marriage served as the basis for bringing Hindus—­in this case Rajputs, particularly of the Kacchvāhā lineage—­into the court and the ruling apparatus of the empire.101 After the wedding, Bhārmal’s eldest son, Bhagvantdās, and grandson, Mān Singh (the son of Bhagvantdās), were presented to Akbar and enrolled as nobles in the permanent service of the empire.102 Both Bhagvantdās and Mān Singh would become not only trusted military leaders and governors for the empire but also close friends and allies of Akbar.103 As would many Rajputs after them, the Kacchvāhās swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, agreeing to provide specified numbers of cavalry for service in the imperial forces, and in exchange they were able to keep their ancestral lands, Hindu customs, and clan standing.104 They thus came to exemplify a new political possibility in which regional allies of the Mughal emperor could be simultaneously “loyal servants of the empire and stout defenders of their own regional territories and cultures.”105 The Kacchvāhās would acquire great power, influence, security, and wealth through their imperial service,106 but what made this alliance worthwhile for Akbar? The Rajputs had developed a reputation as heroic and loyal warriors and Akbar knew that he could make good use of them in his campaigns to expand and secure the empire, not to mention that some of his nearest and most troublesome foes (particularly the states of Marwar and Mewar) were in Rajasthan, so having an ally there would stabilize the region while also allowing for ease of communication with Gujarat, which Akbar hoped to annex for its valuable coastal ports. The success of his relationship with the Kacchvāhās of Amer would lead Akbar to make similar alliances with other Rajput kingdoms such as Bikaner and Jaisalmer (in 1570) and later Jodhpur; however, the Kacchvāhās would (with a few hiccups) maintain a particularly large and influential position in the Mughal military and administrative system up until the death of Mīrzā Rāja Jai Singh in 1667.107 Following the alliance between Akbar and the Kacchvāhās, almost immediately changes took place in Mughal policy that substantively affected Hindu religious life. Within the first two years of that history-­changing marriage (1562–­ 1563), Akbar abolished the levying of pilgrimage taxes on Hindus visiting sacred places, granted non-­Muslims permission to repair temples and to build new structures, issued a decree forbidding the forced conversion to Islam of prisoners of war, and permitted Hindus forcibly converted to Islam to return to Hinduism without incurring the death penalty for apostasy prescribed by Islamic law.108 In 1564, in the face of orthodox opposition, he abolished the jizya, the tax—­customary under Islamic law—­levied on non-­Muslims. While these actions were taken partly as a result of Akbar’s increasingly liberal personal

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religious views and partly from the shrewd Mughal political insight that “in a country where the majority of the population was non-­Muslims, it was unwise to rule for the benefit of a few of their coreligionists,”109 we should not discount the likely influence that Akbar’s close relationship with the Kacchvāhās had on these decisions. The importance of this relationship becomes especially evident in the historical records of 1565, when Akbar made a land grant to the officiating priest of the Govindadev temple in Vrindavan.110 This revenue grant seems to be the first awarded by the Mughals to a Hindu priest for support of a temple and, importantly, it was made on behalf of the Kacchvāhā ruler Rāja Bhārmal.111 By 1580, the Mughals had become intimately involved in the religious affairs of Braj, having awarded jāgīr grants to at least seven temples in the region. Contemporary records indicate that Vaiṣṇavas from several different sects in Braj “quite regularly petitioned and lobbied the imperial darbar for the settlement of grievances as well as for additional land and other material grants,” while “imperial farmans suggest that the Mughal establishment played a direct role in appointing and confirming the offices of temple adhikaris and sevaks” of the Gauḍiya Vaiṣṇavas.112 In addition to the Gauḍīyas, the Vallabha sampradāy (Puṣṭi Mārg) in Braj was also a major beneficiary of Mughal patronage, receiving eight land grants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the first one issued in 1577.113 The Puṣṭi Mārg community claims Vallabha—­a renowned brahman scholar, philosopher, and Kṛṣṇa devotee—­as its founder, though it was his son Viṭṭhalnāth (Śrī Gusainjī) who seems to have truly established and expanded its institutional presence, a presence centered especially at the Śrī Nāthjī temple in Govardhan. One early grant of tax-­f ree land to Vallabha’s sampradāy was issued by Akbar’s mother, Hamida Banu Begum, demonstrating that Mughal patronage of Vaiṣṇava institutions was not limited specifically to the patronage of Akbar.114 What was it about Braj and the Kṛṣṇa-­worshipping Vaiṣṇavas there that merited such attention from the Mughals? While a popular local myth holds that Akbar visited Vrindavan in 1573,115 there is no solid nonsectarian evidence of this event (Jahāngīr, however, clearly did visit, in 1620) nor that Akbar held any particular predilection for Kṛṣṇa, even if plentiful evidence (including regular personal conversations with brahmans and yogīs) demonstrates that other Hindu religious traditions intrigued him greatly. Nevertheless, even if Akbar did not visit Vrindavan, he certainly passed by it on numerous occasions, for geographically it was at the very center of his empire. Indeed, the new, well-­kept, and well-­defended highway (built by Sher Shāh Surī) that connected the imperial establishments at Agra and Delhi passed directly through Braj and helped make it a major place of pilgrimage. As a pilgrimage site, Vrindavan was a center of trade and economic activity, and thus its success meant increased commercial

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traffic that translated into revenue for the empire.116 Kumkum Chatterjee has suggested that the Mughals likely saw their “cordial relationships with the Braj-­based Gaudiya [Bengali] Vaishnavas to be a factor that might assist them in” their determined efforts to consolidate their “control over the eastern regions of the subcontinent.”117 In the estimation of R. P. Rana, the Mughal emperors actively fostered the Vaiṣṇava takeover of Braj (through revenue-­f ree land grants) in order to stabilize a key region that was inhabited and bordered by certain rebellious and predatory peasant groups, and thus to establish a geographically strategic center of imperial legitimation wherein the Vaiṣṇava holders of charitable grants “willingly acted as apologists and propagandists” of the Mughal regime.118 Indeed, Richard Eaton’s research on the Sufis of Bijapur suggests that charitable land grants made their recipients beholden to the state, since “the sole compensation owed by the [recipient] for perpetual state support . . . ​was to render unswerving loyalty to the government.”119 Even as tax-­ free land grants potentially secured the political loyalty of Vaiṣṇava bhakti institutions in the key region of Braj, this state support also suggests a Mughal appeal to the larger quotidian populace of devotees supported by these Vaiṣṇava temples and maṭhas, a way for the state to cultivate positive relations with a growing bhakti public that clearly had a certain political power and utility.120 Braj’s location near the heart of Mughal power, its economic value, and its potential strategic role in achieving Mughal political goals all made it an attractive site to support,121 but Akbar’s choice to make Vrindavan the major place at which to demonstrate his liberal, tolerant religious patronage must also have been influenced by the religious leanings of the Kacchvāhās, who had developed close ties with the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas there. In the years since their initial alliance (in 1562), the relationship between Akbar and the Kacchvāhās had become considerably tighter. A number of Akbar’s children had died after birth, and he fretted intensely over the fact that he was without an heir, so when Salīm was born in 1569 from his Kacchvāhā wife (the sister of Bhagvantdās), he was incredibly thankful and was brought even closer to the Kacchvāhās. Furthermore, in 1584, Bhagvantdās cemented the uniquely strong position of the Kacchvāhās at the Mughal court when he married his daughter Mān Bhawati (Mān Kanwar) to Prince Salīm (Jahāngīr), a union that produced Jahāngīr’s first son, the prince Khusrau, in 1587.122 Meanwhile, Mān Singh had quickly become one of Akbar’s most important and trusted leaders.123 The Kacchvāhās may have had a uniquely close relationship with Mughal power under Akbar, but I have not yet made clear how this would have translated into patronage for the burgeoning Kṛṣṇa devotional center of Braj. After all, the Kacchvāhās trace their royal lineage back not to Kṛṣṇa but to Rām, and they adopted a mūrti of Sītā-­Rām as their dynastic deity in the early sixteenth

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century. Nevertheless, it seems that the emergence of Vrindavan (and the greater Braj area) as a center of Kṛṣṇa worship under Caitanya’s Six Gosvāmīs was an event that sent waves across the religious landscape of the time, and the Kacchvāhā rulers had been swept up in this current. Indeed, Rāja Bhārmal’s son and successor, Bhagvantdās (r. 1573–­1589), a close friend and ally of Akbar’s, was allegedly initiated into Caitanya’s Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sect.124 He built the Haridev (Hari Gopālrāy) temple at Govardhan (in Braj), and he was almost certainly very influential in his son Mān Singh’s decision to construct a magnificent new temple on the site of the first Govindadev temple in Vrindavan.125 Begun in 1576 and completed in 1590, the new Govindadev temple was the largest built in North India since the twelfth century and was made from the red sandstone preferred by Mughals for their imperial construction projects, combining Hindu and Muslim architectural styles.126 Mān Singh’s temple represented “the centerpiece in the [Mughal] royal patronage of Braj”127 and simultaneously served as “the symbol of Kachavāhā glory.”128 While it was especially the Kacchvāhās of Amer (who were of the Rajawat branch of the Kacchvāhā clan) who offered patronage toward bhakti institutions in Braj, other Kacchvāhās did so as well. Notably, a chief of the Shekhavat Kacchvāhā lineage by the name of Raisal Darbari is credited with founding the temple of Gopīnāth in Vrindavan.129 David Haberman has written that “the development of Braj was clearly inspired by charismatic Vaishnava leaders such as Chaitanya, Vallabha, and others, and was carried out by their diligent followers; but much of the early success in the physical development of Braj was insured by imperial patronage resulting from political compromise which recognized the vital service important Hindu officers were rendering the Mughal emperor Akbar.”130 This is certainly true, but, as previously pointed out, it was not just any Hindu officers whom Akbar sought to recognize and reward in the giving of land grants to temples in Vrindavan; it was specifically and especially the Kacchvāhās. As Horstmann notes, “The Kacchavāhā munificence is visible everywhere in Braj. The Kacchavāhās’ attachment to the sacred land of Kṛṣṇa became, in acts of political and religious symbolism, converted into a visible inventory, and the grants which the family made perpetuated their dynastic presence.”131 The Kacchvāhās thus furthered their own interests, legitimacy, and public image at the same time they contributed to the growth of bhakti as an institutional form of religion across North India. Without the powerful presence of the Kacchvāhās in the Mughal court, Vrindavan may not have received the measure of patronage it did, and without that patronage Vrindavan would likely not have become as vibrant a bhakti religious center as it did, nor attained its importance so quickly. Kacchvāhā and Mughal patronage was, of course, not limited to Braj. The burgeoning bhakti community at Galta also received significant attention and

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patronage during Akbar’s reign. Galta was situated just miles from the Kacchvāhā court at Amer and lay just above the Mughal imperial road to Agra and Akbar’s capital at Fatehpur Sikri; thus, its location alone made it an important and attractive site for patronage. As Hawley puts it, “Both literally and metaphorically, Galtā in the late sixteenth century straddled the terrain on which the great new Mughal axis intersected with earlier forms of regional power that the Kachvahas had exercised.”132 Documentary evidence confirms that Akbar gave a revenue grant to the Galta Rāmānandīs, a fact suggestive of the prominent position Galta had attained by the start of the seventeenth century.133 We know that since the early decades of the sixteenth century, when Pṛthvīrāj became the disciple of Kṛṣnadās Payahārī, the Kacchvāhās had supported the Rāmānandīs at Galta. Unfortunately, the documentary record for relations between Galta and the Kacchvāhās is quite sparse until the time of Savāī Jai Singh II (r. 1700–­1743). Nevertheless, Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī (1712)—­though a sectarian work that cannot be fully trusted as a historical document—­speaks to this important relationship in telling a story in which Rāja Mān Singh visits Galta in order to pay homage to the great Rāmānandī rasik bhakta Agradās (a disciple of Payahārī’s) and another in which Mān Singh meets and “abases himself before” Kīlhadev (Payahārī’s successor).134 Furthermore, we know that Kīlhadev (the mahant of Galta for roughly the second half of the sixteenth century) had two Hanumān temples built in Galta prior to 1600,135 which very likely would have required Kacchvāhā financial support, while Nārāyaṇdās, the mid-­ seventeenth-­century abbot, oversaw the building of the two great temples of Gopāl-­jī and Raghunāth-­jī in Galta, along with Galta’s water architecture and gardens.136 These latter construction projects, huge in scope, took place during the reign of Mīrzā Jai Singh I (r. 1622–­1667)137 in Amer, and it is almost certain that they were funded by Kacchvāhā patronage with the aim of making the Galta complex “part of the symbolic apparatus of regnal power.”138 Since the maṭhas and temples of Vaiṣṇava communities like the Rāmānandīs, Vallabhites, and Gauḍīyas owned and developed land (for which they must have employed local laborers) and also served as centers of economic activity (bazaars, trading posts, etc.), in patronizing them the Kacchvāhās and Mughals were supporting the economic and agrarian development and political integration of their realms while also gaining “dependents” who would, in some sense, represent and disseminate their royal authority. Although the focus here is on developments during the foundational period of Akbar’s rule, it is important to mention that the succession of Jahāngīr to the Mughal throne did not substantially alter the firmly established alliance with the Kacchvāhās, nor did it greatly affect imperial religious policy. As Asher and Talbot state, “In both his own attitudes and in the

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state’s practices, Jahāngīr for the most part continued along the lines set by Akbar. Jahāngīr not only maintained earlier grants given to temples, mosques, and religious leaders of all kinds, but he even increased their number considerably.”139 Rajeev Kinra adds that “[Jahāngīr’s] court was essentially just as accommodating, and just as interested in fostering cosmopolitan pluralism, as it had been under his father.”140 Similarly, when Jahāngīr was succeeded by his son, Shāh Jahān, in 1627, there were no major breaks in previous policies. While Shāh Jahān (r. 1627–­1658) took a much more traditional posture toward Islam, seeking to be seen as a devout Muslim in his public persona and curtailing the construction of new Hindu and Jain temples, he nevertheless “maintained the sponsorship of religious institutions and people that his father and grandfather instituted; here, there was no change in policy.”141

R

In many respects, bhakti spread across North India as a popular movement based in communal devotional song and storytelling; nevertheless, we can see that the institutions of sectarian bhakti communities, which became increasingly prominent beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, relied especially upon the patronage of merchants, landowning nobles, princes, and emperors. In this context the Kacchvāhās played a key role, for they influenced the Mughal court’s patronage of Vaiṣṇava devotional communities, they patronized these communities themselves, and—­in the profile and success they achieved working within the Mughal Empire—­they served as models of behavior for other aspiring Rajputs, who, partly through them, came to see Vaiṣṇava bhakti as an essential element in the projection of royal virtue and power. Particularly influential in this regard was the Kacchvāhā king and great Mughal general Mān Singh. In a variety of ways, Mān Singh (r. 1589–­1614) was truly critical to the Mughal project under Akbar. Battling and subduing other Rajput rulers, he helped the Mughals gain fuller control over Rajasthan; his military victories in Gujarat secured a vital transportation route connecting the Mughal heartland with the ports of the Arabian Sea; he led successful military campaigns for Mughal conquest in Bihar, Orissa, and Bengal; and he served as the governor of three administrative provinces (Kabul, Bihar, and Bengal), proving especially essential to the consolidation of Mughal rule in eastern India. By 1605, he had earned the highest rank of any noble besides the emperor’s own sons. Mān Singh patronized the construction of Hindu temples all over the empire, including Rajasthan, Braj, Banaras, Bihar, and Orissa. Catherine Asher remarks that “the temples patronized by Rājā Māna Siṃha span a larger geographical area and outnumber those of any other premodern patron.”142 While most of his

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patronage went to Vaiṣṇava bhakti institutions, he mirrored the political savvy and active religious accommodation of Akbar in also patronizing some Śaiva and Śākta temples, as well as a mosque and a Sufi shrine.143 In terms of the Mughal architectural landscape, Mān Singh’s influence was not simply in the sponsoring of temples but of specifically devotional temples that were newly formatted to provide space in which crowds could assemble multiple times a day for darśan of—­“visual communion” with—­t he divine image. His patronage was thus instrumental in accommodating the popular shift from individual to congregational worship that was occurring with the rise of bhakti.144 Furthermore, through the temples he sponsored, Mān Singh led the way in developing a distinctly Mughal-­Rajput religio-­aesthetic idiom, for his temples displayed Mughal presence and power even as they asserted a Rajput identity and Vaiṣṇava devotional values.145 A contemporary poet praised Mān Singh as “the maintainer of Akbar’s prestige,” almost certainly “alluding in part to his role in spreading imperial Mughal taste.”146 It was not only his patronage of architecture that expressed and extended Mughal prestige but also his sponsorship of painting and written literature. Indeed, “the earliest known examples of the Rajput school of painting come from a garden house in Bairat believed to have been built for Man Singh in 1587 CE.”147 In tune with the Persianate book-­manuscript culture of the time, Mān Singh also patronized and collected written works in Sanskrit, Brajbhasha, and Rajasthani.

Mughal Manuscript Culture and the Explosion of Written Bhakti Literature Mughal court culture was heavily Persianate and had imbibed Islamic traditions that placed great value in books, honoring them as marks of culture and repositories of knowledge, even as embodiments of sacred power.148 In this milieu, manuscripts became an index of wealth and sophistication. The work of Tyler Williams is especially illuminating on this topic. As Williams explains, in Mughal-­Rajput court culture, “written manuscripts formed a type of currency in the rhetoric of kingship and nobility, and also served as a material currency of monetary wealth. A manuscript held value both as a symbol of participation in the elite culture of the empire, as well as an object that could be assigned a specific monetary value.”149 Akbar’s imperial court commissioned, collected, and maintained an abundance of manuscripts, which “were central to both the rituals of the court and to symbolic exchanges of power among the Mughal nobility, including Hindu manṣabdārs like the Rajput kings of Rajasthan.

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Consequently, their courts also began to devote substantial attention and resources to the production and collection of manuscripts.”150 Mān Singh is known to have collected manuscripts and patronized written works in Sanskrit, Brajbhasha, and Rajasthani. He established the Kacchvāhās’ own royal pothīkhānā, “which was not only a library but also [an] atelier for the production of fine, embellished manuscripts.”151 Under Mān Singh’s rule, a new interest in manuscript culture emerged at the Kacchvāhā court that would grow further under Mīrzā Jai Singh (r. 1621–­1667), who was a great patron and collector of literature and who “employed no less a poet than the famous Bihārīlāl, whose compositions incorporated both Krishna-­related devotional themes and the literary motifs of the ascendant rīti tradition.”152 Allison Busch’s work suggests that it was not only the Kacchvāhās but also most Rajput courts of the Mughal period that were “actively transmitting literature, scholarship, and historical records through manuscripts.”153 This new Mughal-­Rajput literary culture and patronage milieu was vital in spurring the production of written works among bhakti communities that sought to gain prestige, power, and financial support. Indeed, a number of scholars have observed that, beginning around 1600, there was an explosion of written vernacular literary activity in North India, particularly in bhakti religious communities.154 The abundance of manuscripts of bhakti songs that begins to appear in late sixteenth-­century Mughal India is remarkable in that, prior to this point, vernacular bhakti compositions in North India seem to have circulated almost exclusively through oral transmission and performance.155 While today there are thousands of North Indian vernacular (Hindavi) bhakti manuscripts extant from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, one would have an extremely difficult time finding any before the late sixteenth century. This shift was likely connected to the value placed on written manuscripts (and paintings) in the newly developing Mughal-­Rajput cultural context.156 Williams’s research indicates that among bhakti communities in Mughal India, manuscripts of devotional compositions came to be thought of as possessing a certain metaphysical power, therefore producing and donating them was a practice believed to generate spiritual merit, while the power they contained made them valuable objects in exchanges with the ruling elite as well as with laity and other monastic communities.157 In early modern North India, it was increasingly the case that a devotional community needed to produce some type of written literature for it “to have visibility among Mughal and Rajput political elites.”158 In addition to these emerging conceptions of the written text among North India’s bhakti communities, the conditions of relative social stability, peace, and prosperity in the Kacchvāhā heartlands must also have been a key factor engendering the production and circulation of bhakti literature.159 With this in mind, it is striking to note how many of our earliest extant North Indian

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bhakti sources come out of regions of Kacchvāhā (or Mughal-­Kacchvāhā) control or influence: the Fatehpur Sūrdās manuscript (1582); the vast literature of the Dādū Panth, including Jan Gopāl’s Janma Līlā, the Sarvāṅgīs of Rajabdās (1620) and Gopāldās (1627), the Pañc-­vāṇī collections (of the bhakti poetry of Dādū, Kabīr, Nāmdev, Raidās, and Hardās) (the earliest manuscript of which dates to 1614), and Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl (1660); the writings of the early Rāmānandīs, including Agradās’s Dhyān Mañjarī (and twelve other compositions) (ca. 1570–­1590), Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl (ca. 1600), and Anantadās’s parcaīs (ca. 1580–­1610); and the works of Nandadās, Harirām Vyās, and others in the Kṛṣṇa-­worshipping communities of Braj. The larger point with regard to bhakti and Mughal manuscript culture is simply this: beginning in the seventeenth century, the devotee members of North India’s bhakti public were increasingly connected not only through the circulation of oral discourse but also through the circulation of manuscripts, tangible material forms of bhakti discourse produced in and by bhakti communities as markers of identity and legitimacy and as important forms of symbolic capital in transactions of religious and political power.160 Through the lens of the Kacchvāhā clan, this chapter has shown how the rise of Vaiṣṇava bhakti in early modern North India occurred in a new and distinctly Mughal-­Rajput cultural and political context. In Akbar’s India, aesthetic practice and political power were inextricably intertwined. The Kacchvāhās patronized literature, architecture, and painting in accordance with protocols of Mughal court culture and thereby made a public claim to be men of cultivation and power. The Kacchvāhās did not simply imitate Mughal court culture but played a key part in carving out a Mughal idiom in which Rajputs could articulate an empowered self-­identity closely associated with Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Allison Busch has highlighted the fact that “courtliness in India was in part an imitative behavior, which is to say that courts responded to what other courts were doing, particularly those that were higher in status.”161 This is certainly the case with the Kacchvāhās, whose rise to wealth and power under Mughal rule made their behavior a model to be emulated by other regional Hindu rulers. The implications this had for the growth of devotional Vaiṣṇavism were significant. To take just one example, let us look to the city of Orchha in the late sixteenth century, where the Bundelā ruler Madhukar Shāh seems to have severed his kingdom’s affiliation with tantric goddess worship and adopted Vaiṣṇava bhakti. As Heidi Pauwels explains, Madhukar’s decision “may well have represented a desire to partake in a new prestigious form of religion. Bhakti had become associated with other successful Rajput rulers in Rajasthan, such as Mān Singh Kacchvāhā, and thus may have been perceived as setting a trend for the socially and politically upwardly mobile elsewhere, like Madhukar in Orchha.”162 Again stressing the Vaiṣṇava bhakti–­linked model of success that the Kacchvāhās had become, Pauwels goes on to say that “Madhukar’s bhakti could . . . ​be viewed

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as a way of carving out a different, more progressive identity for himself,” one “inspired by the success of other upwardly mobile Rajputs, in particular the Kacchvahas.”163 Throughout Mughal India, then, Vaiṣṇava bhakti was increasingly coming to serve as a way for Hindu rulers and aspiring warlords and rulers to acquire and express political power and legitimacy. In focusing on the Kacchvāhās, my intention has not been to reduce the complex array of social and historical forces that engendered the bhakti movement in North India to functions of Kacchvāhā influence. Rather, I have stressed the particularly important role played by this Rajput clan as a way to understanding a larger historical context in which new forms of courtliness and statehood initiated under the Mughal emperor Akbar allowed for the emergence of a bhakti-­centered model for the expression of Rajput-­Hindu virtue and power. Having provided a general understanding of the Mughal-­Rajput sociopolitical context in which bhakti rose to prominence, I turn in the next chapter to a study of the early Rāmānandī bhakti community at Galta. Tied to the Kacchvāhās seemingly from the beginning, the early Galta Rāmānandīs offer a number of key insights into the nature of bhakti in early modern North India and its changing relationship with tantric religious traditions.

R

With the next chapter we begin part 2 of the book. From what has thus far been a broad, thematically focused history, based on a novel engagement with—­a new interpretation and organization of—­a vast array of scholarly literature, we shift to a more fine-­grained study (of a specific group of Mughal-­era bhaktas and yogīs) based on original, primary-­source research. Chapters 4 through 6 focus on the Rāmānandī bhakti community of early modern North India, a close examination of which reveals a great deal about the development of and dynamics at play in North India’s larger bhakti movement. Through this case study of the Rāmānandīs, these chapters explain the emergence of a distinctive early modern bhakti sensibility and explore the relationships between bhakti, tantric religiosity, and yoga in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century North India.

Part II Yogīs, Poets, and a New Bhakti Sensibility in Mughal India

4

Between Bhakti and Śakti Religious Sensibilities Among the Rāmānandīs of Galta

A

s you make your way on the winding stone path leading down the mountainside away from Jaipur and into the narrow valley that cradles the five-­hundred-­year-­old Vaiṣṇava monastic community of Galta, you pass a small and rather curious shrine dedicated to none other than the tantric god Bhairava—­that is, Śiva in his most terrifying, violent, and transgressive form.1 This tiny shrine, the Albelā Bhairav Bābā Temple, houses an ancient natural image of Bhairava—­a large smooth stone, now covered in orange paint. Bhairava Śiva’s presence as protector of a Vaiṣṇava stronghold like Galta is not necessarily unusual, but the characteristics of this particular Bhairava are certainly noteworthy. While Bhairava is commonly worshipped with alcohol or animal sacrifice, this image would never allow its purity to be sullied with such things and instead receives a daily offering of tulsi, the sacred basil plant linked specifically to Viṣṇu. Skulls, snakes, fearsome weapons, and the other staples of Bhairava’s iconography are nowhere to be seen, for this Bhairava is vegetarian, supremely peaceful, and known most especially as the friend, partner, and devotee-­protector of the monkey god Hanumān.2 In many ways this “Vaiṣṇavized” Bhairava mūrti supplies a fitting introduction to Galta, the site of a Rāmānandī community that played a major role in bhakti’s domestication, devotionalization, and, in some instances, supplanting of tantric Śaiva and Śākta traditions in early modern North India. Indeed, this curious Bhairava shrine may offer us insights into the Rāmānandī community begun by Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī in the early sixteenth century, a community that exalted Vaiṣṇava devotion above all else. The Rāmānandīs criticized and competed against the Nāth yogīs, but they also maintained close links with certain aspects of the

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practice and lifestyle of these Śaiva tantric ascetics, links seen especially in the mediating figure of Hanumān. This chapter, then, focuses on the Rāmānandī bhakti sampradāy, particularly the lineage of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī at Galta outside modern-­day Jaipur, in order to analyze several developments that were characteristic of the early modern North Indian religious sphere. As a bhakti movement spread across Mughal India, a major expansion and blossoming of Vaiṣṇava devotional forms occurred, often at the expense of Śaiva-­Śākta religion, a phenomenon that took place at the level of both royal patronage and popular practice. Linked to this trend of “Vaiṣṇavization” was an increasingly noticeable confrontation between the perspective of tantric-­yogic asceticism and that of selfless, emotional devotion to a personal God. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, while yoga and asceticism remained crucial dimensions of the devotional life for many, a number of other bhaktas began to conceive their religious behavior as quite apart from that of yogīs, ascetics, and, most especially, tāntrikas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the growth of sedentary bhakti communities focused on monastery and temple life and the production of written literature, this trajectory only continued and intensified. My aim in this chapter and the next is to contextualize and describe the emergence of a new early modern bhakti sensibility and to improve our understanding of the relationships between bhakti, tantric religiosity, and yoga in North India during this period. I complicate, deconstruct, and reconstruct modern categories of bhakta, tāntrika, and yogī, shifting their boundaries and shedding light on their areas of overlap and interaction as well as their key points of tension and difference. This chapter also seeks answers to a few concrete questions, deceptively simple in appearance: Who were the early Rāmānandīs? What was the nature of the bhakti they practiced? And what was their relationship with tantric ascetics like the Nāth yogīs? I address these questions through an examination of the early Rāmānandī community at Galta and its historical roots, thereby laying the critical groundwork for a discussion of the emergence of a new, self-­conscious bhakti sensibility defined in significant part against the figure of the tantric yogī. I begin this chapter by examining the remembered life of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, particularly his relations with the Nāth yogīs, in order to demonstrate an emerging Vaiṣṇava confrontation with Śaiva-­Śākta religion in North India, while also providing perspective on the bhakti movement’s complex relationship with the separate but interrelated traditions of tantra and yoga. The next section demonstrates how, in hagiographical descriptions of Payahārī’s lineage of disciples, we see clear evidence of the existence of two different but related bhakti paths among the Rāmānandīs, one more yogic and tapas oriented, the other more

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devotional, literary, and rasa oriented. This leads to a critical discussion of the scholarly category of bhakti in which I consider how the case of the early Rāmānandī bhaktas suggests revisions to our modern-­d ay conceptions of the term. After exploring the historical roots and heritage of the Rāmānandīs at Galta, I conclude the chapter with a look at how the figure of Hanumān helps us better understand the character of the early Rāmānandī community.

Payahārī and Tārānāth at Galta A tale from sixteenth-­century Rajasthan sets the stage for my examination of Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s early modern confrontation with Śaiva-­Śākta religion. The story begins in Amer with the Kacchvāhā ruler Mahārāj Pṛthvīrāj (r. 1503–­1527).3 Pṛthvīrāj seems to have initially been a follower and patron of the Nāth yogīs. He is said to have been a disciple of the Nāth yogī Tārānāth, who resided in the strategic location of Galta. Tucked away in a narrow valley in the (once) densely forested hills just outside present-­day Jaipur, a hot and arid region not far from Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, Galta offered privacy, protection, and scenic beauty, as well as a natural source of fresh running water in the form of an underground spring. According to legend, this natural spring is none other than the holy Gaṅgā (Ganges River), herself come down from the heavens in response to the great tapas and devotion of the legendary ṛṣi Gālav, the namesake and ancient mythical inhabitant of Galta. Tradition has it that one of Pṛthvīrāj’s queens, Bālānbāī, was a disciple of the Rāmānandī guru Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, who was a grand-­disciple of Rāmānand himself. The queen faced constant pressure from her husband, the king, to abandon her guru and become a disciple of Tārānāth. When she reported this situation to her guru, Payahārī—­who had been engaged in the performance of devotional asceticism at the great Rajasthani tīrtha of Pushkar—­he immediately made his way to Galta, where he chose a spot, sat down, and began meditating. Noticing the stranger in their midst, some of the Nāth yogīs approached Payahārī, challenged his presence there, and demanded that he leave. Rather than leave altogether, Payahārī stood up, wrapped his dhūnī (an ascetic’s sacred fire) in a bundle of clothing, and simply moved to another place nearby, where he set the still-­burning fire on the ground and sat back down. Miraculously, the clothes in which he had wrapped the dhūnī did not catch fire. Seeing this, the Nāths realized that Payahārī possessed extraordinary power and went directly to their guru, Tārānāth, to tell him about the visitor. In the confrontation that ensued, Tārānāth used his yogic powers to take the form of a tiger and began growling ferociously in the direction of Payahārī,

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seeking to frighten him away. Unperturbed, Payahārī began to feed the tiger the flesh of his very own leg, but, unsatisfied, the fearsome beast inched closer and continued to roar, seemingly intent on devouring Payahārī. Several more times Payahārī offered up his own flesh, but each time the tiger ate it only to continue growling and moving closer.4 Finally, with the tiger about to pounce upon him, Payahārī exclaimed, “What a jackass [gadhā] you are!”5 At the precise moment Payahārī said these words, Tārānāth was transformed from a tiger into a donkey, and his Kānphaṭa earrings (mudrā) fell from his ears onto the ground in front of Payahārī.6 Having sent the cowardly donkey off into the surrounding forest, Payahārī entered a nearby cave and began to meditate. It was Mahārāj Pṛthvīrāj’s habit that he would not eat before taking the vision (darśan) of his guru, Tārānāth. Searching for him at Galta, Pṛthvīrāj came upon Payahārī in his cave and inquired as to the whereabouts of his missing guru. Payahārī said to the king, “Your guru has become a donkey and is out grazing grass” and explained what had happened. Incredulous at first, when Pṛthvīrāj saw his guru’s earrings lying on the ground, he realized that Payahārī was speaking the truth. Putting the dust of Payahārī’s feet upon his forehead, he bowed before him, saying, “Prabhu, forgive my guru’s crime; please restore him to his earlier form!” Payahārī replied, “I will make him human again, but only on these two conditions: that the Nāths must leave this place and go somewhere else and that every day they must bring me wood so I can keep my dhūnī continuously burning.” Once Tārānāth had been restored to his human form, both he and the king accepted Payahārī’s conditions. Mahārāj Pṛthvīrāj became Payahārī’s disciple, and Galta thereafter became an important Rāmānandī center.7 Regardless of the historical fact or fiction of the confrontation between Payahārī and Tārānāth, this story seems to reflect a change of genuine historical significance in the early sixteenth century. At that time the bhakti community that would come to be known as the Rāmānandīs defeated the Nāths at Galta, whether through debate8 or physical force, and took control of that strategic location. Moreover, Mahārāj Pṛthvīrāj and the Kacchvāhās shifted their primary patronage and allegiance from the Nāth yogīs to Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and the Rāmānandī bhaktas. Pṛthvīrāj adopted the two images that Payahārī had brought with him to Galta—­Nṛsiṃha and Sītārām (which became the dynastic deity of the Kacchvāhās)—­a nd installed them both in Amer,9 inaugurating a period of more than three-­hundred years in which the Kacchvāhās would remain closely affiliated with Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl (ca. 1600) corroborates this picture of Pṛthvīrāj, extolling him as a great patron of Vaiṣṇavas.10 This early sixteenth-­century episode in Galta is indicative of the beginning of an important broader trend in North India. It points toward the expanding

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sphere of Vaiṣṇava bhakti religiosity and its historical confrontation with, and gradual social and political marginalization of, the sphere of Śaiva tantric asceticism and occult power represented most prominently by the ubiquitous Nāth yogīs. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries references to the Nāth yogīs began to appear in a wide array of Indian literary sources, attesting that they had come to possess real social influence.11 The rather amorphous group of yogīs known as the Nāths had roots especially in an unorthodox and noninstitutional stream of the larger tradition of tantric Śaivism that had been India’s preeminent religious form since roughly the seventh century. Complementing the role of orthodox tantric priests in temples and palaces, siddhas and tantric yogīs of the early medieval period were experts in magic and bodily power who frequented both cemeteries and royal courts, acting as village healers and shamans while also serving as the agents, counselors, and bards of kings.12 Heirs to this tradition of heterodox, nonsectarian siddhas and yogīs, and with close links to the tantric tradition of Kaula Śaivism as well, the Nāths seem to have first come to prominence in about the thirteenth century, especially in the Deccan region. In the wake of the changes brought on by the Persianate Turkish military conquest and political takeover, they developed an influential presence throughout much of the subcontinent, probably not as an organized, coherent transregional “Nāth” community but as disparate yogī lineages following different local traditions. With Sultanate rule spreading, institutional public forms of tantric religion dying out, and other forms of the tantric tradition retreating into esoteric (often socially elite) private cults that were otherworldly in focus, the tantric Nāth yogīs emerged as leading providers of a path offering real, pragmatic, and accessible power in the world. As David Gordon White remarks, “For the masses, as well as for kings whose concerns were often more this-­ worldly than those of Brahman metaphysicians, the Nāths and many of their fellow Siddhas became the supernatural power brokers” of the day.13 However, as we move into the sixteenth century and the early modern period, the role of these Nāth yogīs was being challenged, for the Hindu religious world of North India was changing in major ways with the emergence of Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities like the Rāmānandīs. The Payahārī legend at Galta can be understood as a historical remembrance of the emergence of an increasingly close relationship between bhakti communities and royal power, a shift in state opinion about what form of religion was considered most sociopolitically advantageous to support and patronize. For many Hindu rulers in North India in the sixteenth century and later, tantric models and legitimations of kingship—­with the niches and opportunities they had created for both orthodox tantric brahmans and heterodox siddhas and yogīs—­no longer promised the political dividends they once had. From the

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instrumental perspective of the state, patronage of bhakti was starting to make more and more sense.14 Although in an earlier period tantric occultists and yogīs may have been key advisers to and agents of Hindu kings, with the sociopolitical changes brought on by the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and the rise of bhakti in North India, it was the Vaiṣṇava gods Kṛṣṇa and Rām—­a nd devotion to them—­that came to be considered most powerful in realizing the this-­worldly goals of the Hindu king and state.15 In the historical memory of many Hindus, it seems that these shifts in the religiopolitical landscape were catalyzed especially by the efforts of charismatic devotee-­saints like Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and those in his Rāmānandī lineage.

Payahārī and Vaiṣṇava Conversions in the Kullu Valley Interestingly, the story from Galta is not the only mention of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī’s name in connection with a major conversion to Vaiṣṇavism. Local tradition in the Kullu Valley of the lower Himalayan range strongly links Payahārī to Rājā Jagat Singh’s conversion from Śaiva-­Śākta religion to Rām bhakti in the mid-­ seventeenth century. Jagat Singh is usually recognized as the most powerful king in the entire history of Kullu, and tradition remembers his most remarkable deed as the installation of the mūrti of Raghunāthjī (brought from Ayodhya) and the introduction of Vaiṣṇavism in Kullu.16 As archaeological evidence makes clear, prior to Jagat Singh’s reign, Śaivism was the state religion in Kullu.17 Before Jagat Singh, the Goddess had been worshipped in Kullu and kings had paid great respect to the Nāth yogīs, so much so that they would not take anything for themselves until they had paid a visit to these Śaiva tantric ascetics and offered them homage, food, and gifts.18 Indeed, local oral tradition has it that Rājā Jagat Singh’s guru was initially none other than Tārānāth, the same yogī who played a starring role as the loser in the story of the confrontation with Payahārī at Galta.19 All this changed, however, when Jagat Singh converted to Vaiṣṇavism through the influence of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī. There are several versions of the story, but the core legend is that Jagat Singh needed help to absolve himself of a great sin. His Nāth guru’s tantric powers had proven ineffective in this task, thus the king approached Payahārī, who was meditating in a nearby mountain cave. Payahārī advised the king that he should have the image of Raghunāthjī brought from Ayodhya and should abdicate the state to Rām (Raghunāthjī) and thereafter rule the kingdom as merely the agent of the Lord.20 Legends aside, two inscriptions, one of 1650 and the other 1656, confirm that Jagat Singh introduced Vaiṣṇavism as the state religion, consigned his kingdom to Rāma, and then acted as a tutelary ruler, as did his successors.21

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Jagat Singh ruled Kullu from 1637 to 1672, and thus he surely could not actually have been in contact with Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, who founded the Vaiṣṇava monastic community at Galta in the early 1500s. Nevertheless, to this day carefully guarded and worshipped in the royal palace at Kullu are footwear and a tattered garment allegedly belonging to Payahārī.22 Furthermore, not far from Kullu, in the mountain village of Jhiri, just a mile or so outside Naggar, is the cave where Payahārī is said to have resided as well as a temple dedicated to him that also claims to have some of his earthly possessions in its safekeeping. Despite the chronological impossibility of a meeting between Payahārī and Jagat Singh, the tradition linking these two figures is clearly strong, and it is not merely local. In fact, it was significant enough that Priyādās, dwelling in Vrindavan, included a story about Payahārī and the Kullu king in his Bhaktirasabodhinī (1712), a commentary on Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl.23 In commenting on Nābhādās’s verses about Payahārī, Priyādās writes that the rājā of Kullu was witness to the fact that Payahārī never asked for anything in return from those he blessed (“those whose head Payahārī put his hands upon, he never spread his hands beneath theirs”). According to Priyādās, the king came to take Payahārī’s darśan in a mountain cave and Payahārī filled him with such bhakti that his only desire was to do service to Hari and the saints. In fact, the king’s devotion was so strong that when his own son mistakenly ate a sweet that was to be offered to God, he took up his sword to kill the boy, and those around had to rush to his rescue. Priyādās explains that this young Kullu prince later became a great devotee unequaled in the honor of the saints. Precisely how and why Payahārī was linked to a king in mid-­seventeenth-­century Kullu—­a place and time quite removed from his early sixteenth-­century community in eastern Rajasthan—­is something of a mystery, but this connection suggests a powerful and pervasive collective memory of Payahārī as a charismatic figure pivotal in effecting Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s supplanting of Śaivism and Śāktism in North India.

Vaiṣṇava-­Nāth Encounters in Panjab The memory of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī’s influence as a Vaiṣṇava saint and missionary is one that extends even beyond Galta and the Kullu Valley. A fascinating tale links Payahārī, through his supposed disciple Bhagvān-­jī, to the defeat of Nāth yogīs in the hills of Panjab and to the subsequent spread of Vaiṣṇavism in that area. According to the tradition of Pindori Dhām, a major Rāmānandī center in the Gurdaspur district of Panjab, the young Bhagvān-­jī met Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī at Galta while on a pilgrimage. Payahārī is said to have converted him to Vaiṣṇavism and made him his disciple.24 Goswamy and

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Grewal suggest that “it was probably with an eye on spreading the doctrine of Vaishnavism to the Punjab Hills which then owed almost exclusive allegiance to Shaivism or Shaktism that Shri Krishnadas Payahari induced Bhagwanji to make the district of Gurdaspur as the base of his activity.”25 Indeed, the Pindori gaddī founded by Bhagvān-­jī seems to have served just this historical role, for evidence shows that he and his successors at Pindori and its offshoots successfully spread the Vaiṣṇava bhakti message in the previously Śaiva-­Śākta-­dominated Panjabi hills, winning the allegiance of numerous hill chiefs, including the rulers of the states of Nurpur, Guler, Chamba, Jaswan, Mankot, Bandralta, and Jammu.26 According to tradition, after being initiated by Payahārī, Bhagvān-­jī returned to the Panjabi hills, where he encountered a group of Nāth yogīs residing in the dense forests of Pindori near the Beas River. Defeating them in a battle of miraculous powers, Bhagvān-­jī forced the yogīs to flee the site, where he then established the Rāmānandī community that remains there today as one of the fifty-­t wo Vaiṣṇava dvārās (“gateways” to the Lord; i.e., recognized initiatory centers/lineages).27 Not only is Bhagvān-­jī remembered as the disciple of Payahārī in these tales, but the story itself also bears striking similarities to Payahārī’s own legend in Galta.28 As in that episode, there is here a “miracle battle” with Nāth yogīs in which the Vaiṣṇava bhakta triumphs over the Śaiva tāntrikas, forces them to leave, and establishes his bhakti community directly on the site where they had been. While Bhagvān-­jī is remembered to have defeated a group of Nāth yogīs residing at Pindori in order to establish the Rāmānandī center there, the full story of Bhagvān and the Pindori community suggests a closer and more complex relationship between the Nāths and the Rāmānandī Vaiṣṇava ascetics. Tradition attributes Bhagvān-­jī’s birth to a blessing given to his elderly father Totārām by none other than Tārānāth, the very same Nāth yogī said to have battled Payahārī in Galta.29 Richard Burghart states that it was actually Tārānāth who led the group of Nāth yogīs that Bhagvān-­jī defeated at Pindori, implying that after his defeat at the hands of Payahārī at Galta, Tārānāth shifted locations to Pindori, only to then be ousted once again, this time by Payahārī’s supposed disciple.30 This seems extremely unlikely; however, historical factuality is rather irrelevant here, for what is noteworthy is the very existence of so many collective memories linking these Rāmānandī and Nāth figures in such interesting, intersecting, and overlapping ways. Even if Tārānāth later became Bhagvān-­jī’s enemy, Vaiṣṇava tradition in the Panjabi hills firmly maintains that it was this particular Nāth yogī who helped bring about Bhagvān’s birth and even named him. 31 This connection with the Nāths lingers in a variety of ways. For one, we should note that Bhagvān-­jī’s other main disciple, in fact his most senior

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disciple, Maheśdās, was actually a Nāth yogī who was known as Maheśnāth before being converted to Vaiṣṇavism by Bhagvān-­jī.32 Furthermore, still today in the town of Bhagvān-­jī’s birth, Kahnuwan, lies a Nāth yogī worship site with a constantly burning dhūnī and small tombs over the remains of Bhagvān’s parents.33 Most interesting of all, whenever a new mahant is installed at Pindori, a Nāth ṭopī (headpiece) is received from the yogī establishment in Jakhbar and placed upon the head of the incoming Vaiṣṇava mahant. As Goswamy and Grewal explain, “The ritual is of such importance that without it the ceremony is deemed to be incomplete. This topi is an unusual conical kind of headgear not at all common to Vaishnava establishments and can be seen in all the paintings of the mahants of Pindori that have survived.”34 An old wall painting of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī in the cave at Galta, one widely reproduced in all the Rāmānandī centers of Rajasthan, depicts Tārānāth standing in a worshipful and submissive pose next to Payahārī and wearing exactly this type of conical headgear (figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī (center) with his two main disciples, Kīlhadev and Agradās (left), as well as (right) Tārānāth and King Pṛthvīrāj of Amer. Photograph by author of painting at Raivasa monastery (Rajasthan), July 11, 2009

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Clarifying Rāmānandī and Nāth Identities The evidence makes it abundantly clear that in early modern North India the relationship between Nāths and Rāmānandīs—­or more broadly between Śaiva tāntrikas and Vaiṣṇava bhaktas—­was a complex one not characterized simply by hostile confrontation. The traditions of Galta, Kullu, and Pindori discussed in the preceding, all have well-­established narratives, historical memories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which there is a shift away from Śaiva-­ Śākta religiosity, especially that of the Nāth yogīs, toward Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Each of these traditions links itself to the figure of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and highlights the significant role the Rāmānandīs played in the great expansion of Vaiṣṇavism that occurred in the early modern period. However, the Vaiṣṇava bhakti that was becoming so prominent was by no means a unified entity—­even among the Rāmānandīs—­rather, it had multiple forms and styles, some of which had a significant degree of overlap with ascetic streams of the very Śaiva-­Śākta tantric forms that they were increasingly supplanting as the favored state religion of Hindu rulers throughout North India. What, then, was the nature of this sixteenth-­century bhakti? Let us now seek a fuller, more precise and nuanced understanding of the practices, perspectives, and identities of early modern bhaktas like Payahārī and the religious world they inhabited. In this regard, it is important to note that the tales about Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and Bhagvān-­jī from Galta, Kullu, and Pindori are all oral traditions whose antiquity is difficult to determine. Each of the stories speaks to a real historical shift from Śaiva-­Śākta religion to Vaiṣṇava bhakti that was taking place in certain Hindu kingdoms of Rajasthan, in the lower Himalayan range, and in Panjab; however, some of these traditions—­particularly the legends about Payahārī’s and Bhagvān-­jī’s confrontations with Nāth yogīs—­give a rather misleading and anachronistic view of the specifics of the religious world and sectarian situation of the sixteenth century. In the verses on Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī in their respective Bhaktamāls, both Nābhādās (ca. 1600) and Rāghavdās (1660)—­our earliest hagiographical sources on Payahārī—­confirm elements of the legend at Galta in mentioning that he fed his own flesh to a tiger (or lion) and that he was the guru of Pṛthvīrāj; yet neither they nor Priyādās (1712), in his commentary on the Bhaktamāl, ever mention any sort of confrontation between Payahārī and the Nāth yogīs. While the oral tradition is quite strong and although the legend may hint at a certain historical reality, our available sources suggest that the tale of the magical battle between Payahārī and the Nāth yogī is one that was not significant in the early historical memory of Vaiṣṇava bhakti communities and did not take written form until at least the mid-­eighteenth century, if not later. All things considered, it seems likely that oral traditions about Rāmānandīs

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pitted against Nāths are rather late in origin (perhaps eighteenth century) and reflect a heightened sectarianism that was at only a fledgling state in the sixteenth century.35 This is not to say that there was not genuine tension and conflict between bhaktas and tantric yogīs in the sixteenth century; as the textual evidence in bhakti poetry and hagiography (discussed in chapters 7 and 8) demonstrates, there certainly was. But the differences between these groups at that point were much more subtle, the boundaries more porous, and any sense of sectarian identity far more fluid than they came to be in the eighteenth century. In other words, the tales specifically identifying Nāth yogīs as the losers in confrontations with Rāmānandī bhaktas most likely emerged in a religious world whose sectarian boundaries were far more firm (ca. eighteenth century) than the actual religious world in which these stories are set (ca. sixteenth century). Thus, we should read them not as evidence of the historical situation in the sixteenth century but as later manifestations of a process of confrontation, competition, and conflict (between bhaktas and tantric yogīs as well as between various bhakti groups)—­a process of community formation—­t hat was only just beginning in the sixteenth century. In order to properly articulate the actual similarities and differences between the Rāmānandīs and Nāth yogīs of early modern North India and to understand the sort of bhakti sensibility that was emerging, I now turn to an analysis of the hagiographical descriptions of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and his two main disciples, Kīlhadev and Agradās, as found in Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. As Heidi Pauwels has written, “Gleaning information from Nābhādās’s Bhakt-­māl has become the first step in writing about any of the medieval North Indian bhaktas, and it is perceived to be the earliest and most authoritative source of evidence on the life of any given saint.”36 Nābhādās was a Galta-­dwelling Rāmānandī and grand-­ disciple (through Agradās) of Payahārī. Moving from oral tradition to his (roughly) datable text, we find ourselves on somewhat firmer ground for gaining an accurate sense of the fissures between and areas of overlap among the spheres of bhakti, tantric religiosity, and yoga in sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­ century North India. Also of use in this pursuit is the Bhaktamāl of Rāghavdās, a member of the Dādu ­Panth who wrote in 1660, also in Rajasthan. 37 As will become apparent, hagiographical descriptions of the Galta Rāmānandīs belie any easy distinction between bhaktas and yogīs and allow us to see the identity of the early modern devotee in clearer terms. While bhakti is always paramount in the verses on Payahārī, Kīlhadev, Agradās and their disciples, in them we also find impressive evidence of the growth of two separate but related bhakti paths, one more yogic, martial, nirguṇ, and tapas oriented, the other more devotional, literary, saguṇ, and rasa oriented. Nevertheless, even in its more yogic and ascetic

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form, early modern Rāmānandī bhakti consistently displayed certain marked differences from the tantric approach of the Nāth yogīs.

Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī: The Yogic Nature of Early Rāmānandī Bhakti According to our earliest sources, both Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl (ca. 1600) and Anantadās’s Pīpā-­paracaī (1588), Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī was a disciple of Anantānand’s, who was a disciple of none other than Rāmānand himself.38 As mentioned, tradition states that in the early sixteenth century Payahārī traveled from Pushkar to Galta, where he defeated a group of Nāth yogīs and established a major Rāmānandī bhakti community supported by the patronage of the Kacchvāhā Rajputs in Amer. But just what kind of bhakta was this Payahārī? Nābhādās describes him in terms stressing his asceticism, renunciation, and yogic acumen. Payahārī is said to have lived only on milk (payas)—­hence his name—­a nd is praised as a “great ascetic-­sage” (mahāmuni) whose “seed” was turned upward (ūrdharetā), a reference specifically marking his mastery of haṭha yoga. Nābhā also notes his identity as a Dāhimā brahman and the powerful influence he had on major kings of India. He writes, In the Kali age, Kṛṣṇadās was the paragon of renunciation; he had relinquished food and drank [only] milk. He would not beg from him on whose head he laid his hand. He granted him the abode of release and rendered him fearless of sorrow. He was a hoard of luster, power, worship, a great muni whose semen was directed upwards [ūrdharetā]. Kings who had conquered the earth served the lotus of his feet. He was the sun that had risen from a Dāhimā family. He gave happiness to the heart lotus of the sants.39 In the next chappay, Nābhādās lists Payahārī’s twenty-­three disciples—­ including kings, women, householders and ascetics, Kṛṣṇa devotees and Rām devotees, and munis and rasiks—­a group reflecting the diversity and catholicity of the Rāmānandī community.40 Toward the end of the Bhaktamāl, Nābhā dedicates another set of verses to Payahārī, this time linking him to Galta, highlighting his virtue, hospitality, and self-­sacrifice and stressing his ascetic self-­d iscipline alongside his devotion to Rām.

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In Galtā, oozing ambrosial excellencies, of virtuous conduct and firm ethics, Kṛṣṇadās, who had conquered the Kali Age, invited a lion (or a tiger) whom he gave of [his own] flesh to eat. Keeping the laws of hospitality, he acquired public fame in the world. He was an epitome of renunciation, he did not lust for gold and women. Intoxicated with the lotus of Rām’s feet, he abided by it day and night.41 In addition to these verses, we learn more about Payahārī in Nābhā’s verses on Pṛthvīrāj. Nābhā writes, “Thanks to the teaching of Śrī Kṛṣṇadās [Payahārī], he [Pṛthvīrāj] became acquainted with the Supreme Truth. By the description of it as nirguṇ and saguṇ [Payahārī] destroyed the darkness of unknowing.” 42 The fact that Payahārī is praised for destroying ignorance by describing the ultimate Truth as both nirguṇ (without qualities) and saguṇ (with qualities) is noteworthy, for it suggests that at least by Nābhādās’s time this nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction was something of an issue, one on which not everyone agreed. Indeed, the Nāth yogīs, as well as the bhakti communities of Dādū and Nānak, tended to acknowledge the Divine as nirguṇ only, and this may have placed them in significant tension with the Rāmānandīs. Payahārī does not seem to have been a prolific writer, but a short work called Rāj-­yog attributed to him deals with the role of yoga in Rām bhakti, stressing meditation and the repetition of the name of Rām while also giving attention to the saguṇ form of Rām.43 That Payahārī would have authored such a text seems entirely in character, for while Nābhā praises his devotion to the lotus feet of Rām, it is his yogic and ascetic qualities that most stand out. The memory of Payahārī as an accomplished yoga-­practicing muni is one that is documented well beyond Nābhādās’s hagiographical masterpiece. Rāghavdās, of the Dādū ­Panth, in his Bhaktamāl of 1660, also describes Payahārī. For the most part Rāghav simply translates Nābhā’s Brajbhasha verses into Rajasthani in describing Payahārī; however, he does add two new chands, one of which again emphasizes Payahārī’s links to yoga and asceticism: jñān anant dayo anatānand yauṃ pragaṭyau kṛṣṇadās paihārī / jog upāsyau jugati sū tejasī antaravṛti akyañcan dhārī /   Anantānand gave him unending knowledge; that is how Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī came into his own.

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He worshipped yoga and his resplendent yogic skill [discipline/ technique] spread throughout the world [even as] he remained in strict poverty.44 Monika Horstmann remarks that “Kṛṣṇadās was a yogi whose yogic practice need not be imagined to have been totally different from that of the Nāths.” 45 To what degree and how his yogic practice was similar to and distinct from the Nāths is a crucial question that I will turn to shortly; here, however, it is important to note the existence of a unique text on haṭha yoga written in 1737 in Vrindavan by a Rāmānandī by the name of Jayatrāma, who proclaimed himself to be a spiritual descendant of none other than Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī.46 James Mallinson describes this text, called the Jogpradīpakā, as “a manual of haṭhayoga written in 964 Braj Bhāṣā verses, using dohā, sorṭhā and caupāī metres.” 47 Yet it is certainly no ordinary haṭha yoga manual, for Śiva—­credited as the original teacher of haṭha yoga in all other such manuals—­is mentioned but a single time, whereas Sītā and Rām (Siyārām) are together presented as the chief deities of the text and on many occasions directions are given to visualize them as part of one’s yogic practice.48 Whether this means that Payahārī’s own yogic practice involved the visualization of Sītā-­Rām cannot be determined based on the sources available to us. There is certainly no conclusive evidence that it did.49 Nevertheless, as I explore in the next chapter, Payahārī’s yoga did in fact differ from the yogic practice of the Nāths in significant ways, and distinguishing the two will help us to better grasp the distinctions and connections between the early modern realms of bhakti, tantra, and yoga.

Agradās and Kīlhadev: Two Streams of Rāmānandī Bhakti In order to further flesh out the nature of Rāmānandī bhakti and its relationship with tantra and yoga, I turn to the hagiographical descriptions of Payahārī’s main two disciples, Agradās and Kīlhadev. What do we know about the religious life and practice of these two Rāmānandīs? At the death of their guru, Payahārī, Kīlhadev took over the Galta gaddī and Agradās is said to have traveled to Raivasa, near modern-­day Sikar, where he founded the Rām-­rasik tradition. Agra is associated with rasik devotional practice, which typically involves a daily regimen of external rituals of worship and service as well as internal practices such as visualization, meditation, and role-­playing (often as an intimate female friend and attendant of Sītā’s) aimed at bringing about full participation in the ultimate reality of Rām and Sītā’s eternal līlā. The literary record tells us that Agra

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was also a prolific writer, the author of at least fifteen works in addition to many scattered verses found in anthologies of bhakti poetry. Our earliest description of Agradās comes from his disciple Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl: śrī agradās haribhajan bin kāl vṛthā nahiṃ bitayau / sadācār jyoṃ sant prāpt jaise kari āye / sevā sumiran dhyān caraṇarāghau cit lāye // prasidh bāg soṃ prīti suhath kṛt karat nirantar / rasanā nirmal nām manhūṃ varṣat dhārādhar // śrī kṛṣṇadās kṛpā kari bhaktidatt manavac kramakari aṭal diyau / śrī agradās haribhajan bin kāl vṛthā nahiṃ bitayau // 40   Agradās never spent a moment when he was not absorbed in doing bhakti to Hari.50 He acted in accordance with the good conduct of the saints. In service, meditation, and remembrance, he kept his heart on the feet of Rāghav [Rām].51 He loved his famous garden and worked on it endlessly with his own hands. The pure name of God fell from his tongue like rain from a cloud. Blessing him, Kṛṣṇadās [Payahārī] gave [Agra] the gift of bhakti and made him firm in heart, speech, and action. Agradās never spent a moment when he was not absorbed in doing bhakti to Hari.52 Agra’s devotion and service to God are especially highlighted here, and there is an interesting mention of the “famous garden” Agra is said to have tended with great love and dedication. I examine Agradās’s writings in some detail in chapter 6, but for now we can gain a bit more insight into his character from a few remarks Nābhādās makes in other sections of his Bhaktamāl. At the very beginning of the text Nābhā explains that it was his guru, Agra, who ordered him to compose this work in praise of the devotees of God. In the fourth dohā, he states, “Guru Agradev gave the order: ‘Sing the glory of the bhaktas. There is no other way to cross the ocean of existence.’ ”53 Nābhādās has been recognized as something of a revolutionary for raising the status of the bhaktas—­the devotees—­and equating them with God.54 The famous opening line of the Bhaktamāl states, “Bhaktas, bhakti, God, and guru, though four in name, are one in essence.”55 It seems, however, that the original inspiration for this idea was actually Agradās, who stressed that

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singing the praises of the devotees brings liberation. This is demonstrated again toward the end of the Bhaktamāl, where Nābhā states, “Agra says, he who narrates the virtues of the followers [of God] gains the power of Sītā’s Lord [Rām].”56 It is clear from Nābhā’s verses that Agra was not simply a great bhakta of Rām and Sītā but also one who sought to spread his firm conviction that all true bhaktas are worthy of devotion and that by cherishing the memory of the great bhakti saints and following the model they set, one grows closer to the Divine. Nābhā’s description of Agradās becomes more meaningful when contrasted with his description of Payahārī’s other chief disciple, Agra’s guru brother, Kīlhadev: As Death did not destroy Gāṇgeya [Bhīṣma], so it could not subdue Kīlha. Day and night he stayed absorbed in the contemplation [ciṅtavani] of Rām’s feet. All beings bowed before him, he was a hero who partook of the bliss of doing bhakti. He was strong in the Sāṃkhya and Yoga doctrines, he held the experience [of the Divine] in his hand like a cherry plum. Through the power [bal] of Hari and bodily [tan] practice [karnī], he proceeded to the brahmarandhra. In the world the son of Sumerdev [Kīlha] is well known; his pure fame spread over the earth.57 While in Agradās’s description (in the original Brajbhasha) it is the words bhakti, haribhajan (doing bhakti and singing to Hari/Viṣṇu), sevā (service), and smaraṇ/sumiraṇ (remembering God, especially God’s names and deeds)58 that stand out, here Kīlha is characterized most especially by his mastery of yoga, through which he was able to subdue his body and conquer death, choosing the time of his own passing by leaving through the brahmarandhra opening at the top of his skull.59 It is worth noting that Nābhā uses the word bal (power or strength) to describe Kīlha’s yogic practice and that he compares Kīlha to Bhīṣma, the great warrior and yoga-­practicing ascetic of the Mahābhārata, known for his ability to control the time of his own death. In chapter 289 of book 12 of the Mahābhārata, Bhīṣma expounds the practice of yoga, emphasizing its bal and the power and strength of its practitioners.60 Kīlha’s yoga likely had its roots in this tapas-­linked yoga tradition of the Mahābhārata. Ghurye writes that Kīlha “established the practice of ‘yoga’ as a necessary ingredient of Rama-­devotion for the inmates and followers of his centre,” and sectarian tradition associates him with the founding of the ascetic branch (tapasī śākhā) of the Rāmānandī sampradāy.61

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In contrast to Agradās’s significant literary output, Kīlha seems not to have composed more than a few poems. In my manuscript searches in the archives of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, I found only three extant pads attributed to Kīlha, one of which is not entirely legible in the manuscript. Here I offer a first-­ time translation of the other two. In large part, these poems correspond to the image of Kīlha as an austere yogī that we get from the hagiographical sources. Their content suggests that intense asceticism and detachment from the world were foundational elements of Kīlha’s religious life. The first poem comes from the Fatehpur manuscript62 of 1582, one of the oldest sources of North Indian bhakti poetry. Kīlha says, [Rāg Rāmagarī] re man tū tū hī tū tū hī tū tū hī terā / mai nāhī tan mai na koū kāhū karā (kerā?) / māta nahī tāta nahī kalat bandh pherā (jherā?) / gād nahī pāni nahī javar bandh gherā / arath nahī mīt nahī grih sang ghorā / kīlha kahai kīl nahī sakal gur merā /   O heart, you, only you, only you are yours and yours alone. I am not this body, I am no one and no one’s.63 No mother, no father, no wife [kalatra]; you are bound to these troubles (but they are not yours). No mud, no water, no millet [grain]; [yet] you are enclosed in [their] bondage. No wealth, no friends, no home; these things make frightful company. Kīlha says, Kīlha is nothing—­the Guru is my everything.64 The next pad comes from a manuscript dated v.s. 1715 (1658) and is similarly dedicated to denouncing worldly possessions and sensual desires as major enemies in the spiritual quest. [Rāg Prabhātī] re man ajāh to tripati tan dharaṇā jugi jugi phirayau khanḍ khanḍ phiryau pur pur phiryau phiryau gharaṇ jahā jahā tahā tahā kanak kaminī bhajyau tin kiyau tero gyan haraṇ akal vimuk bhayā sang hī dīp gaī na miṭe janam maraṇ

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jau jū bikhaī bikhe mat (mast?) suṇo suṇo hit tau jyū supineh na taraṇ kīlh kahai tere tab trividhi tākai caraṇ saraṇ   O heart, this body holds to the threefold [?] māyā. You have wandered through birth after birth; you have wandered the whole world. You have wandered and wandered through city after city, house after house. Wherever you went, there you devoted yourself to gold and lustful women. And they have stolen your knowledge. You became opposed to wisdom, went along with the light [?], and [could] not erase the [cycle of] birth and death. As long as you are infatuated with sensual enjoyment—­listen, listen for your betterment—­even in your dreams you cannot cross [the ocean of existence]. Kīlha says, the three worlds are yours when you make His [Rām’s] feet your shelter.65 In both these poems, Kīlha’s strict ascetic outlook shines forth clearly, yet his austerity and rejection of the world are accompanied by a clear devotion that stresses that in turning from the world, one must turn to the Guru (i.e., to the feet of Rām). While bhakti, yoga, and asceticism all merge in the figure of Kīlha, the hagiographical tradition clearly remembers him especially as a death-­conquering master of yoga. Adding to Nābhādās’s description of Kīlhadev, Priyādās wrote in his influential commentary—­the Bhaktirasabodhinī—­that at the time of his death Kīlha gathered all the saints, and, honoring all of them, he abandoned his body through the “tenth door,” the final cakra at the top of the head (also called the brahmarandhra or brahmāṇḍ). This story clearly suggests that Kīlha had achieved a level of yogic accomplishment in which he had gained the power to live as long as he wanted until consciously deciding to exit his body out the top of his head, the “gateway of Brahmā,” for final liberation. Rāghavdas’s Bhaktamāl alludes to this same perfection in yoga when it introduces what becomes a standard feature of Kīlha’s hagiography, that he was bitten three times by a snake but that each time the poison did not affect him.66 The Bhāgavata Purāṇa lists both these abilities—­the power to determine the time of one’s death and that to neutralize poison—­as siddhis (powers) acquired through the mastery of yoga and its various modes of concentration (dhāraṇā).67

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If, then, our enduring image of Kīlhadev is that of the yoga-­practicing ascetic, of Agradās we instead imagine the devoted gardener. The garden is a key feature of Agra’s hagiography and, whatever its factual basis may be, it seems to act as a metaphor for the loving care and fastidious attention he gave to God. Nābhā’s verse suggests that the pure devotion of Agradās’s bhajans and his repetition of the name of Rām were the water that nourished his garden. As I explain in chapter 6, the image of Agra as a gardener is quite appropriate, for he sought to cultivate devotion in himself and others, to grow and tend to a devotional community through his dedicated service, offering the fruits (literal and metaphorical) of his labor to God. In all the earliest available sources, it is Agra’s devotion that is highlighted, whereas it is Kīlha’s expertise in yoga—­his conquering of death through austere mental and bodily practice—­that is at the forefront. Both are bhaktas, but their styles of practice appear quite separate. This distinction is also highlighted in the Rām-­rasik oral tradition, which tells a story about a gathering of saints attended by both Kīlha and Agra. Kīlhadev proclaimed to the assembled bhaktas that “with the help of one’s own power, through steadfast love, doing bhakti, God can be obtained.” Agradās responded with a slightly different perspective, saying, “All action is dependent on God, and believing this while acting, it is possible to obtain God.” 68 In other words, while Kīlha stressed bhakti in combination with one’s own effort or power (bal), Agra stated that everything—­all our action—­is dependent on God, and nothing comes from our own effort. Plainly, Kīlha is chiefly a devotee—­he “partook of the bliss of performing bhakti” and “stayed absorbed in the contemplation of Rām’s feet day and night”—­yet his bhakti also maintains elements of a tantric-­yogic reliance on the self and on the power(s) generated through one’s own ritual and ascetic practices. A critique of this sort of tantric-­yogic perspective—­a multifaceted, devotion-­based critique of Śaiva-­ Sākta outlooks and practices—­emerged as a sort of rallying point for many bhakti authors, a pole around which a common bhakti sensibility would come together, especially in the rapidly developing traditions of bhakti that reflected Agradās’s perspective of emotion, humility, and dedicated service far more than Kīlha’s yogic-­ascetic bhakti approach. In addition to their different styles of devotional practice, their literary output also distinguished these two bhaktas. The production of vernacular written literature was a key feature of bhakti’s rise in North India and a critical factor in its success. This vernacular literature—­primarily collections of bhakti poetry, stories of deities and legendary devotees, and hagiographies of poet-­saints—­was at the heart of North India’s bhakti movement and its vital role of forming community identities, spreading coherent bhakti ideologies over wide geographical

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expanses, and, perhaps most importantly, providing a textual foundation for the traditions of performance (storytelling, recitation, song, etc.) that so informed the community experience of devotees.69 Not all bhaktas composed literature, however, and those who did definitely did not all do so to the same extent. Devotees’ chosen lifestyle and mode of practice—­in addition, of course, to their natural temperaments and talents—­certainly affected their degree of participation in the world of bhakti literary composition. Payahārī’s two main disciples illustrate this fact perfectly. While Agradās has at least fifteen works attributed to him, in addition to hundreds of pads, there seem to be only a few scattered pads attributed to Kīlhadev. This evidence strongly suggests that these two disciples of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī at Galta represent the emergence of two separate but related streams of religious practice among Rāmānandīs in the mid-­sixteenth century, one more focused on tapas and yoga, with closer links to an itinerant (and perhaps even warrior) lifestyle, and the other centered on rasik bhakti, with closer links to a sedentary, temple-­or monastery-­based life and the production of written literature. In the descriptions of some of the disciples of Agra and Kīlha, these distinctions become even clearer. For instance, Rāghavdās portrays Kīlha’s disciple Dvārkādās as a master of haṭha yoga, whereas he depicts Agra’s disciple Nābhādās as a rasik bhakta devoted to the praise of the saints. Of Nābhā he writes, nābhai nabh setī kīnhauṃ khīr-­nīr bhin bhin granthan kau sār sarbaṅgī hari gāyau hai / bhakti bhagat bhagavant gur dhāri ur bic ra bakhāṇi sarvahī kauṃ sir nāyau hai / sat-­jug tretā ar dvāpar kalū ke bhakt nāv kritamālā kīnī nīkau bhed pāyau hai / rāgho gur agar kūṃ arpi girā gaṅgajal pure patibrat bala rām yauṃ rijhāyau hai // 160   Nābhā made a bridge to heaven; [like a haṃsa] he separated milk [knowledge] from water [ignorance]. He sang the essence of the various forms of devotion to God described in the scriptures. Having kept bhakti, bhakta, Bhagvān [God], and guru in his heart, He knew and praised all these and bowed his head to them. The bhaktas of the Sat Yug, Tretā Yug, Dvāpar Yug and Kali Yug, He made a garland of their names; he knew the beauty of their subtle differences.

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Rāghav says, he offered his words, pure as the water of the Ganges, to his guru, Agra. Through the power of his complete pativrat [devotion of a wife to her husband] he attracted Rām.70 In contrast, Rāghav describes Kīlha’s disciple Dvārkādās in this way: haṭh-­jog jamādik sādhikai dvārikādās hari sauṃ milyau //ṭek kukas kī nadikā nīr maiṃ lagī samādh ī/ prabhu pad suṃ rati acal yek ātma ārādhī / bām jām ghar bit bandh kul jagat nirāsā / kām kraudh mad moh karam kī kāṭī pāsā / gur kīlh karaṇ prasād taiṃ bhakti sakti bhram kauṃ gilyau / haṭh-­jog jamādik sādhikai dvārikādās hari suṃ mililyau // 165   Having mastered haṭha yoga and conquered Death [Yama], Dvārkādās met Hari. In the water of the Kukus River, he attained samādhi [meditative absorption]. He had immovable passion to the feet of Prabhu; he devoted himself to that one and only soul. He was without passion for the things of this world: wife, son, home, wealth, brother, and family. He cut the net of desire, anger, ego, attachment, and karma. With the blessing of Guru Kīlha’s compassion, he swallowed [gilyau] the confusion [bhram] regarding bhakti and śakti. Having mastered haṭha yoga and conquered Death [Yama], Dvārkādās met Hari.71 Nābhādās also wrote verses on Dvārkādās (upon which Rāghav likely modeled his own), stating that he “abandoned his body [through the practice of] aṣṭāṇg jog” and “cut the net of māyā with the sword of knowledge and the power of doing bhakti.”72 While Nābhā thus depicts his contemporary Dvārkādās as an ascetic bhakta and an expert practitioner of yoga, in contrast he says this about himself in the concluding verse of the Bhaktamāl: “Some have the power of yoga, some the power of Vedic ritual, some the power of family/caste [kul], and some have the hope of [attaining fruits from good] action. [I don’t have any of these], only the garland of devotees [bhaktamāl] and Agra dwell in the heart of Nārāyaṇdās [Nābhādās].”73 The clear implication seems to be that, in contrast to saints like Payahārī, Kīlha, and Dvārkā, his Rāmānandī brethren who

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combined bhakti with the bodily self-­disciplines of tapas and yoga, he knows nothing of yoga and does not place hope of salvation in any sort of action, ritual, or social standing, but only in cherishing God, guru, and the bhaktas in his heart. Even in the disciples of Kīlha and Agra, then, we can see two rather distinctive kinds of devotee. While Nābhā, like his guru, Agradās, seems to have been a rasik practitioner and devotee of Rām and Sītā, as well as a producer of literature (in addition to the Bhaktamāl, he is said to have authored two aṣṭayāms—­ one in prose, one in verse—­a nd several pads found in anthologies of bhakti poetry),74 Dvārkādās appears to be like his guru, Kīlha, a world-­renouncing, tapas-­practicing master of yoga. Agradās with his disciple Nābhādās, and Kīlhadev with his disciple Dvārkādās, are thus representative of what would become the two main branches of the Rāmānandī community, the vairāgīs (or tyāgīs), peripatetic yoga-­practicing ascetics, and the rasikas, temple-­ or monastery-­dwelling “savorers” of the sweet essence (rasa) of devotion. How should we interpret this apparent binary division within the Rāmānandī fold? One possibility returns us to the legendary stories about Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī securing royal patronage at Galta and Kullu. Arik Moran has argued that the narrative pattern of stories such as these probably reflects an early modern historical reality in which (a) a charismatic holy man (sādhu) and his itinerant ascetic followers would venture into a kingdom and gain the king’s favor by offering spiritual, military, or economic support; (b) the king would then provide him and his sect or community with royal patronage, often establishing a temple dedicated to the sādhu’s or sect’s patron deity; and (c) the peripatetic ascetics would then settle down or be joined by sedentary devotionally oriented monastics who saw to the extension of their power base in the kingdom.75 More evidence is needed to determine the accuracy and prevalence of such a historical pattern, but Moran’s suggestion is intriguing in light of the two streams of practice we have identified in the early Rāmānandī community at Galta. In this model, early modern North Indian ascetic orders like the Rāmānandīs and the Daśanāmis can be conceived in terms of two categories of ascetics—­one monastically rooted, the other itinerant—­who depended on and complemented one another in key ways.76 The lifestyle of the peripatetic lineages would have made them perfectly suited for involvement in military labor (e.g., as hired soldiers, guardians of sectarian property and resources, protectors of trade and pilgrimage routes or caravans) and the long-­distance transmission of goods and information, while monastery-­based members worked to support and further popular worship, recruited members and patrons, maintained a base (presumably one node in a larger network) supporting long-­d istance commercial activities, and composed scholarship and literature propagating their ideology

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and increasing their public profile. As useful as this general picture is, we should be wary of drawing too stark a distinction between these two “categories” of ascetic—­the sedentary monastic and the itinerant yogī—­a nd of conceiving ascetic lineages as purely “monastic” or “nonmonastic.” Véronique Bouillier’s many years of research on the modern-­d ay Nāth sampradāy has shown that monasticism ought not be equated with a process of sedentarization or a “taming” of free-­moving ascetics, as some have suggested.77 As she demonstrates, monasteries are “intrinsic to the nature and even the emergence” of ascetic communities, acting as a crucial institutional base connecting to the larger social, political, and economic world and a necessary anchor for the collective organization of a body of diverse, individualistic, ascetic practitioners.78 Furthermore, the worlds of sedentary monastic life and peripatetic asceticism “are not opposed”; rather, wandering and monasticism typically exist “in a relation of complementarity,” a dialectic wherein ascetics easily change their way of life, not remaining permanently sedentary or itinerant.79 The early Rāmānandīs seem to bear out Bouillier’s view. Although Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Dvārkādās, on one side, and Agradās and Nābhādās, on the other, are representative of two distinctive styles of bhakti practice, we should not conceive these men or these two bhakti streams as entirely separate from one another, for in fact they were undoubtedly intertwined. Indeed, the ascetic lineages of the Rāmānandī community were not exclusively monastic (sedentary/rasik) or nonmonastic (itinerant/yogic). Agradās, for instance, did not have disciples of only the rasik bhakti persuasion but was also guru to disciples like Bhagvān-­jī (who, as noted, is remembered in Panjab as an itinerant ascetic who bested a group of Nāth yogīs in a battle of supernormal powers) and Puraṇ, whom Rāghavdās describes as a cave-­dwelling practitioner of aṣṭāng yoga who worshipped the name of God, lived his life without desire for worldly things (gold or women), and started a community where meditators practiced yama, niyama, prāṇayāma, and āsana (the first four “limbs” of aṣṭāng yoga).80 Rāghav also penned verses on Khem, who was either a disciple of Kīlha’s or of Agra’s (Rāghav mentions both as having a disciple named Khem), clearly depicting him as a rasik bhakta.81 In contrast to the verses on Puraṇ, yoga and asceticism are not mentioned in the chappay on Khem, who is instead praised for knowing and meditating in his heart on only Sītā and Rām, for holding their form (rūp) dear to him, and for composing verses in the depths of love (prem).82 From the preceding hagiographical descriptions, it should be plain that the Rāmānandī community of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century embraced a wide range of devotional practices and religious lifestyles. In particular, the early Galta Rāmānandīs brought together aspects of yoga and asceticism—­i ncluding a number of practices and lifestyle elements that they

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seem to have shared with the Nāth yogīs—­with an emerging bhakti perspective that was coming into conflict with elements of the tantric outlook. I will explore this bhakti-­tantra conflict shortly in the context of the Rāmānandīs’ relationship with the Nāth yogis, but to properly contextualize our discussion, I must first refresh our understanding of bhakti and the bhakta more generally.

Reimagining the Bhakta The insights that the preceding hagiographical accounts give us into the early Rāmānandī bhaktas’ religious lives raise some interesting questions about the nature of bhakti itself. In particular, the yogic-­a scetic stream of the Galta community—­which seems to have been its earliest stratum—­challenges prevalent understandings of, and common assumptions about, bhakti as a distinct category of religiosity. The work I have drawn most heavily on thus far, Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl, calls itself a “garland of devotees” and is a work explicitly dedicated to singing the praises of the great bhaktas; yet, as has been noted, Nābhā describes many of the members of his own devotional community as practicing a religious lifestyle that, while including bhakti, clearly seems to center most on asceticism (tapas) and yoga. If “death-­conquering,” yoga-­mastering, “paragons of renunciation” like Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Dvārkādās constitute exemplars of bhakti, then it would seem that our conception of bhakti needs some serious revision. If these are bhaktas, what then is bhakti? Scholarly descriptions of bhakti draw on a vocabulary of devotion that ranges widely from veneration, worship, and submission to passionate emotion, participation, and performance to embodiment, circulation, and memory. Nevertheless, too rarely does the spectrum of this vocabulary include words that would reveal any yogic, ascetic, or tantric dimensions of bhakti. Generally speaking, scholars of bhakti have not adequately studied its important historical relationships with yoga, tantra, and asceticism, sometimes fostering an inaccurate impression of bhakti as a discrete and autonomous genre of religiosity. As glimpsed in chapter 1, for most of Indian history the practices of bhakti, yoga, tantra, and asceticism have been tightly intertwined. The Bhagavad Gītā (200 BCE–­200 CE) presents bhakti as a kind of yoga, essentially a fixing of the mind (citta/man), consciousness (cetas), and intellect (buddhi) on God (Kṛṣṇa), which ideally requires disciplined meditation (dhyāna) and dispassion (vairāgya).83 Early medieval traditions of Śiva bhakti, such as that seen in the Skanda Purāṇa, describe “Śiva’s favorite devotees” not as ideals of passionate emotion or aesthetic sensibility but as one-­pointed (ekāgramanasaḥ) and self-­controlled (dāntāḥ),

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“skilled in Sāṅkhya and Yoga,” and as worshipping “by means of the six-­limbed yoga” (ṣaḍaṅgena yogena).84 In the Vaiṣṇava traditions, Gerard Colas has noted that “Sanskrit literature from around the third century AD attests a tendency which stresses asceticism and yoga in association with devotion for Nārāyaṇa. . . . ​ The early Pāñcarātra and Vaikhānasa traditions promoted this yogico-­ascetic-­ cum-­devotional tendency.”85 Even the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), frequently cited by scholars of Hinduism as the early foundation of the tradition of emotional bhakti, is far from being as bhakti centric as it is often assumed to be. In that the BhP seems to have set the stage—­to a greater or lesser extent—­for all the Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions that followed, it is a particularly interesting example for illustrating the underappreciated fact that, at least up to the sixteenth century (my period of concern), bhakti, yoga, tantra, and asceticism often went hand in hand. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa is a Sanskrit text composed probably in the ninth or tenth century, most likely in the Tamil region of South India,86 that gives a narrative, didactic, and philosophical treatment of the life of the god Kṛṣṇa, placing bhakti above jñāna and karma (ritual activity) in the path to liberation. In Thomas Hopkins’s words, it “is generally considered to be the first major systematic statement of emotional devotionalism.”87 David Haberman states that the BhP “introduces passionate emotionalism into the world of intellectual Kṛṣṇa bhakti,” citing Friedelm Hardy’s influential argument88 that it was through the BhP that “the emotional religion of the southern Ālvārs became united with northern Vedānta philosophy and spread through the authority of a Sanskrit purāṇa to influence the developments of emotional Kṛṣṇa bhakti throughout India.”89 Despite all this talk of emotional devotion, when one actually reads through the text, particularly when one looks beyond the famous book 10 dedicated to the līlās of Kṛṣṇa, one finds that alongside mentions of impassioned bhakti are reference after reference to practices of yoga, asceticism, renunciation, and tantric ritual. To take an example, the yogic practice attributed to Kīlhadev of abandoning the body at the time of death (by leaving through the brahmarandhra opening at the top of the skull) is described in book 11, chapter 15, which states, “Having blocked his rectum with his heel and pushed up the vital air to his heart, chest, throat, and crown of the head, forcing it upward through the brahmarandra to Brahma, the sage should shed the body [whenever he likes].”90 book 2, chapter 2, offers similar instructions, stating that the muni (sage), whenever he desires to give up his body, should control his breath, restrain his senses, and merge his Self into the Supreme Spirit. First of all he should squat [on his seat] pressing the anus with his heels and then, overcoming languor, should draw the air upward through the six places

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[where the six mystical circles are located]. The muni should draw the air located in the circle within the navel upward into the heart, then raising it along the path of the up breath [udāna], he should take it into the breast, then, joining [breath] with knowledge, he should bring it slowly to the root of the palate. Thereafter, having closed the seven passages [i.e., eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth], he should bring it to the circle located at the middle of the eyebrows. Then, remaining [in this state] for twenty-­four minutes, he whose gaze is sharp, taking the breath up and piercing his cranial vault [mūrdhan], he will surge upward into the beyond.91

The text then gives an alternative set of instructions for the one who desires to “acquire the eight siddhis [superpowers]” and “to sport in the company of celestial beings” and “move freely within and outside the three worlds.”92 Subject matter like this makes it clear the BhP is not simply about bhakti, at least not bhakti in the way many are prone to conceive it today. While it is true that bhakti and emotionality receive striking new emphasis in the BhP, as a whole the text articulates a bhakti that cannot be easily—­if at all—­separated from practices of renunciation, tantric worship, and yoga. Book 3, chapter 28, for instance, describes the practice of yoga—­citing five of the standard eight limbs of Pātāñjala yoga—­but frames this yoga as a preparatory practice for a visualization meditation meant to develop intense devotion to the Lord. The text states that one should take a seat on the ground, controlling one’s posture (āsana) and keeping the body erect, practice breath control (prāṇāyāma), withdrawal of the senses (pratyāhāra), concentration of the mind (dhāraṇā), and meditation (dhyāna), and that “when the mind is controlled and purified by [this practice of] yoga,” one should meditate on the form of the Lord (III.28.11–­12). Then follows a detailed description of how the sage should visualize each minute aspect of the Lord in his heart, a meditation intended to develop his emotion for God, so much so that “his heart melts through bhakti, the hairs on his body stand erect through excessive joy, and he is constantly bathed in a stream of tears occasioned by intense love” (III.28.34). Here we have the emotional bhakti usually associated with the BhP, yet the preparation for and means to that ecstatic experience of devotion are practices of Pātāñjala yoga and visualization techniques of tantric yoga. These key tantric and yogic dimensions of bhakti in the BhP have not received the attention they deserve, but I am certainly not the first scholar to note them. Edwin Bryant, for example, has presented the bhakti of the BhP as “a very specific type of yoga practice,”93 and Barbara Holdrege has demonstrated how the text draws heavily on tantric (especially Pāñcarātra) conceptions of mantra and ritualized practices of tantric yoga centered on visualization meditation and

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mental repetition of the mantra as a sonic form of a deity. As Holdrege shows, in a section on the legendary bhakta Dhruva, book 4 of the BhP presents an essentially tantric meditative practice “which involves visualization of Bhagavān’s four-­armed form, mental repetition of his sonic form, and mental offerings to him enshrined within the heart—­as the pivotal practice of bhakti-­yoga that leads to liberation (vimukti).”94 In book 11, chapter  14, of the BhP, Kṛṣṇa states that nothing—­not Yoga, Sāṅkhya, the study of sacred scriptures, asceticism, nor renunciation—­captivates Him as does intense bhakti, adding that righteousness, truth, mercy, knowledge, and asceticism cannot purify a mind bereft of bhakti.95 In an oft-­quoted verse, he says, “A man full of devotion to Me—­who speaks in a voice choked with emotion, whose heart melts, who weeps incessantly and laughs, who sings unabashedly at the top of his voice and dances—­purifies the world.”96 Nevertheless, a close reading of the text suggests that the way in which one attains this level of emotional devotion is through practices of renunciation, contemplation, and yoga, for immediately following these verses about the nature and importance of bhakti, Kṛṣṇa says, The mind of a man dwelling on the objects of sense gets attached to them. The mind of one contemplating Me gets absorbed in Me alone. Therefore, giving up the thought of the unreal and worthless objects [of the world] as things seen in a dream or fancied, concentrate your mind—­purified through devotion to Me—­on Me alone. Abandoning from a distance the company of women as well as of men delighting in the company of women, and having conquered one’s mind, one should sit down in a secure and lonely place and unweariedly think of Me.97

After thus advocating renunciation and one-­pointed mental concentration, Kṛṣṇa explains how such “a seeker of liberation [mumukṣu]” should contemplate Him.98 The text describes posture, methods of breath control, and a detailed visualization meditation on the form of God within one’s own heart (envisioned as an upside-­down lotus bud), continuing with a detailed account of the various powers (siddhis) attained through yogic concentration (yoga dhāraṇā) on different forms of God.99 While there is no doubt that bhakti is paramount in the BhP, it has not been stressed enough that in this text, and throughout the entire medieval period, bhakti is often understood to be closely intertwined with, even inseparable from, practices of yoga, tapas, renunciation, and tantric visualization. As book 3, chapter 32, of the BhP tells us, the ultimate spiritual goal is possible only for one “whose mind has been composed and rid of all attachments through faith

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[śraddhā], devotion [bhakti], daily practice of yoga [yoga abhyās], and renunciation [virakti].”100 From the sixth to the thirteenth century, tantric ideology and ritual were central in South Asian religious life and, in this context, bhakti—­ conceived in a multitude of fashions—­usually appeared as one element, one dimension, among many in the religious life. There are certain medieval compositions—­like the Sanskrit BhP and the Tamil poetry of the Āḷvārs and Nāyanārs—­in which bhakti undoubtedly takes center stage as a mode of expression (Tamil devotional songs) or as a path of great salvific power (BhP), but even in such texts, prior to the sixteenth century, we do not typically—­if ever—­see the bhakta positioned in opposition to the ascetic, tāntrika, or yoga-­practicing muni. Rather, prior to the early modern period the term bhakta seems to be an entirely nonexclusive identity that simply marks one as having a participatory relationship with God, one in which—­especially after the BhP—­the cultivation and expression of deep emotion, particularly in song,101 were often seen to be central; however, the form of the bhakta’s “participation” and the means to his or her emotional experience in no way precluded, and often actually called for, renunciation, asceticism, yoga, or tantric ritual technique. For our purposes, the point is that when Nābhādās, circa 1600, praises world-­ renouncing, yoga-­practicing ascetics like Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Dvārkādās as exemplary bhaktas, this should not be any cause for cognitive dissonance. There was nothing whatsoever unusual about the bhakti of these figures. The yogic-­ ascetic stream of the early Rāmānandī community at Galta serves as a reminder that bhakti must be conceived in a way that allows us to imagine a certain breed of detached, yoga-­practicing ascetic as just as much a bhakta as the poet-­saint singing songs to God. Indeed, there is no doubt that in many instances the yoga-­ practicing ascetic and the passionately singing poet-­saint were one and the same person.102 If, then, on the one hand the early Rāmānandīs at Galta remind us that bhakti had long been clearly intertwined with asceticism, tantra, and yoga, on the other hand they also offer valuable insights into how these once rather closely interwoven threads of religious practice began to unravel into increasingly distinct strands of religious identity. As the forthcoming pages show, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among many bhakti communities of North India we see a move away from an inclusivist bhakti closely intertwined with tantric and yogic practices toward a more circumscribed bhakti that marginalized or directly opposed elements of tantra, yoga, and ascetic religiosity. It seems that a number of bhaktas in early modern North India—­the Rāmānandīs among them—­were beginning to cultivate a new bhakti sensibility and imagine a new bhakti community positioned against certain core components of tantric, yogic, and ascetic thought and practice. We can see this trend especially in the rasik bhakta

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stream of the early Rāmānandīs represented by Agradās and Nābhādās, but we also see aspects of it in the ascetic-­yogic stream of Payahārī and Kīlha, especially when we contrast them with their superficially similar tantric competitors, the Nāth yogīs.

Rāmānandī Roots In order to properly understand the Galta Rāmānandīs, and to differentiate them from the Nāth yogīs, we must first get a better sense of their heritage. Ascertaining the historical roots of the Rāmānandīs is no easy task, especially considering that the first real evidence we have of a community tracing itself to the figure of Rāmānand (and including as his disciples famed yet heterodox bhakti poet-­saints such as Kabīr and Raidās) does not occur until the end of the sixteenth century in Rajasthan. Both Nābhādās, in his Bhaktamāl (ca. 1600), and Anantadās, in his Pīpā-­parcāī (1588), connect themselves to Rāmānand through Agradās (i.e., Rāmānand → Anantānand → Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī → Agradās). Nābhādās places Rāmānand in Kāśī (Banaras) and links him somewhat ambiguously to the lineage of the great southern Vaiṣṇava ācārya Rāmānuja (eleventh century) and his Śrī Vaiṣṇava sampradāy.103 Notably, Anantadās never mentions Rāmānuja or the Śrī sampradāy. Nābhā devotes two stanzas to Rāmānuja, one of the few times he gives any one person so much attention. He states, “No one is equal to Rāmānuja” and praises his Śrī sampradāy as “the crown jewel of sampradāys” and “the canopy of bhakti.”104 Nābhādās certainly had good reasons for linking his burgeoning community to the prestige of Rāmānuja and the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas; Nābhā’s community was liberal in its social views and diverse in its social makeup (including śūdras, untouchables, and women), and as Pinch writes, he “afforded this ragtag band of bhaktas and sants a modicum of Vaiṣṇava respectability by endowing them with an unimpeachable sectarian pedigree.”105 Yet beyond Nābhā’s assertion there seems to be no evidence of any formal or otherwise meaningful affiliation between the Rāmānandīs and the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas.106 If Rāmānand’s connection with the Śrī sampradāy is doubtful, Richard Burghart has demonstrated that it is even more unlikely that Rāmānand actually founded a monastic order of his own.107 Regardless of these uncertainties, what is clear is that Nābhādās wanted to assert that his community, through Rāmānand, was closely linked with both saguṇ-­f riendly orthodox Vaiṣṇavism (indeed with its most prestigious ācārya, Rāmānuja) and the popular group of predominantly low-­caste, nirguṇ-­focused bhakti poet-­saints known as the Sants. Nābhā did not reconcile the seemingly contradictory strains in his assertion,

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leaving scholars somewhat puzzled over the Rāmānandī community’s origins and early identity. Were they an orthodox Vaiṣṇava monastic community seeking to expand its base of support by bringing popular heterodox saints like Kabīr and Raidās into the fold? Were they a community of socially liberal yoga-­ practicing ascetics and Name-­chanting nirgūṇ bhaktas who sought to acquire more respectable, orthodox credentials by linking themselves to the Śrī sampradāy? Were they a schism from the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas, a lineage that split off because of their unorthodox views on caste (i.e., their practice of initiating the low caste)?108 It is difficult to answer these questions with any certainty, but in looking back to the origins of Rām devotion and the Sant tradition we can gain a much better sense of the identity of the early Rāmānandīs. The two streams of Rāmānandīs identified earlier may have common roots in the tradition represented by a text known as the Agastya Saṃhitā (AgSaṃ), a Sanskrit work composed in Banaras, in Vaiṣṇava brahman circles, in the twelfth century.109 The AgSaṃ is novel in making Rāma the exclusive object and aim of worship; he is not just another incarnation of Viṣṇu but is equated with supreme reality itself. In the content and emphases of its teachings, the AgSaṃ possesses several intriguing links to the sixteenth-­century Rāmānandī community in Galta. For one, the AgSaṃ stresses the recitation of the divine Name, which seems to have been the foundational practice of all the early Galta Rāmānandīs. In addition, the text advocates two paths of worship that mirror the tendencies of the two streams of the early Rāmānandīs. It teaches worship of both the nirguṇ Rām and the saguṇ Rāmcandra, prescribing practices of yoga, meditation, tantric ritual and visualization, and singing the Name. Furthermore, the primary mantra taught in the AgSaṃ is the six-­syllable ṣaḍakṣara mantra (rāṃ rāmāya namaḥ), the same mantra used by Rāmānandī ascetics today and one that clearly differentiates them from the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas, who use the aṣṭākṣara mantra (oṃ namo nārāyaṇāya).110 Interestingly, Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl follows the AgSaṃ in reconciling Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism by presenting Śiva as part of the lineage of great Rām bhaktas initiated through this Rām (ṣaḍakṣara) mantra.111 In addition to these links, Agradās, in his Dhyān Mañjarī (discussed in depth in chapter 6), describes a meditative vision that adopts the very same detailed description of Rām and Sītā seated on a lotus throne under a tree that the AgSaṃ (33.7–­15) first articulates in its instructions for the visualization and mental worship of saguṇ Rām.112 According to the AgSaṃ (20:29), the primary spiritual goal is to realize the identity of the Self (ātman) with Rām, and this can be done either by yoga and meditation on the abstract (nirguṇ) Rām, by means of worship (to the saguṇ Rām), or by both.113 In the Kali Age, the path of kīrtana (devotional singing) and saguṇ worship (ārādhana) is deemed the easier path. For the AgSaṃ, this worship is

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primarily “a device to convert the supreme abstract principle (which is identical to the ātman) into a qualified form, that is, to make god visible in one’s own heart and/or in an idol in order to facilitate the identification of the worshipper with him.”114 The saguṇ worship of Rām advocated in the text is thoroughly yogic and tantric—­involving prāṇāyāma (yogic breathing practices) and the ritualized visualization practices of bhūtaśuddhi (destruction and purification of the mundane body) and nyāsa (divinization of the body)—­a nd does not differ in principle from the Pāñcarātra tradition and its Śaiva and Śākta counterparts.115 We should not find anything unusual in this; to reiterate an earlier point, bhakti and tantra were largely integrated throughout the medieval period with worship and devotion regularly taking place in tantric modes and ritual contexts. The AgSaṃ places special emphasis on the salvific power of the Name of Rām, which is conceived as both the phonic equivalent of the supreme, nirguṇ Divine and as “the key or the medium through which the devotee gains access to god in a tangible form.”116 As Hans Bakker explains, in the text “singing the praise of Rāma (kīrtana), remembrance of him (smaraṇa), and listening to the story of his deeds (śravaṇa) are all more or less concomitant with the practice of uttering his name.”117 The AgSaṃ (25:9–­10) states that the Rām mantra can be used even without initiation (dīkṣā)118 or tantric divinization of the body (nyāsa), proclaiming further that “even sinners who say Rāma, Rāma, Rāma, truly even them he pulls out of the pool of their millions of sins” (3:25).119 While the Rāmānandī community at Galta did not come into existence until approximately four hundred years after the composition of the AgSaṃ, the text’s emphasis on singing and chanting the Name, its worship of nirguṇ Rām and saguṇ Rāmcandra, its description of yogic practices and visualizations, and its accommodation (within an orthodox framework) of men and women of all castes, including the uninitiated, offer some fascinating parallels with what we know about the practices and attitudes of the community of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Agradās. It is uncertain whether these early Rāmānandīs had any direct historical link to the community that composed the AgSaṃ, but they certainly seem to have followed that twelfth-­century community in spirit and, in several ways, in thought and practice as well. The AgSaṃ is especially noteworthy as an orthodox Vaiṣṇava scripture that so early and so adamantly advocates the practice of repeating the Name of Rām as a means to salvation. Vaiṣṇava references to the power of the divine Name date back at least to the BhP, where the four syllables of the name Nārāyaṇa are considered to have great salvific potency. However, the practice of chanting the Name—­and particularly the name of Rām—­is most closely associated with, and was most extensively adopted by, the nirguṇ Sant tradition of bhaktas like Kabīr, Raidās, Dādū, and Nānak. Bakker’s work is important in demonstrating an early

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source and an orthodox Vaiṣṇava framework for this tradition’s most cherished practice. He writes that “the Rāmarakṣāstotra, of which the nucleus must be old since it is referred to by the Agastyasaṃhitā [12th cent.] declares: ‘The world is protected by the Name of Rāma which is the unique victorious mantra. Accomplishment in all pursuits is easily attainable for him whose voice pronounces (It).’ ”120 The practice of reciting the name of Rām seems to have arisen alongside the cult of the divine Rāmcandra, which, beginning in the twelfth century, became an increasingly prominent aspect of Hindu political theology. While Rāmāyaṇa themes are prevalent from an early date, Sheldon Pollock has noted that there is no evidence of Rām as a deity or focal point of religious practice in South Asia until the mid-­t welfth century, when we see “a sudden onset of activity of building temples to Rāma, which intensified over the next two hundred years.”121 As Bakker similarly remarks, “We should view the evolution of a Ramaite form of Vishnuism in north India as a new departure occasioned by the specific social and political conditions of the 11th to 13th centuries.”122 More than in the emergence of Rām as supreme deity and exemplar of Hindu kingship, here we are interested in the related rise of the so-­called Sant movement of nirguṇ bhaktas. By the early thirteenth century, not long after the composition of the AgSaṃ, nearly all of North India, from the Ravi River on the border of modern-­day Pakistan to Assam in the far northeast, had come under the military dominion of Persianized Turks.123 With most of North India under Persianate rule, and with political repression “imped[ing] the construction of new sanctuaries and durable religious artifacts, such as idols,” in this period there seems to have been a shift “from temple worship to non-­material modes of devotion as found in the Sant movement and the cult of the Name.”124 Bakker points out that “the cult of the name as a separate strand in the religion of North India coincided roughly with the period of most stringent repression of temple worship and idolatry.”125 According to R. S. McGregor, the “nonmaterial praxis” of reciting the divine Name grew up in North India at this time not only because “the building of temples faced restrictions in many north Indian areas” but also because the practice was “in keeping with both the meditational practice of nāth śaivas and the Muslim practice of dhikr.”126 The Sants, then, emerged and flourished in the altered sociopolitical situation of Sultanate India, a new environment characterized by the expansive presence of both Persianate politico-­military power and Sufi religious activity. The “Sant movement” is a scholarly designation for a group of like-­minded bhaktas of fifteenth-­to-­seventeenth-­century North India; however, the Sants did not actually make up an organized, coherent community with a clear self-­identity.127 The word sant does not mean “saint” but is from the Sanskrit sat

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(truth, being) and refers to “one who knows the truth” or “one who has experienced ultimate reality.”128 In general, the Sants are united by their low social class; their heterodox nonsectarian perspective; their orientation toward a formless, nirguṇ (qualityless) Divine; their focus on unmediated inner spirituality; their simple puritan lifestyle; their vernacular compositions of devotional song and poetry; the importance they gave to satsaṅg (the company of the sants) and the divine Guru (satguru); and, perhaps most of all, their devotion to the Name.129 The Sant tradition is typically considered to be a synthesis of three different movements in late medieval and early modern North India: Sufism, Vaiṣṇava bhakti, and the tantric asceticism of the Nāth yogīs.130 With the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Sufi orders began to expand, in the process encouraging and promoting certain shared beliefs and practices among the Indian populace.131 The Sants were clearly influenced by Sufi ideas, practices, and attitudes. In keeping with the Sufis, they rejected ritualism, idol worship, and caste distinctions and devoted themselves to a Divine without qualities (nirguṇ). The Sants advocated ideas and practices shared by Sufis and Hindus alike, such as worship through communal singing (samā‘/kīrtan), remembrance and recitation of the name of God (dhikr/nāma-­japa), and the concept of divine love (often conceived of in terms of separation).132 In many ways, the Sufi-­Sant relationship was not so much one of influence as one of “elective affinity.” A number of these ideas and practices had already been articulated in the orthodox Vaiṣṇavism and Rām devotion of the AgSaṃ, and, in the changed social, political, and religious environment of late Sultanate India, they found themselves particularly well suited for emphasis, adoption, and adaptation. I have stressed that the practice of the Name was fundamental for the Sants, but it is crucial to note that the Name they invoked was almost exclusively Vaiṣṇava—­most often it was Rām, but frequently also Hari, Govind, and Mādhav. While the Sants interacted with and (in certain ways) resembled Sufis, they maintained a loosely Vaiṣṇava identity that kept them distinct from, and in competition with, Sufi Islam. However loose, nonsectarian, and “vulgate” their Vaiṣṇavism actually was, a number of the most famous Sants—­K abīr, Raidās, Pīpā, Dhanā, and Sen—­a re typically remembered as Rāmānandīs; that is, as members of an orthodox Vaiṣṇava sampradāy.133 Nābhādās claimed these figures as disciples of none other than the founder of the community, Rāmānand, who likely was a leading Sant himself. As Purushottam Agrawal has demonstrated, the image we have from Sanskrit sources of Rāmānand as an orthodox ācārya is a recently constructed and spurious one.134 Agrawal argues persuasively that the Rāmānand of Hindi

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vernacular sources—­our earliest sources on Rāmānand—­was a historical personage who lived in fifteenth-­century North India and was a significant figure in the Sant tradition, as seen in Vaiṣṇava hagiographies and the poetic compositions attributed to him in the Ādi Granth and the Sarvāṅgīs of Rajjab and Gopāldās.135 These poems of the “Hindi Rāmānand” emphasize chanting the name of Rām, renunciation and the illusory nature of worldly pleasures, and turning inward to attain a state of sahaj or śūnya (concepts with clear links to the Nāths), thus offering an ascetic, nirguṇ vision that closely parallels that of Kabīr.136 Both the poetry and disciples attributed to Rāmānand place him, and the Galta community that traced itself back to him, squarely within the tradition of the Sants.137 Certainly, what we know about Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and his successor, Kīlhadev, indicates that they, too, followed the Sants in thought, practice, and social attitudes. If, then, we can safely say that the Rāmānandī community at Galta had deep roots in the Sant tradition, we must remember that this Sant tradition—­in addition to its Sufi and Vaiṣṇava connections—­also had links with the Nāth yogīs. In scholarship on bhakti, the link between the Nāths and the Sants (sometimes called nirguṇīs), most especially Kabīr, has become something of a trope. Pitambar Datta Barthwal, in an essay published in 1931 and titled “Hindī kavitā meṃ yog-­pravāh” (The yoga stream of Hindi poetry), first “drew scholarly attention not only to the general significance of the Nath compositions in the development of Hindi literature, but more importantly to the powerful connection between Naths and the Nirgunis.”138 He elaborated this argument in his seminal work, The Nirguna School of Hindi Poetry (1936), declaring that the nirguṇ bhaktas “are deeply indebted to the Nath Pantha.”139 Western-­language scholarship on the Sants (nirguṇ bhaktas) has followed in Barthwal’s footsteps. As Karine Schomer explains, “The general scholarly consensus is that the Sants represent a synthesis of Vaishnava bhakti and elements from the tradition of the Naths.”140 Charlotte Vaudeville similarly states, “The Sant sadhana or the Sant ideal of sanctity . . . ​may be viewed as a subtle blending of the two main traditions of Hindu mysticism, apparently antagonistic to each other: Vaishnava bhakti and an esoteric Tantric tradition, whose most popular representatives are Gorakhnath and the Nath Yogis.”141 Long before these modern scholars, we have evidence that Mughals in the seventeenth century also understood the Sants and the Nāth yogīs (as well as the Sufis) to be closely linked, if nevertheless separate. In a fascinating Mughal miniature painting commissioned around 1650, the Sant bhaktas Kabīr, Raidās, Pīpā, and Sen are depicted sitting in a row with—­ but separate and across from—­Gorakhnāth, the reputed founder of the Nāth yogī order, and his guru, Matsyendranāth, at a gathering of Sufis at a major Sufi shrine (figure 4.2).142 Furthermore, the poetry of Kabīr and Raidās makes it clear

Figure 4.2 Mughal miniature of Sufi celebration (with bhaktas and yogīs), commissioned circa 1650 (probably by Dāra Shikoh), at the shrine of the Sufi saint Mu‘īn al-­Dīn Chishtī in Ajmer (Rajasthan). Top, Sufis standing and observing; middle, Sufis performing dhikr, chanting names of God to accompaniment of music and dance; bottom, seated bhakti saints and Nath yogīs; left to right: Raidās, Pīpā, Nāmdev, Sena, Kamal (Kabīr’s son), an Aughar, Kabīr / Matsyendranāth, Gorakhnāth, Jadrup, Bābalāl Dās Vairāgī, unidentified. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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that, whatever differences these devotee poets had with the Nāth yogīs, they rubbed elbows enough with them to be quite intimate with their yogic practices and ideas. From all this, it becomes clear that the Rāmānandīs, with their Sant roots, had a rather complex relationship with the Nāth yogīs, one in need of further analysis and interpretation. The early Rāmānandī community at Galta combined dimensions of yoga and asceticism—­i ncluding certain practices and lifeways shared with the Nāth yogīs—­w ith a new bhakti sensibility that was increasingly at odds with key aspects of tantric religiosity. Determining what these Rāmānandī bhaktas had in common with the Nāths and, even more importantly, what distinguished the two is the subject of the next chapter. Before proceeding to that, I conclude this chapter with a brief but crucial look at the monkey god Hanumān, a metonymic figure who can help us understand the nature of the Galta Rāmānandīs’ religiosity and the way in which they sought to embrace a multiplicity of (sometimes contrasting) religious modalities in a changing sociopolitical landscape.

The Role of Hanumān I opened this chapter by taking note of the Bhairava shrine along the path leading into Galta, an intriguing presence at a Vaiṣṇava stronghold, and even more so in that this ordinarily fierce, tantric form of Śiva is, at this tiny shrine, worshipped with tulsi leaves as the peaceful, vegetarian devotee-­protector of the monkey god Hanumān. Having examined the Galta Rāmānandīs and their heritage, we can now see why this aniconic stone image is a rather fitting introduction to the Rāmānandī community of Galta, reflecting its nirguṇ, ascetic, yogic, and even (to a lesser extent) tantric roots. The “Vaiṣṇavization” of this Bhairava image at Galta speaks to the Rāmānandīs’ bridging of the tantric, ascetic realm of śakti and the vulgate Vaiṣṇava devotional realm of bhakti, a mediation symbolized especially in the very figure this Bhairava is said to worship and protect, Hanumān. Hanumān is renowned as a paragon of both bhakti and śakti. In his relationship to Rām and Sīta he is the model bhakta, the supreme ideal of dedicated service and selfless devotion, but he is also the god of yogīs and fighting sādhus, a great ascetic with extraordinary powers (siddhis) who is often considered the avatār (or the son) of Śiva.143 It is no wonder then that the oldest shrines at the Rāmānandī community of Galta—­the community Payahārī founded and where Kīlhadev and Agradās resided—­are dedicated to Hanumān.144 It is clear that this

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community had risen to prominence by the late sixteenth century, for we have a record of a grant given to the Galta Rāmānandīs by Akbar (r. 1556–­1605).145 Tradition has it that Kīlhadev built Galta’s first temple and made it a Hanumān shrine, and it may have been Mughal patronage that allowed him to finance this project. Installed in the temple, and in Galta’s other early Hanumān shrine (known as Interior Hanumān-­jī), which was also likely built during Kīlha’s tenure as abbot, is the peculiar feature of the perpetual fire (akhaṇḍajyotiḥ), which “is characteristic of both Bhairava and Hanumān worship.”146 Why would the Rāmānandī community at Galta have chosen to dedicate the very first temple they constructed to Hanumān? It would seem that Hanumān’s two sides, his ability to bridge the realms of śakti and bhakti, tantric asceticism and devotional Vaiṣṇavism, made him the perfect mediating figure for the Rāmānandī community and its diversity of practitioners. As Monika Horstmann writes, “His impressive presence in Galta integrates the various religious strands and propensities within the early monastic constituency.”147 If śakti and bhakti “allude to dual aspects of Hanuman’s personality,” then, as Philip Lutgendorf notes, “among Ramanandis, the two aspects seem to have corresponded to the main subdivisions of the order, into tyāgīs or wandering ‘renouncers,’ who practiced strenuous yogic disciplines, and Rasiks (‘savorers’ of the sweetness of devotion), who resided in temple-­monasteries and practiced visualization based on selected Ramayana episodes.”148 Indeed, for tyāgīs, Hanumān is an immortal yogī, master of tapas, and avatār of Śiva, while for rasik devotees, “Hanumān is understood to be one of the ‘eternal attendants’ (parikara or parṣad) of the Lord and his Shakti. He appears (depending on the sub-­sect into which one is initiated) either as a stalwart guardian of the eastern gate . . . ​or (in his ‘secret’ identity) as Charushila, one of the eight intimate female friends of Sita.”149 In light of the fact that Galta’s earliest shrines are dedicated to Hanumān, it is interesting to note that one of the six Hindi poems attributed to Rāmānand is a pad praising Hanumān. Scholars have tended to discount this poem because it is saguṇ in orientation (all the other poems attributed to him being decidedly nirguṇ) and is found in neither the Sikh Ādi Granth nor the Dādū-panthī Sarvāṅgīs. While it is entirely possible that this poem is of dubious provenance, this should not be so readily assumed. First, that this poem is not in Sikh or Dādū-panthī collections makes perfect sense, for while the Rāmānandī community included bhaktas of both nirguṇ and saguṇ persuasions, the Sikhs and Dādū-panthīs were rather strictly nirguṇ and would not have adopted a poem about Hanumān. More importantly, considering the early Galta community’s apparent preference for Hanumān (as suggested by the two early Hanumān shrines there), it would only make sense if their founder was, like many of them, something of a nirguṇ, ascetic Sant as well as a Hanumān devotee. The two were hardly mutually exclusive, as

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some scholars have mistakenly presumed. Rāmcandra Śukla, among others, used the aforementioned Hanumān poem to imagine the existence of two Rāmānands, since, in his eyes, the Vaiṣṇava bhakta who authored the Hanumān pad could not possibly have composed the other poems rejecting idol worship and celebrating the nirguṇ worldview.150 Here again we have an example of a modern conceptualization of bhakti, replete with an overdrawn nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, being projected back onto the past with problematic results. Potentially adding to the evidence that Hanumān played a key role in the early Rāmānandī community, R. S. McGregor notes that two early seventeenth-­ century Brajbhasha adaptations of the Sanskrit drama the Hanumān-­nāṭaka (a version of the Rām story centered on the deeds of Hanumān) indicate a separate Hanumān-­focused strand of early Rāmānandī literature.151 Hanumān first comes into his own as an independent god in the tenth to fourteenth centuries (his rise roughly paralleling that of Rām), when freestanding Hanumān images emerge in northern and central India; however, “the real iconographic boom” does not begin until around the fifteenth century.152 Thus, it was especially beginning in the early modern period that, among both bhaktas and tāntrikas, Hanumān’s importance began to increase, the surge in his iconographic presence coinciding with the beginning of the North Indian bhakti movement. It may be that Hanumān’s rise in popularity occurred at this particular time because, in the context of expanding Vaiṣṇava devotionalism, he was able to serve as such an effective mediating figure, appealing to a wide spectrum of types of practitioners and religious approaches. As bhakti communities and devotional perspectives spread across North India, for many, especially those with historical links to tantric or ascetic-­yogic traditions, Hanumān could act as an ideal focal point, an accessible deity who “combined self-­a ssertive shakti and success with self-­sacrificing bhakti and subordination.”153 This certainly seems to have been the case for the Rāmānandīs of Galta. Much like Hanumān, the early Rāmānandī community embodied “two contrasting (though not necessarily opposing) religious orientations.”154 The concluding lines of the description of Dvārkādās in Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl seem to allude to the Rāmānandī reconciling of the tantric yogic and the devotional, of śakti and bhakti. In the original Rajasthani, the verse reads gur kīlh karaṇ prasād taiṃ, bhakti sakti bhram kauṃ gilyau, which I translated earlier as “With the blessing of Guru Kīlha’s compassion, he [Dvārkādās] swallowed [gilyau] the confusion [bhram] regarding bhakti and śakti.” How should we interpret this line? Noteworthy is the clear implication that in the religious world of the time there existed some contention regarding the proper relationship between bhakti and śakti. But what exactly was this “confusion”? And who was confused? Regardless of the correct interpretation of the verse, it is clear that the Rāmānandī

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community did seek, like Hanumān (and perhaps through him), to reconcile the two modes of practice I have been discussing. The figure of Hanumān would have been able to unite the two different streams of Rāmānandī bhakti practitioners, absorbing whatever differences they may have had into a common focal point whose symbolic resonances could meet all their diverse needs at one and the same time. Much like Hanumān himself, these Rāmānandīs maintained an emphasis on yogic calm, ascetic austerity, and tantric power while also engaging an emotionality, regard for dignity and self-­ limitation (maryādā), and self-­effacing, humble devotion that were distinctly bhakti qualities. Whatever similarities these Rāmānandīs may have had with the Nāths, their veneration of Hanumān and their idealization of his deep emotional attachment and humble, self-­effacing love and service to Rām and Sītā clearly distinguished them from those tantric yogīs. Indeed, while the Nāth yogīs regularly worship Hanumān today, there does not seem to be any historical evidence for the monkey god’s presence in the religious life of the Nāths prior to the eighteenth century.155 Lutgendorf has suggested that Hanumān’s dual (śakti and bhakti) aspects actually constitute “a shorthand for two of the principal currents in Hindu religious history, and their confluence creates a paradoxical yet highly desirable ego-­ideal: that of being powerful, autonomous, and self-­realized, and yet simultaneously of having an ‘open heart’ and ready access to deep feeling, especially self-­giving love.”156 In a number of ways, it seems that this ideal was exactly what many of Galta’s early Rāmānandīs strived to attain in their religious lives. Nevertheless, in early modern North India, the tides of history were clearly moving in the direction of the bhakti side of this dialectic. Thus, even as the Rāmānandīs (in their yogic-­ascetic dimension) resembled and were in dialogue with the Nāth yogīs, it was their fundamental differences that increasingly were coming to the fore. In the next chapter, I analyze these key distinctions and thereby attempt to give insight into the emergence of a new early modern bhakti sensibility formed, in large part, in opposition to a caricatured tantric “other.” Reading the past with our modern categories, we have often tended to see Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga as distinct entities, often conceiving the bhakta in stark contrast to the tāntrika and the yogī. In this chapter I have shown that, historically speaking, bhakti religiosity often had more elements of asceticism, tantra, and yoga than we would ordinarily suppose. That is not to say, however, that there were not real differences between these areas, differences that were becoming more and more conspicuous in the socioreligious context of early modern North India. The early Rāmānandīs of Galta, particularly when compared with the Nāth yogīs, illustrate both these points quite well. Understanding yoga-­practicing ascetics like Payahārī and Kīlhadev as Nābhādās did—­that

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is, first and foremost as bhaktas—­forces us to expand our conception of bhakti and the bhakta. At the same time, comparing these ascetic Rāmānandīs with the Nāth yogīs allows us to see that there were important differences between these two communities, differences we might understand as initial fissures in an increasing divide between the realms of bhakti and tantra. It is to these differences that I now turn.

5

Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas Styles of Yoga and Asceticism in North India

E

arly modern North India saw the expansive growth of a new and distinctive bhakti sensibility that was in tension with key aspects of the tantric tradition. To offer insights into the nature of this tension, in this chapter I explore the specific ways in which the Rāmānandī bhaktas differed from the Nāth yogīs. Comparing the Nāths and the Rāmānandīs not only provides a better understanding of each group but also sheds light on the manner in which a new early modern bhakti sensibility was formed, in large part with a caricatured tantric “other” as its necessary foil. While the perspective of Agradās, Nābhādās, and rasik devotees like them makes a more obvious contrast with the Nāth yogīs, the difference between the more ascetic-­yogic Rāmānandīs (like Payahārī and Kīlhadev) and the Nāths is more subtle and difficult to determine. As Pinuccia Caracchi has claimed, the tapasvī śākhā, the ascetic-­yogic lineage of Kīlhadev, is “a Rāmānandī branch that was deeply influenced by the doctrine of Gorakhnāth.”1 How, then, did this tapasvī lineage of Rāmānandīs differ from the Nāth yogīs? As I show in this chapter, the answer lies partly in the origins, techniques, and goals of their yogic practice and, perhaps even more so, in a growing distinction in perspective, a fundamental contrast between the devotional approach to God and the tantric quest for occult power.

Who Are the Nāth Yogīs? I have made frequent reference to the Nāth yogīs, but they have not yet received a proper introduction. It was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that

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the Nāth yogīs seem to have come to prominence in India’s religious landscape, yet they had roots in the far older traditions of siddhas, Vajrayāna Buddhists, and Kaula Śaivas. The medieval siddhas were a diverse group of practitioners who sought—­by various tantric, ascetic, and alchemical means—­to acquire the powers and accede to the station of various immortal demigods (also known as Siddhas) and magicians (vidyādharas) residing in heaven. The tradition of these siddhas, famous for their magical powers and antinomian behavior, transcended sectarian boundaries and was popular among Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. Early (thirteenth-­to-­fifteenth-­century) lists of the great Siddhas include Ādinātha (Śiva), Matsyendra, Gorakṣa (Gorakh), and Jālandhara, who each appear in later lists of “the nine Nāths” to which the present-­day Nāth order traces its origins.2 Gorakhnāth (Gorakṣa) is considered the historical founder of the Nāth yogīs and is almost always remembered as the disciple of Matsyendranāth; however, these two figures seem to have lived at least three centuries apart. Matsyendra (Mīna, Macchinda) probably lived in the ninth century, and tradition holds that he was the founder of the Kaula Śaiva tantric movement. Gorakhnāth likely lived in the twelfth century and is said to have come from this Kaula tradition but to have reformed it, purging it of sexual practices and establishing a Nāth lineage of celibate yogīs. The earliest references to Gorakh are in two texts from opposite ends of the subcontinent (Karnataka and northern Bengal). Both are dated to the early thirteenth century and both “refer to him as a master of yoga, suggesting that his reputation was well-­established” throughout much of India by that point.3 The late medieval yogī lineages of the Gangetic Plain and northwestern India appear to have initially linked themselves not to Gorakhnāth but to other Siddhas, especially Jālandharnāth.4 These Nāth yogīs were not a homogeneous group with any single, clear ideology or shared system of practice; yet we can understand them as a coherent community, a loose-­k nit, heterogeneous confederation of yogīs with a clear corporate identity based on their allegiance to renowned Nāth Siddhas and their distinctive insignia—­particularly, the wearing of large hooped earrings (mudrā) and a horn (siṅgī) around the neck.5 We know (from Dā’ūd’s Candāyan) that by the late fourteenth century some of these yogī lineages had come to adopt Gorakhnāth as their founder and tutelary deity, and over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the vast majority of Nāth yogīs in northern and northwestern India would follow suit.6 The social, political, and cultural conditions of thirteenth-­to-­fifteenth-­ century North India generated a religious environment characterized in part by a shared grammar of asceticism that often superseded sectarian religious boundaries. In this context, Sufis, tāntrikas, and yoga practitioners of all stripes interacted with and borrowed from each other. Intermingling

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their soteriological techniques and ascetic lifestyles, they “produced a North Indian ascetic archetype that survives to this day, with the result that members of the main North Indian ascetic orders, including the Nāths, are almost identical in lifestyle and appearance.”7 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sectarian identities began to crystallize among both ascetic and devotional communities. By the mid-­sixteenth century, the various loosely related Nāth yogī lineages had become organized into twelve panths and were clearly contrasted with other organized ascetic orders, especially the (Daśanāmī) saṃnyāsīs.8 The different lineages of tantric ascetics that eventually came to be formally organized within a Nāth sampradāy and that I have referred to as Nāths or Nāth yogīs were for centuries popularly known simply as yogīs. Confusing the historical picture, however, is the fact that other yoga-­practicing ascetics were also sometimes called yogīs. There is much that separated the Nāth yogīs and the early yoga-­practicing ascetic Rāmānandīs of Mughal India, but let us first briefly highlight their similarities. Both communities tended to conceive of a single, formless Divine without qualities (nirguṇ) and both held liberal social attitudes, accepting members from every caste. Furthermore, both placed great value on asceticism, renunciation, and inner spirituality. Nāths and ascetic Rāmānandīs both praised the divine Guru, shunned worldly attachments, and stressed the need to turn inward to find ultimate Truth. In addition to these shared perspectives, scholars have often asserted that yoga-­practicing Rāmānandī bhaktas such as Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Dvārkādās also closely resembled the Nāth yogīs in their yogic practice. Peter van der Veer, in his historical and ethnographic study of the Rāmānandī sampradāy, contrasts their rasik-­devotee branch with that of the tyāgīs, the branch of itinerant ascetics, and states that it is the tyāgīs who “have remained most faithful to the original identity of the Ramanandi order.”9 Following Charlotte Vaudeville, he argues that the early Rāmānandīs were the inheritors of a Śaiva yogic tradition, were “deeply influenced by the Tantric community of the Nath yogis,”10 and “could hardly be distinguished from the Nath yogis in appearance and practice.”11 Monika Horstmann echoes this view, claiming that Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī “was a yogi whose yogic practice need not be imagined to have been totally different from that of the Nāths.”12 What, then, separated these two early modern religious communities? The Rāmānandīs differed from the Nāths in two major ways. First, despite scholarly claims to the contrary, they generally practiced quite different forms of yoga. Second, the Rāmānandīs’ religious sensibility was shaped by a bhakti attitude and approach to the Divine that was in marked contrast to the Nāth yogīs’ tantric perspective. I explore both these differences in the following, beginning with the key distinctions in these two communities’ yogic backgrounds and

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orientations. In short, when it came to yoga, the Nāths were usually doing something considerably more tantric and siddhi oriented than the Rāmānandīs and other ascetic lineages (like the Daśanāmīs), whose yogic practice fell more squarely within the liberation-­oriented orthodox yoga tradition. In order to untangle the threads of the complex relationship between the Nāths and Rāmānandīs of sixteenth-­century North India, and to trace their different yogic roots, we must first make a brief foray into the history of yoga.

Modes of Yoga in Indian History The Sanskrit word yoga derives from the root yuj, meaning “to harness or control,” “to yoke,” or “join,” and a key thread running throughout the history of yoga—­in all its great diversity of forms—­is the “harnessing” (taming, controlling, and directing) of a lower-­order being, entity, or aspect of consciousness by a higher-­order being (level of consciousness, etc.) for some purpose.13 The first systematic account of yoga seems to occur in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (ca. third century BCE), where it is linked to the reining in of the senses and the stilling of the mind to reach the highest spiritual state.14 Our next major source of information on yoga is the Mahābhārata, in which the terms yoga and yogin occur nearly nine hundred times “and do so in contexts which often suggest a broader and rather different understanding of the terms from that found in classical yoga.”15 In the Mahābhārata, yoga is a loose set of practices often closely linked to tapas (ascetic practice or “heat” that purifies the body and generates powers and boons) and typically involving withdrawal from the everyday world, moral conduct, control of the body (diet, posture) and the breath, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, and meditation.16 Overall in the Mahābhārata, we see the development of two distinctive yogic tendencies: on the one hand, a tradition of yoga practice aimed at acquiring power (bala, vibhūti), mastery, and lordship (aiśvarya)—­a tradition associated with the developing Yoga school of philosophy—­ and, on the other hand, a tradition of yoga practice aimed at achieving gnosis (i.e., salvific knowledge) or liberation through meditative insight—­a tradition drawing heavily on Buddhist thought and associated with the developing Sāṃkhya school of philosophy. If some practitioners of yoga and asceticism tended to seek nondual consciousness (samādhi) or knowledge/experience of the Divine through utter detachment (vairāgya) from sense objects and desires, others tended instead to utilize their senses in order to gain control over them and their objects, seeking to become “as powerful as a God”—­i.e., to master and use “entities in the world by exercising acquired yogic power in the fashion of a God,

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a Lord, an īśvara.”17 This sort of distinction in yogic practice, present already in the Mahābhārata, would prove meaningful well into the early modern period. Regardless of their approach, for all these yogic practitioners of ancient India, successful yoga practice was assumed to result naturally and inevitably in the possession of extraordinary “godlike” powers (siddhis, vibhūtis, balas), although the attitude taken toward these yogic powers differed considerably. The term yoga came to possess a complex set of varying meanings in Indian history.18 In this book, following arguably its most common and consistent usage, I conceive yoga as an assortment of methods of meditation and mind-­body asceticism—­technologies for “harnessing” oneself—­i ntended to bring about spiritual realization (liberation) or extraordinary power. In understanding yoga in this way—­as psychosomatic disciplines designed to transform consciousness and realize the full potentials inherent in the human mind and body—­we see that, historically, yoga has been a diffuse set of different techniques, not confined to any particular sectarian affiliation or social form, that could be appropriated and practiced independently of any ideological allegiances. Therefore, it should be no surprise that both Nāths and Rāmānandīs practiced some form of yoga. The question is how their approaches to yoga, and their specific yogic practices, were similar and different. In attempting to make sense of the vast yoga tradition, I identify three major streams of distinctive yogic practice: (1) ascetic (tapasvī) yoga, (2) meditational yoga, and (3) tantric yoga. This division of yoga has heuristic value, but it is an artificial one, a drastic oversimplification of a very complex and foggy historical reality. These three streams might be considered genres of yogic practice with particular emphases (in practice and thought) and characteristic methods; however, they were never entirely separate from each other, often commingling their respective techniques. The specific psychosomatic techniques and disciplines of yoga emerged from a larger body of ancient Indian ascetic practice. In Vedic sacrificial religion, prior to performing the ritual the sacrificer was required to engage in asceticism, or tapas, in order to purify his sinful human condition and attain a purified, divine condition.19 The term tapas generally refers to the transformative power of heat—­ whether in fire, the sun, or the human body—­but can be more specifically defined as both the “heated effort” of asceticism and the “heated potency” produced by that ascetic effort.20 Practices of tapas developed in both Vedic (brahmanical) and non-­Vedic (śramaṇa) contexts and involved especially the regulation and retention of the breath (prāṇāyāma, often understood as the highest form of tapas), recitation of mantras (japa, svādhyāya), meditation, fasting, sexual abstinence, and a variety of other physical austerities and bodily mortifications such as prolonged silence, isolation, begging for food, not sleeping, and performance of

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arduous physical postures.21 In the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, and the Purāṇas, yoga and tapas often go hand in hand, with many yoga-­practicing ascetics also described as cultivating tapas through celibacy, holding difficult postures for long periods, and practicing extended breath retention in order to still the mind completely and to develop a store of potent energy within the body that could be used to give blessings and curses or to win boons such as supernormal (“magical”) abilities. The extraordinary power generated by tapas was necessarily based on the ascetic’s celibacy (the retention of his life essence, or semen), renunciation, and mastery of his vital breath and physical body.22 While physical austerities and the regulation of respiration were components of many (but not all) forms of yoga in South Asia, in what I am calling the ascetic (tapasvī) stream of the yoga tradition these made up the primary emphasis. At the core of this historical genre of yoga is the discipline of the body and the manipulation and preservation of key energies within it, especially through breath-­ control practices (prāṇāyāma). While the physical (bodily) focus of tapasvī yoga is one of its more distinctive elements, I do not mean to imply that there was no mental or meditational component.23 Indeed, to control one’s breath (directing the movement of the life force of prāṇa within the body), to preserve one’s vital essence (retas/semen), and to make the mind motionless required intense mental (meditational) concentration. A fundamental principle undergirding such yogic practice came to be that mind, breath, and life essence (semen) are all closely interrelated, thus the discipline and manipulation of one is closely linked to the control of the others. It is especially in this tapasvī stream that the Rāmānandī practitioners of yoga find their historical roots. While a diverse array of yoga practices had existed for centuries prior, it was the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (325–­425 CE) that seems to have first codified them into the classical yoga system of eight limbs—­i.e., aṣṭāṅga yoga.24 Developed from earlier Upanishadic models and drawing upon Buddhist and Jain traditions (e.g., the Buddhist eightfold path, the ten bodhisattva bhūmis of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the fivefold ethical code of Jainism), Patañjali’s system of yoga came to serve as a transsectarian template—­“in a sense, the gold standard”—­for later systems of yoga.25 For more than a century, the standard scholarly claim has been that Patañjali was the author of the Yoga Sūtra and that, not long after its composition, his work was glossed by an author named Vyāsa (or Vedavyāsa) in a commentary called the Yoga Bhāṣya, which nearly always appears along with manuscripts of the Yoga Sūtra. In fact, as Philipp Maas has persuasively argued, the Yoga Sūtra and Yoga Bhāṣya very probably have one, common author named Patañjali and constitute a unified whole, a single work called the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra.26 Most likely composed between 325 and 425 CE,

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Patañjali’s work had, by the early seventh century, become widely accepted as the authoritative exposition of yoga.27 Though fundamentally informed by Sāṃkhya metaphysics and Buddhist (especially Yogācāra) traditions of philosophy and meditation, the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra offered a nonsectarian, brahmanical Hindu vision of yoga that would be drawn upon by nearly all schools of yoga.28 Even so, Pātañjala yoga is a clear representative of meditational (gnosis-­centered) yoga, a stream of yogic tradition whose content and emphases remained distinct in key ways from ascetic and later tantric modes of yoga. While tapas, recitation of scripture, and breath control are discussed as preparatory practices, the focus of the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra is on the cultivation of mental concentration and contemplation to achieve increasingly deeper levels of samādhi and to attain “truth-­bearing insight” into the ultimate nature of reality and the Self.29 The meditational stream of yoga expressed in the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra (and in early Buddhist texts on yoga and meditation) focused above all on contemplation and the discipline of the mind in order to achieve nondual consciousness or salvific knowledge of the Self/Divine. In the tantric traditions that emerged in India in the fifth and sixth centuries, we see a rather different stream of yoga practice. Indeed, Patañjali does not mention what is most central to the practice of tantric yoga: in order to be liberated, one must first become divine.30 In contrast to both meditational and ascetic yoga, tantric yoga is particularly concerned with visualization exercises designed to facilitate contact or union with God, by virtue of which the practitioner can partake of God’s divine power(s).31 The visualization-­based meditations of tantric yoga involved detailed conceptions of the human “subtle body”—­u nderstood as a microcosm of the universe—­combined with the practice of mantra-­japa (recitation of mantras). Tantric scriptures posited different types of prāṇa (vital energy, breath) flowing through a network of channels (nāḍīs)—­said to number seventy-­t wo thousand—­in the yogic body and concentrated in different knots (granthis) or circles (cakras) vertically aligned along the central channel, or suṣumna nāḍī, running up the spine. These granthis or cakras (sometimes also called padma, or “lotuses”) corresponded to primary elements and sounds in the cosmos, were considered the dwelling places (sthāna) of particular deities, and often served as points or foundations (ādhāras) on which to fix the mind during yogic meditation. Tantric conceptions of the yogic body and techniques for raising the life breath (prāṇa) or primal energy (kuṇḍalinī) along the suṣumnā drew on and expanded existing ideas about the body from medical traditions and the ancient stream of tapasvī yoga. In turn, these tantric innovations in theorizing the subtle body—­especially

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Kaula ideas about the inner ascent of the serpent goddess kuṇḍalinī32—­were then drawn upon by yoga practitioners of all stripes. In contrast to ascetic yoga, which was informed especially by the (somewhat misogynistic) logic of seminal retention, tantric yoga was often based upon a fundamentally sexualized logic in which the fusion of masculine and feminine principles (e.g., Śiva and Śakti, semen/bindu and menstrual fluid/rajas) was central to realizing the power and liberated consciousness of the Divine. If ascetic yoga tended to conceive the body in ultramasculine terms and to fear, ignore, or marginalize women and sexual union as distractions or obstacles to yoga’s aims, then tantric forms of yoga instead often highlighted the role of both feminine and masculine energies/substances in the body and emphasized—­at least in symbolic or sublimated form—­the transformative power of their sexualized union. While many (though not all) varieties of tantric yoga practice required seminal retention or celibacy, the effecting of a sublimated union of masculine and feminine principles/fluids within the subtle body nonetheless remained at the core of tantric yogic practice, clearly distinguishing it from ascetic yoga. Tantric texts presented a yoga that was also clearly distinct from meditational yoga. Formulations of tantric yoga were usually ṣaḍaṅga, or “six limbed.”33 The tantric traditions were concerned primarily with mantra yoga and laya yoga (yoga through dissolution; i.e., techniques for “dissolving” the mind in higher levels of consciousness). Tantric varieties of laya yoga typically involved visualization-­based meditations on progressively more subtle elements and energies within the subtle body, the most well-­known techniques being the raising of kuṇḍalinī up the spine and the dissolving of the mind in an internal sound (nādānusandhāna). The practice of raising the kuṇḍalinī—­the feminine power and divine energy of śakti within the body, conceived as a serpent sleeping coiled at the base of the spine—­was initially one among many forms of laya yoga but quickly rose to a level of preeminence among the methods of tantric yoga. It was only beginning in the thirteenth or fourteenth century that tantric communities began to seriously incorporate physical practices—­those we associate especially with haṭha yoga—­into their (mantra-­ and visualization-­focused) yogic repertoire. While the goal of meditational yoga was direct perception of reality or nondual consciousness (samādhi), in tantric yoga the aim was framed in theistic terms as equality or identity with the Divine, the attainment of God’s powers and liberated consciousness.34 If meditational yoga reached its aim most especially through the disciplining, concentrating, and stilling of the mind, then tantric yoga instead sought its goal most characteristically by putting the imaginative capacity of the mind to work in various visualization-­based meditations that involved purifying and imaginatively destroying the conventional

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body (dehaśuddhi) in order to reconstruct a divine body in its place (nyāsa), then using that creative capacity to worship inner deities and manipulate inner energies (which were usually associated with particular mantras). A word often used to describe this distinctive meditation of tantric yoga practice is bhāvanā, translated variously as “mental construction,” “creative contemplation,” or “imaginative meditation.” It is also often referred to as dhāraṇā, a term used in a slightly different sense than Patañjali uses it in his eight-­limbed system, where it refers specifically to a fixation of the mind on a particular object. Here the meaning is similar to that of bhāvanā in that, in tantric dhāraṇā, one utilizes visualization and the creative, imaginative capacity of the mind to “yoke” oneself to the object of concentration in order to take on certain attributes or powers (siddhis) associated with that object (usually a deity). While all three of the streams of yoga I have discussed were concerned with the acquisition of siddhis, in meditational yoga they were typically seen as obstacles to the ultimate spiritual goal, whereas in tantric yoga these godlike powers were often the primary objective and were seen as signs of the unveiling of divine omnipotence within oneself. If the sixteenth-­century Rāmānandī practicing yoga could trace his yogic roots most especially to the tapasvī stream, then the Nāth yogī found his in the stream of the tantric sādhaka just described.

The Democratization of Yoga With the end of the Tantric Age from roughly the thirteenth century came major changes in the field of yogic practice. The conquest of northern and central India by Persianate Turks in the thirteenth century had a major impact on India’s religious landscape, particularly on certain tantric traditions that had been prominent for centuries. Under the military and political dominance of Persianized Turks, the patronage and infrastructure sustaining institutionalized and brahmanical forms of tantric religion in northern and central India largely collapsed. Nevertheless, tantric yogic technologies did not disappear in the Sultanate period but rather found themselves released from the elitist grip of brahmanically oriented, esoteric systems of tantric ritual characterized by complex, sect-­specific mantras, cosmologies, and theologies. With the rapid decline of this brahman-­run, institutional tantra, the rise of a transsectarian Vedāntic orientation, and the spread of Sufism, Sultanate India witnessed the emergence of a new ascetic environment and yogic sensibility in which complex rituals and metaphysical teachings had little place. In this context, new and simplified modes of yoga practice emerged centering especially

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on (a) stripped-­down forms of (often kuṇḍalinī-­based) tantric laya yoga and (b) the distinctive physical techniques of haṭha yoga. Haṭha yoga is known as the yoga of force, the name coming from the root haṭh-­, which means “to treat with force or violence,” a reference to the forceful effect that haṭha-­yoga practices were said to have upon the vital energies (bindu, prāṇa, kuṇḍalinī) within the yogī’s subtle body.35 In haṭha yoga’s earliest formulations, its distinctive feature is a set of physical techniques, called bandhas or mudrās, that are used, in combination with breath control practices, (a) to raise and preserve the elixir of life, the bindu (i.e., semen), stopping its natural downward flow and dissipation by forcing it up the central channel and keeping it in the head, and (b) to raise the feminine principle (rajas, kuṇḍalinī) at the base of the spine within the subtle body and unite it with the masculine principle (at the top of the head), resulting in full, liberating spiritual realization. Haṭha yoga developed especially between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, reforming and combining elements of all three of the traditions of yogic practice discussed in the preceding, but particularly the tantric and ascetic (tapasvī) streams. The haṭha-­yoga tradition offered a simple spiritual path “based solely on the practice of yoga (rather than ritual, gnosis or devotion),” a method that “omitted the doctrinal and ritualistic complexity of earlier tantric and philosophical traditions,” utilizing simpler meditation methods and more physical techniques and thereby making the practices and goals of yoga available to a much wider audience.36 The pathbreaking work of James Mallinson, of which I make extensive use here, has greatly advanced our understanding of the haṭha-­yoga tradition. As he demonstrates, the first text to teach many of haṭha yoga’s distinctive principles and physical practices is, in fact, a Vajrayāna Buddhist work, the circa eleventh-­ century Amṛtasiddhi.37 It is not until the thirteenth century, however, that we see a real surge in textual composition related to yoga, products of a milieu in which a diverse group of ascetic lineages were engaged in extensive yogic experimentation. This spate of textual production suggests the participation of ascetic lineages in new patronage relationships (with householders), a desire to codify their yoga teachings for and disseminate them to new audiences and practitioners, and new forms of competition among these yoga-­practicing lineages involving textual claims to authority and prestige.38 Of special note is the Dattātreyayogaśāstra, a Vaiṣṇava work composed in the thirteenth century that is the first text to teach a systematized form of haṭha yoga and call it by that name. The text describes ten physical techniques called mudrās or bandhas (each supposedly practiced by the ṛṣi Kapila), which would thereafter distinguish haṭha from all other forms of yoga, teaching these ten practices as methods for pneumatically or mechanically achieving the ancient tapasvī goal of preventing the

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downward flow of the masculine vital principle (bindu).39 At about the same time that text was written, a Śaiva (Nāth-­Siddha) lineage composed the Gorakṣaśataka, which teaches three haṭha-­yogic bandhas (locks) and introduces one haṭha-­yogic mudrā (seal) and several haṭha-­yogic breath-­restraint techniques (kumbhaka), all in order to master the breath and achieve the tantric (laya-­yoga) goal of raising and uniting the kuṇḍalinī (Śakti) with Śiva at the top of the head in an experience of spiritual realization.40 As these two contemporaneous texts illustrate, tantric and nontantric ascetic lineages—­as well as celibate and noncelibate lineages—­ chose to emphasize (or ignore) different yogic techniques and to use them for different purposes, but these Sultanate-­era ascetics all seem to have been invested in the reform and simplification of yoga practice, an opening up of yoga’s methods and aims to a broader range of practitioners.41 They accomplished this especially by adopting (a) haṭha yoga’s physical and breath-­control techniques and (b) simplified versions of contemplative tantric laya yoga, especially involving the raising of kuṇḍalinī, but also by (c) placing their yoga teachings within a nonsectarian Vedāntic metaphysical framework. As I noted in chapter 1, at roughly the same time that the Tantric Age was coming to an end, Vedānta was rising as a shared “Hindu” scriptural-­ philosophical foundation and soteriological orientation.42 Beginning with Rāmānuja in the twelfth century, the various “Vaiṣṇava Vedāntas” produced in South India placed Vedāntic knowledge (jñāna) and bhakti-­driven (theistic) forms of meditational yoga into an intimate, interdependent relationship.43 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the tradition of Advaita Vedānta, which until then had been unambiguously critical of yoga practice, began to assimilate the traditions of yoga and yogīs.44 As Jason Schwartz has demonstrated, beginning in this time the scholars and theologians of Advaita Vedānta increasingly embraced the meditative praxis and subtle body technologies their tradition had long rejected, homologizing these yogic methods with the goal of realization of ātman and brahman.45 If Advaita Vedāntins were increasingly incorporating yoga into their religious systems in this period, it seems that practitioners of yoga were also increasingly adopting and expressing Advaita Vedāntic orientations. The corpus of the haṭha-­yoga tradition was composed at the very same time that “Vedānta was becoming the dominant paradigm of scholarly religious thought.” 46 Mallinson has shown that most of the texts of early haṭha yoga (ca. 1200–­1450) were products of a Vedāntic milieu and tended to express their spiritual goal in Vedāntic terms—­i.e., as gnostic realization of the Self and absorption in brahman.47 The use of Vedāntic soteriology—­the conceptual language of salvific knowledge of or union with the Divine (ātman/brahman) within the body—­ assisted in the larger historical process of simplifying and democratizing yoga by detaching it from its earlier sectarian theistic contexts. At the same time,

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these yogic teachings and practices contributed to the further expansion of Vedānta’s influence in early modern India.48 The modes of haṭha and laya yoga developed in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries drew on but significantly transformed earlier traditions of tantric and ascetic yoga in order to increase the accessibility and effective power of yoga. They downplayed demanding physical austerities and rejected “extreme ascetic practices such as sitting amid five fires, standing on one leg for twelve years, lying on a bed of nails or holding the arms up until they wither away.” 49 These forms of yoga reacted to the exclusivity and secrecy of the many tantric (and other sectarian) lineages current in the early medieval period by simplifying, interiorizing, and corporealizing much of earlier tantric practice.50 Elaborate, sect-­specific theological and cosmological systems were now abandoned,51 the various items required for ritual practice were now located within the yogī’s own body, 52 and the visualizations and mantras that had been the near-­exclusive means for raising kuṇḍalinī were now often accompanied or replaced by breath-­ restraint techniques and mechanical physical acts.53 The rise of the stripped-­down, interiorized, and democratized yogic practices described here foreshadowed the straightforward, accessible religiosity of North India’s bhakti movement and, by the fifteenth century, was paralleled by—­a nd sometimes intertwined with—­the spread of the simple, inward-­oriented, socially liberal devotion of nirguṇ-­oriented bhakti figures and communities there like the Sants. As noted, the origins and development of both were intimately linked to the sociopolitical conditions of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in India: the military-­political dominance of Persianized Turks, the corresponding decline of institutional (brahmanical, royally patronized) forms of tantric religiosity, the rise of Vedāntic orientations, and the increasing presence and influence of Sufis. While the new yogic sensibility that emerged in this historical context rejected certain aspects of the tantric tradition (such as sectarianism, exclusivity, complex ritual and metaphysics), the bhakti poets of North India would reject certain other aspects of tantric religiosity that persisted into the early modern period (especially via the ubiquitous Nāth yogīs), such as the tantric emphasis on becoming a god and acquiring extraordinary powers. Early modern bhaktas would aim their criticisms especially at tantric yogīs, but—­as I will show in chapter 7—­many bhakti poets also deemed the practice of haṭha yoga and asceticism in general to be misguided, ineffective, and in some sense at odds with their own bhakti ethos. However simplified, open, and accessible haṭha yoga was in comparison with previous forms of yoga in South Asia, it was still an intensive and time-­consuming form of religiosity, one spread almost entirely through the expert guidance and oral instruction of qualified gurus and one practiced by individuals (primarily male renouncers) in solitary contexts.54 The

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bhakti of North India’s bhakti movement, on the other hand, was a fundamentally social phenomenon, a discourse and a sensibility spread especially through the performance of songs and stories in social contexts in which entertainment, artistic virtuosity, aesthetic appreciation, ethical instruction, and ecstatic religiosity melded in moments of collective effervescence. By and large, ascetics and yogīs worked for themselves, for their own goals, and were not particularly interested in diffusing a religious message to a broader public, while bhakti singers and reformers sought a wider audience and strived, in some sense, to work for the general good of a larger community.55 This is not to say that practitioners of tapas or haṭha-­yoga practitioners could not also be bhaktas—­they could be and they were—­however, it is to highlight at a general level what was a very real difference and tension between these two styles of religiosity and their corresponding sensibilities, a contrast that would often be stressed in devotional literature of the Mughal period, as I discuss in chapter 7.

Munis Versus Siddhas Having surveyed relevant pieces of the history of yoga, let us return to the specific questions at hand: How did the yoga of the Nāths differ from that of the Rāmānandīs? What might their yogic differences suggest about more fundamental differences in religious sensibility? As has been mentioned, prior to the fifteenth century the Nāth yogīs of the Indian subcontinent were a rather amorphous group of different regionally based lineages of itinerant tantric ascetics sharing only a certain siddhi-­oriented perspective and a claimed affiliation with one of various semidivine, perfected humans, or Siddhas, such as Matsyendranāth, Jālandharnāth, and Gorakhnāth. Many of these yogī lineages had roots in the very tantric community that seems to have originated kuṇḍalinī yoga, the Paścimāmnāya Kaula tradition of the Deccan to which Gorakh and Matsyendra probably belonged, thus it is not surprising that their yoga practice was primarily a continuation of tantric kuṇḍalinī-­style laya yoga, in a simplified form suiting the times. While the Nāths have long been widely considered as the primary exponents and systematizers of haṭha yoga, Mallinson’s research shows that the Nāth yogīs of the early modern period had little interest in the physical practices of haṭha yoga and focused instead largely on the pursuit of siddhis “through means such as tantric ritual, mantra-­repetition, alchemy and visualization-­based layayoga. These Yogīs were yogis as magicians.”56 In contrast to the Nāths, the ascetic stream of Rāmānandīs in early modern North India were, in fact, active practitioners of haṭha yoga.

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As pointed out in the previous chapter, if we understand the early Rāmānandīs as a “devotional” community (one of the four orthodox Vaiṣṇava sampradāys) and perceive them through the lens of our modern category of bhakti—­one that usually leaves little room for asceticism and yoga in its conception of an emotional practice of devotion and humble service to a personal God—­it would be easy to miss out on how very yogic their religious practice was. Yet we know that many of the Galta Rāmānandīs—­like Payahārī, Kīlha, Dvārkādās, and Puraṇ—­ were, in fact, master practitioners of yoga. Their yoga, however, was a liberation-­ directed (mumukṣu) haṭha-­yoga practice that had little to do with the predominantly siddhi-­oriented (bubhukṣu) and laya-­yoga-­based practice of the Nāths. In contrast to the perspective of the yoga-­practicing Rāmānandī ascetics, the orientation of Nāths was actually far more in tune with what the tantric tradition had termed a sādhaka. In many tantric texts, a clear technical distinction is made between the yogī, who has liberation (mokṣa) as his aim, and the sādhaka, who puts great emphasis on supernormal experiences/enjoyments (bhoga) and powers (siddhis). While nearly all South Asian religious communities believed that siddhis emerge naturally as part of yogic practice, the attitude taken toward these powers varied considerably from tradition to tradition. As Mallinson states, “In the Pātañjala and haṭha yoga traditions . . . ​siddhis have been said to be impediments to the ultimate aim of yoga, liberation, since the composition of the Yogasūtra in the fourth or fifth centuries CE. In the tantric tradition, on the other hand, siddhis are the main aim of the [sādhaka] initiate.”57 While the sādhaka may also aim for liberation, or the “great siddhi” (i.e., realization of Śivahood), he does so only after enjoying worldly and otherworldly powers and pleasures as long as he wishes. While it is quite rare to find a Nāth yogī today who practices the mudrās and bandhas of haṭha yoga, “the ascetic traditions among which the first formulations of Hatḥa Yoga originated, namely, the forerunners of the Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs and the Rāmānandīs,” adopted classical haṭha yoga and “continue to write about and practice it up to the present day.”58 The Bhaktamāls of Nābhādās and Rāghavdās indicate that Rāmānandī ascetics were practicing a liberation-­oriented, tapas-­rooted haṭha yoga in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the eighteenth century, among other evidence, we have a Rāmānandī-­authored haṭha-­yoga manual, the Brajbhasha Jogpradīpakā (1737) by Jayatrāma, who proudly proclaimed himself part of the lineage of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī. 59 During these same centuries of the early modern period, the Nāth yogīs were composing no such works and do not seem to have been particularly concerned with haṭha yoga at all.60 The Gorakhbāṇī, a collection of vernacular (“Hindi”) writings61 attributed to Gorakhnāth whose oldest manuscripts come from the seventeenth century,62 is

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probably our best resource for understanding the Nāth yogīs in early modern North India and confirms this picture. The first thing to note about the Gorakhbāṇī is that it is extraordinarily heterogeneous, with verses sometimes contradicting themselves, a reflection of the fact that the Nāth yogīs were not then an entirely coherent community but a loose-­k nit confederation of yogī lineages whose practices and perspectives were not always the same. The Gorakhbāṇī emphasizes a number of practices and concerns common to all yogic and ascetic traditions, such as breathing exercises (prāṇāyāma), not eating or sleeping too much, restraining the five senses, and maintaining control of the mind. Overall, the verses show a distinct hostility toward women and lust, though in typical fashion for this inconsistent text the occasional contradictory verse suggests that some Gorakhnāthī yogīs were engaging in sexual activity and utilizing the practice of vajrolī mudrā to do so without “losing their seed.” 63 Despite the heterogeneity of the text, if we look for trends, they are clear. In its 275 sabdīs and 62 pads, although the preservation of bindu is a prominent concern, the Gorakhbāṇī makes only a couple of references to the āsanas, bandhas, and mudrās of haṭha yoga (those physical practices that distinguish haṭha from other forms of yoga). For instance, in one of the few references to these physical practices of haṭha yoga, sabdī 232 states, “Leave the bad woman, give up bhang / Perform the bodily bandhas day and night / In this way, all success in yoga comes to you / And the guru will establish you in nirvāṇ samādhi.” In contrast, sabdī 134 criticizes key elements of haṭha-­yoga practice, stating, “O pundit, why do you die struggling for knowledge? / Know the highest place in some other way! You are practicing āsan [postures] and prāṇāyām [breathing exercises] / Day and night, you start and finish tired.” Sabdī 133 is particularly interesting as it explicitly rejects orthodox Pātañjala yoga (in contrast to eighteenth-­century Sanskrit texts by the Nāths that treated Gorakh’s yoga as a continuation and development of classical aṣṭāṅga yoga), while advocating a yogic practice involving tantric innovations (brought into haṭha yoga) such as khecarī mudrā, the practice of lengthening the tongue and reaching it to the soft palate to taste the nectar (amṛta) of immortality in the skull. This poem states, “Nine nāḍīs and seventy-­t wo rooms / All aṣṭāṅga [eight-­limbed yoga] is a lie / Use the suṣumnā as the key and the lock / Reverse the tongue and touch the palate.” 64 If references to haṭha yoga’s distinctive physical techniques are quite rare in the Gorakhbāṇī, again and again in a large number of poems, we find references to siddhas and siddhis, the raising of kuṇḍalinī, subtle body physiology (nāḍīs, cakras, etc.), and related practices of tantric laya yoga aimed at uniting sun (Śakti) and moon (Śiva), listening to the “unstruck” internal sound (nād), and drinking the nectar (amṛta) of immortality.65 In other words, the clear tendency in  the text is toward an ascetic lifestyle and a simplified (kuṇḍalinī-­ and

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nādānusandhāna-­based) tantric laya yoga whose primary goal is the (sublimated, erotic) union of the two divine principles within the human body to attain immortality, transcendence, and power.66 Other Nāth texts confirm this general picture. In his study of Sanskrit Nāth-­Siddha texts, Lubomír Ondračka notes that an extensive number of these works repeat the following verse: “When the rajas is impelled by the motion of śakti through the breath, then it achieves unity with the bindu, whereupon the body becomes divine.” 67 Like so many of the yoga practitioners in the Sultanate period’s new and more nonsectarian ascetic milieu, the Nāth yogīs rejected the complex metaphysics, theologies, and rituals of earlier tantric practice, but they nevertheless seem to have maintained simplified forms of tantric laya yoga at the core of their yogic practice, along with a focus on the acquisition of embodied divinity, immortality, and siddhis that was characteristic of tantric siddhas and sādhakas. It should now be apparent that the essential contrast between the yogic practice of the Nāths and the Rāmānandīs is that between the tantric heritage of siddhas, on the one hand, and the tapasvī heritage of munis and ṛṣis, on the other. Mallinson points out that this distinction is found in a wide range of texts in which kuṇḍalinī and related tantric laya-­yoga practices are associated with siddhas like Gorakṣa and Matsyendra, while the practices of bindu-­preserving, tapas-­based yoga are linked to munis and ṛṣis like Dattātreya, Mārkaṇḍeya, and Kapila. He remarks that this distinction “manifests among today’s ascetics as a distinction between the Śākta Nāths and the relatively more orthodox Daśanāmīs and Rāmānandīs.” 68 Mallinson is careful to note that the distinction between muni (or ṛṣi) and siddha (or yogī) is a general principle, not a universal rule, and many anomalies exist (Kapila, for instance, while usually called a muni, is referred to as a siddha in the Bhagavad Gītā and Dattātreyayogaśāstra).69 The key point here is that the Nāth yogīs of the early modern period traced their yogic lineage back to siddhas and tended to remain true to those tantric roots—­both in their interest in acquiring siddhis and in the tantric laya-­yoga (i.e., kuṇḍalinī-­ and nādānusandhāna-­based) practices that stayed at the heart of their practice—­ whereas ascetic Rāmānandīs traced their yogic lineage to munis, practicing a haṭha yoga that maintained close ties with those munis’ ancient physical techniques of tapas. It should not surprise us, then, that Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, founder of the Rāmānandī community at Galta, is described in Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl not as a siddha or yogī but as a muni. Nābhā describes Payahārī not simply as a muni but as “a great muni [mahāmuni] whose seed was turned upward [ūrdhvaretās].”70 The term ūrdhvaretās refers to an individual who has managed to raise and preserve his bindu (i.e., retas, “semen”), an accomplishment demonstrating real yogic mastery. Mallinson explains that “the ancient tradition of the ūrdhvaretās tapasvī

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(the ascetic whose seed is [turned] upwards), which is closely associated with the practice of yoga in texts such as the Mahābhārata, is likely to be the source of early Hatḥa Yoga, in which the preservation of bindu is paramount. This relatively orthodox tradition has survived in ascetic orders such as the Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs and the Rāmānandīs.”71 When Nābhā describes Payahārī’s disciple and successor at Galta, Kīlhadev, he seems to link him to this same yogic tradition, for he explicitly compares Kīlha to Bhīṣma (Gāṇgeya), the great warrior and yoga-­practicing ascetic of the Mahābhārata, and writes, “Through the power [bal] of God [Hari] [in/through] his [yoga] practice [karnī], he proceeded to the brahmarandhra and [abandoned] his body [tan].”72 As this verse indicates, through his mastery of yoga Kīlha was able to choose the time of his own passing by leaving (i.e., projecting his soul up the suṣumṇā nāḍī) through the brahmarandhra opening at the top of his skull.73 Like that of his guru, Dvārkādās’s yogic expertise was also deemed noteworthy, for Rāghavdās writes, “[He] mastered haṭha yoga and conquered Death.”74 Clearly, Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, Kīlhadev, and Dvārkādās were masters of yoga. The interesting thing is that, despite their yogic expertise, in the Bhaktamāls of Nābhādās or Rāghavdās, neither they nor any of the other early Rāmānandī ascetic practitioners of yoga are ever called yogīs. As just noted, these Rāmānandīs typically would have traced their roots back to munis and ṛṣis, in distinction to siddhas and yogīs, but even so, a key question remains: What, then, is a yogī? If not simply the practitioner of yoga, then who is the yogī?

Seeking the Yogī The close study of the early Rāmānandīs conducted in chapter 4 demonstrated that we likely need to reconceptualize commonplace understandings of bhakti and the identity of the bhakta. From another angle, these same Galta Rāmānandīs show us that our view of yoga and the identity of the yogī may need to be revised as well. According to Gerald Larson, “the term ‘Yoga’ in the tradition of the [Yoga Sūtra] and its principal commentaries is seldom used in the sense of ‘yoke,’ ‘join’ or ‘union,’ as it is sometimes claimed in popular accounts of Yoga. The term refers, rather, to concentration and is most easily understood in the [Yoga Sūtra] and its commentaries simply as ‘disciplined meditation’ in regard to the various states of awareness.”75 David Gordon White counters that overemphasis on philosophical and analytical texts like the Yoga Sūtra, Bhagavad Gītā, and their commentarial literature has skewed understandings of yoga toward this definition of “disciplined meditation,” which, he claims, is not historically accurate.

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In Sinister Yogis, White argues that when we focus our attention on the practitioner of yoga, the yogī, then Vedic sources, epic literature, and medieval narrative accounts demonstrate that the “purest,” most original, and most consistent meaning of the term yoga centers not on meditation but rather on “yoking,” or “occult and extrovert techniques of effecting union by projecting the self outwards in order to overcome death, enter other bodies and effect various kinds of wizardry.”76 White highlights medieval Indian literature that depicts yogīs as sinister, frightening figures who seek and wield awe-­inspiring supernormal powers that can benefit or harm those with whom they interact. Using these narratives to stress the centrality of “yoking” and siddhis in yoga (over and above meditation, breath control, etc.), White asks, “Why is it that not a single yogi in these narratives is ever seen assuming a yogic posture (āsana); controlling his breath, senses, and mind; engaging in meditation (dhyāna); or realizing transcendent states of consciousness (samādhi)—­all of the practices of what has been deemed ‘classical yoga’? If these be yogis, then what is yoga?”77 The answer to his first question seems simple enough. These narratives were just that, stories meant to engage and entertain their audiences; they were not how-­to manuals on yoga and would obviously seek to highlight the most captivating aspects of a yogī’s character and practice.78 The fact that narrative literature would underscore yogīs’ dangerous side should therefore not surprise us; yogīs were widely assumed to gain access to siddhis and were free to use them in whatever way they wished. Yet there seems to be no good reason for considering these narrative expressions of awe and fear regarding the potential dangers inherent in yogic powers as the basis for, or even as a privileged source for, our understanding of the content of yogic practice or the historical identity of yogīs. The question of extraordinary powers, or siddhis, looms large over recent scholarly attempts to make better sense of yoga and yogīs. As noted, a key element in distinguishing the Nāths and the Rāmānandīs is their respective attitudes toward the siddhis. In both the Mahābhārata and the Yoga Sūtra it is quite clear that the acquisition of siddhis is an important and natural by-­product of yoga practice, but the attitude toward them is ambiguous. In the Mahābhārata, warnings of their dangers appear as well as approval of their use for certain purposes.79 In the Yoga Sūtra, descriptions of extraordinary powers and forms of cognition occupy almost the entirety of the third book (pāda)—­constituting more than one-­fourth of the whole text—­yet these siddhis are explicitly regarded as hindrances to the larger goal of liberation.80 White rightly notes that historians have largely ignored the Yoga Sūtra’s third pāda and have generally neglected the powers and wizardry that are, in fact, a crucial dimension of yoga.81 In bringing attention to the siddhis and to unexplored dimensions of

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“yoking” that constitute critical elements of yoga practice, White provides an important corrective. Nevertheless, as Mallinson points out, we should not confuse the siddhis acquired through yoga with yoga—­i.e., yoga practice—­itself.82 The larger point is that if we comb the records of history for figures called yogīs, we undoubtedly will miss out on a great many “practitioners of yoga,” for they are not necessarily one and the same. In their respective Bhaktamāls, neither Nābhādās nor Rāghavdās even once uses the term yogī in describing Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, Kīlhadev, Dvārkādās, or the other early Rāmānandī ascetic practitioners of yoga. Interestingly, despite the great importance of renunciation to their lifestyle, Nābhādās and Rāghavdās also never refer to any of the Galta Rāmānandī ascetics as saṃnyāsīs.83 At around the same time that Nābhādās composed his Bhaktamāl, two Sikh sources—­Guru Granth Sāhib 9.2, 34.2,84 and Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās 8.13—­mention the organization of yogīs into twelve panths (a feature of the Nāth order today) and the organization of saṃnyāsīs into ten divisions (a feature of the Daśanāmī order today). It seems, then, that by the beginning of the seventeenth century the terms yogī and saṃnyāsī had come to refer to specific sectarian communities of ascetics distinct from the Rāmānandīs; thus, Nābhādās was likely quite deliberate in not using these words.85 As noted, by the early sixteenth century the term yogī referred most especially to Gorakh-­ following Nāth ascetics; however, there is ample evidence that the word still sometimes denoted Rāmānandī and Daśanāmī practitioners of yoga as well.86 That a practitioner of yoga would sometimes adopt the label of yogī is understandable; however, “sometimes” is the operative word, for it would seem that the more the term became associated with the Nāths, the more it came to hold sinister, low-­caste, and generally undesirable connotations—­especially for bhaktas or those concerned with orthodoxy and social propriety—­leading the Rāmānandīs to distance themselves from the formal label of yogī.87 Clearly, there is a great deal of confusion surrounding the term yogī itself, which has not had a historically consistent meaning or referent and has been used rather loosely to refer to individuals whose yogic practices and religious outlooks differed considerably.88 While it might seem that a yogī is quite simply one who practices yoga, what is considered to constitute “yoga,” and to what degree that yoga is central in the religiosity of any given yogī, varies greatly.89 Depending on the period, region, and specific community in which the term is being used, what is meant by the label yogī may be something quite different, and scholars writing about yoga and yogīs must remain cognizant of these differences. In seeking the yogī in the historical context of early modern North India, one must be aware that many master practitioners of yoga, like the early Rāmānandīs at Galta, might not necessarily have gone by that name. Furthermore, by the

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sixteenth century, those who were most often called yogīs, the Nāths, seem to have practiced mainly simplified forms of tantric laya yoga quite distinct from the tapasvī-­oriented physical practices (bandhas, mudrās) that were the primary basis of the haṭha-­yoga tradition.90 This liberation-­oriented classical haṭha-­yoga tradition was transmitted and practiced most especially by Rāmānandīs and Daśanāmīs, practitioners of yoga who were sometimes called yogīs but more often went by other terms that would distinguish them from the Nāths. Indeed, for Nābhādās, regardless of their level of yogic mastery, the members of his Rāmānandī community at Galta were first of all bhaktas, and even more than in their yogic practice it was in their devotional perspective that they differed from the Nāths.

Nāth Yogīs and the Quest for Occult Power Clearly, the Rāmānandī and Nāth communities differed in their yogic practice and roots, as has been described. Yet the most fundamental difference between the two was one of basic religious perspective and sensibility, one indicated by their respective attitudes toward the siddhis. Namely, the Rāmānandīs’ bhakti approach contrasted significantly with the Nāths’ tantric approach to the Divine, specifically their quest for occult power. A major theme of scholarly literature on the Nāths is their association with magic and the occult. Véronique Bouillier, one of the foremost ethnographers of the modern-­day Nāths, writes that “very few [Nāth yogīs] practice complex yogic practice (sādhanā). What ancient narratives and modern stories glorify, more than personal spiritual achievements, are the wondrous deeds, the supernatural powers obtained by heroic yogīs.”91 According to Dasgupta, “The general religious nature of Nāthism is characterized by a wide-­spread belief in occult power attained through the practice of yoga. All the legends are permeated through and through with a spirit of supernaturalism more in the form of the display of magical feats and sorcery by the Siddhas than in the form of occasional interference from the gods and goddesses, or any other supernatural being.”92 Mircea Eliade adds, “[Gorakhnāthis] are chiefly known and respected for their magical prowess: they have a considerable reputation as healers and magicians, they are supposed to be able to bring rain, they exhibit snakes. The ability to tame wild beasts is also attributed to them; they are said to live in the jungle, surrounded by tigers, who sometimes serve them as mounts.”93 George W. Briggs regales us with a host of legends about the magical feats of Gorakhnāth,

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who is said to have turned the water of a well into gold and then crystal; pronounced a spell over a sword enabling it to sever rocks; filled dried-­up lakes with water; caused withered gardens to bloom; brought about a twelve-­year drought in Nepal; taken the form of a fly to avoid guards; changed himself into iron and then into a frog; transformed some of his disciples so that half their bodies became gold and the other half iron; restored numerous deceased individuals to life; granted children to barren women; turned horse dung into locusts and then into a human body that he infused with life; restored his own hands and feet cut off by his angry stepmother; and carried with him a magic bag from which he drew grains, apples, flowers, and ashes that conferred the gift of sons or transformed themselves into gems, goods, or clothing.94 The performance of such wonders and wizardry is clearly an essential trait of the Nāth yogī. As Gordan Djurdjevic has argued, the tantric practice of the Nāth yogīs “is ultimately not a quest for salvation but for power,” a fact seen clearly in “the ultimate ideals the Nāths are striving to achieve: divine body (divya deh), perfection of body (kāya siddhi), liberation while in life ( jīvanmukti), obtainment of the elixir of immortality (amṛt), becoming a perfect adept (siddha), being a wizard (vidyādhar).”95 Djurdjevic explains that “what these ideals and goals signify is explicitly the attainment of infinite occult power in an immortal body. This is the will to power and a dedication to a lifestyle committed to its acquisition.”96 A key point is that the power sought by tantric yogīs is sacred in nature. From the perspective of tāntrikas like the Nāth yogīs, in general “the sacred manifests itself as power.”97 The tāntrika relates to the sacred, to the Divine, by trying to access and appropriate that power for himself. In contrast, the bhakta tends to approach the sacred as, above all, the Beloved, relating to the Divine especially through feeling. This is not to say that bhaktas did not also conceive the sacred as powerful but rather that, for the bhakta, the power of the all-­powerful Divine was to be supplicated; it could not be appropriated by one’s own actions. In Winand Callewaert’s terms, the tantric yogī believes that “no exterior agent is necessary” since “his own energy, when properly directed,” will achieve his spiritual goal, while the bhakta instead “relies on God’s grace” and “asks for God’s help.”98 A number of passages from the Gorakhbāṇī allow us to get a better grasp of how the perspective of the Nāth yogīs would have differed from that of bhaktas—­ even yoga-­practicing bhakti ascetics—­in early modern North India. In the following sabdī (200), we see the Nāth yogīs poking some fun at the Vaiṣṇavas, claiming that their founder and tutelary deity Gorakhnāth bested Kṛṣṇa and Rām (as well as Viṣṇu’s other avatārs) by conquering the powerful force of sexual desire that even these great gods could not master.

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Viṣṇu descended into the ten avatārs, But they were overcome by lust. The invincible lust was conquered by the ascetic Gorakh. He preserved the downward flowing [bindu].99 The poem implies that through his yogic mastery, Gorakhnāth attained a station above even the gods. To say the least, this sort of irreverence would not have been popular with Vaiṣṇava bhaktas, yet it is quite common in the Gorakhbāṇī.100 The first three lines in each of the following three sabdīs (17–­19) convey fairly typical yogic and ascetic themes—­meditation, controlling the senses, abandoning worldliness and desire—which ascetic Rāmānandīs would also have supported; ­however, in the last line of each poem, we see an attitude that could hardly be more opposed to the humble devotional approach of the bhaktas. The yogī who holds above what goes below Who burns sex, abandons desire, Who cuts through māyā [worldly illusion] Even Viṣṇu washes his feet.   He who does the ajap-­jap101 maintains meditation on śūnya [emptiness], Who controls the five sense organs And offers his body as an oblation in the fire of Brahman102 Even Śiva [Mahādev] bows to his feet.   He who places no hope in wealth and youth Having no thoughts about women In whose body the nād103 and bindu are burnt Even Pārvatī serves him.104 While the bhakta’s religious practice aimed at an intimate knowledge and, even more, an emotional experience of the Divine, the Nāth yogī’s practice aimed at accessing the power within his own body to become divine, and even to excel the gods themselves. According to the text, Pārvatī serves such a yogī, Śiva bows to him, and Viṣṇu washes his feet. These expressions of the Nāth’s tantric perspective could only come off as arrogant, egotistic, and deluded to the humble devotee of God. In the two following sabdīs (147–­48), the tantric yogī’s goal of divinizing himself is made even more explicit. If the bhakta strived to worship and to love God, the Nāth yogī strived to become God.

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Breath [pavan] is verily yoga, breath is verily pleasure. Breath verily takes away the thirty-­six diseases. Few know the mystery of the breath. In so doing, you are the creator, you are God.   Bindu is verily yoga, bindu is verily pleasure. Bindu verily takes away the thirty-­six diseases. Few know the mystery of this bindu. In so doing, you are the creator, you are God.105 This “you are God” perspective would certainly not have been well received by either bhaktas or Muslims, for whom—­no matter how intimate their relationship with the Divine—­there remained a certain distance between man and God, a separation and duality necessary for the devotional relationship to exist at all. More essential than this, however, was that—­to reiterate the point—­for the bhaktas (and Sufis), the Divine tended to be of the nature of Love and was distinctly moral and good in character, whereas the Nāth yogīs and other tāntrikas tended to conceive the Divine as sacred power, an amoral power that could be accessed (through appropriate rituals, mantras, or yogic practices) and used for any purpose, worldly or spiritual, sinister or beneficent.106

The Vernacular Nāths Even as we come to a clearer understanding of the primary religious perspective and sensibility of the Nāth yogīs, and how distasteful it was to many early modern bhaktas, it is important to note that not all Nāth lineages, and certainly not all individual Nāths, should be understood as power-­obsessed, siddhi-­seeking tantric “magicians.” Particularly in the vernacular Nāth traditions of Rajasthan and Maharashtra, we find evidence of a sort of Nāth yogī rather different from the tantric sādhaka-­oriented kind I have been describing. In Maharashtra, Jñāndev, the thirteenth-­century author of the Jñāneśvarī (Bhāvārthadīpikā), the famous vernacular (Marathi) translation of and commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, was part of a Nāth lineage (indeed, the “great-­grand-­disciple” of Gorakhnāth himself), yet—­far from a pursuit of occult power—­his religious practice seems to have fused Vedāntic jñāna, tantric kuṇḍalinī-­based laya yoga, and a contemplative, dispassionate mode of bhakti in a quest for liberation.107 This is not the place for a proper discussion of the Jñāneśvarī (1290), but it must be noted how so many of the key late-­medieval and early-­modern historical shifts discussed

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here—­e.g., simplified forms of tantric laya yoga, the increasing influence of Vedānta, and the rise of bhakti in connection with a shift from Śaiva to Vaiṣṇava orientations—­can be seen in this fascinating late-­thirteenth-­century vernacular text, intriguingly with a Maharashtrian Nāth author as their apparent nexus.108 In the vernacular literature of Rajasthan—­albeit three centuries later than the Jñāneśvarī—­we also find evidence of Nāths who can hardly be considered as tantric yogī-­magicians. Monika Horstmann has discussed a tradition of “vernacular Nāths” in early modern Rajasthan that is quite distinct from the image of tantric wonder-­workers we tend to get in either the legends or Sanskrit texts of the Nāth tradition. These vernacular Nāths—­perhaps heirs, in some loose sense, to the Nāthism of Jñāndev—­practiced a religiosity that emphasized yogic breath control and contemplation in an “interior journey leading to liberation in the esoteric body” while scorning the unnecessary external signifiers (split ears, etc.), occult practices, and displays of siddhis that were characteristic features of so many Nāth yogī lineages.109 They also seem to have had some affinity with the nirguṇ bhakti of the Sants, for in North India it was actually not the Nāths themselves but the Dādū Panth—­a nirguṇ bhakti community of Rajasthan—­who first disseminated swaths of vernacular Nāth literature, notably in the very same manuscripts containing their own and other bhakti literature.110 Horstmann discusses the “Hindi” compositions of a Nāth by the name of Prithīnāth who flourished in the sixteenth century.111 Prithīnāth’s work demonstrates that his religious practice aimed at Brahman gnosis and the attainment of bodily perfection and immortality through yogic breath control and the conquering of the fickle mind. He shows no interest in siddhis, does not mention kuṇḍalinī (though he discusses the importance of uniting the “sun” and “moon” within the subtle body), and he disparages those who needlessly practice austerities and attend to external appearances. Still, he often repeats that his spiritual goal—­a characteristically Nāth one that would not have gone over well with most bhaktas—­is to “make the body divine,” to “transform the impure body into a deity,” and “to make oneself a god.”112 There is no doubt that the Nāth yogī often served as a foil for the articulation of an early modern North Indian devotional sensibility. I cite the examples of Jñāndev and Prithīnāth not to dismiss the characteristic tantric sādhaka/siddha orientation of most Nāth yogī lineages but to highlight the facts that (a) Nāths certainly did not come in just one size and shape, and (b) the “other” of the Nāth yogī in bhakti literature was a constructed, caricatured, and pedagogical one, not one that necessarily accurately reflected on-­the-­ground realities. Diverse Nāth identities and caricatured Nāth depictions aside, there was a substantive tension between the characteristic outlook of the Nāth yogīs and that of the Vaiṣṇava bhaktas. The following passage clearly illustrates the core features of the Nāth’s

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tantric perspective that most humble, God-­loving bhaktas would have found objectionable. Having analyzed the corpus of bāṇīs (sayings) attributed to Gorakhnāth and other early Nāth Siddhas (Carpaṭi, Gopīcand, Bhartṛhari, etc.), David Gordon White identifies the following major themes as characteristic of the Nāths: First, the bāṇīs are nirguṇ: there is nearly no mention of any god in them, and when the divine is mentioned, it is without a name, qualities, or attributes. Second, on those rare occasions that the saguṇ gods of Hinduism (Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Maheś) are named, they are not at all objects of worship or even respect: what the bāṇīs say is that the yogin who succeeds in his practice makes these high gods his slaves! Third, Gorakhnāth and the other authors of the early bāṇīs never state that they are themselves incarnations of gods. On the contrary, they emphasize that mere humans like themselves can become unaging and immortal (ajarāmara) Siddhas—­perfected beings, demigods—­through various types of (usually yogic) practice. This is the entire thrust of all of the early Nāth Siddha teachings, both in the vernacular languages and Sanskrit: that humans can, by means of their practice, raise themselves up from their mortal status and become jıvanmukta, liberated in their human bodies. They were in fact claiming more than this, as the name they chose for their order makes clear: human yogins could, through their practice, lift themselves up to the level of the very same divine Nāths and Siddhas that people were worshiping in the medieval period in western India. They could become “self-­made gods.”113

As taken up in chapter 7, in the poetry of the bhakti saints, from Kabīr to Surdās to Tulsīdās, yogīs are regularly mocked and ridiculed for exactly the claims described in this passage. Relatedly, in chapter 8 I discuss a genre of stories (shared by Sufis and Hindu bhaktas) in which devotee-­saints triumph over “magical” yogīs through the gift of miracles from God (or from their devotion to God), powers revealed as much stronger than any derived from individual practices of tapas, laya yoga, or tantric mantra-­japa. In the preceding pages, I explored how the Nāth yogīs of the early modern period were different from the specifically ascetic-­yogic stream of Rāmānandīs. In many ways, Galta Rāmānandīs like Payahārī, Kīlha, and Dvārkā shared much with the Nāth yogīs, from their liberal social attitudes to their ascetic, renunciatory lifestyle and appearance; however, they also differed in important ways. In contrast to a number of scholarly claims, the yogic practice of the Nāths was generally quite distinct from that of the Rāmānandīs, reflecting their tantric Kaula and siddha heritage in comparison with a Rāmānandī yoga rooted in the

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more orthodox traditions of tapas-­practicing munis. More essential than this difference—­though reflected in their respective attitudes toward the siddhis in yogic practice—­was the widening gap between these two communities’ respective (devotional versus tantric) conceptions of and approaches to the Divine. As William Pinch aptly puts it, bhaktas’ conflict with tāntrikas like the Nāth yogīs was “not simply an argument about style. It reflected a profound disagreement about the very nature of God: and whether men could legitimately aspire to be gods. As such, it reflected a deep disagreement about the meaning of religion.”114 While this chapter has discussed the Nāths in relation to the ascetic-­yogic stream of the Galta Rāmānandīs, in fact nearly everything we know about the early Rāmānandīs comes from the literary efforts of the community’s other more rasik and devotional stream, the inaugurator of which seems to have been Payahārī’s disciple Agradās. In the next chapter, I focus on the figure of Agradās, his disciple Nābhādās, and their writings and bhakti vision. Exploring their devotional project provides key insights into the ways in which the emerging bhakti communities of early modern North India sought to define themselves and compete for followers and patronage within the new social and political contexts of Mughal India.

6

Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti Formations of Bhakti Community

T

his chapter examines the life and influence of the sixteenth-­century Rāmānandī devotee-­poet Agradās in order to understand the remarkable rise of bhakti communities and sensibilities in early modern North India. I explore the strategies and motivations at work in Agradās’s literary compositions, demonstrating how his corpus tactfully negotiated pious sentiments, political agendas, and aesthetic tastes to address multiple audiences and expand the circulation of a bhakti sensibility. Agradās is an important but virtually unstudied figure whose life and literary output offer valuable insights into the ways in which the emerging bhakti communities of early modern North India forged their identities, competed for followers and patronage, and contributed to the expansion of a larger bhakti public. Inaugurating a vernacular literary project within his community that sought to praise the deeds of great devotee-­saints, Agradās spread the saving message of bhakti in a fashion that would garner the Rāmānandīs prestige, power, and patronage in the new Mughal-­R ajput political, aesthetic, and religious environment of the late sixteenth century. In the service of this project, he composed works that engaged popular literary and theological trends centered on the aesthetic experience of sublime emotion (rasa) while simultaneously articulating popular Sant values that were at the earliest core of his Rāmānandī community. In the following I show how Agradās sought to articulate a “sensible” bhakti; that is, one prudently fashioned to appeal to many, combining pious sentiment with a pragmatic concern to bring “elite” and “popular,” rasik and Sant, aesthetic and ascetic together into a broad, inclusive bhakti community. Agradās was one of many bhakti “entrepreneurs” of his day who strategically sought to attract

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followers (“consumers”) by adapting the techniques of competitors in the religious marketplace while also generating his own distinctive (if hybridized) religious forms.1 In addition to describing how prudent or “sensible” Agradās’s bhakti literary project was, given the historical circumstances, in supporting the interests of his own Rāmānandī community, I also explore the way in which his compositions assisted in the growth of a transsectarian bhakti sensibility. In early modern North India, a broad bhakti public emerged whose members were united by similar aesthetic tastes, a common moral sense, and shared norms of emotional value and expression. In this context, the compositions of Agradās and other bhakti poets like him acted as discursive instruments whose performance communicated and rendered bhakti ideas and values as facts of the body, not just the mind, evoking shared emotions and thereby generating an experience of participation in the larger bhakti public. With regard to the historical figure of Agradās, in this chapter I ask the following questions: Who was this great bhakta? How is his life remembered in the sources available to us? What did he write and what are the key themes and messages in his compositions? What was his religious outlook and what role did that viewpoint play in the larger bhakti movement spreading across North India? I show that Agradās represented an important perspective within the Rāmānandī community and within the early modern North Indian bhakti movement as a whole, a vision of religiosity that focused on saguṇ devotion, was institution friendly and literature producing, and utilized certain tantric religious technologies while positioning itself in deliberate opposition to key tantric attitudes and perspectives.

The Life of Agradās Agradās was a disciple of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī’s at Galta, the reputed founder of the Rām-­rasik tradition, and the guru of Nābhādās, the famous author of the Bhaktamāl. Of the fifty-­t wo Vaiṣṇava dvārās (gateways to the Lord; i.e., recognized initiatory centers/lineages), thirty-­six of which are Rāmānandī, he is said to have established at least eleven,2 more than any other individual. The literary record tells us that Agra, unlike any preceding Rāmānandī, was a prolific author, the composer of at least fifteen works in addition to many scattered verses found in anthologies of bhakti poetry. Despite his clear importance, extremely little scholarship exists on the work and influence of Agradās, and a full study of his life and literature has not yet been conducted in any language.3 While a complete study of Agradās is beyond the scope of this chapter, I

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demonstrate here his critical importance in North Indian bhakti history, discussing aspects of his hagiography and writings that have never before received scholarly attention. Agradās’s exact dates are difficult to ascertain with any confidence; however, it is clear that he flourished during the second half of the sixteenth century, which would have made him a contemporary of Tulsīdās and the later Vrindavan Gosvāmīs.4 Tradition maintains that he was born as a brahman at Pīkasī village in Rajasthan and in his late teenage years traveled to Galta, where he took initiation from Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī into the Rāmānandī samprāday. At the death of his guru, Payahārī, Agradās’s guru brother Kīlhadev took over the Galta gaddī, and Agradās is said to have traveled approximately sixty miles north-­northwest to Raivasa (Rewasa), situated at the base of the Aravali mountains, near modern-­day Sikar, where he began the Rām-­rasik tradition.5 According to Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl (1660), Agradās had the following thirteen disciples: Nābhā, Jangī, Prāg (Prayāg), Vinodī, Pūraṇ, Banvārī, Bhagwān, Divākar, Narsiṃh, Khem, Kisor (Kiśor), Jaganāth, and Laghu Udhyau.6 While it is Nābhādās who usually receives all the fanfare and whose fame is highlighted at Raivasa today, it was in fact Agra’s disciple Vinodī who is said to have taken over the gaddī at Raivasa dhām. Today Agradās is most often remembered as the founding father of the Rām-­ rasik sect. Rām-­rasik bhakti seems to have emerged in response to and in dialogue with the earlier rasik tradition of Kṛṣṇa devotion, which the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Gosvāmīs of Vrindavan developed in the first half of the sixteenth century. This bhakti tradition took up legends about the adolescent Kṛṣṇa’s erotic sports with Rādhā and the gopīs and melded them with the Sanskrit aesthetic theory of rasa to formulate a new kind of devotional practice in which different varieties of human love could be purified and transformed into an experience of spiritual bliss through the devotional contemplation of the deeds of Kṛṣṇa.7 Devotees would assume the role of one of the intimate companions of the Lord (e.g., servant, friend, elder, or lover), imaginatively participating in and savoring the emotions of the divine “play,” or līlā, of their beloved Kṛṣṇa. Those initiated into this system of ritual and practice became known as rasiks, “those who savor ras,” and undertook a regimen of daily external rituals of worship and service of the deity as well as internal practices such as visualization, meditation, and role-­playing in order to fully participate in the ultimate reality of Kṛṣṇa’s eternal līlā.8 Beginning in the sixteenth century, the theology and practices of Rām-­and Kṛṣṇa-­oriented sects developed along very similar lines and continuously cross-­ pollinated each other.9 The success of Kṛṣṇa devotion and the influence of the theology of the Vrindavan Gosvāmīs seem to have led Agradās to rapidly adapt their teachings and found the Rām-­rasik sect. Indeed, it appears that Agradās

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and his disciple Nābhādās were quite aware of, and significantly influenced by, developments in Vrindavan and that they held the leading figures of Caitanya’s Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava community there in high esteem. Key aspects of Agradās’s religious vision seem to closely resemble those of the Gauḍiyā sect in Vrindavan, particularly in their śṛṅgāra-­centered rasik bhakti toward Kṛṣṇa and their heavy emphasis on the divine Name, practices that Agradās held very dear. Despite some important differences between them, it is hard not to see that the Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava community must have been a major influence on Agradās and his disciple Nābhādās. Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl devotes a surprising amount of space to praising Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava bhaktas, with full entries on Caitanya, Nityānanda, Viṣṇupurī, Raghunātha Gosvāmī, Keśav Bhaṭṭ, Rūpa and Sanātana Gosvāmī, and Jīva Gosvāmī, as well as brief mentions of Gopāl Bhaṭṭ and several other bhaktas of the Gauḍiyā tradition in Braj.10 It is difficult to know to what degree Agradās consciously modeled his own project on that of the Vrindavan Gauḍiyās, but in all likelihood he intentionally followed their lead and did so not solely out of attraction to their teachings but also as a strategic decision to model the community that, more than any other bhakti sect, had earned the special attentions—­and financial support—­of his own sect’s primary patrons, the Kacchvāhās, and through them the Mughals. As Kumkum Chatterjee has remarked, the Kacchvāhās “supported various religious sects, but had a particularly close relationship with the Gaudiya Vaishnavas with their strong Bengali affiliations,” with Rājā Bhagwān Dās, the father of Rājā Mān Singh, perhaps even having accepted initiation into the sect. Perhaps because of the Mughals’ close alliance with the Kacchvāhās, Akbar and his nobles made generous rent-­free land grants to Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava–­controlled temples from the 1560s to the 1590s, the royal decrees for which make clear the “close involvement of Rajput nobles such as Bhar Mal, Todar Mal and Ramdas Kachhwaha.”11 Rāmānandī rasik tradition holds that rasik practice had existed for centuries but was kept secret until Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī gave Agradās the task of popularizing rasik teachings.12 Agradās is thus considered to have formally begun the Rām-­rasik tradition in Rajasthan in the late sixteenth century. It was not until the early eighteenth century, however, that Rām-­rasik bhakti spread eastward and gained in popularity, taking root most especially in Ayodhya, but also in Citrakut, Janakpur, and Varanasi, among other places.13 Rām-­rasiks tend to focus on a very particular portion of the life of Rām and Sītā—­the period of approximately twelve years that they enjoyed together in Ayodhya (Saket) after getting married but before Rām was exiled. In most versions of the Rāmāyana, this phase of Rām’s life receives little or no attention; however, Rām-­rasiks delight in imagining the details of this idyllic period, a līlā in which Rām and Sītā express their ultimate reality through the quality of

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mādhurya, or “erotic sweetness.”14 Agradās’s best-­k nown composition is the Dhyān Mañjarī, a late sixteenth-­century Brajbhasha text that appears to be the earliest Rām-­rasik meditation manual, a genre of texts offering detailed descriptions of Rām, Sītā, and the beautiful city of Saket with which the initiated Rām-­rasik could conduct elaborate visualizations of the intimate life of Rām and Sītā, typically taking on the role of either a female companion (sakhī) or maidservant (mañjarī) of Sītā or a male companion (sakhā) of Rām. These companions were the select few who had access to the inner sanctum of the Kanak Bhavan (House of Gold) in Saket, where they served and worshipped Rām and Sītā, witnessing their supreme līlā.15 Agradās thus seems to have been a pivotal figure in taking the figure of Rāmcandra—­t raditionally centered on divine kingship, power in battle, and righteous rule of the world—­and shifting his worship toward a Kṛṣṇaite erotic theology and a refined emotional experience that “cultivated a distinctly apolitical interiority” among devotees, a style of religiosity better suited (than traditional forms of Rām worship) to the new Mughal-­Rajput political and cultural context.16 In his own rasik practice, Agradās is said to have taken on the persona of Candrakalā, Sītā’s dearest female companion—­who is remembered to have artfully arranged Rām and Sītā’s initial meeting in the Puṣp Vāṭikā (Flower Garden) of King Janak’s palace grounds in Mithila—­and many hold that he was actually an incarnation of this sakhī. Indeed, some of his poetry is signed Agra-­ali, the “-­ali” being a colloquial term for a woman’s intimate female friend.17

R

Our earliest description of Agradās comes from his disciple Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. Nābhā writes, Agradās never spent a moment when he was not absorbed in doing devotion to Hari. He acted in accordance with the good conduct of the saints. In service, meditation, and remembrance [sumiran], he kept his heart on the feet of Rāghav [Rām]. He loved his famous garden and worked on it endlessly with his own hands. The pure name of God fell from his tongue like rain from a cloud. Blessing him, Kṛṣṇadās [Payahārī] gave [Agra] the gift of bhakti and made him firm in heart, speech, and action. Agradās never spent a moment when he was not absorbed in devotion to Hari.18

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Love, devotion, and service are the focal points of Agra’s description, and he is also linked to the word sumiran, the remembrance of God. Anantadās, the grand-­disciple of Agra (yet his contemporary), in his Pīpā-­parcāī, written in the late sixteenth century, confirms the lineage given by Nābhā and similarly notes that Agra “excelled in love (prem) and strictly observed the rules of remembrance (sumiran).”19 Nābhādās’s and Anantadās’s use of the word sumiran20 was deliberate and particularly apt in that this term’s two main connotations—­the practice of chanting the divine Name and the practice of visualization meditations of the Lord—­seem to have been the two primary components of Agra’s devotional life and religious practice.21 In describing his guru, Nābhādās makes a point of mentioning Agradās’s “famous garden” and presenting him as a devoted gardener. The garden is a crucial feature of Agra’s hagiography from the very beginning and acts as a metaphor for the loving attention, constant care, and dedicated service he gave to God while also suggesting the sedentary nature of his religious life (in comparison with more itinerant Rāmānandī ascetics). Nābhā’s verse suggests that the pure devotion of Agradās’s bhajans and his repetition of the name of Rām were the water that nourished and sustained his garden. Rāghavdās echoed these sentiments in his 1660 Bhaktamāl, writing, “Understanding his garden to be Hari’s, [Agra] loved it very much. Weeding, digging and watering [the garden] himself, whatever fruits and flowers grew, he offered them all to Prabhu.”22 As Philip Lutgendorf notes, “Portraits of Agradas often show him in a garden: he is said to have chosen this setting for his visualizations of Ram and Sita’s intimate pastimes, and the custom of planting formal gardens adjacent to Ram temples may have originated with him.”23 Indeed, Jhā writes that Rām-­rasik bhaktas continue to follow the example of Agradās by keeping small gardens in their temples and by combining their names with bāg, kuṅj, nikuṅj, bāṭikā, van, and other similar horticultural words.24 Agra’s garden plays a key role in a popular story, first found in Priyādās’s Bhaktamāl commentary of 1712, in which Mahārājā Mān Singh comes to visit and pay homage to Agradās. As Priyādās narrates it, Mān Singh arrived with a great entourage while Agra was working in his garden. The king entered the garden but was asked to wait by two guards seated at the entrance. Agra, meanwhile, was sweeping some leaves out of the garden when he saw the large crowd assembled outside. Not wanting his devotional routine to Rām and Sītā to be disturbed by them, he sat down and became absorbed in a state of ras-­filled meditation. At this point, Nābhādās came to speak with his guru. Having approached and prostrated himself before Agradās, Nābhā stood up and became so moved by the sight of his beloved guru engrossed in meditation that his eyes filled with tears. By this time, Mān Singh had grown tired of waiting and had come looking for

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Agradās. Arriving at the scene and witnessing with his own eyes the two sants’ extraordinary and tender display of love and devotion, Mān Singh realized that Rām had indeed fully bestowed his mercy and kindness on these servants of his.25 In this story, Priyādās praises the single-­minded dedication and deep emotion inherent in the devotion practiced by Agra and his disciple Nābhādās while simultaneously showing these saints’ interaction with and impact upon perhaps the leading Hindu-­Rajput political figure in the Mughal Empire. Indeed, oral tradition at Raivasa remembers this as the event responsible for firmly planting the seed of bhakti in Rājā Mān Singh’s mind and making him thereafter a great patron of the Vaiṣṇavas.26 In his Rāmrasikāvalī (1864), the rasik devotee and writer Raghurājsiṃh of Rewa went so far as to say that Mān Singh became the disciple of Agradās.27 One legend in particular is often told about Agradās’s arrival in Raivasa. Having left Galta, Agradās was traveling with a group of sants. They were on the road in an uninhabited area when evening came upon them. Looking out into the distance they could not see a single dwelling. That day also happened to be the Ekādaśī fast and, sitting in the wilderness, they became very thirsty and hungry. Agradās was extremely concerned about the suffering of the sants with him. He wondered how God could watch the distress of his true devotees. At that exact moment, far away they saw a flickering light in a hut. Seeing this light in the midst of the desolation and darkness, their hearts rose. Agradās led the men toward the hut, and upon arriving they saw that a radiant elderly woman was seated there beside a charming lake and garden. The old woman gave them cold water and insisted on giving them a meal of fruit. The sants accepted and when the meal was ready, they offered prasād to God and invited Agradās to come and take fruit. Wanting to give to the old lady first, Agra requested that she come; however, when the sants went to get her they saw that the old lady was no longer there and that the beautiful lake and garden had vanished as well. Understanding what had happened, Agradās then realized that this woman who had come to their aid, offering light in the darkness, was none other than the divine mother Sītā (Jānakī). He was filled with great sorrow that Mā Jānakī had suffered so much difficulty for him and that he was not able to properly take her darśan. All night tears flowed from his eyes in separation from his Jānakī. He began to wonder how long Jānakī, who bestows happiness on the world, could endure her devotee’s intolerable grief. At that very place, smiling, Sītā then presented herself. She gave her devotee assurance that she would always be ensconced in Raivasa and that he should start a community there. It was based on that divine encounter that Agradās arrived in Raivasa village at the feet of the Aravali hills. There at the base of the mountains, under a pīpal (fig) tree—­ that still stands today, right next to his still-­burning dhūnī—­Agra sat down and

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began meditating. In those days, there was a serious drought; there was no water whatsoever in Raivasa. Hearing that a famous saint had arrived in their village, some residents came out to Agradās and told him about the great suffering they were experiencing because of the lack of water. Moved by their stories, Agradās thrust his cimṭā (fire tongs) into the ground. At that moment, at that precise spot, an underground spring of fresh water burst through the earth. Later a well was built there that, according to tradition, is the very well that stands today in the garden behind Raivasa monastery.28 While tradition—­as well as all scholarship—­maintains that Agradās founded a Rām-­rasik community at Raivasa after leaving Galta in the mid-­sixteenth century, there is good reason to believe that no Rāmānandī institution existed at Raivasa until the early eighteenth century and that Agradās never actually went there and, perhaps, never left Galta.29 The earliest text explicitly linking Agradās to Raivasa is Jivārām Yugalpriyā’s Rasik-­Prakāś-­Bhaktamāl (1839). This sectarian hagiographical text devotes two stanzas to Agradās: ras-­bodh vipul ānandaghan agra svāmi bānī biśad / akṣar pad anuprās madhurtā bālmīk sam // āśay gūṛh upāy prāpti rasikan kī saṅgam / raivāse jānakī vallabhī rahasi upāsī // lalit rasāśray raṅg mahal kal kuñj khabāsī / ācāraj ras rās-­path rasik barj rasikan sukhad // ras bodh vipul ānandaghan agra svāmi bānī biśad // 14   Agra Swāmī’s beautiful words showered [revealed] rasa like abundant clouds of bliss; His use of letters, verses, and alliteration and his mādhurya [erotic love/sweetness] were like that of Vālmīki. He obtained the hidden meaning and secret method of the meeting of the rasiks. Living in Raivasa, he enjoyed the worship of Jānakī [Sītā] and her Lord. The servant30 Agra’s garden was a beautiful shelter of rasa like Sītā and Rām’s private royal chamber. Founder [leader] of the sect which delights in rasa, he is the greatest rasik, and gave happiness to all the rasiks. Agra Swāmī’s beautiful words showered [revealed] rasa like abundant clouds of bliss.   agra svāmi śrī-­agra sahacarī janaklalī kī / puṣp bāṭikā milan hetu priy bhānti bhalī kī //

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candrakalā priy nām śyām siy vas kari rākhī / pragaṭi svāmi pad lahī dhyān ras man man cakhī // granthkār śṛṅgār ras sāgar mañjari dhyān hīṃ / bhedī anbhedī paṛhai rasik rās path jān hīṃ // 15   Agra Swāmī was first [the favorite] among the female companions of Janak’s daughter [Sītā]. She/he expertly arranged Rām and Sītā’s meeting in the flower garden. Candrakalā was [Agra’s] name, the beloved female companion who helped bring Rām under Sītā’s spell [power/control]. Meditating on the feet of the manifest God, Agra deeply tasted rasa. He is the author of that ocean of śṛṅgār rasa, the Dhyān Mañjarī. Whether wise or ignorant, whoever reads this work will know the essence of the rasik path. These verses from the Rasik-­Prakāś-­Bhaktamāl demonstrate the features that had solidified into key elements of Agra’s hagiography by the early nineteenth century. Unlike Nābhādās, Rāghavdās, and Priyādās before him, Yugalpriyā describes Agradās as the founder of the Rām-­rasik tradition, remembers him to have resided at Raivasa (a place never mentioned by any earlier hagiographers), and emphasizes his identity with Sītā’s favorite companion, Candrakalā. Furthermore, by this time (1839) we see that Agra’s work, the Dhyān Mañjarī, has become a definitive, essential text of the Rām-­rasik tradition. The Dhyān Mañjarī offered a detailed vision of Rām and Sītā in Ayodhya that probably served as the foundational early manual of Rām-­rasik meditation. Interestingly, of the twenty-­ four manuscripts of this text I have found in my research in the archives of North India (more than twice as many as of any other work attributed to Agradās), the overwhelming majority come from the nineteenth century; in fact, only a single one comes from before 1800.31 The nineteenth century was the heyday of Rām-­rasik bhakti, thus it makes good sense that it was then that the Dhyān Mañjarī found its greatest popularity. Yet Agradās seems to have been just as much a Sant as a rasik, and he composed a number of works and poetic verses that do not have explicitly rasik themes but instead emphasize renunciation, the power of reciting the Name, and the importance of bhakti in a more general sense. It is actually these (non-­rasik) compositions that we find in all the earliest manuscripts of works attributed to Agra, including two seventeenth-­ century manuscripts of his Kuṇḍaliyā and at least six seventeenth-­century manuscripts of collected poetry that include his pads. We cannot be certain, but all

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of this suggests that it was not until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when Rām-­rasik bhakti was rising to prominence and felt the need to look back and establish a clear lineage with a distinguished past, that Agradās was marked as the founder of the Rām-­rasik tradition and thereafter increasingly came to be remembered almost exclusively as a rasik (his hagiography perhaps even acquiring new elements), while the rest of his work and historical identity were marginalized.32 I turn now to the compositions of Agradās to provide a sense of both the rasik and Sant dimensions of his religiosity and the way in which his literary output (and that of his disciples) embraced the ethos of nirguṇ ascetics and Sants while also engaging with the burgeoning śṛṅgār (erotic love) devotional themes and Brajbhasha aesthetic refinements that could garner his community patronage and prestige within the developing Mughal-­Rajput literary and court culture. Agradās was a religious entrepreneur who worked to circulate both a sensible bhakti and a bhakti sensibility in early modern North India. His compositions were both pious and pragmatic, seeking to articulate a prudent bhakti that would appeal to a variety of potential “consumers” (and thus benefit his own Rāmānandī community) while also expressing and mobilizing a distinctive set of aesthetic tastes, ethics, and emotional values—­a sensibility—­common to the larger bhakti public.

The Compositions of Agradās Scholars writing in Hindi have been rather inconsistent in the texts they attribute to Agradās, though two works, the Dhyān Mañjarī and the Kuṇḍaliyā, are always mentioned. In my own manuscript searches in the archives of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (namely, in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Vrindavan, and Varanasi), I have found thirteen compositions attributed to Agradās (including one in Sanskrit), in addition to many scattered verses in anthologies of bhakti poetry.33 Unlike any other Rāmānandī before him, it is clear that Agra was quite prolific. Based on the number of manuscripts I have found for each of his compositions, it seems that his most popular works are, in order of significance, these four: the Dhyān Mañjarī, the Kuṇḍaliyā, the Prahlād-­caritra, and the Nām Pratāp. Of these key works, I focus below especially on the Dhyān Mañjarī and the Nām Pratāp, for they represent what seem to have been the two most important aspects of Agra’s spiritual life: rasik meditation practice (on Rām-­Sītā) and the remembrance of the divine Name.

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The earliest known compositions of Agradās are the poems attributed to him in anthologies. The earliest verses I have located come from a manuscript dated v.s.1670 (1613 CE), which would be remarkably close to the saint’s lifetime. 34 In bhakti anthologies that include his compositions, it is safe to say that Agradās is most commonly found with Tulsīdās or Sūrdās. His poetry is also quite often grouped with that of Nandadās and Kṛṣṇadās (of the Vallabha sampradāy), and not uncommonly with that of Paramānand, Mīrā, and Kabīr. We should be careful not to read too much into this, but one might speculate that he was most often grouped with Tulsī and Sūr because, like him, these poets wrote in a more polished, literary fashion and with a typically saguṇ Vaiṣṇava orientation. In addition to his more rasik (saguṇ, śrṇgār, refined aesthetic) sensibilities, Agradās had a clear Sant dimension as well (i.e., a more ascetic, nirguṇ outlook we might associate with the likes of Kabīr and Raidās). Sometimes his verses are even included with those of the famous Rajasthani nirguṇ bhakta Dādū, whom he seems to have explicitly criticized. Regardless of Agra’s and the Rāmānandīs’ feelings toward them, members of the Dādū ­Panth seem to have had no problem including Agradās’s verses in their collections of bhakti poetry. Indeed, Rajjab’s Sarvāṅgī (ca. 1600) includes ten of Agradās’s poems.35 Here I translate five of these poems that speak to some representative themes in Agra’s oeuvre.36 I begin with a poem about a practice that was undoubtedly at the very heart of Agradās’s spiritual life: the remembrance (reciting, singing) of the divine Name. rām nām sidhānt siromani / des kāl kul nem nahīṃ tahṃ bidhi niṣedh ḍāre dūnyūṃ cuni // ṭek // ved purāṇ sumaratī sāstra hūṃ ihai ank rakhyau sabhīṃ gani / mārg rāj duhūṃ kar sonauṃ nirabhai calai nisīdin bani ṭhani // siv virañci sanakādi seṣ such nārad sārad sākhi sant muni / viduṣaṇi sār udhāri liyau mathi agra nirantari ātam pati bhani // 20.937   The Name of Rām is the crown jewel of all accomplishments. Where there is no country, time, family, or daily rites, there I have abandoned both the proscriptions and restrictions [of orthodox religion]. The Vedas, Purāṇas, smṛti, and śāstras, having considered them all, I have embraced this [Rām-­Nām]. On a highway with gold in both my hands, I walk fearlessly day and night, well adorned [with the Name].

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Having mulled over [all knowledge], scholars have revealed this essence, thus Agra endlessly speaks of [recites the Name of] his own Lord [husband]. In this pad, Agradās shows his learning in the orthodox Sanskritic traditions (saying that he has considered the Vedas, Purāṇas, smṛtī, and śāstras), yet at the very same time he expresses a strong Sant sentiment that orthodoxy’s requirements and prohibitions are meaningless beside—­or perhaps better put, they can be transcended in—­the practice of remembering the name of God. In the last line of the poem, Agra states that he recites the Name without end as “his own Lord [husband],” a phrase that could indicate his rasik sensibilities and preference for approaching the Divine in a feminine role (i.e., one of the servant companions of Sītā). The next pad further emphasizes the power of the divine Name and its recitation, one of the most consistent and emphatic themes in all of Agradās’s work. jo nar rām nām anusaraī / bidhi niṣedh bādhā nahiṃ tākauṃ tīn karam tan taiṃ jhari paraī // ṭek // loh aginat pākhān nāv pari jo baisai so pār utaraī / koṭi baras kau timar sadan meṃ dīpak udai tihī chin haraī // cit kī vṛtti avidyā ṭākau kañcan kalaṅk again jaisaiṃ jaraī // agradās sansau nahīṃ yāmeṃ anīyās bhav dūtar taraī // 22.1438   The one who follows the name of Rām, For him, proscriptions and restrictions are not obstacles; the three karmas fall away from his body. One who sits on a stone boat loaded with countless pieces of iron [with the Rām-­Nām], even he crosses [the ocean of existence]. For even in a house that has been in darkness for one hundred million years, when a lamp is lit the darkness is banished in the blink of an eye. As a fire burns away gold’s impurities, so [the name of Rām purifies] the workings of the mind bound to ignorance. Agradās says, there is no doubt in this [with the Rām-­Nām], one effortlessly crosses the insurmountable [ocean of] existence. This poem extols the purifying, salvific potency of the name of Rām, which can carry even the most sinful beings across “the ocean of existence.” Agra

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devotes an entire ninety-­eight-­verse independent work, his Nām Pratāp, to this theme; it was clearly of fundamental importance in his belief and practice. The following poem is striking in its expression of intense humility and servitude. In this, it is representative of an increasingly prominent devotional perspective that was in sharp contradistinction to tantric religious approaches and attitudes. yahu mohi dījai rājā rām / dāsanidās dās kau anucar śravan kathā mukh nām // ṭek // mokhi ādi de-­cāri padārth mere nāhin kām / caran ren sādhan kī sir pari kṛpā karau such dhām // santani kau anurāg nirantari ihi bidhi bītahuṃ jām // agradās jācat hari carcā sudhā sindhu biśrām // 41.639   Oh King Rām, give me just this, I am the follower of the servant of the servant’s servant, put your story in my ear and your Name in my mouth. Liberation and the things of this world, I have no use for them. [I place] the sand from the feet of the saints upon my head; have mercy on me, abode of happiness. [Engaged in the] endless love of the saints, in this way let me spend every period of the day. Agradās begs to hear about Hari,40 that resting place, the ocean of nectar. These verses overflow with a loving devotion that revels in humble service, adoration, and praise. Agra, the “follower of the servant of the servant’s servant,” wants only one thing, to have his ears filled with accounts of the Lord’s deeds and good qualities and his mouth filled with the Lord’s sacred Name. He would give up worldly pleasures and even spiritual liberation in order to continue to immerse himself in devotion to Rām. It is hard to imagine a perspective more contrary to that of the power-­seeking approach of the Nāth yogīs (e.g., as seen in the Gorakhbāṇī) than this. The following composition comes from a section of poems in the Sarvāṅgī dedicated to the theme of warnings (citāvanī). This particular pad is in tune with common Sant attitudes about the body and the fragility and preciousness of human life. nānau nikhar sakhar saudā milai tau kāhe na lehu maṃdamati āgar / kari hari bhajan pratīt na tan kī jyūṃ jal bharyau karautī kāgar //

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deh kheh chin bhaṅgar kram biṭ nāhin chānī bāt ujāgar / agra syām kau nām amolak rasnā sumari rām sukh āgar // 73.3641   If, in a trade, you get a pile of good things for just a penny, why not take this treasure, you fool? Sing your devotion to Hari! Don’t trust the body, it’s like a paper cup filled with water. Oh ignorant one, you haven’t learned the obvious: this body—­ breakable in a moment—­will next be dust. Agra says, the name of God [Syām] is priceless; let your tongue remember [recite] Rām, the treasure house of contentment. In this poem, Agradās warns his listeners not to become attached to the body, which is unreliable and impermanent. Again, Agra expresses a point of view very much at odds with that of the Nāth yogīs, whose tantric practice used the body as its foundation in a quest for physical immortality. From Agra’s devotional perspective, one must not rely on the body but should instead focus solely on devotional songs and actions to God. Agra praises the Name once again in this pad, using a business or trade metaphor to stress its great value, attained with such ease. As he reiterates in others of his poems in the Sarvāṅgī, with one’s life span so uncertain, and human birth so rare, why not take the name of God and do bhakti right away! The next poem is quite striking, especially if one thinks of Agradās in the way he has almost universally been remembered by scholars and devotees alike, as the great rasik devotee of the saguṇ Rām. First, the pad stresses the importance of the nirguṇ dimension of the Divine, then, when Agra shifts the poem’s orientation by pointing out the identity of saguṇ and nirguṇ, he does so with a reference not to Rām but to Kṛṣṇa (Śyām) and the ladies of Braj. sukah paihau nirguṇ ke jānaiṃ / ahūṃ mamat gun doṣ bisarihau byāpak brahm pichānaiṃ // ṭek jyūṃ til tel dār meṃ hutabhūk aise sab meṃ dekhau / kistūrī ke mṛg kī nāī anant kahūṃ jinni pekhau // yahū upades syāmsundar kau braj banitā ur dhārau / agra syām pūraṇ paramānand bichūran bharam nivārau // 43.1442   Contentment is obtained by knowing the nirguṇ. By recognizing the pervasive Brahman, one forgets worldly attachment, good qualities, and faults.

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As the oil within a sesame seed or fire within wood, see [the Brahman] within all. Look for it just as the musk deer looked about endlessly [for that sweetest of scents].43 This is the instruction of Kṛṣṇa [śyāmsundar]; the ladies of Braj hold it in their hearts. Agra says that Śyām is complete and supreme bliss; abandon the illusion [confusion] of separation [between nirguṇ and saguṇ]. It is tempting to say that Agradās could not possibly have composed this verse. While that is certainly a possibility, it seems more reasonable and productive to accept the poem and correspondingly expand our view of Agradās in the realization that, in a community like that of the early Rāmānandīs, the perspective of this poem is not only completely plausible but also actually quite representative. This poem from the Sarvāṅgī is certainly not the only instance in which Agradās composed devotional verses with Kṛṣṇa in mind. To give one other example, in a pad from a 1685 manuscript titled the Bhāgavat Pad Prasaṅg, containing more than three hundred of his poems, Agradās describes the lush, enchanted environment of Braj in the rainy season and praises the “gentle, heart-­stealing” smile of Kṛṣṇa, concluding that “his face is a treasure house of bliss like the moon of Vrindavan.” 44 In early modern North India’s world of bhakti, it should come as no surprise that a devotee-­poet with a special preference for the worship of Rām would nonetheless have also composed devotional verses focused on Kṛṣṇa. When it came to Rām and Kṛṣṇa, those two brightest stars of early modern North India’s Hindu devotional scene, there was certainly no imperative to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Devotional preferences existed, but they were typically nonexclusive in nature. The great Kṛṣṇa poet Sūrdās wrote poems about Rām (as well as about Sītā and Hanumān), while Tulsīdās, the great Rām bhakta, dedicated a full work of poems to Kṛṣṇa, his Kṛṣṇa Gītāvalī. Even Sant poets like Kabīr and Raidās, whose perspective was predominantly nirguṇ in orientation, drew on the imagery and narrative traditions of both Rām and Kṛṣṇa. This inclusive Vaiṣṇava approach also seems to have characterized the early Rāmānandī community to which Agradās belonged.45 Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, the founder of the community at Galta (and Agra’s guru), seems to have been a devotee of Kṛṣṇa—­as his name indicates—­a nd to have turned his disciple King Pṛthvīrāj to Kṛṣṇa devotion as well,46 yet he is also remembered for bringing

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aniconic (śālagrām) images of both Sītā-­Rām and Nṛsiṃha (Viṣṇu in his half-­ man, half-­lion avatār) with him to Galta (which were then installed at the court of the Kacchvāhās at Amer);47 thus he seems to have been a devotee of Viṣṇu in all forms. If this was the devotional perspective of Agradās’s guru, that of his disciple Nābhādās was quite similar. In the opening passage of his Bhaktamāl, Nābhā implies that he venerates all twenty-­four avatāras of Viṣṇu that proceed from the four vyūhas (though he states that he especially reveres Rām and Sītā).48 That Agradās would praise Kṛṣṇa in some of his poems is, then, clearly not so odd. What begs for a bit of further explanation, however, is Agradās’s extolling of the nirguṇ (qualityless) Divine in the poem. The distinction between nirguṇ and saguṇ conceptions of the Divine goes back to at least the late sixteenth century, and perhaps much earlier, in North India. That this was a topic of debate—­a matter on which all did not see eye to eye—­is suggested by a number of bhakti sources, including the Rāmcaritmānas, in which Tulsīdās “goes out of his way to assert the essential compatibility of both conceptions of Ram.” 49 In a key scene, Pārvatī tells Śiva that she is unable to reconcile the transcendental majesty of the nirguṇ Rām with the worldly deeds and qualities of the saguṇ Rām. Śiva explains (1.121.3–­4) the essential correspondence of these nirguṇ and saguṇ dimensions, asserting that it would be deluded not to see the two as ultimately one and the same. Tulsī (via Śiva) states, Wise men, sages, the Vedas and Puranas declare that there is no difference between the sagun and nirgun forms of Brahman. That which is without attributes, without form, imperceptible, and without birth is compelled to take on the qualities of the iconic under the influence of the devotees’ love. How can that Absolute without attributes become qualified? In the same way that water and hailstones are not different from each other. He whose very name is like the sun to the darkness of ignorance, tell me how can he be subject to ignorant delusion?50 I return to this important subject later, but for now it is enough to note that Agradās seems to have shared Tulsī’s views on the relationship and essential compatibility of the nirguṇ and saguṇ Divine. In the final line of his poem, Agra urges his listeners to abandon the illusion that there is any separation between the nirguṇ Brahman and the saguṇ Kṛṣṇa. Many others on the religious scene of the day—­Sufis, Sikhs, and Nāths, to name a few—­shared different and more strictly nirguṇ theological views, and this may have been a source of real conflict. In other words, while it was not unusual for bhakti poets with a saguṇ preference

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to praise the nirguṇ dimension of the Divine, as Agra does, acknowledging it as the ground or essence of the saguṇ, it is far more rare to find poets with a nirguṇ preference praising the saguṇ. For Agradās and many other poets and bhaktas like him, for whom aesthetic experience and religious experience were closely intertwined (and dependent upon relishing the specific qualities of the Divine), to reject the saguṇ dimension of the Divine was in many ways to miss the point—­the savor or rasa—­of bhakti altogether. In the poems attributed to him in Rajjab’s Sarvāṅgī, we have seen Agradās express the themes of total humility, servitude, the fragility of the body, the preciousness of human life, and, above all else, the power of the Name. Tulsīdās, in the Rāmcaritmānas, had asserted that the name of Rām was the vital bridge between the saguṇ and nirguṇ dimensions of the Divine. He wrote, “The Name is a witness between the nirguṇ [aguṇa] and saguṇ realms; it is a clever translator through which both [realms] become illuminating.”51 Once again, Agradās seems to have felt just the same way. As a bhakta who not only sought to bridge the nirguṇ and the saguṇ but also to embrace his community’s Sant values while simultaneously asserting for them a more patronage-­f riendly orthodox identity, the Name was of the utmost importance to Agra, for its practice and theology were something agreed on and respected by nearly all. We can gain some valuable insights on Agra’s perspective on the divine Name, as well as his overall literary project, in his Nām Pratāp.

Agradās, the Divine Name, and the Cultivation of Brajbhasha Literature The Nām Pratāp is essentially Agradās’s vernacular rendering and interpretation of the story of Ajāmil as told in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), VI.1–­3. The following discussion and translations are based on the ninety-­eight Brajbhasha verses of this text found in a manuscript dated 1701 (v.s. 1758).52 As in BhP VI.1–­3, the verses of Agra’s Nām Pratāp occur within this narrative frame: Śukdev (son of Vyāsa, the sage-­author of the Mahābhārata) is telling the story of Ajāmil to King Parikṣit, the first king of the Kali Yuga, who is deeply troubled at the corruption and evil of the age and fearful of the horrible sufferings of hell. Ajāmil was a corrupt, sinful brahman who, after wasting away years in immoral behavior, found himself on his deathbed. As the story goes, when the messengers of Death (Yama) approached to take him away, Ajāmil cried out for his son, who happened to be named Nārayaṇ. When Viṣṇu (Nārayaṇ) heard his Name called out, he immediately sent his own messengers to confront those of Death and protect Ajāmil

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from them. After some debate, Death’s messengers returned defeated and empty-­handed to the realm of Yama, who then had to explain why they could not take away this man whose sins seemed to so greatly outnumber his merits. The reason, of course, was the saving power of the divine Name, which protected Ajāmil and ignited a transformation within him that would eventually lead him to become a model of piety. With Śukdev as his mouthpiece, Agradās explains this purifying, salvific force of God’s Name, writing (v. 43), “If the Name comes to your tongue / The tyranny of death can never grasp you.”53 Even after hearing the tale of Ajāmil, however, King Parikṣit remains doubtful about the power of the divine Name. The text states (v. 50), “In response, the king asked a question / How can just reciting the Name bring you salvation?”54 Śukdev replies to the king’s question in a series of verses that articulate the core message of Agradās’s work. nām sakal sādhani kau rājā / jog jagya tap sarai na kājā // 69   The Name is the king of all spiritual practice. [Without it] yoga, sacrifice, and asceticism achieve nothing.   sādhan sabai nām bal sāñce / nām binā sādhan sab kāce // 70   The power of the Name is the essence [truth] behind all spiritual practice. Without the Name all spiritual practices are worthless.   aur jugani bahu bidhi byauhārā / kali keval hari nām adhārā // 71   In other ages, there were many systems and paths, but in this Kali Age, the name of Hari is our only shelter. In verse after verse, Agradās praises the incomparable glory and efficacy of the Name. He writes (vv. 86–­88), dhani janam soī baḍbhāgī / rām nām sauṃ rasnā pāgī // 86   He who is so very fortunate as to have this blessed [human] birth / Let his tongue be immersed in the name of Rām.   des kāl pūjā mantra hīnā / sab nirbighan nām kai līnā // 87  

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Without country or time, without worship or mantras / One engrossed in the Name [can achieve] all things without obstacle.   rām set bin sāgar vārā / nām liyai nar hai bhav pārā // 88   Without the bridge of Rām, [one cannot cross] this endless ocean, [but] taking the Name, a man crosses this [ocean of] existence. Having extolled the Name in virtually every conceivable way, Agradās concludes his composition with these two verses: nām pratāp jo sunai sunāvai / jīvan mukat param pad pāvai // 97   ān upāi nahī kī koī āsā / agardās śrī hari nām bisvāsā // 98   Whoever listens to and recites the glory of the Name [Nām Pratāp], Their soul is liberated and attains the highest place.   There is no hope in other ways. Agradās places his faith in the Name of Hari. The Nām Pratāp clearly demonstrates the incredible importance that the Name held in the theology and practice of Agradās and his Rāmānandī community. Agra’s verses in this text reiterate the message of many of his poems in the Sarvāṅgī. The absolute power of the Name was a message proclaimed by bhaktas far and wide in early modern North India: Tulsīdās, the Sikhs, the Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava followers of Caitanya, and Sants like Kabīr and Raidās, among others, were united in this core belief and practice. Indeed, Agra’s words in verse 71, kali keval hari nām adhāra (“in this Kali Age, the name of Hari is our only shelter”), are nearly identical to those in verses composed by both Raidās55 and Tulsīdās.56 For Agradās, the bhakti practice of remembering the Name (in song, recitation, or meditation) was a truly necessary form of devotion without which all other spiritual practices became useless. He highlights the ultimate superfluity (if not worthlessness) of yoga, asceticism, sacrifice, worship rituals (pūjā), and the use of mantras (vv. 69 and 87); one need only have faith in the Name. The significance of Agra’s Nām Pratāp is not simply its emphatic advocacy of the Rām-­Nām. As a rendition of a popular devotional tale from the BhP, this work

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also suggests Agradās’s involvement in the project of making Sanskrit religious and literary texts available (in written form) to a broader audience in the emerging cosmopolitan vernacular of Brajbhasha. The Rāmānandīs had deep roots in the tradition of the Sants, and the spirit of asceticism, renunciation, and yoga among the early community at Galta has been noted. Agradās sought to maintain the Rāmānandīs’ Sant values while taking the community in a new direction that could garner it prestige, power, and patronage in a changing sociopolitical environment. While the Sants by and large rejected Sanskritic and brahmanical traditions, in certain contexts Agradās—­especially in his Dhyān Mañjarī and Kuṇḍaliyā—­embraced Sanskrit literary authority and joined a growing movement of poets who were cultivating in Brajbhasha “a new and self-­consciously classicizing idiom of Hindi.”57 Agra seems to have authored at least one work in Sanskrit58 and was probably quite learned in Sanskritic traditions, but his mission was to spread the messages and stories of bhakti in Brajbhasha, a language of great promise in that it was not only accessible to everyday devotees but also developing a new register perfectly suited for sophisticated literary expression in the courts of Rajput kings, and perhaps even Mughal emperors. In the second half of the sixteenth century, while poets such as Nandadās in Braj were rendering Sanskrit texts into artfully constructed Brajbhasha verses, giving special attention to the legends of Kṛṣṇa in the BhP, Agradās chose to write interpretive vernacular tellings of stories—­all found in the BhP but also almost certainly in vernacular oral circulation—­about the power of bhakti and the deeds of exemplary bhaktas, a concern and a project he would pass on to his disciple Nābhādās. In this effort, Agradās authored not only the Nām Pratāp, on the tale of Ajāmil (BhP VI:1–­3), but also the Prahlād Caritra, about the story of the great devotee Prahlād (BhP VII:1–­10), and the Dhruv Caritra, which retells the narrative of the inspiring and praiseworthy bhakta Dhruv (BhP IV:8–­12).59 In his mission to celebrate the great bhaktas and the transformatory power of devotion to those bhaktas, Agradās’s choice to focus specifically on devotees featured in the BhP was a strategic one linked to a larger historical trend in which this scripture had acquired special importance among devotees. In the fifteenth century, Lakṣmīdhara’s Bhagavannāmakaumudī (Moonlight of God’s Name) had made “a serious scholastic attempt to accord the genre of purāṇa—­specifically, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa—­a superlative place in the hierarchy of Sanskrit scripture,” 60 and by the sixteenth century, the BhP had come to be “regarded by many as the definitive commentary on and sum of all Vedic knowledge.” 61 Audiences would have been quite familiar with its stories and characters, able to admire the specific ways a poet rendered them. Furthermore, listening to the BhP’s tales was considered a meritorious activity and one of the most efficacious ways of cultivating love for God.62 Wherever Agra’s vernacular renditions of the

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well-­known tales of the great bhaktas of the BhP circulated and were performed, with their artfully tailored bhakti themes and messages, they would almost certainly have induced particular “modes, and moods, of feeling together” among audiences, generating an “effervescent sentiment of sharing and taking part in a larger social ensemble”: an early modern North Indian bhakti public.63 In other words, Agradās’s Brajbhasha works on the famed bhaktas of the BhP (Ajāmil, Dhruva, Prahlād) engaged popular literary and religious trends of the late sixteenth century in a fashion skillfully tailored to bring in followers and patronage for the Rāmānandīs, but perhaps more crucially, their circulation and performance helped to sustain and expand a far-­reaching transsectarian bhakti sensibility and public.

Agradās the Rasik I turn now to Agradās’s most famous work, the Dhyān Mañjarī, in order to provide insight into his rasik side, a dimension that manifested itself in terms of both his devotional practice and his literary style and output. The Dhyān Mañjarī, or Handmaiden of Meditation, is Agradās’s most well-­k nown and influential work. Composed sometime in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, it is the earliest known distinctly Rām-­rasik work and became a foundational text of the Rām-­rasik community. Like nearly all of Agra’s compositions, it is written in Brajbhasha64 and consists of seventy-­nine rhyming couplets in the rolā meter.65 The only English-­language scholarship on the Dhyān Mañjarī, which also constitutes the only English-­language discussion of any of the works of Agradās, is that of R. S. McGregor. In a short essay, McGregor gives a brief but useful description of the contents of the text, but he does not translate any of the verses.66 In the following, I offer translations of some of this foundational work’s most essential verses.67 Before delving into the text, it is important to note the significance of the title Agra gave to this composition. It is first a work meant to assist in meditation, or dhyān. The vision of meditation articulated in the text has close parallels with traditional tantric practices of inner worship and yogic visualization, showing that just as much as bhakti communities were distancing themselves from many aspects of the tantric tradition, at the same time they were also appropriating certain tantric ritual practices, remaking them in a new devotional context. Agradās intended his work to be a helper and intimate companion, or mañjarī, for rasik practitioners, a “handmaiden” working in service of their meditation on the divine play of Rām and Sītā. Yet Agra’s use of the word

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mañjarī in the title is suggestive of more than this. In the developing Kṛṣṇa bhakti of Braj, the girlfriends of Rādhā, her closest companions and servants, came to be known as mañjarīs. A form of spiritual practice developed in which the rasik took on the role and identity of one of these mañjarīs in order to best witness and relish the profound love of Rādhā for Kṛṣṇa.68 As Tony Stewart explains, the role of the mañjarī had “an advantage enjoyed by no other figure in the līlās of Krishna: immediate and continuous access to Rādhā’s and Krishna’s play.” 69 As noted, Agradās is remembered to have taken on the role of Sītā’s closest female companion in his rasik devotion. There is no doubt he was a trailblazer in taking contemporary developments in Kṛṣṇa bhakti in Braj—­particularly the rasa-­ centered theology and mañjarī sādhana formulated among the Vrindavan-­based Gauḍiyā Vaiṣṇava followers of Caitanya—­and adapting them to a Rāmaite devotional context. According to tradition, Agradās felt that taking on the role of one of Sītā’s handmaidens, or mañjarīs, during devotional meditation was the most effective means for a practitioner to become “the supreme participant-­ observer” of the līlās of Rām and Sītā, “present and contributing, but not the direct object of [their] attentions,” and thus perfectly situated to observe and become a vessel of their sublime emotions.70 The Dhyān Mañjarī opens with the following line, a directive to meditate on Rām and the power inherent in this practice: sumirau śrīraghuvīr dhīr raghuvaṃs vibhūṣaṇ / saraṇ gahe sukhrāsī harat aghsāgar dukhaṇ // 1   Engross yourself in the remembrance of Śrī Raghuvīr [Rām], ornament of the Raghu family. He who takes the refuge of this source of joy removes oceans of sin and suffering. Following this invocation, Agradās begins describing the city of Ayodhya, or Avadhpuri (vv. 3–­8), and the righteousness, devotion, and good fortune of its residents (vv. 9–­11). He says (v. 12), “This very Ayodhya is the Ayodhya described in śruti and smṛti. When you meditate [on this Ayodhya], it gives contentment; pronouncing its name destroys all sins.”71 The text (vv. 14–­27) then proceeds to describe the pleasure groves of Ayodhya; the divine splendor of its birds, trees, fruits, and flowers; and the sin-­cleansing and heaven (Vaikuṇṭha)-­granting power of the Sarju River flowing nearby. In a number of ways, Agra’s description of Rām’s Ayodhya seems to be modeled on Kṛṣṇa’s Vrindavan. Indeed, these verses reflect “the quest for a mythical space that would be the site of the madhurya lila of Ram and Sita,” a site that, as Paramasivan puts it, “would parallel, if

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not rival, the spaces of Vrindavan and Golok that had so captured the imagination of much of North India through the Krishna devotional traditions.”72 The detailed images in Agra’s descriptions are often astonishing. In a particularly evocative verse about the trees of Ayodhya, he writes, “The branches, heavy with the weight of fruits and flowers, are leaning to the surface of the earth, as if extending their arms to offer fruit to those passing by.”73 The vivid imagery in such verses is a reminder that the disciplined meditation the text is meant to assist depends on the ability of the rasik practitioner to reproduce first a spatial environment, the geography of Ayodhya, as the prelude to emotional involvement with Rām and Sītā.74 After describing the pleasure groves of Avadhpuri, Agra depicts the gold-­ inlaid, jewel-­studded lotus throne upon which Rām sits (vv. 28–­30), then delves into an elaborate śikh-­nakh (head-­to-­toe) description of the beautiful and awe-­i nspiring features of Rām (vv. 31–­47), whose form “ten million suns feel ashamed upon seeing.”75 Verses 48 to 65 offer an equally detailed vision of Sītā and of the divine pair seated together. Before moving on to describe their attendants—­Śatrughna, Lakṣman, Bharat, Hanumān, Nārad muni (vv. 66–­70)— Agradās concludes his verses on Rām and Sītā with these words: “How can one describe the incomparable appearance of the divine couple? / Whatever poetic language one uses, it finds meaning and expression only through their divine power.”76 Before proceeding to a translation and analysis of the final ten verses of Agra’s text, a few key observations will be useful. More than half the verses in the Dhyān Mañjarī are devoted to intricate śikh-­nakh verbal portraits, a descriptive genre commonly seen in Indian poetry but one that, Lutgendorf reminds us, we must not dismiss “as a mere convention” because “in serving to create (in Kenneth Bryant’s memorable phrase) a ‘verbal icon’ of the most literal sort, it represents, in fact, a recipe for visualization.”77 To flip the coin back over, if Agradās’s detailed descriptions of Rām-­Sītā were recipes for visualization, it is crucial to note that he composed them according to accepted literary codes and sophisticated aesthetic protocols in order to evoke a deep and purified emotional experience. In Sanskrit literary theory, portraying the beauty of a main character in terms of these accepted codes was thought to deepen the experience of rasa. The emotional experience that Agradās sought to evoke and heighten through artful literary method was a devotional one, thus here we see the aesthetic and the religious truly blurring into one another. The Dhyān Mañjarī offers a “recipe” for a meditative vision of the divine couple (yugal svarūp) seated upon a lotus on a throne under a wishing tree, one based on an image—­a meditation (dhyān)—­of the pair first described in the Agastya Saṃhitā (where the practitioner is to visualize Rām and Sītā within his own

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heart) but that Agradās places in the pleasure groves of Avadhpuri. As B. P. Singh has demonstrated, Agra’s description of this vision (particularly the tree-­throne-­ lotus theme) closely parallels a passage from a no longer extant tantric text called the Sadāśiva Saṃhitā.78 More than on the Sadāśiva Saṃhitā, it seems that Agradās drew heavily on the work of the Braj poet, scholar, and Kṛṣṇa devotee Nandadās. In the Dhyān Mañjarī, Agradās not only adopts the meter of Nandadās’s Rāspañcādhyāyī (Quintet on Kṛṣṇa’s dance) but also makes “a series of striking verbal and conceptual borrowings” from Nandadās’s work in his descriptions of the beauty of Rām and Avadhpuri’s pleasure groves. As McGregor points out, “The way Agradās makes these borrowings, from different parts of the source poem and evidently with close knowledge of its text, illustrates his intention and ability to make the fullest use of this contemporary, vernacular Kṛṣṇa source. The variations of topic and interpretation between the two poems, and the different order of treatment of some shared topics, means that considerable literary skill was required.”79 The fact that Agradās borrowed from the work of Nandadās is interesting for two reasons. First, it further indicates his interaction with the burgeoning Kṛṣṇa devotional communities of Braj, and, second, it speaks to his adoption of a refined literary sensibility, demonstrating a concern and intent to display poetic artfulness and cosmopolitan sophistication in accord with the conventions of an emerging Brajbhasha public sphere. Nandadās’s influence on Agradās seems to have been strictly literary, for their religious views differed substantially, so much so that Agra’s disciple Nābhādās does not mention Nandadās at all in the earliest manuscripts of his Bhaktamāl, which, as mentioned, envisioned an extraordinarily expansive community of devotee-­saints.80 This is not necessarily surprising since, in many ways, Nandadās was far more influential as a scholar-­poet than as a bhakta of Kṛṣṇa. Nandadās flourished in Braj in the second half of the sixteenth century, and while he is claimed as a member of the Puṣṭi Mārg sect of Vallabha, his literary influence extended far beyond that of any single religious community, for he was a critical early figure in familiarizing vernacular poets and their audiences with the theory, conventions, and vocabulary of Sanskrit poetics.81 Indeed, Allison Busch identifies Nandadās’s Rasmañjarī as a forerunner of the rīti-­granth genre82 and says that he “paved some of the way toward the classicization and elaboration of Hindi literary culture.”83 Agradās was probably a junior contemporary of Nandadās’s, with most if not all his works preceding those of the great rīti poet Keśavdās, who burst onto the scene in 1591 with his Rasikpriyā. Thus, Agradās wrote at a time when Brajbhasha was well established in bhakti religious circles and was on the rise as a sophisticated literary idiom, rapidly gaining importance in courtly contexts.

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Agra wrote in Rajasthan, within the orbit of the Kacchvāhā rulers of Amer, who were taking the lead role in establishing “a transregional Rajput courtly culture that was evolving in dialogue with the Mughal imperial system”84 and was significantly informed by the values, images, and narratives of Vaiṣṇava bhakti. This developing cosmopolitan court culture engendered a new interest among Rajput rulers in literacy and books, which manifested in the second half of the sixteenth century in an explosion of written texts (that increasingly supplemented oral practices) and the first development of libraries.85 Agradās found himself in the midst of all these trends and the new patronage conditions to which they gave rise. By producing written texts, especially ones that interfaced with the increasingly popular Kṛṣṇaite-­influenced śṛṅgāra literary culture, it was possible for bhakti poets to plug into the petty noble circuit and perhaps make even bigger court connections that would bring the benefits of both prestige and patronage to themselves and their communities.86 Agradās wrote at a time when Brajbhasha literary production and the Vaiṣṇava devotion with which it was so often associated were increasingly becoming part of Rajput kingly self-­presentation, a self-­fashioning designed to display the Rajput rulers’ worthiness, prestige, sophistication, and power to (a) the Mughals, who, crucially, could participate firsthand in the “cultural repertory” of Brajbhasha (unlike with the far more inaccessible realm of Sanskrit);87 (b) rival Rajput houses; and (c) their own local subjects. By following the lead of Brajbhasha literary figures like Nandadās and composing polished vernacular works on Vaiṣṇava themes according to time-­honored Sanskrit aesthetic conventions, Agradās made the Rāmānandī sampradāy into an active participant in an emerging cosmopolitan Mughal-­Rajput literary culture. His literary project provided the Rāmānandīs a level of dignity, distinction, and deportment that was vital in their competition with other religious communities for the support and patronage of those with wealth, sophistication, and power. Agradās’s Kuṇḍaliyā—­h is second most popular work (behind the Dhyān Mañjarī) in terms of number of extant manuscripts—­is also indicative of this trend.88 The title of this text refers to the kuṇḍaliyā meter in which it is composed, a long and relatively complex meter (a six-­l ine stanza of cyclical structure involving a dohā combined with one rolā quatrain) that would seem to indicate a more self-­consciously “poetic” metric choice in comparison with the generally simpler meters used by Sants such as Kabīr, Ravidās, and Nāmdev. In manuscript collections, Agradās’s Kuṇḍaliyā often goes by the title of Hitopadeśa-­ bāvanī since it deals with the subject matter of the Sanskrit Hitopadeśa, an independent treatment of the Pañcatantra that includes teachings on morality and wise political behavior. The Hitopadeśa was quite popular among the Mughal political elite, so much so that Akbar commissioned painted versions of

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the text and even commissioned Abu al-­Fazl to prepare his own recension (the ‘Ayar-­i Danish) in simplified Persian. It is probably no coincidence, then, that Agradās chose to compose a Brajbhasha work, using a sophisticated literary form and poetic style, dealing with the themes and content of this popular text, for producing this sort of literature could garner the Rāmānandīs social and financial capital. In the historical context of Mughal India, thus, composing works like the Dhyān Mañjarī, Nām Pratāp, and Kuṇḍaliyā was truly a display of virtue and power.

R

Let us return now to the text of the Dhyān Mañjarī and see how Agradās concluded his most famous work. If the first sixty-­n ine verses of the work were primarily a display of artful poetic description, in the last ten verses (vv. 70–­79), Agradās shows a bit more of himself as he elaborates on the significance of the rasik meditation he has so carefully laid out. He writes, ye hī dhyān ur dhare svayaṃ tatu suphal karevā / bhav caturānan ādi caran bande sab devā // 70   Keep only this dhyān89 in your heart and it will bring forth good fruits in the body. The feet of Rām are worshipped by Śiva, Brahmā, and all the gods.   yah daṃpati var dhyān rasik jan niti prati dhyāve / rasik binā yeh dhyān aur sapne nahi pāve // 71   Rasik practitioners meditate daily [always] on the dhyān of this magnificent couple [Rām and Sītā]. Those who are not rasiks cannot obtain this dhyān even in dreams.   amal amṛt ras dhār rasik jan yehī ras pāge / tāku nīras gyān jog tap choī lāge // 72   Rasiks immerse themselves in the pure nectar of the flow of this rasa. To them, jñāna [knowledge], yoga, and tapas [asceticism] are as rasa-­less [dull, useless] as a dried-­up stem of sugarcane.  

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param sār yeh carit sunat śravanani aghahārī / dhyān param kalyān sant jan ānand kārī // 73   Hearing the supreme essence of this Dhyān Mañjarī destroys all sins. The greatest prosperity comes from this dhyān, which gives bliss to the saints.   tinhī bhūli jani kahu kuṭilatā paṅk malin man / yah ujjal mani māl paherehi param rasik jan // 74   Even by mistake do not tell this to minds soiled by the mud of wickedness. This shining jeweled garland can be worn only by great rasiks.   jagat īs ko rūp varani kahe kavani adhik mati / kahā alp khadyot bhānu ke nikaṭ kare duti // 75   Tell me, what great wise person can describe Rām, Lord of the World? What light can a firefly shine when it is next to the sun?   kahā cātak kī sakti akhil jal caṇcu samāve / kachuk būṇd mukh pare tāhe le ānand pāve // 76   Does a cātak bird90 have the power to put all water [every single drop of rain] in its beak? Just a few drops fall in its mouth and it obtains bliss from these.   suni āgam vidh arth kachuk jo manhī suhāyo / yah maṅgal kar dhyān jathā mati varani sunāyo // 77   Having heard the Āgamas, some of its teachings pleased my mind; According to these, I have proclaimed and described this auspicious dhyān in keeping with my own understanding.   śrī guru santani anugrah te as gopur vāsi / rasik janan hit karan rahasi yah tāhi prakāsī // 78  

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By the grace of the guru and the saints, this Gopur-­dwelling man Has shed light on this secret for the benefit of rasiks.   dhyān mañjarī nām sunat man mod baḍhāve / śrī raghuvar ko dās mudit man agra sugāve // 79   Hearing just the name of the Dhyān Mañjarī, the heart’s joy increases. Agra, the servant of Raghuvar [Rām], sings this [Dhyān Mañjarī] with a happy heart. What can we learn from these concluding lines? Let us begin by taking note of Agradās’s use, in verse 77, of a seemingly innocuous but actually quite revealing phrase: jathā mati, or “in keeping with my own understanding.” As Allison Busch has pointed out, this little phrase was “the refrain of rīti poet-­intellectuals,” invoked by a number of early modern North India’s most refined poets.91 Indeed, Keśavdās said in his Rasikpriyā (5.41), “I have composed this passage according to my own understanding” (kahe apanī mati anusāra), while Nandadās used the similar phrases “according to my own judicious understanding” (sumati anusāra) and “in keeping with my understanding” (yathā mati).92 Busch argues that we should take seriously these authors’ claims that they were expressing their own opinion, as such assertions were frequent and central to their identities and projects. These statements demonstrate that the poets intended to create new knowledge, to make their own interpretations and poetic flourishes, offering their own visions while working within classical genres and protocols.93 Strictly speaking, Agradās was perhaps not a rīti poet, yet it seems clear that he must be included among those vernacular poets of early modern North India who “sought to reshape the classical tradition ‘according to their own understanding.’ ”94 If composing interpretive vernacular renditions of three different stories from the BhP (his Nām Pratāp, Prahlād Caritra, and Dhruv Caritra) is not evidence enough, his intention to reshape earlier Sanskritic religious tradition is expressed clearly in the Dhyān Mañjarī when he states that he has examined the Āgamas and “proclaimed and described this auspicious dhyān in keeping with my own understanding ” (v. 77). It is noteworthy that Agradās refers specifically to the corpus of the Āgamas as the classical tradition that he has become familiar with and sought to reshape in his Dhyān Mañjarī. “Āgama” typically refers to one of the Śaivāgamas, the Sanskrit scriptures of the orthodox tantric Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, but it seems likely that Agradās meant this as a more general reference to Sanskrit ritual texts of the orthodox tantric traditions (including works such as the

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Agastya Saṃhitā). Indeed, it seems that in this text Agradās drew on tantric ritual technologies and understandings but placed them within a distinctly bhakti framework that was largely critical of the tantric approach to the Divine. In verse 71, we see that there is an element of exclusivity in the devotional practice that Agradās has described; it is only for rasiks to cultivate and experience this meditative vision. He uses the word rasik a number of times in these concluding verses, but what exactly does Agra mean by this term? In the world of Sanskrit poets, a rasik was a connoisseur, a trained interpreter, an emotionally attuned reader, and this sense is clearly present in Agradās’s use of the term.95 In the context of Rām bhakti, however, the rasik is an emotionally attuned devotee, a connoisseur trained specifically to understand and imagine the stories of Rām and Sītā and to perform himself into the role of their intimate companion-­servant and thereby taste the sweet, juicy essence (rasa) of divine love. Agradās’s text was meant not only to appeal to existing rasiks like this but also to create a new community of such rasiks and to demarcate that community from others. As Agradās stresses again in verse 74, the teachings of the Dhyān Mañjarī are meant only for rasiks and should not be shared with the ignorant. In verse 78, he reminds his listeners that this is a “secret” (rahasi) revealed “for the benefit of rasiks.” In advocating such secrecy and restraint in the propagation of these teachings, Agra’s text here resembles an aspect of esoteric tantric traditions. Indeed, as Lutgendorf has remarked, “Like tantric treatises, rasik texts often contain warnings against revealing their teachings to the uninitiated or people who have not yet attained mastery over their senses.”96 At the same time that the Dhyān Mañjarī stresses secrecy, as a work that put into writing a type of meditation practice that ordinarily had been directly transmitted only between master and disciple, this text’s very composition was a sign of changing times, evidence of a new valuing of textual knowledge. Secrecy and initiation are hardly the only parallels between tantric and rasik devotional practices. Certainly the element of rasik bhakti most clearly indebted to the tantric tradition is its detailed visualization meditation. The meditative process of visualizing an object (usually a deity) and trying to identify oneself with that object, often termed bhāvanā, dhyāna, or smaraṇa in tantric literature, is “an indispensible part of tantric ritual and yoga in general.”97 The visualization meditation of tantric ritual and yoga described in texts like the Āgamas involves an imaginative creation, a detailed mental construction of the deity being worshipped. As Csaba Kiss states, this tantric meditation “is not merely a ‘mechanical’ mental reproduction of a visual image, but an intense, emotional and empathic ‘living out’ of a dream-­like goal by completely losing one’s self in the image.”98 Kiss describes the practice of tantric dhyāna as having the following three key elements: “[1] the mental creation by effort of something which is

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not normally present in the mind; [2] the vivid visualization of a predefined object; and [3] an empathic, emotional attitude towards the created mental object or a total self-­identification with it.”99 Clearly, this description of meditation in tantric yoga could just as easily refer to the meditative practice of rasik bhakti. As noted, Agradās links his Dhyān Mañjarī to the tradition of the Āgamas and uses the same terms—­dhyāna and smaraṇa—­as these tantric texts to describe rasik meditation. The detailed visualization of Ayodhya, Rām, and Sītā that his work was designed to assist seems in key respects to be none other than a tantric meditation. Nevertheless, to call Rām-­rasik meditation tantric is rather misleading, since tantric-­style visualization techniques had been vital elements of devotional practice for centuries (e.g., as is clear in the BhP). If the ritual process, the creative mental work being done, was essentially identical in the meditations of tantric yoga and rasik devotion, the two were quite different in terms of the worldview, sensibility, and goals that framed their practice and made it meaningful. Put most simply, tantric visualization typically aimed at identification with the deity; i.e., the divinization of the self, whereas the visualization of rasik dhyān sought to cultivate a purified emotional experience of divine love, one that required a separation from—­and a rich emotional relationship with—­the deity. While the rasik practice that Agradās’s text was meant to assist involved technologies of meditative visualization that had their roots in tantric tradition, the point of this rasik meditation was to lose oneself in devotion to Rām and Sītā, to imagine oneself into a position in which one could heighten one’s experience of love by relishing their every feature and witnessing their every move. To take on their divine identity and acquire their power(s), as one might in tantric traditions, would have been the furthest thing from the rasik bhakta’s mind. Agradās was not alone in the project of bhakti’s assimilation of tantric technologies in early modern North India. In her research on Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, Barbara Holdrege adeptly describes this same process. She offers a detailed analysis of how the early Gauḍīya rasik bhaktas of Braj “appropriate[d] certain devices and practices associated with yogic meditation techniques and tantric ritual traditions and reinscribe[d] them as components of a distinctively Gauḍīya regimen in which meditation is re-­visioned as a devotional practice.”100 They strategically appropriated and domesticated tantric (Pāñcarātra) ritual practices, reorienting them from the construction of a divinized tantric body to the bhakti-­ inspired fashioning of a perfected devotional body—­with which they would have privileged access to Kṛṣṇa’s divine līlā.101 At roughly the same time, and not far from Braj, Agradās similarly sought to reorient tantric methods, but in the sphere of Rām devotion. His Dhyān Mañjarī utilized a ritualized meditative practice with origins primarily in the tantric tradition—­a powerful technique of

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disciplined imagination that had been refined in tantric contexts—­but this meditation was to be performed with a type of devotional mind-­set incompatible with the usual goals and perspectives of tantric tradition. As shown in chapter  1, forms of bhakti and tantric religiosity had long been intermixed in India, with devotion regularly taking place within a tantric paradigm during the medieval period. In the early modern period in North India, however, a new bhakti sensibility emerged among many bhakti poets and communities who criticized and sought to separate themselves from certain tantric understandings of and approaches to the Divine. At the same time that they articulated a new and more exclusionary notion of bhakti, some also—­especially in rasik contexts—­continued to employ certain ritual methods and meditation techniques with distinctly tantric roots.102 Indeed, bhaktas like Agradās did not explicitly position themselves and their bhakti religiosity against “tantra” per se (the perception of any such clearly bounded genre of religiosity did not yet exist)—­in fact, they often saw their work as continuous with the traditions of the orthodox tantric Āgamas and Saṃhitās. However, as described in more detail in the following chapters, many early modern North Indian bhakti poets deliberately marked themselves off from and defined their collective sensibility against certain tantric attitudes and religious approaches, particularly those associated with Śāktas and tantric yogīs. Agradās’s Dhyān Mañjarī offers an illustration of how North India’s bhakti movement—­particularly in its rasik forms—­incorporated and sustained certain dimensions of tantric practice (e.g., its yogic technologies) even as it reacted against and marginalized other key aspects of the tantric tradition.

The Bhakti Community Envisioned by Agradās and Nābhādās Agradās is the first Rāmānandī for whom we have any significant body of written literature. It is clear from the corpus of his work, as well as from the literature produced by his disciple lineage—­most especially his immediate disciple Nābhādās and his grand-­disciple Anantadās—­that Agra began a literary project that aimed to extol exemplary Vaiṣṇava bhaktas and spread the saving message of bhakti in a fashion that would give his community a place of prominence in the new social, political, and cultural atmosphere of Mughal India. While all indications are that Kīlhadev, Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, and probably even Rāmānand himself positioned themselves primarily within an ascetic, yogic, and Sant devotional culture and were not much concerned with either brahmanical propriety or the composition of literature, Agradās seems to have spearheaded an

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effort to secure respectability and legitimacy for the Rāmānandīs among other sectarian Hindu communities by producing vernacular devotional literature that engaged Sanskritic traditions and interfaced with the developing Mughal-­ Rajput court culture. With the Rajputs’ rise to political power within the system of Mughal rule developed under Akbar, paralleled by the intertwined ascent of rasik aesthetics and Vaiṣṇava bhakti, religious communities found themselves in a new patronage milieu, and Agradās took the lead in adapting and representing his community in light of these developments, all the while promoting the power of bhakti and praising the great bhaktas. Agradās’s disciple Nābhādās, in accord with Agra’s directives, continued this project, further expanding the circulation of a sensible bhakti and a bhakti sensibility. In fact, while Agra may have inaugurated a multipurpose Rāmānandī bhakti literary endeavor, there is no doubt that history remembers Nābhā’s contribution to have exceeded that of his guru. According to Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī (1712), one day Agradās and Kīlhadev came across a blind infant who had been abandoned in the forest; this child was none other than Nābhādās. Agra and Kīlha restored his sight and brought him back to Galta, where Agradās initiated him into the Rāmānandī order.103 At the beginning of his Bhaktamāl, Nābhā explains that it was Agra who ordered him to compose his famous work in praise of the devotees of God. In the fourth dohā, he states, “Guru Agradev gave the order, ‘Sing the glory of the bhaktas. There is no other way to cross the ocean of existence.’ ”104 Toward the end of the Bhaktamāl, Nābhā reiterates the key role of his guru in the composition of the text, stating, “Agra says, he who narrates the virtues of the followers [of God] gains the power of Sītā’s Lord [Rām].”105 As mentioned, Agra composed several Brajbhasha works creatively retelling stories (all found in the BhP) about exemplary bhaktas—­namely, his Nām Pratāp, Prahlād Caritra, and Dhruv Caritra—­in order to praise the power of Vaiṣṇava devotion. Nābhā’s verses about his guru give further evidence of Agradās’s bhakti philosophy, suggesting that the Bhaktamāl was a work directly inspired by and dedicated to Agra’s conviction that divine favor, even liberation, can be attained by singing the praises of the great bhaktas, cherishing their memory, and following their model. In addition to Nābhā, Agradās’s grand-­disciple Anantadās (a disciple of Agra’s disciple Vinod) also continued his literary project of praising the great bhaktas and popularizing the power of their devotion through compositions in Brajbhasha. While technically he was Agradās’s grand-­disciple, Anantadās was a contemporary of Nābhā’s and thus was likely not any more distant from Agra than was Nābhā. Anantadās composed a number of parcāīs—­separate hagiographical works in praise of individual bhaktas; namely, Nāmdev, Pīpā, Kabīr, Raidās, Trilochan, Sen, Dhanā, and Aṅgad—­t hat constitute, along with Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl,

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some of our earliest and most significant sources for understanding bhakti in early modern North India. Nābhādās is explicit that Agradās’s guidance and bhakti outlook fundamentally informed his Bhaktamāl, and Agra’s leadership and vision, in some measure, were likely also behind the bhakti hagiographical works of Anantadās.106 Hagiographical texts serve as valuable tools for the historian seeking insights into how communities of the past imagined themselves and defined their identity in relation to others. In this regard, Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl has received special attention from scholars for the catholic Vaiṣṇava devotional community it imagined into being in early modern North India. In a classic essay, Richard Burghart suggested that the Bhaktamāl’s liberal inclusion of servant castes, untouchables, and women (more than 75 percent of the population of the Ganges basin) “reveals the broadening of criteria for recruitment into a Vaishnavite sect thereby enabling the sect to compete more effectively for devotees and disciples.”107 Expanding on Burghart’s work, William Pinch has argued that the Bhaktamāl reimagined the core institution of orthodox sectarian Vaiṣṇavism, the sampradāy, in order to make room for the popular heterodox group of Sants thriving outside the order, as well as their lay followers. In the Bhaktamāl, Agradās’s disciple Nābhādās “crafted a language of and conceptual frame for supra-­sectarian religious organization that could accommodate both monastic and lay populations.”108 A closer examination of this important text can teach us much about Agradās and Nābhādās’s influential bhakti vision. There are several South Indian hagiographical collections that might be considered precedents to Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl, but there seems to be no North Indian Hindu precedent for such a work.109 Nābhā would almost certainly not have consulted any of the southern hagiographies (which were in Tamil, Telegu, or Sanskrit); the bhakti community he envisioned was a distinctly North Indian one. Nābhādās either did not know or was quite unconcerned with the bhaktas of South India, who get little to no mention in his text. The bhakti community imagined in the Bhaktamāl is generally restricted to North India, including devotee-­saints ranging from Gujarat in the west, to Bengal in the east, to Maharashtra in the south, but focused most on those of Rajasthan and the Gangetic Plain. It is quite possible that the prolific Sufi genre of the tazkirā (on the life stories and miraculous deeds of Sufi saints) had a significant influence on Nābhā’s work, perhaps even serving as a model (in its form, style, and intent), or an inspiration, for the early modern North Indian bhakti hagiographical genre in general.110 If the Bhaktamāl’s vision of bhakti community had any immediate Hindu model, it would seem to be in the work of Harirām Vyās, who flourished in Vrindavan circa 1535–­1570.111 Vyās did not write a hagiographical collection, but he produced a number of nonsectarian hagiographical poems praising an

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array of North Indian devotees whom he clearly imagined to be members of a common bhakti community. Interestingly, Vyās repeatedly lists together and praises as a group six early Sants—­Nāmdev, Kabīr, Raidās, Sen, Dhanā, and Pīpā—­ five of whom Nābhādās and Anantadās boldly claimed as disciples of Rāmānand and thus members of their own sampradāy. As Pauwels notes, this was not an arbitrary grouping; these poets saw themselves as linked, a fact seen in early poems attributed to them. For instance, in a poem in the Guru Granth Sahib, Dhanā mentions Nāmdev, Kabīr, Raidās, and Sen, while an early poem by Pīpā mentions Nāmdev, Kabīr, and Raidās.112 These Sants were from different regions and different castes—­though most were from poor, disadvantaged social classes—­but they were united in their exemplary devotion to God and, according to Nābhādās and Anantadās, in their discipleship to Rāmānand (all except Nāmdev).113 Whether or not this assertion was justified, in publicly laying claim to these highly popular Sants the Rāmānandīs were presenting themselves as the preeminent representatives of a bhakti transcending the boundaries of geography and social position. At the same time that Nābhā claimed these heterodox, low-­ caste bhaktas, he also explicitly linked his community to one of the loftiest symbols of Vaiṣṇava orthodoxy, the South Indian brahman ācārya Rāmānuja and his Śrī sampradāy.114 Faced with the challenge of appealing to both low-­caste rural communities and the political and intellectual elite, Nābhā once again followed his guru’s lead, for, as noted, Agra sought to maintain and assert his community’s Sant values while also providing the Rāmānandīs with orthodox brahmanical respectability and marketing them for patronage in the new Mughal-­Rajput cultural and political sphere. While the Bhaktamāl in part aims to articulate the Rāmānandīs’ position as first among equals in the early modern bhakti universe, only a handful of the approximately eight hundred bhaktas it praises are marked as part of the Rāmānandī sampradāy; the text’s vision of bhakti community is quite broad and thoroughly nonsectarian. Indeed, James Hare writes that the Bhaktamāl is “radically inclusive” in its selection of exemplary devotees, praising women, servant castes, untouchables, and bhaktas of nearly every sectarian orientation in addition to brahmans, kings, and Rāmānandīs.115 Hare emphasizes that the text envisions a community that is “striking” in “its breadth and inclusiveness” and not restricted by sectarian boundaries; “rather, it is defined by bhakti.”116 He later reiterates that “Nābhādās imagines bhakti as a wildly inclusive community.”117 In the midst of all this wild, radical inclusion, it is that much more striking, and that much more meaningful, that certain popular religious figures (and thus their communities) are entirely left out of Agra’s and Nābhā’s vision of bhakti community. This was a broad, catholic Vaiṣṇava community they imagined, but it did not include everyone; it did not even include all of North India’s

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major bhaktas. Crucially, Nānak, Dādū Dayāl, and Gorakhnāth are nowhere to be found in the Bhaktamāl, nor are any of the members of their respective communities. What do we make of this? Hare is correct that the community envisioned by Agra and Nābhā was defined by bhakti, but exactly what kind of bhakti are we talking about? In taking a closer look at the Bhaktamāl’s key exclusions we gain a much better understanding of the bhakti sensibility Agradās and Nābhādās sought to cultivate.118 A key factor behind the Bhaktamāl’s exclusion of the Nāths, Sikhs, and Dādū Panth must have had to do with competition, self-­definition, and social status. In many respects—­in their devotion to the nirguṇ Rām (even if they encouraged devotion to saguṇ forms of Viṣṇu as well), the importance they attributed to chanting the Name, and their liberal social values and open acceptance of low castes—­the Rāmānandīs had more in common with the Nāths, Sikhs, and Dādū-panthīs than with the three communities of Caitanya, Vallabha, and Nimbārka. These three sampradāys were rather distinct from the Rāmānandīs yet quite similar to each other in that they each focused rather exclusively on worship of Kṛṣṇa, had clear brahmanical roots, and generally held a greater concern with caste practices and orthodox social and religious propriety. In claiming themselves as one (arguably the most prestigious one) of the cār sampradāy, Agradās and Nābhādās must have sought to give their socially inclusive community, which consisted of many members from the poorest strata of Indian society, an enhanced social status that would allow them to compete more effectively for both patronage and followers. If this was the case, it would only make sense that they would also have wished as much as possible to (a) distinguish themselves from their closest competitors in recruiting followers from the lower rungs of society and (b) distance themselves from any association with those communities whose orthodox “Hindu” credentials and brahmanical deportment were in question. In both cases, the Rāmānandīs probably would have wanted to separate themselves most from Nāth yogīs and the followers of Nānak and Dādū, and excluding them from the Bhaktamāl was likely an effort in that direction. Through Nābhādās, the Rāmānandīs thus made a number of shrewd strategic moves as they laid claim to the most popular heterodox (nirguṇ) Sants (as disciples of Rāmānand), simultaneously associated themselves with the burgeoning orthodox (saguṇ) Kṛṣṇaite communities of Braj, which seemed increasingly to be the favorite beneficiaries of Mughal and Rajput patronage, and at the same time distanced themselves from key competitors of questionable social status by excluding them from their vision of bhakti community. Even with these issues of competition and social status in mind, the exclusion of Gorakhnāth, Nānak, and Dādū still begs for further explanation. It was

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not all a matter of strategy and competition but also something more substantive that kept these figures out of the bhakti community imagined by Agradās and Nābhādās. Let us take a brief look at these three exclusions. Perhaps the least surprising of the figures excluded from the Bhaktamāl’s imagined devotional community is Gorakhnāth. It is clear that the Nāth yogīs’ tantric conceptions of and approaches to the Divine were in sharp conflict with the perspectives of most early modern bhakti authors. With the significant exception of the Dādū-panthī Sarvāṅgīs (of Rajjab and Gopāldās) and the Dādū-panthī Bhaktamāl of Rāghavdās, none of the early bhakti collections include either poetry or hagiographical descriptions of Gorakhnāth or any other Nāth yogīs. Even though Gorakhnāth was a major figure on the religious scene of the day and despite the fact that the early Rāmānandī community had a distinctly yogic-­ascetic spirit, Gorakhnāth’s tantric persona (among other traits) placed him and his followers well outside the bhakti community that Agra and Nābhā envisioned. The exclusion of Nānak, the founder of the Sikh community in the Panjab, seems far more striking, for there is no doubt that Nānak was a bhakta. At present, it is not entirely certain whether the renown of Nānak’s teachings or knowledge of the political and anthologizing activities of his Sikh community in Panjab would have reached Rajasthan (Galta) by the start of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, considering the distance between them (less than four hundred miles), general patterns of circulation in North India (the very same ones that had brought knowledge and compositions of Rāmānand, Kabīr, Raidās, and other bhaktas to the burgeoning Sikh community by then), the likelihood that a Rāmānandī community (Piṇḍorī Dhām) had been established in the Panjab by the end of the sixteenth century, and the fact that Nānak had passed away roughly half a century before the composition of the Bhaktamāl, it seems extremely unlikely that Agradās and Nābhādās would not have known about him and his teachings. Like the Rāmānandīs, Nānak and the Sikhs propagated a bhakti message in distinct opposition to the attitudes and practices of the Nāth yogīs. In the last three decades of the sixteenth century, Sikhs developed some of the first anthologies of bhakti poetry, and amid the devotional songs of their own gurus they included compositions by Kabīr, Dhanā, Trilochan, Raidās, and Sen, whom the Rāmānandīs had claimed as their own. Considering all of this, it is puzzling that Nānak would have been left out of the Bhaktamāl’s broad collection of exemplary devotees. Probably the most interesting of all the Bhaktamāl’s exclusions is that of Dādū. Nābhādās certainly knew about Dādū, for he was a contemporary of Agradās’s and a fellow Rajasthani who achieved considerable renown during his life and

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resided in Amer, near the court of the Kacchvāhās, from roughly 1579 to 1593. Dādū wrote nirguṇ devotional songs and preached about the power of bhakti; it seems that in many ways his message and lifestyle were inspired by Kabīr.119 As noted, a member of Dādū’s community—­Rajjab, in his Sarvāṅgī (ca. 1600)—­included Agradās’s compositions in an anthology of bhakti poems composed at about the same time as the Bhaktamāl, while later Dādū-panthīs praised Payahārī, Kīlhadev, Agradās, and Nābhādās in their hagiographical collections. All this would seem to indicate that Dādū and his immediate followers were part of the same general bhakti community as the Rāmānandīs; however, Agra and Nābhā did not seem to think so, as Dādū is nowhere to be found in the verses of the Bhaktamāl. As I show later, it is clear that the teachings and lifestyle of Dādū were not in tune with the bhakti vision of Agradās and Nābhādās on two significant fronts. This may partly have to do with the fact that Dādū was quite friendly with the Nāth yogīs and seems to have closely resembled them in aspects of his yogic practice and asceticism. Indeed, there is a “profuse occurrence of Nāth-­Yogic symbols”120 in Dādū’s sākhīs, and his community clearly maintained the link he had established with the Nāths, for the Dādū-panthī Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl includes passages praising a line of Śaiva yogīs and Nāth siddhas going all the way back to Matsyendranāth.121 While Dādū’s relationship with the Nāth yogīs must have been a source of discomfort for the Rāmānandīs, it does not explain the absence of Nānak and the Sikhs in the Bhaktamāl. It would be more convincing if we could find a common denominator between Gorakhnāth, Nānak, and Dādu, something all shared that would have made their religiosity unpalatable to Agradās and Nābhādās. Two related facts come to mind. First, the Nāths, Sikhs, and Dādū-panthīs are all known to have had regular, friendly relations with Sufis and deliberately blurred the lines between Islam and “Hinduism” in their practices and philosophies. Bolstering the significance of this point is the fact that Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl does not include any Sufis, whereas Sikh and Dādū-panthī anthologies include the poems of Sufi devotees. If Muslims were beyond the pale of the bhakti community that Agra and Nābhā envisioned, one likely reason for this was that they shared a fundamental outlook with Nānak and Dādū: a fiercely and strictly nirguṇ sensibility and approach to the Divine.122 That an exclusively nirguṇ perspective would have been problematic for the Rāmānandīs is suggested in a revealing verse from the Bhaktamāl about the Kacchvāhā king Pṛthvīrāj, who had become the disciple of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī after Payahārī defeated the Nāth yogī Tārānāth. Nābhādās wrote, “Thanks to the teaching of Śrī Kṛṣṇadās [Payahārī], he [Pṛthvīrāj] became acquainted with the Supreme Truth. By the description of it as nirguṇ and saguṇ [Payahārī] destroyed

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the darkness of unknowing.”123 The fact that Nābhā praises Payahārī for destroying ignorance by means of describing the ultimate Truth as both nirguṇ (without qualities) and saguṇ (with qualities) is significant. Indeed, if Pṛthvīrāj’s guru prior to Payahārī was the Nāth yogī Tārānāth, Nābhā seems to have implied that a purely nirguṇ conception of the Supreme—­t hat generally espoused by the Nāths, as well as Nānak and Dādū—­was the “darkness of unknowing” that Payahārī’s teaching destroyed.124 Agradās and Nābhādās, like Payahārī, fully accepted and respected the nirguṇ Divine, but they also reveled in the sweet essence (rasa) of a love experienced in and through praising, reading, hearing, and imagining the deeds and qualities of a saguṇ God. As I’ve noted, in one of his poems, Agradās stresses that there is ultimately no difference, no separation, between the nirguṇ Brahman and the saguṇ forms of Viṣṇu; however, it seems that he could not abide a religious outlook that would not allow for the incomparable taste of the Divine in form.125 In fact, one of Agradās’s poems explicitly criticizes Dādū for precisely this reason.126 The following translation is based on the text found in the oldest manuscript of Agradās’s Kuṇḍaliyā that I have been able to locate, dated 1635.127 apnī mā ḍāyan kahai aisau kaun kapūt / aisau kaun kapūt kahai ḍāin mahatārī / daḍū pakarī ṭek bheṣ bin deh bigārī / kathanī kathanī atibhalī man diyau na cālan / ek laun ke svād bin bigare sab sālan / agar svām ke svāṅg bin dekhat hī ke bhūt / apnī mā ḍāyan kahai aisā kaun kapūt // 65   What kind of a bad son would call his own mother a witch?128 Dādū held firm in his intentions, but without proper dress, he ruined his body.129 For all his great sayings, he would not let his heart be moved.130 Without any flavor—­not even the taste of a bit of salt—­all the vegetables are spoiled.131 Agradās says, without [not seeing] the garb [svāṅg] of the Lord [svāmī], he [one] sees only an evil spirit.132 What kind of a bad son would call his own mother a witch? This is a difficult poem that resists easy interpretation and could be translated in a multitude of ways. Nevertheless, Agradās’s core intent is clear. In these verses, he cleverly criticizes Dādū on two different levels. On the one hand, Agra

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finds fault with Dādū’s inappropriate dress. It seems that Dādū presented himself in a fashion that was neither clearly Hindu nor clearly Muslim; he may even have resembled the ascetic Nāth yogīs, who typically roamed about with only a few ragged garments on their bodies. Supporting this view is Jan Gopāl’s account of the life of Dādū, the Janma Līlā (ca. 1620), which tells of an incident when “the question of dress arose and Svāmījī was not pleased,” [and said] “How can I please the Muslims and what should I wear for the Hindus?” (3:23).133 In another verse, Jan Gopāl states that Dādū “radiated the contemplative mind of Sukhdev and had the ascetic appearance of Gorakhnāth” (7:2a).134 Agradās and his disciple Nābhādās envisioned an expansive Vaiṣṇava community, but their generous understanding of what it meant to be Vaiṣṇava did not extend far enough to include a figure whose appearance and lifestyle blurred the boundaries between ascetic tantric yogī, Hindu, and Muslim. As the poem suggests, for Agradās, Dādū’s inappropriate dress was not only problematic (and harmful to the body) in itself but also indicative of far larger misunderstandings. The second level of criticism in Agra’s poem is the more fundamental one: Dādū does not understand or appreciate the feminine, immanent dimension of the Divine (māyā, śakti) and sees in the manifest world only evil and illusion, thus calling his own mother a witch. Just as he does not wear appropriate dress (bheṣ), Dādū also does not understand the importance of the garb (svāṅg) of the Lord (svāmī).135 Agradās’s use of the word svāṅg is significant, for in addition to referring to dress or garb, it also refers to a drama (play) or dramatic role, as in the drama or līlā of the Lord and the dramatic role (or garb) that God takes on when he descends in form into the world. It is this immanent, feminine, saguṇ aspect of the Divine that Dādū misperceives. It may be a show, a guise, in some respects (as the other meanings of svāṅg and māyā would suggest), but it is a garb essential to divine “self-­expression” and to the textured experience of human beings’ relationship with God. However excellent Dādū’s words, however firm and unwavering his tapas and meditation, in not seeing this vital dimension of the Divine, Dādū’s heart is unmoved, and he lives a dull and wasted life without the sweet taste of God. Agra’s portrayal of Dādū is once again confirmed by Jan Gopāl, who states in the Janma Līlā that Dādū “rejected svāṅg, bheṣ, partiality, and sectarianism, knowing only the [nirguṇ] brahman as the complete truth. He did not perform ritual worship to any god or goddess, nor did he honor pilgrimage sites, fasts, or caste.”136 According to Jan Gopāl, Dādū even once stated, “If you stay firm in the nirguṇ devotion, the Unknown will help you, and there will be no room for the corruption of a personal deity. Reflect and ponder on this” (15:18.13).137 For Agradās and Nābhādās, none of this would have been acceptable. To follow a path

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of strict, exclusive nirguṇ devotion or yogic-­ascetic practices aimed at making the mind immovable—­as did Dādū, Nānak, and Gorakhnāth—­was, from Agra’s and Nābhā’s perspective, to make oneself impervious to the sweetest, most rasa-­ filled aspects of God’s grace and presence. We can now understand why the bhakti community imagined by the Bhaktamāl did not include religious figures as important as Dādū, Nānak, and Gorakhnāth. Agradās and Nābhādās envisioned an expansive community defined by bhakti, but their understanding of bhakti, as catholic as it was, did have its limits. They celebrated the figure of the bhakta and imagined an expansive community based on a loosely Vaiṣṇava devotional understanding of, and attitude or approach to, the Divine. Their vision fully embraced the nirguṇ but found its greatest joy in the aesthetic experience of sublime emotion—­love—­for God in form and with qualities. It is worth noting that many Sufis—­as Sufi premakhyān literature unquestionably demonstrates—­were quite like Agradās, Rūpa Gosvāmin, and other rasik-­ inclined Hindu bhaktas in locating and seeking the experience of the Divine especially in the emotional-­aesthetic savor of the rasa of love. As early as 1379, in Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan, well before the Rāmānandī community in Galta or the Kṛṣṇa devotional communities in Braj had come into being, Indian Sufis were articulating an understanding of rasa as “the mark of the circulation of desire between Allah and the world.”138 The Cāndāyan asserts, “It’s only rasa when you wet it with love; sweet like ghee in sugar-­cane molasses, sweet like moon-­nectar you could taste, Cāndā! You may avoid rasa, push it away, but the world is sunk only in love’s savor!”139 Clearly, for Dā’ūd and other like-­minded Sufis, just as for Agradās and Nābhādās, the beauty and sweetness of the Divine was to be found and relished especially in the manifest world and in embodied human emotional-­aesthetic experience. For both theses Sufis and these Hindu bhaktas, love—­the savor of its pure essence—­was ultimately the means and the end. Here we have one illustration of how, even as Agradās and Nābhādās imagined a bhakti community that excluded Muslims, they simultaneously articulated devotional values and sensibilities that were closely aligned with—­and subtly inflected by—­those of many Sufis. We must remember that the Rāmānandīs were participants in a highly interactive, competitive Mughal religious environment in which mutual borrowings and exchanges of concepts and technologies took place between religious people of many different backgrounds and inclinations. In their works, Agradās and Nābhādās, among other early modern Hindu authors, may have generally ignored the presence of Islam, neither mentioning Muslim figures nor explicitly engaging Islamic concepts or compositions, but the fact remains that Islam—­and especially Sufism (its literature, saints, ideas, and institutions)—­was an inextricable part of the larger religious landscape in which they (and all of

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early modern North India’s Hindu bhakti communities) operated, shaping that landscape and inflecting the development of bhakti religiosity within it in subtle but important ways.

R

Throughout the medieval period bhakti generally was not a singular, exclusive practice but an element or aspect of a larger religious life, a devotion performed in combination with asceticism, yoga, and tantric ritual worship. Agradās and Nābhādās were key proponents of a new understanding of bhakti. Theirs was a vision of bhakti as a more exclusionary spiritual path, as well as a distinctive ethical, emotional, and aesthetic sensibility uniting a vast religious community; it was a vision of bhakti that gave no significant place to yoga, jñāna (knowledge), tapas (asceticism), and tantric religiosity. As Agradās said, in comparison with rasik devotion, “jñāna [knowledge], yoga, and tapas [asceticism] are as rasa-­less [dull, useless] as a dried-­up stem of sugarcane,” and, in comparison with singing the name of God, “yoga, sacrifice, and asceticism achieve nothing.”140 Generally speaking, Hindus in premodern India do not seem to have conceived of bhakti as a restricted category of religiosity or a uniform set of ideas in the way that many Western scholars later would;141 nevertheless, study of the Rāmānandīs indicates that Hindus in early modern North India did come to understand bhakti as the basis of a particular community sensibility, as the common praiseworthy foundation linking a diversity of religious practitioners and distinguishing them from others. Agradās and his disciple Nābhādās were key players in this historical development, in a sense reinventing the bhakta as a distinct category of religious person. While their views were not the final word, Agra and Nābhā represented and contributed to an expansive new vision of bhakti community, a catholic Vaiṣṇavism infused with both Sant and rasik values that would become an important dimension of mainstream Hinduism in modern India. This chapter has demonstrated that in the religious marketplace of Mughal India, Agradās was an entrepreneur who inaugurated a Rāmānandī literary project that he prudently crafted to serve the specific interests of his own community (by appealing to potential followers and patrons) while also expressing and inculcating a transsectarian bhakti sensibility; i.e., a distinctive set of shared aesthetic tastes, ethics, and emotional values. In this latter respect, the compositions of Agradās, Nābhādās, and bhakti poets like them worked to construct a broad-­based bhakti social formation in early modern North India. Their literary works acted as mobile (i.e., they circulated across territory) and mobilizing

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(i.e., emotionally, socially inspiring) discursive instruments that, when performed, could generate and activate bhakti’s sentiment and sensibility, thereby inviting (for some) and sustaining (for others) participation in a transregional bhakti public. In part 3 of the book, the focus shifts from the Rāmānandī devotional community to an exploration of some crucial larger trends in the religious landscape of early modern North India. If bhakti had long been closely intertwined with asceticism, tantra, and yoga, then in Mughal India these once tightly interwoven threads of religious practice began to unravel into increasingly distinct strands of religious identity. As a wide-­ranging survey of bhakti poetry and hagiography reveals, a number of bhaktas in early modern North India—­the Rāmānandīs among them—­were cultivating a new and Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility defined in fundamental contradistinction to certain core components of tantric, yogic, and ascetic thought and practice.

Part III The Devotee Versus the Tāntrika

7

Yogīs and Tantra-­Mantra in the Poetry of the Bhakti Saints

Gorakh awakened yoga and drove bhakti away from the people. —­Tulsīdās

Against the snake of passion, no mantra or magic avails. —­Raidās

A

significant gap exists in the historiography of North India’s bhakti movement. As I’ve noted, scholarship to date has generally failed to consider the important place of tantra and yoga, broadly construed, in the rise of devotional religion in early modern North India. How did North Indian bhakti poets, hagiographers, and communities understand tantric and yogic forms of religiosity, and what role did their depictions of tantra and yoga have in the growth of bhakti from the sixteenth century onward? This chapter continues to explore the development of bhakti sensibility and community in early modern North India as a process that took place in clear interaction with—­ and often opposition to—­t he tantric-­yogic asceticism and magic of groups such as the Nāth yogīs. If identity is typically formed in opposition to an “other,” there were multiple others against whom bhaktas defined themselves and their religious approach, yet arguably the most important foil for the new bhakti identity and sensibility was one that has not received much scholarly attention: the twofold tantric other of the yogī and Śākta.

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In an important article, Heidi Pauwels has examined derogatory references to Śāktas in the poetry of Kabīr, Tulsīdās, and Harirām Vyās.1 Pauwels demonstrates that the identity of bhaktas across the spectrum—­whether devotees of Rām, Kṛṣṇa, or the nirguṇ Divine—­was formed in part by a consistent mocking and critique of the Śākta, a category whose meaning was inconsistent but closely associated with blood sacrifice, sexual ritual, goddess worship, and immoral, polluting practices. Holding certain links to the Śāktas, but quite a separate figure, the tantric yogī—­whether in the guise of sorcerer-­magician, ascetic, or healer—­was perhaps an even more important other in the formation of early modern North India’s distinctive bhakti sensibility. In order to demonstrate this crucial point, here I examine references to yogīs, yoga, tantra, mantra, and Śāktas scattered throughout the poetry of North Indian bhakti saints and the literature of bhakti communities. Looking at both commonalities and differences in attitudes toward yogīs, asceticism, and tantra-­mantra among the various streams of North India’s bhakti movement, I discuss poet-­saints who cover the spectrum in terms of sectarian affiliation, devotional orientation (nirguṇ/saguṇ), theological outlook, caste background, and geographical location. The discussion ranges from hagiographers like Anantadās and Kṛṣṇadās Kavirāj to poets like Nāmdev, Nānak, Sūrdās, and Harirām Vyās; however, I focus especially on the bhakti poetry of Kabīr, Raidās, and Tulsīdās. As noted in the preceding chapters, it is in North Indian sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we first observe the formation of a distinctive bhakti sensibility opposed to certain yogic and tantric perspectives. Prior to this time, while tensions between different religious attitudes and approaches certainly existed, there does not seem to have been any fundamental dividing lines between the realms of bhakti and tantra, or bhakti and yoga. The poetry I examine here helps to demonstrate that, in North India, those lines began to be drawn especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that this trend continued into and even intensified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at how bhaktas contrasted themselves with the twofold tantric other of the yogī and Śākta, I shed light on exactly what bhakti meant in early modern North India and how it was perceived as different from other modes of religiosity. Yogīs and Śāktas were hardly one and the same. In short, criticism of yogīs tended to center on the pretensions of their ascetic lifestyle, the pointlessness of their physical practices, and the ignorance and delusion at the core of their quest for power(s) and immortality, while criticism of Śāktas tended to focus more on the moral deprivation, sensual indulgence, and spiritual bankruptcy of their blood sacrifices to the Goddess, meat eating and related impurities, and tantric sexual rituals.2 Nevertheless, in this period bhakti poets and

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communities who differed from each other in many ways came together in positioning themselves against both these groups. In exploring the reasons for this phenomenon, I seek to improve our understanding of the development of bhakti sensibilities during the early modern period and to articulate more precisely the dynamics involved in a broad change in the Hindu religious world that manifested itself especially during the Mughal period: the rise of Vaiṣṇava bhakti at both the elite and popular levels, a development that often occurred at the expense of tantric Śaiva-­Śākta religious forms.

The Manuscript Sources of Bhakti Literature This chapter surveys a broad range of bhakti poetry, and before diving in some preliminary remarks are needed about the manuscript sources of the verses translated here. It is crucial to remember that the bhakti poems and hagiographies to which we have access come from manuscripts and a contemporary oral-­ performance culture that have been mediated by any number of (usually unknown) singers and scribes. As Winand Callewaert states, “Very few of [these singers and scribes] passed on the songs of a poet-­mystic without changing them. Musicians adjusted the metre to suit the rhythm; they adapted the language for the convenience of the audience as they went from village to village, from one region to another. . . . ​This oral tradition, unlike that of the Vedas, did not shun variety and creativity.”3 Bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India was above all a tradition of song and performance. Kenneth Bryant explains that “poems were taught by singer to singer, and the corpus of poems known to the tradition grew rapidly from generation to generation.” 4 A study of bhakti manuscripts reveals not only the frequent addition of “new” poems attributed to particular saints but also the constant transformation of the old poems, with each poem appearing “in almost as many different versions as there are manuscripts that contain it.” Most often these versions differ in ways that suggest “not the careless errors of scribes, but the exuberant and imaginative improvisations of singers.”5 Linda Hess’s remarks about Kabīr and the body of songs composed in his name further illuminate this process and can be applied to most of the early modern bhakti poets: [The poet-­saint] certainly shared his works orally. Others listened, sang, and spread the poetry. It naturally changed as they spread it. Dialects and musical styles transitioned. Slips of the tongue (and ear) and gaps of memory did their work. Deliberate alterations occurred when someone preferred a different

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order of the stanzas, inserted a favorite name of God, disliked and jettisoned a certain verse, or thought up a great improvement in a line. It wasn’t long until [the poet-­saint’s] name was tacked on to whole poems he never composed—­whether the source was a song floating around in local tradition or something the performer made up, feeling that the content was suitable to [him] or that the attribution honored [him].6

At some point, likely during the lifetime of a given poet-­saint, someone wrote down the words sung by or attributed to him or her. Performers sometimes jotted down verses in their personal notebooks, but increasingly, beginning in about 1600 in North India, bhakti compositions also came to be collected in written manuscripts that were usually (though not always) sponsored and preserved by sectarian religious communities. Over the years, these manuscripts would be copied, altered, added to, and copied again. While we tend to give a certain authority to the written text, in fact the bhakti verses found in such manuscripts might be best considered as mere snapshots in time of songs that were constantly transforming to suit the needs, temperaments, and ideological leanings of specific performers, audiences, and sectarian communities. I mention all of this simply to make readers aware of the textual problems involved in quoting the poems attributed to any given bhakti poet-­saint. Consequently, when I speak of “Kabīr poems” or “Sūrdās’s compositions,” when I write that “Raidās says” this, or that “Tulsīdās sings” that, I do so for the sake of convenience and not to suggest that the historical figure of Sūrdās or Raidās himself actually composed the poem under discussion (though, in the case of some poems, they certainly could have). Nearly all the verses quoted in the following come from seventeenth-­or eighteenth-­century manuscripts, and some even come from the late sixteenth century. In many cases, the bhakti poems I discuss were probably not composed by the poet to whom they are attributed and, in all cases, it is impossible to identify an “original” or “authentic” version of any particular poem attributed to one of these bhakti poet-­saints; however, for our purposes this is all of very little importance.7 What matters here is that there are bhakti compositions criticizing, marginalizing, and satirizing tantric and yogic religiosity in a wide array of manuscript sources, a simple fact demonstrating that the verses expressing these sentiments were almost certainly being performed by singers at roughly the same times and places in which the manuscript collections were made—­i.e., circa 1550–­1800 in locations throughout northern and central India and also into Maharashtra (to the south) and Bengal and Assam (to the east). My primary concern in this chapter, then, is to document the existence and nature of a tension developing in Mughal

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India between the sensibilities of bhakti and tantric-­yogic religiosity and to  demonstrate the clear and widespread presence in early modern bhakti literature (and, to a certain extent, in Sufi literature as well) of verses that disparage or subordinate aspects of tantric-­yogic religiosity as part of the articulation of a new devotional sensibility.8 As noted in the introduction, we do not know the extent to which the wider population of early modern North India shared the partisan perspectives seen in bhakti and Sufi sources. While the implicit and explicit critiques of yogīs and tantra-­mantra found in these devotional compositions would certainly have been influential upon the members of the bhakti and Sufi publics, it is not entirely clear to what degree these people would have shared the perception of tantric and yogic religiosity found in bhakti and Sufi discourse. In any case, we must remember that the composers and performers of the bhakti verses discussed here were devotional “insiders” who were expressing a polemical, ideological position against caricatured opponent competitors. In the bhakti literature criticizing, subordinating, and satirizing yogīs and tantra-­mantra, it is important we recognize this element of caricature and, relatedly, the way bhakti authors constructed and utilized alterity as a teaching tool for expressing devotional values. In certain respects, we might say that the bhakti poetry and hagiography considered in this chapter are not depicting and disparaging the actual tāntrikas and yogīs of early modern North India so much as pedagogically useful, generalized, stereotyped, and (comically or grotesquely) exaggerated versions of these figures, in contrast with which these texts’ bhakti religious vision and sensibility could be put into high relief. Throughout this chapter, I use the term tantra-­ mantra to refer to this caricatured version of tantric religiosity.

Kabīr and the Nāth Yogīs Whom better to start with than Kabīr in an investigation of the place of yogīs and tantra-­mantra in the bhakti poetry of early modern North India? Kabīr has often been associated with the Nāth yogīs, who, according to a number of scholars, are the primary source of the heterodox attitude, paradoxical style, yogic imagery, and mystical language seen in the poetry attributed to Kabīr. Writing in Hindi, P. D. Barthwal, in the 1930s, and Hazariprasad Dvivedi, in the 1940s, first noted that Kabīr’s verses are filled with terminology and imagery borrowed from the Nāth yogīs. Dvivedi, in his most famous work, Kabīr (1942), described Kabīr’s metaphysics as a direct outgrowth of Nāth philosophy, going so far as to

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argue that “Kabir was brought up in a community of weavers which was Nath-­ Panthi by tradition and had only recently converted to Islam”—­a n argument that has been thoroughly critiqued in subsequent scholarship—­and adding that, “You just cannot understand the sayings of Kabir, if you do not possess knowledge of the Nath Panthi doctrines.”9 The Nāths’ influence on Kabīr has been something of a trope in English-­language scholarship as well. Following Dvivedi, Charlotte Vaudeville writes that Kabīr “appears so heavily indebted to the Nāth-­panthī form of Yoga that [his] sayings can hardly be understood without reference to it.”10 She suggests further that Kabīr’s great popularity derived in part from the prestige and power of the Nāth symbols and language that he used; that is, his verses resonated so much because “the mass of his listeners” had already “drunk deep” of the tantric yogic tradition “through the preaching of the ubiquitous Nāth-­panthī Yogīs.”11 Similarly, Hawley speaks of “the fundamental debt Kabir owed to a community of yogis called Nāths, whose teaching crystallized an approach to the technology of bodily transformation that appears in his poetry time and time again.”12 If scholars have made clear the Nāth “presence” and influence in Kabīr’s poetic corpus, most have also rightly emphasized that Kabīr differed from, and criticized, the Nāth yogīs in important ways. Mariola Offredi argues that Kabīr responded to the perspective of Gorakhnāth and emulated the paradoxical style of poems attributed to him but rejected the value that Gorakh and the Nāths gave to yogic practice.13 As Hawley writes, “Kabir seems to know the whole Nāth Yogī routine, the husbanding of kuṇḍalinī energies, and to be comfortable with it—­at least verbally,” yet their yogic “form of discipline, at least as an end in itself, is not for him.”14 In Kabīr’s opinion, “Anything that depends on a technology of the senses ultimately doesn’t work. . . . ​Real naturalness, real selfness (sahaja subai) eludes the disciplines of yoga.”15 For Gorakh and the Nāths, the body is a source of mortality and decay that must be mastered and purified, made immortal through yogic practices such as raising the kuṇḍalinī, breath control, retention of semen, and consumption of herbs and alchemical potions. In Lorenzen’s words, “Kabir, as might be expected, has little use for any of this. For him, the central truth is that Ram dwells within the body. He is always with us. A person need only look within his body to find him. The body is not something to be controlled and transformed. The body, as it is, is the key to salvation” because “[it] is Ram’s vessel.”16 Vaudeville states that whatever influence the Nāths had on Kabīr, he “emphatically rejected their practices and mocked their vain pretension to have conquered death and to have obtained bodily immortality.”17 Indeed, poems attributed to Kabīr are especially critical of the Nāths’ claims to achieve

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immortality and liberation through tantric yoga. The following verses denigrating Gorakhnāth come from three sākhīs attributed to Kabīr: Flickering, struggling, swaying—­no one is left out. Gorakh got stuck in Death City. So who’s a yogi?18   Gorakh was yoga’s connoisseur. They didn’t cremate his body. Still his meat rotted and mixed with dust. For nothing he polished his body.19   Gorakh couldn’t keep his breath though he knew some yogic tricks. Power, profit, control—­yes, but he couldn’t go beyond.20 In these compositions, the poet stresses the inevitability of death for all, the senselessness of haṭha yoga’s bodily practices, and the inability of Nāth tantric methods to achieve anything other than worldly goals. In another poem, Kabīr emphasizes the arrogance, sneakiness, hypocrisy, and insincerity of the Nāth. “How will you cross [the ocean of existence], Nāth, how will you cross, so full of crookedness? Look how he meditates, serves and prays. Look: the white plumage, the crane’s sly ways.21 Mood of a snake, look: utterly lewd, utterly quarrelsome, utterly shrewd.”22 We find this sort of criticism of the Nāth yogīs in all three of the major manuscript traditions of poetry attributed to Kabīr—­the corpus of the Dādū ­Panth, compiled in Rajasthan; that found in the Sikh Ādi Granth, compiled in Panjab; and that represented by the Bījak, compiled in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—­as well as in the Fatehpur Manuscript (1582), a Rajasthani source (separate from these three manuscript traditions) that includes the oldest extant Kabīr poetry. While these verses are critical of specifically Gorakhnāth and his followers, more commonly the compositions of Kabīr and the other bhakti poets refer simply to yogīs or jogīs. This raises a perplexing question: In the bhakti poetry considered here, who is the yogī? As in the preceding lines, Gorakhnāth is occasionally referenced (and criticized) in the bhakti poetry of early modern North India; however, one only rarely finds mention of “Nāths” in this same bhakti literature. Up through the seventeenth century, the various Nāth lineages of tantric ascetics in North India were most often known simply as yogīs. The confusion comes from the fact that the term yogī could also refer to a wide range of other yoga-­practicing ascetics with no links to Gorakh or the siddhas, including Daśanāmi saṃnyāsīs and even Rāmānandīs. 23

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Compositions attributed to both Gorakh and Kabīr mark “the yogī” as a category of religious identity distinct from “the Hindū” and “the Mussalmān.” As one Kabīr poem states, The Yogī cries: “Gorakh, Gorakh!” The Hindu invokes the name of Rām. The Musalmān cries: “Khudā is One!” But the Lord of Kabīr pervades all.24 It is noteworthy that the verse here links the category of the yogī specifically to Gorakh. In several sixteenth-­century works of Sufi premākhyān (love story) literature yogīs are also explicitly identified with Gorakhnāth, and many bhakti poets reference specifically Gorakhnāthi paraphernalia (e.g., the horn, or sīṃgī) in their yoga-­or yogī-­themed compositions. While we cannot assume that every mention of a yogī in early modern bhakti literature is meant to refer to a Gorakhnāthi yogī, it is fair to say that they most often do. In any case, bhakti critiques of yogīs were certainly not limited to the Nāth yogīs, who exemplified a number of traits that bhaktas were increasingly finding problematic but were by no means the only ones exhibiting those traits. While not all yogīs and ascetics shared the Nāths’ tantric roots and traditional interests in siddhis, bodily immortality, and worldly power—­characteristics most bhaktas found particularly unsavory—­yogīs and ascetics of all stripes pursued a lifestyle and bodily regime that often came under fire from devotees as misguided and fruitless.

Fake Yogīs, Senseless Yoga Many of Kabīr’s poems critical of yogīs focus on the uselessness and vanity of their physical practices, attire, and external markings. The “true yogī,” one poem states, is the one who has abandoned yoga’s external trappings, powers, and practices in favor of simple devotion to God. He is, Kabīr remarks, that “rascally kind of yogī” with “no deeds, no creeds, no yogic powers, not even a horn or gourd, so how can he go begging?. . . ​That yogī built a house brimful of Rām. He has no healing herbs; his root-­of-­life is Rām.”25 In another poem, Kabīr says, Go naked if you want, put on animal skins. What does it matter till you see the inward Rām? If the union yogis seek came from roaming around in the buff, every deer in the forest would be saved.

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If shaving your head spelled spiritual success, heaven would be filled with sheep. And brother, if holding back your seed earned you a place in paradise, eunuchs would be the first to arrive. Kabir says: Listen brother, without the name of Rām, who has ever won the spirit’s prize?26 Again and again, Kabīr drives home the point that yogīs’ practices get them absolutely nowhere, for without devotion to God one remains spiritually empty-­ handed. He says, “Without Hari he’s befuddled, without a guru he’s a mess. Everywhere he goes he loses himself in nets within nets. The yogi says, ‘Yoga’s the top, don’t talk of seconds.’ Tuft of hair, shaven head, matted locks, vow of silence—­who’s gotten anywhere?”27 In another poem, this one from the Ādi Granth, Kabīr states, “Brother, even dressed up with your staff, earrings, patchwork cloak, and arm rest, you have gone astray. Madman, give up yogic posture (āsanu) and breath-­[control] (pavanu). Madman, give up trickery and always worship Hari.”28 The Kabīr Granthāvalī version of the same song reads, “You stay fixed on yogic postures and breath-­[control]. But, madman, it is mental impurity you should renounce. What’s the use of going about with horns and earrings? What’s the use of smearing all your body with ashes?”29 Anyone familiar with the poetry of Kabīr knows that he mocks and disparages not only yogīs but also just about everyone on the religious scene of his day. Hindus, Muslims, brahmans, mullahs, pandits, shaikhs, Śāktas, and pīrs all come in for criticism. Why should we give special attention to the figure of the yogī? In the corpus of poetry attributed to Kabīr, in fact, yogīs (or jogīs) “are mentioned by name more often than any other group.”30 Clearly, yogīs were an especially central other against which the bhakti perspective defined itself. And Kabīr was hardly the only bhakti poet to heap criticism upon the religiosity of yogīs, thereby bringing the bhakti perspective into relief. Harirām Vyās, a Kṛṣṇa devotee residing in sixteenth-­century Vrindavan, writes, “[What good are] yogis, yatīs, ascetics (tapīs) and sannyāsīs? There is no end to their pain.”31 The devotional poet Trilochan, remembered as a contemporary of Nāmdev’s, has this poem denigrating ascetics and tāntrikas attributed to him in the Ādi Granth: Without cleansing your soul from filth, you donned the garb of an Udāsī [celibate Sikh ascetic], But within the lotus of your heart, you’ve not recognized Brahmin: how then have you become a Sannyāsī? O Jay Chand, you are wandering in error: Never did you find your Paramānand!

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Eating in each and every house, you’ve fattened your body, wearing a patched garment and an ascetic ear-­ring for gain! In vain you rub on yourself ashes of the cremation-­ground: without the Guru, you never found the Essence. What’s the use of your litanies and penance ( jap tap)? Why do you keep churning water? O you Seeker of Nirvana! Invoke that One who created the eighty-­four lakhs of beings! O you, Kāpālika! What’s the use of carrying that gourd-­pot, of wandering to the sixty-­eight holy spots? Says Trilochan: “O living beings, listen: without the corn, there is no redeeming the pledge!”32 As Winand Callewaert explains, “This pad is a condemnation of all kinds of wandering ‘holy men’ and ascetics, whatever their garb and denominations. . . . ​ According to Trilochan, all their pretensions are vain, since they never got the ‘corn,’ i.e., the experience of God within their soul, necessary to ‘redeem the pledge’ and obtain final release from the bonds of mundane Existence.”33 This same perspective regarding the senselessness of the yogic-­ascetic regime comes across in Anantadās’s parcaī of Trilochan, which states: “Reciting mantras, performing asceticism and sense-­control, [one] emaciates the body in vain.”34 Guru Nānak similarly questions and criticizes the external pretensions of the yogī in his Siddh Goṣṭ (Siddha Goṣṭi).35 This composition makes up part of the Ādi Granth and is a philosophical discourse presented as a dialogue between Guru Nānak and the Nāth yogīs.36 In the text, the Nāths proclaim to Nānak that the way of yoga is renunciation and asceticism, admonishing him to take up their garb, earrings (mudrā), small cloth pouch ( jholī), patched cloak (khinthā), and philosophical perspective (darśan) so that he will become a “master yogī” (yogendra) and suffer no more. 37 Nānak responds that only one whose mind is attuned to the Guru (gurumukhi) can attain the way of true yoga. Highlighting the fact that true spirituality rests on inner qualities, not external trappings, he says, Let the eternal Word [sabad] within you be your earrings and forsake selfish attachment. Rid yourself of desire, anger, and egoism and adopt wisdom through the Guru’s Word. Let this be your patched cloak and ascetic’s pouch, Nānak says, for only the One, Hari, brings salvation.38

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He goes on to state, Let detachment from the worldly be your begging bowl [khapar] and let the qualities of the five elements be your cap [topī]. Let the body be your meditation mat and let the mind be your loincloth [ jāgotī]. Let truth, contentment, and self-­discipline be your companions. Nānak says, the one whose mind is attuned to the Guru is immersed in the Name.39 This stanza underlines the futility of the yogī’s outward symbols (begging bowl, earrings, patched cloak, etc.) and, as Piar Singh notes, “in their place it advocates the cultivation of virtues of truth, continence, self-­restraint, etc.,” asserting that spiritual realization is “obtained through the Yoga of Nam-­Simran [remembrance/recitation of the Name] alone and not through intricate Haṭha-­ yogic practices.” 40 Later in the text, Nānak states, “The twelve sects of yogīs and the ten sects of saṃnyāsīs wander (over many rebirths) in confusion,” for one finds the door of liberation only through the Word of the Guru.41 Lying behind these verses from Kabīr, Trilochan, and Nānak seems to be an overarching perception that most yogīs were not at all what they claimed to be.42 While many may have taken on the garb of the yogī, they simply did not possess the spiritual qualities these external accoutrements were meant to signify—­ detachment, wisdom, inner purity, etc. They were false yogīs. As Nāmdev remarks in one of his abhangas, “He thinks he’s renouncing! This isn’t it at all: it’s living with worldliness and not being moved. . . . ​Your clothes, says Nāmdev, you can easily change, but you won’t change the brazenness inside.” 43 Tulsīdās, in his Dohāvalī, suggests that these sorts of yogī impostors were prevalent in his day: “Those who wear inauspicious and inappropriate clothes, external markings, and ornaments, who eat everything whether clean or unclean—­in the Kali Yuga these sorts of yogīs and siddhas are revered by people.” 44 Reiterating Tulsī’s sentiments about these false ascetics, Kabīr says, “In body, they are all ‘yogīs,’ but yogīs of the mind are few.” 45 In another verse, he writes, “Donning an ascetic’s garb, he becomes a Lord, he eats and drinks his fill! But the narrow path which the saint has taken is ever closed to him.” 46 A frequently cited poem attributed to Kabīr, but likely of late sixteenth-­century provenance, criticizes warrior ascetics who dress as yogīs and falsely claim detachment and wisdom: Never have I seen such yogis, brother.47 They wander mindless and negligent, proclaiming the way of Mahadeva [Śiva]. For this they are called great mahants.

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To markets and bazaars they peddle their meditation—­false siddhas, lovers of maya. When did Dattatreya attack a fort? When did Sukadeva join with gunners? When did Narada fire a musket? When did Vyasadeva sound a battle cry? These numbskulls make war. Are they ascetics or archers? They profess detachment, but greed is their mind’s resolve. They shame their profession by wearing gold. They collect stallions and mares, acquire villages, and go about as millionaires.48 Pinch explains that this poem reflects “a wide religious condemnation of false religion, and false yogis in particular, that was gaining momentum in northern India, especially after 1500.” 49 This is certainly true; as evident in the preceding, fake yogīs were major targets of criticism from bhakti poets. Nevertheless, bhakti critiques extended well beyond false yogīs. Even “real” yogīs—­those whose practice might be perceived as authentic and sincere—­were often reckoned followers of a path that simply did not work, or one whose spiritual efficacy was far inferior to that of bhakti. Tulsīdās is particularly vehement in making this point.

Powerful Bhakti, Powerless Yoga Throughout his poetic corpus, Tulsīdās repeatedly emphasizes how mantras, yoga, and practices of renunciation and asceticism are completely unnecessary; all one needs is loving devotion to God. He writes, “Without detachment [vairāg], mantric recitation [ jap], sacrifices, yoga, and fasts, without asceticism [tap], without sacrificing the body—­Tulsī says, all contentment is quickly and easily obtained if you simply love the Prayag-­l ike feet of Prabhu.”50 Not only are these other (non-­bhakti) modes of religiosity needless; they are also ineffective. In the Vinay Patrikā, Tulsī states, “People follow the prescriptions of the Āgamas, reciting mantras and doing sacrifices, but they do not obtain their goal. Even in dreams, contentment does not come from the practice of yoga and siddhis; only sickness and sorrow remain.”51 He goes on to conclude the stanza with this verse: “Tulsī says, without trust and love [in God] one wanders aimlessly, is defeated, and dies. The name of Rām is the only vessel to carry one across the ocean of existence.”52 Here Tulsī stresses that those who follow the paths of yoga, tantric mantras and rituals, and asceticism do not achieve their spiritual aims, for contentment and liberation can come only through faith and love in Rām and the power of the Name.

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For Tulsīdās, bhakti’s great power, and the inefficacy and inferiority of yogic and tantric religious modes, has much to do with the historical context of the Kali Age. In days past, he seems to say, yoga, renunciation, and sacrifice may have worked, but in these dark times such methods no longer have any efficacy. In the Rāmcaritmānas, he writes, “In this difficult age there is a great wealth of sins, there is no dharma, no wisdom, no joga, no jap. Abandoning faith in all these, the one who does bhakti to Ram alone is wise.”53 He reiterates this point in his Kavitāvalī, stating, “This Kali Age has engulfed all dharma; mantric recitation, yoga, and renunciation have all fled for their lives. Who grieving after them will die? Tulsī says, I have sold myself into the hands of the Lord of Jānakī [Rām].”54 In highlighting the needlessness of asceticism, mantras, and yoga, Tulsīdās also stressed the great power inherent in singing and hearing stories of the Divine. In the Rāmcaritmānas, he writes, “Even without renunciation, mantric recitation, or yoga, those who sing or hear the praises of Ravana’s foe [Rām] shall be rewarded with steadfast devotion.”55 Anantadās, in his Pīpā parcaī, similarly states, “Yoga, sacrifices, repetition of mantras, asceticism, and fasts [ joga jigi jap tap vrat]—­all that cannot equal the recitation of the stories of Hari.”56 Here it is apparent that in contrast to the esoteric tantra-­mantra, ascetic deprivations, and solitude constituting various forms of yogic religiosity, a core component of bhakti’s religion of the heart is simply to absorb oneself in telling and listening to tales about God. In his Saṃnyāsanirṇaya, Vallabha (ca. 1479–­1531), the brahman founder of the Puṣṭi Marg bhakti sect, emphasized this key distinction between the social, humble nature of bhakti and the solitary, proud nature of asceticism. He states (vv. 3–­6) that bhakti requires one to regularly “associate with helpful companions”—­participating in and relying on a community of fellow devotees—­while the ascetic’s practice is quite a lonesome affair.57 Furthermore, says Vallabha, the ascetic life leads to conceit (abhimāna), hypocrisy, and egotistic absorption in the very sensuality it ostensibly seeks to avoid, whereas bhakti demands humility and surrender.58 Raidās also makes it clear that bhakti is not about asceticism or the pride-­ evoking practice of yoga but about losing oneself in the love of God. He sings, Bhakti is not like this, my brother. Whatever is done without the name of Rām, is all called delusion. Bhakti is not suppression of the senses, not speaking of wisdom, not digging a cave in the forest. Not some joke, not the snares of desire. This is not bhakti. Bhakti is not binding the senses, not practicing yoga, not eating less—­all these practices are called karma.

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Bhakti is not reducing the sleep, not practicing renunciation. These practices are not bhakti; they are the pride of the Vedas.59 Later in the poem Raidās states that bhakti happens when one loses the self in Rām; all else is merely senseless pride and delusion. Pride, egotism, and desire emerge persistently in bhakti poetry as spiritual obstacles that the yogic and ascetic paths simply cannot overcome. Raidās lists yogīs and ascetics among those who are enslaved and ruined by these worldly temptations of māyā. He says, “Viṭṭhal, stop, stop your Māyā devouring the world. She has such great power, she enslaves all, she leads gods, men and sages astray. Child, old woman, very beautiful maiden—­she assumes diverse guises. Yogīs, renunciates, ascetics, sanyāsīs, wise men—­none of them survives.” 60 In another poem, Raidās lumps yogīs and saṃnyāsīs with several other arrogant figures who are lost and confused without Rām. He writes, “[They think to themselves] ‘We are great poets, high-­born pandits, yogīs, sanyāsīs, wise, virtuous men, warriors, benefactors’—­such states of mind are never destroyed. Ravidās says, none of them understands, they have fallen into error like madmen.” 61 Despite their difficult practices, yogīs and ascetics are not able to abolish their selfish greed, pride, and confusion and are haunted by these things through the night. The bhaktas, on the other hand, sleep like babies, for they have given themselves in devotion to Rām. In Tulsīdās’s words, “Itinerant yogīs and bands of ascetics stay awake, practicing meditation, for in their hearts lies a heavy fear of greed, delusion, anger, and desire. . . . ​But Tulsī sleeps soundly—­his one faith is in Rām.” 62 From the perspective of many early modern North Indian bhakti poets, the yogī and his practices represented the epitome of delusion, egotism, and foolishness. Sūrdās suggests exactly this when he states, “Fool, dispense with pride and pretension and before you roast in the flames, say the name of Rām. . . . ​Unless you reflect on Hari, the Lord of Sūr, you’ll be like those yogīs—­ like monkeys they are—­you’ll wriggle on a leash, and dance.” 63 Here Sūr openly mocks the yogī by comparing him to a monkey performing tricks on a leash, a puppet to māyā and its worldly illusions and desires. Hawley notes that this “estimation of yogis as practicing a senseless regimen, one that purports to lead to liberation but is in fact an instrument of imprisonment, is made at several points in the Sūrsāgar.” 64 In the excerpts from the following Sūrdās poems, the gopīs of Braj find absolutely no value in yoga. These poems come from a genre called bhramargīt, or “songs to the bee.” The setting is this: Kṛṣṇa has left Braj for Mathura and the messenger Ūddhav (or Ūddho) is sent to console the distraught female cowherds

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(gopīs) of Braj, who pine desperately for their Beloved. As Ūddhav speaks, trying to convince the gopīs that they ought to take up the path of yoga, a bee flies by and, in their distress, the gopīs address their reproaches and pleas of longing to this bee.65 “Why should we take up the discipline of yoga, so unknowable, untellable, unmeasurable?” 66 they cry out. In another poem, the gopīs make it clear that, for them, yoga foolishly and cruelly misses the entire point: the joy of an intimate personal relationship with God. They sing, It’s a dirty trick, this yoga, and it won’t sell in Braj. . . . ​Who will give up grapes to feed on fruit from the bitter nīm tree? How could we leave the taste of Sūr’s Dark Lord, and live on that insipid stuff of yours?67 Here yoga is characterized as bitter and insipid in contrast to the sweetness of devotion to Kṛṣṇa. This perspective is reiterated in the following excerpts, which describe the ascetic yogī’s path as tasteless, a source of suffering, and a worthless concoction that does absolutely nothing to help with the gopīs’ fundamental dilemma: separation (viraha) from their Beloved. [Ūddho] says to leave behind our clothes and jewels, also our love for family and home, Let our hair grow wild, put ash on our skin, and study his tasteless no-­trait path. To my way of thinking, he’s only speaking grief—­love’s pain—­in the hearts of poor young maidens.68   Ūdho, they say, has arrived in our midst to peddle his yoga to poor young maidens. His postures, dispassion, his eyes turned within—­f riend, how can they cancel our distance from Śyām? . . . ​What kind of doctor, says Sūr, can this be who hands out prescriptions when he doesn’t know the disease?69 These Sūrdās verses, like so many others in early modern North Indian bhakti literature, clearly convey the opinion that the path of yoga and asceticism is not only misguided and emotionally empty but also utterly ineffectual in achieving the religious goals of the bhakta.

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Locating the Bhakti Critique: Factors of Caste and Geography It is interesting to note that when it comes to the specific content of bhakti poetry referencing Nāth yogīs, there is a marked tendency for poetry attributed to lower-­caste, nirguṇ Sants like Kabīr, Raidās, and Nānak to show a familiarity with the technical terms of Nāth tantric yoga practice and philosophy, whereas poetry attributed to higher-­caste, saguṇ saints like Tulsīdās and Sūrdās shows a clear awareness of the details of the Nāth yogī’s garb, accoutrements, and lifestyle but rarely if ever shows the same intimate knowledge of kuṇḍalinī yogic praxis or Nāth philosophical terminology. Mīrābāī, a markedly saguṇ poet-­saint, is an interesting case in this regard. Contributors to the Mīrābāī poetic corpus seem to have come from both higher-­caste and lower-­caste backgrounds, but while lower-­caste communities have gone so far as to make her the disciple of an untouchable Nāth yogī guru,70 poems attributed to her nevertheless tend to show no evidence of the intimate details of (or terminology associated with) tantric yoga or Nāth meditative experience. Furthermore, while figures like Kabīr, Raidās, Pīpā, and Sena occasionally appear with yogīs and Sufis in Mughal miniature paintings, this is not the case with Mīrābāī nor with Sūrdās or Tulsīdās. Much of Sufi literature shows the same heightened awareness of Nāth yogī thought and practice that we find in the lower-­caste nirguṇ bhakti poetry, suggesting a common social location shared by some Sufis, yogīs, and nirguṇ bhakti Sants that may have allowed for more frequent and more intimate exchanges among them. Indeed, this distinction is borne out in Mughal miniature paintings, which depict extremely few Daśnāmīs and higher-­caste, saguṇ bhaktas but show many yogīs and a number of lower-­caste nirguṇ Sants.71 Many Sufis and nirguṇ bhaktas like Kabīr and Raidās were alike in being rather unconcerned with matters of caste purity, and this likely allowed them to mix more freely with each other and with yogīs, a fact reflected in the content of literature they both wrote that utilized Nāth yogī imagery, symbols, and terms even as it disparaged key aspects of Nāth yogī religiosity. The social location (class and caste) of devotee-­poets—­a nd, just as importantly, the social makeup of the sectarian communities behind the production of manuscripts of bhakti poetry—­certainly affected the specific content of different bhakti critiques of tantric-­yogic religion, but, as the poems attributed to Tulsīdās and Kabīr make clear, bhakti poets (and bhakti communities) across the social spectrum were generally in agreement in their negative attitudes toward tantric yogīs and Śāktas. Earlier I discussed some verses from Kabīr that explicitly directed themselves at Gorakh and the Nāths, criticizing their yogic practices and attitudes. It is Tulsīdās, however, who penned perhaps the most striking of

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the bhakti verses that speak to the conflict between bhaktas and Nāth yogīs. In his Kavitāvalī, he famously wrote, “Gorakh awakened yoga and drove bhakti away from the people [Gorakh jagāyo jog, bhakti bhagāyo log]. He played with the directives of the scriptures—­what a fraud!”72 Here Tulsī boldly proclaims not only that the tantric-­yogic teachings of the Nāths are opposed to the teachings of bhakti but also that they have actually caused bhakti to weaken among the people. While Tulsīdās and Kabīr differed in many important respects, they were in clear agreement in their negative opinion of tantric yogīs and ascetics. Tulsī was a brahman, a devotee especially of the Divine in form and with qualities (saguṇ),73 and he has often been remembered as a socially conservative poet who sought to maintain the caste and purity restrictions of traditional Hindu varṇāśramadharma. Kabīr, on the other hand, was a low-­caste weaver with a Muslim and perhaps even Nāth background, a devotee of a formless God without qualities (nirguṇ), and he is remembered for his vehement attacks on conservative brahmanical social views and institutions. If these characteristics would place Tulsī and Kabīr at opposite ends of the spectrum of bhakti poets, the two are nevertheless united in their rejection of key aspects of tantric and yogic religious approaches. For both, utter devotion to Rām—­whether conceived as the formless Ultimate or as Rāmcandra, avatār of Viṣṇu—­is the only valid and authentic spiritual path; all else is worthless egotism, pretension, and foolishness. Kabīr and Tulsī were linked in at least one other way. They both resided in the sacred city of Banaras along the Ganges River. The question that arises from this simple fact is one about physical location. The impact of social location on bhakti polemics has been noted, but what about geographic location? To what degree did the rhetoric of bhakti reformers regarding tantric and yogic religiosity in early modern North India emerge from specific local contexts? There is no doubt that an aspect of the differences in the content of poetry attributed to the various North Indian bhakti saints (and among manuscript recensions of individual poets like Kabīr) has to do with the specific contexts of religious competition in the particular geographic regions in which the poetry was produced, which were themselves tied to locally specific economies, political relationships, and situations of land control. The precise nature of “the other” necessarily depended on exactly who one was competing against for followers and patronage at a particular place and time. For instance, Sikh literature (especially the janam-­sākhīs) makes it clear that the developing Sikh community in Panjab was in rivalry primarily with Gorakhnāthi yogīs and the devotees of Sufi saints and faced no serious competition from any other bhakti sect or Vaiṣṇava group in the area, or from Śāktas.74 Generally, in the medieval and early modern period in North India, Nāth yogīs seem to have had a major presence in Rajasthan, Panjab, and

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around Banaras, thus they were criticized and marginalized especially by poets, and in manuscript traditions, from these regions. On the other hand, bhaktas writing in Braj (like those in the nascent Gauḍiya, Vallabhan, Rādhāvallabhan, and Haridāsī communities) far less frequently refer to yogīs. As a rather new and developing pilgrimage center for Kṛṣṇa devotees, it makes sense that Braj would not have been a regular stopping point on the circuits of itinerant tantric yogīs; they simply were not major competitors in the religious marketplace of the area. Braj-­dwelling bhaktas like Harirām Vyās did, however, compose polemics about Śāktas, who seem to have maintained a significant presence in Braj even after the sixteenth-­century Kṛṣṇa revival there. As Vaudeville writes, “In spite of Vaiṣṇava abhorrence of the bloody rites associated with Devī-­worship, the pastoral castes, especially the Jāṭs and Gujārs who form the bulk of the autochthonous population of Braj-­bhūmi, did remain attached to the cult of their local goddesses.”75 While there are nuances in poetic content and emphasis that correlate (in part) with differences in bhakti authors’ (and bhakti manuscripts’) geographic locations, the fact is that criticism of yoga and tantra came from devotional poets in a wide variety of places, including Banaras, Avadh, Braj, Rajasthan, and Panjab. Clearly, the bhakti sensibility that was forming in the early modern period, partly against the foil of the twofold tantric other, was one that stretched across a broad swath of North India, one extending even into Bengal and Assam. The sources examined and discussed thus far have come from primarily Rajasthan, Panjab, and the Gangetic Plain (e.g., Braj, Avadh, Banaras), but bhakti critiques of tantric-­yogic religion also came from further east, addressing audiences in Bengal and Assam, as well as from Maharashtra to the south. In the following poem, Nāmdev, the fourteenth-­century Maharashtrian singer-­saint, stresses the confused and purposeless nature of the religious practices of itinerant ascetics and tantric-­yogī healers: Show us, then, your herbs, your roots, charms and spells as you go around naked, a wanderer—­so what? Show us how you’ve fasted, how stern your yogic acts, as you meander over the land—­so what? So what? It only redounds to your disgrace. Remember instead the One who never ends. Pointless, says Nāmdev, are your many schemes. First go to Viṭhobā, his feet—­fasten on to them.76 In another poem, Nāmdev asks, “Mādhav, how shall I perform yoga? There is great difficulty in doing yoga. . . . ​I have neither knowledge nor meditation. . . . ​

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Let me go to the shelter of Hari.”77 Similarly, a poem attributed to Tukarām, the seventeenth-­century Maharashtrian poet and Kṛṣṇa (Viṭṭhal) devotee, emphasizes the value of bhakti over and above yoga, asceticism, and gnosis: “Yoga cannot grasp You, sacrificial rites cannot get You, You do not yield to penance, the senses cannot touch You, Knowledge cannot discover You. . . . ​ Because Your form is beyond reach of speech and mind, I have to measure You with my own devotion.”78 A number of early modern authors writing in Bengali and Assamese also included yoga in lists of religious approaches they said were worthless in comparison with bhakti, or ought to be abandoned in favor of bhakti. Kṛṣṇadās Kavirāj, in his Caitanya-­caritāmṛta (1537) states, “Karma, yoga, and jñāna—­these look toward the face of bhakti. But all these sādhanas yield most worthless fruit, for without bhakti they have not the power to give.”79 In Locanadāsa’s Bengali hagiography of Caitanya, the Caitanya Maṅgala (LCM) (ca. 1560–­1580), there is a scene in which the young Caitanya challenges a man, saying, “Wagging your hands and head [in pride], you have abandoned bhakti and seek yoga. Instead of jñāna and karma, give your heart over to the worship of Kṛṣṇa and become a rasika immersed in blissful consciousness. Gaining mastery over the elements of the material world is not the practice of proper worship.”80 Another example comes from Kavikarṇapūra’s allegorical drama, the Caitanyacandrodaya (ca. 1575), in which Caitanya, on his pilgrimage south, encounters the great devotee Rāmānanda Rāya, who explains to him the essential truths of bhakti. The text states, “Rāmānanda observed that one who yokes himself to Kṛṣṇa through love (prema) is better than one who follows the path of yoga; that only the one who relies on the spiritual body of Bhagvān, the heart-­thrilling form, and not on the physical form of this worldly body, is truly liberated from the world of creation.”81 Śaṅkaradeva, a Kṛṣṇa devotee writing in Assam in the sixteenth century, also saw no value in the practice of yoga. As Phyllis Granoff explains, “Śaṅkaradeva’s rejection of the practice of yoga comprises a central episode in his biography that was composed in Assamese by his disciple Daityāri sometime in the early 17th century.”82 While Śaṅkaradeva seems initially to have been a practitioner of aṣṭāṅga and haṭha yoga and to have seen them as the means to salvation, Daityāri’s hagiography explicitly and emphatically states that when Śaṅkaradeva discovered the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, he gave up all practice of yoga and came to believe fervently in the necessity for the exclusive practice of devotion.83 Granoff demonstrates how Śaṅkaradeva, in his Bhaktiratnakāra, made very selective use of verses in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa in order to present it as unambiguously expressing the message that only devotion to God brings liberation and that yoga, mantras, austerities, etc., cannot. Śaṅkaradeva carefully chose verses that

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elevated devotion and the recitation of the Name while also selecting those explicitly rejecting or marginalizing yoga practices, despite the fact that those same practices are clearly praised in other verses in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. As I note later, Śaṅkaradeva and other bhaktas like him were opposed not only to yoga but also and especially to Śākta and other tantric practices.

Anti-­Śākta Sentiments While much of the devotional critique was directed at the yogī, Śāktas were also major targets of criticism. Anantadās described Raidās as being born to Śākta parents who later convert and become bhaktas of Hari and, in a separate parcaī, narrated Pīpā’s shift from worship of the Goddess (who admits her own subordinate status) to the love of Hari. In the opening verses of his Kabīr-­paricaī, Anantadās also remarks that Kabīr spent many days among the Śāktas but had then become a devotee of Hari.84 Anantadās was not the only hagiographer to use the Śāktas as a contrast to highlight the devotional perspective of the great bhakti heroes and heroines. Priyādās, in his Bhaktirasabodhinī (1712), tells us that Mīrābāī’s in-­laws were Śāktas and that Mīrā’s mother-­in-­law pressured her to worship the Goddess, but that she adamantly refused, maintaining that she worshipped Kṛṣṇa (Giridhārīlāl) alone.85 In each of these examples from the hagiographies of Kabīr, Mīrā, Pīpā, and Raidās, we see how Śāktas and goddess worship were set up as a foil for bhakti devotional religion. As Heidi Pauwels has noted, “Diatribes against śāktas are widespread throughout North Indian bhakti texts, in nirguṇa as well as in Rāma and Krishna bhakti.”86 To get a feel for the anti-­Śākta rhetoric prevalent among bhakti poets of early modern North India, let us look at examples from two very different devotees, writing in very different social and geographic locations: Kabīr, a fifteenth-­century, low-­caste, nirguṇ poet of Banaras/Varanasi, and Harirām Vyās, a sixteenth-­century, high-­caste, Kṛṣṇa poet of Vrindavan. Although bhaktas depicted the outlook and practices of yogīs and tāntrikas as misguided, worthless, ineffective, or inferior (to love and devotion), in bhakti verses on Śāktas there is an additional element of vitriol and genuine disgust. Here are two sākhīs of Kabīr: Better is the she-­dog of a Vaiṣṇava than the mother of a Śākta: The one keeps listening to Hari’s praise and the other goes to buy sin!87  

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A pig is worth more than a Śākta, for he keeps the village clean! When the Śākta, the wretch, has died nobody will take his name!88 Harirām Vyās voices a similar hostility, writing, Paint black the face of a śākta, o Heart. I cannot stand seeing a śākta, whether old or for profit. When I see a śākta, I’m afraid, even more than of a lion. The devotee deserves my love, (but) he kills living beings, not afraid to reduce to dust. Worshiping garbage-­pots on the eighth and fourteenth day, the poor guy is dim of wits.89 Vyāsdās (says): leave such company, instead (turn) right away to worshiping Śyām [Kṛṣṇa].90 In this poem, Vyās targets the “left-­hand” tantric practice and sexual ritual of sahajiyās and Śāktas in Bengal: Senseless bairāgīs perform spiritual training in Bengal. By the power of mineral, alchemy and herbs, [their] desire [the bodiless god of love] is inflamed night and day. [They] are not affected by the passionate bliss of Śuk’s words [i.e., the Bhāgavata Purāṇa], no element of doubt is dispersed. Perversions [and] values of the ephemeral world catch on; in pursuit of wealth, everybody’s concentration is broken. Living in the woods they grasp the heavy and high breasts of alluring ladies and serve them. Considering every woman to be a sādhu, they leave the holy men and abandon Hari’s lap. Words of desire, like arrows in every limb, [and still] the quiver bundling [more arrows] shines brightly. Vyās [says]: [Even with] the firm noose of desire on his neck, he [still] likes desire and passion.91 In bhakti poems such as these it is not always clear whether the word śākta refers to a rival religious community whose specific practices were found objectionable or is a more generic term for a nondevotee stuck in immorality, worldly desires, and sensual temptations. Pauwels’s study demonstrates that

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bhaktas typically associated the Śākta with goddess worship, blood sacrifice, tantric sexual ritual, and unorthodox, low-­caste (impure) practices. While bhakti opposition to these dimensions of tantric Śākta religiosity was quite real and quite strong, it is also important to note that, like the yogīs encountered in the preceding, to an extent the Śāktas of bhakti literature were caricatured figures, straw men that helped in marking the boundaries of a growing bhakti public and religious sensibility.92 Eventually, the impact of North India’s burgeoning bhakti movement would extend into the Śākta realm as well. Beginning in the mid-­eighteenth century, we find a vibrant tradition of devotional poetry to the Goddess in Bengal, an intimate, emotional Śākta bhakti that reflects the powerful influence of Kṛṣṇa bhakti in that region.93 Nevertheless, in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Bengal and Assam (traditional hotbeds of goddess worship and tantric religion), Śāktism and bhakti—­at least according to the bhaktas—­seem clearly to have been at loggerheads.94 In his sixteenth-­century hagiography of Caitanya, Vṛndāvana-­ dāsa describes Bengal prior to Caitanya’s devotional movement as “devoid of Kṛṣṇa-­Rāma bhakti . . . ​the people sang praises of Caṇḍī (the Goddess) far into the night, and made offerings in pūjā (worship) to Vāsulī (i.e., Caṇḍī); with wine and flesh they worshipped the Yakṣas (demons/nature spirits). In the uproar . . . ​ no one heard the name of Kṛṣṇa.”95 Here Śākta religion takes on a role similar to the one it occupies in Anantadās’s parcaīs, serving as a foil for bhakti, an ignorance preceding the realization of bhakti’s truth, a darkness that—­in these authors’ narrative ploys—­a llows the light of bhakti to shine that much more brightly. Similarly, the seventeenth-­century Narottama-­vilāsa of Narahari-­dāsa describes the Śāktas of Bengal, untouched by bhakti, as being “practiced in godless deeds, knowing nothing of true dharma and karma, and doing indescribably evil things. At the doors of their houses is the blood of goats and sheep and buffaloes. . . . ​Lascivious women stay with them, and they use flesh and wine in their worship.”96 The atmosphere in Assam is described in much the same way. Rāmānanda Dvija, in his mid-­seventeenth-­century biography of Śaṅkaradeva, the Guru Caritra, writes that before the advent of Śaṅkaradeva’s Vaiṣṇava movement in Assam, “People did not worship Kṛṣṇa or perform the deeds sacred to Hari. They, on the other hand, would fain worship Bhairava and consider it to be the greatest of religions. They made offerings of blood of tortoises and goats to that deity, and drank of it as a sacred drink (prasāda).”97 While there may be grains of truth in such remarks, such statements are important not so much for providing historical information as for conveying the manner in which tantric Śāktism and Śaivism served as a demonized other against which bhaktas were forming their devotional sensibility.

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Śaṅkaradeva (1449–­1569) of Assam seems to have shared the hostile attitude of Kabīr, Harirām Vyās, and Anantadās toward Śāktas. Śaṅkaradeva was born into a Śākta family (who kept an image of Cāṇḍī in their home) but became a great devotee of Kṛṣṇa who led a devotional revival that was “the first major challenge to Śākta Tantra in Assam,” fiercely rejecting its blood sacrifice, esoteric rites, mantras, and tantric yoga.98 Besides his criticism of yoga, Śaṅkaradeva also scorned blood sacrifice and, in his Kīrttana-­ghoṣa, demonstrated a particular disdain for “left-­hand Tantric worship with ‘women, wine and meat’ (strī-­ madya-­māṃsa sevā), an ignorant and futile practice that only leads sinful fools to their own destruction.”99 In this work, Śaṅkaradeva argues that devotion to Hari utterly surpasses all other rites and practices, including “tantra mantra . . . ​ yajña,” and so forth.100 Tantra-­mantra often gets highlighted as an inferior or ineffective religious practice in a particular genre of bhakti poetry, which I consider in the following.

Bitten by the Snake: Bhakti and Tantric Healing I now shift from the Śakta to the figure of the tantric yogī as healer, as represented in bhakti poetry, and the utter powerlessness of the tantric yogī’s tantra-­ mantra against either the snake of viraha (love in separation from the Divine) or the snake of māyā (the worldly delusion and desire that bind us in suffering and prevent liberation). There is a long tradition of tāntrikas and yogīs acting and earning renown as healers. At the core of these tāntrikas’ and yogīs’ healing practices were the recitation of mantras and the use of plants and herbs as amulets consecrated and made potent through mantric recitation.101 The repertoire of the gāruḍika, or tantric snakebite healer, typically consisted of herbal medicines, mantras to the bird king Garuḍa, protective diagrams (yantra), and spells (vidyā) understood to be sonic embodiments (i.e., mantras) of particular goddesses.102 A trope in Indian literature and folktales is the tantric yogī or gāruḍī summoned to cure the sickness that no one else can cure.103 Here of particular concern is the tantric healing of snakebites, which were not only a real health hazard in many parts of India but also a common poetic metaphor.104 In the Indian Sufi romance the Madhumālatī (1545), the story’s hero, Prince Manohar, falls terribly ill, and when none of the physicians, exorcists, or sages can help him, a tantric healer is summoned. This learned tāntrika boasts of his “skills and magic,” saying he can raise the dead with his incantations and invoke

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the gods through his magic;105 however, in the end he is forced to admit that the illness is beyond his powers: “He tried everything—­words, medicines, all his skills as a healer—­but all proved useless.”106 The text states emphatically, “The Prince’s ailment was incurable. No herb, no mantra in this world could heal him.”107 Similarly, in Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (1540), the protagonist, King Ratansen, falls into a condition “more grievous than death,” repeatedly losing consciousness in his intense pain. “All his family and dependents, his princes and lords, all came speedily. And all the magicians and the curers of snakebite (gāruḍī) and the sorcerers and the physicians and the wise men were summoned.”108 But they could not heal his sickness. What was this incurable illness suffered by Ratansen and Manohar, seemingly unparalleled in the agony and madness it brought on? The answer, of course, is viraha—­the passionate, anguished love that occurs in separation from one’s beloved. Well before the Hindavi Sufi romances were composed, the great Chishti Sufi saint of Delhi, Shaikh Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā’ (1242–­1325), is known to have recited these Arabic verses that conceive the devotee’s passionate longing for God in terms of an incurable snakebite. Each morning, and again, each evening My eyes, due to love of you, keep weeping. My liver, bitten by the snake of desire, No doctor or charmer has the means of curing. For none but he who enflames me with desire Can, if he chooses, quench that raging fire.109 Amir Hasan, the collector of the sayings of Nizām al-­Dīn in the Fawā’id al-­Fu’ād (ca. 1308–­1322), rendered the last two couplets of this poem into Persian: My liver’s been pinched by a serpent’s deadly bite, Which no spell, however potent, can hope to right. Only that one whose love distracts and destroys me Can cast a healing spell; who but he knows my plight?110 In bhakti literature as well we see this same thematic emphasis on the power of passionate longing for an absent beloved (viraha)—­expressed in terms of the very same metaphor of a snakebite inflicting suffering that can be healed only by the beloved. Though each seemingly drew on earlier, separate traditions of Islamicate (Arabic and Persian) and Sanskritic love poetry, this shared emphasis and metaphor likely served as a point of contact and resonance between Sufis and bhaktas.

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Rajab, a seventeenth-­century bhakti poet-­saint of the Dādū ­Panth, states, “The separation from my beloved hurts like a snakebite; only the vision of God is a suitable medicine. Without seeing him I remain sad, I find no peace in body or soul.”111 Along the same lines, one Kabīr song says, “The snake of viraha has entered the body; it has bitten the inmost heart—­yet the saint does not turn a limb: ‘Let it bite as it pleases!’ he says.”112 Another Kabīr sākhī declares, “I found a raft formed by a snake in the Ocean of Existence: If I let go, I shall drown, if I hang on, it will bite my arm.”113 In both these Kabīr poems, the snake is viraha, and though it causes suffering, that pain is welcomed as a necessary element in the path of bhakti, which alone brings liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. Kṛṣṇadās Kavirāj, in the Caitanya-­caritāmṛta, identifies the snake not with viraha but with God (Kṛṣṇa), whose serpent bite of love causes that viraha; “Long and powerful bars are the two arms of Kṛṣṇa; they are not arms, but long black-­ snake bodies. Coiling through the cleft of the twin mountains they bite the hearts of women; in that poison’s burning women die.”114 Similarly, Sūrdās, in one of his poems, describes Kṛṣṇa as a snake that has bitten Rādhā then abandoned her to suffer intense pain in separation from her Beloved. After listing multiple failed efforts to cure Rādhā’s faint, feverish condition, Sūr states, “Nothing availed against the cruel bite of that serpent, the God of Love.”115 In another poem, Sūrdās depicts the Divine as the snakebite curer, the lone healer able to cure the pain of viraha. Taking on the voice of the gopīs of Braj, Sūrdās sings of Kṛṣṇa: We’ve been bitten, my friend, by a dark, black snake And no one—­no one but the Lord of the Yadus—­can take the poison away. Ūdho, it’s a good thing you’ve come to bind us with a tourniquet before you leave, But when will you send us Sūrdās’s Lord to pour his mantras on our heads?116 A slightly later (1640) version of this poem adds these lines: “None of the tantras and mantras work—­the experts have given up and gone. Call the doctor of snakebites (gāruḍī), call Gopāl: [only] he can make these waves of fainting go away.”117 Snakebites and tantric healing practices for dealing with them seem to have been relatively widespread among the audiences to whom many bhakti poets and storytellers performed. The story and poems referred to here utilize the burning pain, fever, and fainting caused by a snakebite as metaphors for the intense

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anguish and longing experienced by the devotee in separation from God. Together these bhakti sources speak to the paradox that the beloved Divine is simultaneously both the snake that has caused the tormented love of viraha and the snakebite curer (gāruḍī) uniquely capable of healing the devotee’s lovesickness. Yet these verses consist of more than just metaphors and clever literary devices for describing the nature of viraha. That “none of the tantras and mantras work” is a detail very much worth noting, for it suggests that for the religious needs and desires of these bhaktas, tantric methods were increasingly perceived to have no worth or power. This sentiment, already seen in the devotional perspective of the Padmāvat and Madhumālatī, is one that recurs in the poetry and hagiography of the North Indian bhakti saints. While snakes, snakebites, and other painful illnesses were traditional metaphors for describing the power of devotion, the nature of longing (viraha) for the Beloved, or the sufferings of saṃsāra, what seems new in early modern North Indian devotional materials’ use of these metaphors is the way that tantra-­mantra and tantric healers, specifically, come in as the foil to bhakti, throwing the power and truth of the devotional path into high relief. Mīrābāī, in her earliest dated poem (in the 1604 Kartārpur manuscript), describes the power of the love she feels for the Divine, contrasting it with the powerlessness of tantras and mantras to relieve her anguish. She sings, He’s bound my heart with the powers he owns, Mother—­he with the lotus eyes. Arrows like spears: this body is pierced, and Mother, he’s gone far away. When did it happen, Mother? I don’t know but now it’s too much to bear. Tantras, mantras, medicines—­I’ve tried, but the pain won’t go. Is there someone who can bring relief? Mother, the hurt is cruel. Here I am, near, and you’re not far: Hurry to me, to meet. Mira’s Mountain-­Lifter Lord, have mercy, cool this body’s fire! O Mother, my heart is bound in the bonds of the Lotus-­Eyed One.118 Mantras are the bread and butter of tantric practice. Indeed, tantra is commonly known simply as mantraśāstra, or “the science of mantras.” Yet again and again in their compositions, the poet-­saints note how these vital tools of the tantric trade have no value and no power in the realm of bhakti. As one of Kabīr’s poems declares, “Once the snake of viraha is in the body, no mantra can control it. To live in separation from Rām is to live in madness.”119 An early (1657) poem

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attributed to Mīrābāī shows a similar attitude toward mantras, stating, “Mantras cannot bind a heart that Kṛṣṇa the Mountain-­Lifter’s limbs have set free.”120 The message in these verses is clear: love—­love for the Divine—­is far stronger, far more potent, than any power a tantric mantra might harness. The ineffectiveness of tantras, mantras, and magical healers is a theme not only in bhakti poetry but also in bhakti hagiography. The Rāmānandī Anantadās, writing in Rajasthan in the late sixteenth century, narrates this story about Pīpā, the great king and bhakti saint. Pīpā was a worshipper of the Goddess; “for him there was no other deity . . . ​he was focused only on the goddess, ignorant of the true path to liberation.”121 Having served her well, one day Pīpā asks the Goddess to grant him liberation. Anantadās’s use of parody and satire comes through clearly in the Goddess’s response to Pīpā’s request. She says, “When did you ever see anyone find liberation through me? Yet, even understanding saints do not know that. I can give you every other joy; if that satisfies you, then serve me. But if you hope to find liberation, then worship only Hari without hesitation.”122 When the Goddess leaves, Pīpā becomes incredibly distraught, crying, sighing, and refusing to speak. Intimating that these were signs of the anguish of viraha, a sudden and intense longing for Hari ignited in Pīpā by the Goddess’s revelatory words, Anantadās says that Pīpā was “like a beautiful woman without her husband.”123 He writes, Some thought he was under the spell of witchcraft (mūnṭhi), and they called wise tantric healers (gāruḍī). Others thought a demon had possessed him, or that he had been cheated by a crook. Some thought he had been struck by a sudden sickness which caused immense pain. They called for a doctor (vaid) to give medicines and a sorcerer (bhopā) to exorcise him. Magical practices (ṭāman) were tried and occult mantras (ṭaunān, spells/charms) were chanted. The Devī was touched when offerings were made. Brahmins were asked to consult his horoscope and alms were given according to the planets. But they did not know the secret of Hari, as if they had taken cannabis or daturā (intoxicating thorn-­apple).124

Here several tantric specialists are summoned and try out their magic and mantras, but none of it works, for—­as Anantadās writes—­“they did not know the secret of Hari.” Eventually, Pīpā speaks to his subjects. He urges them to abandon the Goddess and devote themselves wholeheartedly to Hari. Explaining the source of his anguish, he says, “No cheat has cheated me nor have I been possessed by a demon. Only the love of Hari has taken root in my heart.”125 Anantadās depicts devotion to Hari as a higher plane of religiosity, one concerned not with the transitory, illusory pleasures of goddess-­worshipping Śāktas but with the

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Real; one grounded in a love whose power tantric magic and mantras simply cannot touch. All this is certainly not to say that the everyday people listening to performers of bhakti poems and stories had come to see gāruḍīs and other tāntrikas as completely powerless or ineffective. Anantadās, Pīpā, or any other bhakta, if bitten by a snake or possessed by a mysterious illness may very well have consulted a tantric healer to remedy the situation with his rituals, herbs, and mantras. While bhakti poets and hagiographers made metaphorical, pedagogical use of tantra-­mantra in their compositions in order to better define and advance their own devotional approach and sensibility, in practical terms bhaktas would not have been able to offer any real alternatives to the remedies and traditional folk procedures provided by tāntrikas for snakebite and other poisonings and illnesses. The point is rather that these tantric powers and methods were being circumscribed and increasingly placed on a different, lower, and worldlier level separate from the higher plane of bhakti and the power of God and devotion to God. While the everyday pragmatic value of tantric methods was not necessarily under attack, the performance of these bhakti poems sought to subtly strip away tantra’s soteriological appeal, demoting its efficacy to an exclusively worldly, practical level, while positioning bhakti as the sole, authentic path to salvation. In another of his parcaīs, Anantadās tells this story about the young Raidās. Born into the home of untouchable, Śākta parents, Raidās refuses to take milk from his mother. Crying and crying, the baby Raidās refuses to eat and is soon hovering on the brink of death. Anantadās narrates how Raidās’s family, fearing for their son’s life, “summoned many a sorcerer (bhopā) and healer (vaid) to work magic and minister potions ( jantra mantra auṣaudī karāvai). Whoever saves this dying child (they said), will be hailed as Dhanvantari [the founder of Indian medicine and physician of the gods]. We will do whatever he says and heap things in front of him.”126 None of these tantric healing methods work and Raidās lies there thinking, “Dying is better than living, for life without Hari is tasteless.”127 It is only when the great bhakti saint Rāmānand arrives, sent by Hari, that the baby Raidās is healed. Rāmānand says to Raidās’s family, “If you become devotees (bhaktas), brothers, Hari will revive your child.”128 They accept, Rāmānand initiates Raidās, and soon afterward “everyone’s hearts were gladdened when Raidās started to suckle at his mother’s breast.”129 Here not only is the jantra-­mantra of the tantric healer shown to be ineffective but also the baby Raidās is revived only when his family, explicitly marked as Śāktas, convert and become bhaktas of Hari. The trend is clear: it’s another loss for the Śāktas and tāntrikas and another win for bhakti.

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Moving now from Raidās’s hagiography to his poetry, in a composition filled with references to snakes and snake charming, Raidās states, “Against the snake of passionate desire, no mantra or magic avails.” The snake in this verse is not viraha but that of māyā and all the sensual desire and worldly delusion associated with it. Once again tantric mantras and magic are marked as ineffective, but this time the critique centers on their inability to liberate one from saṃsāra. Raidās sings as follows: Foolish man! How can you sleep in the jaws of death, abandoning the true Rām, contemplating countless pleasures? His incredible patience gone, Kṛṣṇa liberated (Braj) from the fury (of Kāliyā). Against the snake of passionate desire (madan) no mantra nor magic (mantra jantrā) avails. There is no near nor far shore for its waves of venomous fire. Your wisdom is slain by the serpent of greed (lobh). You are bewildered in the poisonous waves of the ocean of saṃsār. You are bound in delusion, the guṇs and the senses. Call out the great snake-­charming (gāraḍī) mantra, place it in your ears. Awake and cry “Rām”—­why are you asleep? The Sants have told as many teachings as are told in the smṛti, but those supreme sages [of smṛti] have not all learnt the true snake-­charming art. Brahma-­rishis, Nārad, Syambha, Sanak and his siblings—­only those who repeated “Rām” passed over. [Previously,] the remedy given for this sickness was performing vedic rituals, chanting mantras, going on pilgrimages and giving alms. But the true nāgadamanī medicine (cure for snakebite) is remembering Rām. Raidās says: Consciousness, awake!130 In this poem, Raidās initially describes the snake as madan, “passionate desire.” He goes on to call it the serpent of greed (lobh), whose poison is the delusion of saṃsāra.131 As mentioned, against this snakebite of worldly desire and delusion tantric mantras and magic have absolutely no power. There is but one mantra that brings liberation from this affliction: Rām, the name of the Lord.132 In the last verse, Raidās emphasizes that the only medicine capable of healing the snakebite of māyā and liberating one from its bondage is the loving remembrance (sumiraṇ) of Rām.133 In two of his oldest dated poems—­f rom the Fatehpur manuscript of 1582—­ Kabīr similarly stresses that when it comes to the sāṃsāric poison of the snake

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of māyā, our only hope of salvation is to look with devotion to God. Calling out to the Divine, in one of these he states, “You’re the snakebite curer (gāruḍī). I’m a pot of poison. What will you give me, elixir-­giver? The serpent of this world has bitten my body—­one pain everywhere, fearsome delusions.”134 The other poem shows Kabīr, in a style all his own, marginalizing tantra-­mantra as part of the illusory realm of māyā. He says, “People are so dumb. Their minds just can’t get the point. The mind cannot see it’s tasting māyā’s fake flavor. It just doesn’t happen; the truth never dawns. Tantras, mantras, medicines—­fakes one and all; And only Kabīr is left around to sing the name of Rām.”135 While others are lost in ignorance and worldly desire, using tantric practices with no ultimate efficacy, Kabīr—­like so many of the bhakti poet-­saints—­finds the Real through the devotional practice of singing the divine Name. And it was not only the name of God that these bhaktas sang. We must not forget that all the bhakti tales and poetic verses discussed here were typically not read but sung and performed. It is no coincidence that the word for “doing bhakti”—­bhajan—­ also means “devotional song.” With this in mind, we might say that bhaktas like Kabīr, Raidās, Sūrdās, and Mīrābāī were not simply disparaging tantra-­mantra but actually replacing it with an altogether different use of language, one more participatory, more emotional, and more infused with devotion and humility. In some sense, in North India’s bhakti movement, the paradigmatic tantric verbal practice of mantra-­japa, typically an individual activity, is supplanted by the ordinarily communal bhakti verbal practices of performing poetry, telling stories, and singing songs to God. Since participatory singing of, to, and about God was at the heart of bhakti’s exclusive path to salvation, then we might say that the medium of the critique—­the song, the tale—­was itself the antidote, the real cure exposing the false medicine (tantra-­mantra) that was the object of the critique.136 The bhaktas highlighted in the preceding—­Mīrābāī, Sūrdās, Rāidās, Kabīr, and Anantadās—­all stress the power of bhakti, both in terms of emotional intensity and salvific ability, while underlining the inefficacy of tantric methods. In positioning themselves against tantric and yogic religiosity, most of the bhaktas discussed in this chapter advocated a devotional practice in which the remembrance of the name of God—­in singing, chanting, and meditation—­was central. If bhakti poets frequently marginalized or rejected the soteriological value of tantric mantras and mantric recitation ( japa), at the same time it would seem their bhakti possessed a rather mantric core. What, then, was the relationship between this bhakti “mantra”—­the divine Name—­and the tantric words of power with which it was in conflict? As explained in the following, the devotional chanting of the Name entirely reconceived tantric notions of the mantra and oriented them within a considerably different religious worldview.

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The One and Only Mantra: The Name of God The specific messages, styles, and locations (both social and geographic) of the major bhakti poets were sometimes quite different, yet the great majority of these diverse bhaktas came together under a common banner in criticizing the twofold tantric other of the yogī and Śākta, as well as, necessarily, the mantras that constituted such a fundamental part of their tantric religiosity. At the same time, another thing unifying the devotional poets and hagiographers of early modern North India, arrayed along a spectrum of different forms and styles of bhakti, was their common faith in the divine Name. As Hawley has written, with regard to the saints of the early modern “vulgate Vaiṣṇava” tradition, “the hallmark of the whole group, from Sūr at one end to Kabīr at the other, is a trust in the absolute power of the name of God.”137 Indeed, there is good reason to believe that beginning in the fourteenth century, the label “Vaiṣṇava” referred not to any sectarian community or group recognizing Viṣṇu as their supreme deity but to those given to the practice of nāmakīrtana and nāmasmaraṇa—­singing and “remembering” the Vaiṣṇava names of God (Hari, Rām, Govinda).138 The bhakti saints’ emphasis on the Name drew, at least in part, on tantric conceptions of mantra139 but also radically reinterpreted them by reducing all other mantras to virtual meaninglessness. Nāmdev says, “There is no other mantra than the name; whosoever tell are foolish and ignorant.”140 Similarly, Śaṅkaradeva states in his Bhaktiratnākara, “There is only one religious duty, the worship of this god [Hari]. There is only one mantra, the name of this god.”141 In the realm of sacred sound, only the name of God—­the one true mantra—­had any real power.142 As noted, this bhakti “mantra” was sometimes placed in explicit contrast with tantric mantras. Kabīr says, “Tantras, mantras, medicines—­fakes one and all; And only Kabīr is left around to sing the name of Rām.”143 In similar fashion, Raidās exclaims, “Against the snake of passionate desire (madan) no mantra nor magic (mantra jantrā) avails. . . . ​Awake and cry ‘Rām’—­why are you asleep?”144 This understanding of the divine Name grew out of the bhakti view that true, genuine salvific power resides only in God, not in properly performed ritual acts or pronouncements of magical words or spells. While tantric mantras may have been granted a limited sphere of efficacy in more mundane affairs (healing, exorcisms, etc.) and while they might still have served certain practical functions (initiations, etc.), from the perspective of early modern bhaktas, they had absolutely no value in transcending worldly delusion and achieving spiritual liberation. In the context of a movement founded on humble, loving devotion to an all-­powerful God, real power could not come from anywhere but God. As Guru Arjan states in his Sukhmanī, a bhakti text devoted to praising the divine Name,

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“Man has no power to work his will, for power resides in God alone.”145 Writing from the Sikh community of bhaktas in Panjab, Guru Arjan asserted, “Better by far than any other way is the act of repeating the perfect Name of God. . . . ​Better by far than any other skill is endlessly to utter the wondrous Name of God.”146 For bhaktas like Arjan, Nānak, Nāmdev, and Kabīr, among many others, the Name stood “for God’s being, the sum total of all that He is, the focus of all that can be said and thought about Him . . . ​the essence of God’s reality.”147 It seems that reciting the name of God was meant to “actualize the aural dimension of [God]’s very being in the mind or heart of the practitioner, an act that was ultimately ontologically transformative.”148 While there are stories—­most famously those of Vālmīki and Ajāmila—­i n which the saying of the divine Name (sometimes accidentally) by a sinful non-­bhakta is the trigger for a major internal transformation—­a purifying realization that leads to a life of devotion—­the core message of these tales is not that simply pronouncing the Name (regardless of devotional attitude and intention) has automatic salvific efficacy but rather that the Name—­a s the name of God—­ has an inherently purifying and transforming power that both expresses divine Grace and opens the human heart to God. We might speculate that just as the idea of a single, all-­powerful, loving God was making more and more sense in the context of the organized, centralized Mughal Empire, so the streamlining and “centralizing” of mantric practice also made sense in this social and political context. We might also speculate that the great value attached to reciting the name(s) of God in the Islamic tradition had something to do with this emphasis among the bhaktas of early modern North India. Indeed, dhikr—­the repetition of the attributes of God—­was perhaps the single most important ritual practice of Sufis and strongly resembled Vaiṣṇava nāma-­kīrtana, while Sufi samā held strong resemblances with the bhakti practice of singing (kīrtan, bhajan) of the qualities of God.149 Furthermore, it is worth noting that, according to Vaiṣṇava hagiographical literature (including Kṛṣṇadāsa’s Caitanya-­caritāmṛta), the practitioner par excellence of the bhakti method of reciting the divine Name was none other than a Muslim, a Sufi named Haridāsa, “whose recitations were legendary.”150 Of course, reciting the name of God had long been a part of Hindu devotion. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa (ca. ninth to tenth centuries) presents nāma-­kīrtana as both the preeminent means to and expression of realization of the supreme Bhagavān, claiming that singing God’s name removes all sins and fulfills the goals of human life (puruṣārtha).151 But there is new interest in and emphasis on this text in the late medieval and early modern periods,152 seemingly in connection with the text’s resonance with and ability to give support to then trending religious perspectives (nondualist Vedānta and devotional aesthetics) and practices (vernacular singing and

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storytelling).153 The practices of Hindu nāma-­smaraṇa and kīrtan and Sufi dhikr and samā undoubtedly developed independently of each other, but their similarity in both form and effect (ecstatic devotional experience) is nevertheless remarkable. The clear resonance between bhakti and Sufi religiosity in this respect must have given further impetus to the practice by both groups and played a role in the development of a larger, shared devotional culture in early modern North India with singing (and hearing) the name/qualities of God at its very center. In the late Sultanate and Mughal religious landscapes, the divine Name must also have held great appeal in that, unlike tantric mantras, which were transmitted secretively and selectively, it was open and available for all to sing, a reflection of the “democratizing” spirit of bhakti. Regardless of how tantric philosophers and theologians may have conceived them, from the perspective of North Indian bhakti poets, it is clear that the mantras of tantric yogīs and Śāktas were elements of a subordinate sphere of power whose validity was seriously in question. Tantric mantras functioned as elements of a world of amoral power that seemed rather foreign to the worldviews of many Sufi and bhakti authors. The tantric yogī or Śākta accessed his power (śakti) via the (proper and repeated) recitation of the mantra (among other means) and could use that power in any way he pleased, for good or evil, for selfless or selfish motives. The divine Name, on the other hand, could never be utilized in such a fashion. For the bhaktas, the Name is not something that can be manipulated or used to manipulate. It is not an instrument of worldly power or selfish gain—­never is it used this way in bhakti literature—­but a transformative force. It is the concentrated, aural form of the transformative force of Love—­the love simultaneously expressed by the devotee and embodied by the Divine—­a power that, in contrast to the characteristically amoral power appropriated via tantric methods, is distinctly moral and distinctly good.

The Dādūpanthī “Exception” and Its Implications In an environment as socially, culturally, and religiously diverse as that of India, we can expect that there will be outliers in even the most distinctive of historical trends. When it comes to my argument about the rise of a distinctive bhakti sensibility (contrasted with yogic and tantric sensibilities) in early modern North India, such is the case. In sixteenth-­century Orissa, the Pañca Sakhā, or “Five Companions,” were Vaiṣṇava devotees who advocated a practice far more focused on jñāna (liberating knowledge) and tantric yoga than the bhaktas

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discussed in the preceding. Influenced in part by the Buddhist tantric tradition in the region, these five early modern poets—­Balarāma Dāsa, Jagannātha Dāsa, Acyutānanda Dāsa, Yaśovanta Dāsa, and Ananta Dāsa—­felt that “the single most important means to achieve liberation [was] the cultivation of a complicated yogic practice akin to what we know from scores of Tantric and Haṭha Yoga texts.”154 Similarly, the Sahajiyā Vaiṣṇavas of Bengal devoted themselves to Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, drawing heavily on the Vaiṣṇava bhakti of Caitanya, yet far from opposing tantric and yogic methods, they made esoteric tantric sexual rites and yogic practices central to their religiosity.155 The Nirañjanī sampradāy, a small but prolific (in terms of manuscript production) nirguṇ bhakti sect in Mughal Rajasthan, were also outliers in that they actively linked themselves to the Nāth yogīs, claiming that their founder, Haridās, took initiation from Gorakhnāth himself and prominently including poetry attributed to Gorakh in their anthological collections.156 The Dādū Panth is perhaps the most interesting of the exceptions to the trend among early modern North Indian bhakti communities to marginalize or overtly criticize tāntrikas and yogīs, particularly the Nāths. As noted in chapter 6, the Dādūpanthī Sarvāṅgīs and Dādūpanthī Bhaktamāl of Rāghavdās are perhaps the only early (pre-­eighteenth-­century) North Indian bhakti texts that include writings or descriptions of Gorakhnāth or any other Nāth yogīs. Indeed, Dādū and his followers, unlike the vast majority of bhakti communities we know of, were kindly disposed to Gorakhnāth and to yogic practices. The Dādū ­Panth’s positive attitude toward the Nāth yogīs should be kept in mind when considering trends in the content of bhakti poetry in Dādūpanthī manuscript traditions, particularly with regard to major bhakti figures claimed across sectarian lines. It is worth noting that the few poems attributed to Kabīr and Raidās that not only reference tantric yoga but also seem to approve of its practice tend to come from Nāth or Dādūpanthi manuscript collections. Callewaert and Friedlander point out, for instance, that while there are several pads attributed to Raidās in the Dādūpanthī manuscript tradition that contain positive references to yoga, such references are not found in the Sikh manuscript tradition of Raidās’s poetry.157 The members of the Dādū ­Panth firmly placed themselves within a tradition of nirguṇ bhakti and followed Vaiṣṇava devotional thinking in many respects, yet they also heavily “emphasized the yogic tradition by referring to Gorakhnāth’s system and also to the Pātañjala-­Yoga and by making it an integral part of their own theology.”158 In his Kāyābelī (Creeper of the body), Dādū systematically recasts yoga into a bhakti frame,159 while Sundardās, one of Dādū’s most brilliant and prolific disciples, asserts in his Jñānasamudra (1653) that the defiled heart can be purified through three means: bhakti yoga, haṭha yoga, and sāṃkhya yoga.160

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Sundardās was undoubtedly a practitioner of haṭha yoga and wrote several works on yoga that show him to be indebted to the teachings in Svātmarāma’s Haṭhapradīpikā (ca. 1450), but he appropriated and framed this haṭha yoga in a manner that made it compatible with the nirguṇ bhakti understandings of the Sants.161 Interestingly, in his Sarvāṅgayogapradīpikā, at the same time that he praises Matsyendranāth, Gorakhnāth, and other renowned Nāth yogīs, Sundardās mocks and criticizes an array of tantric and ascetic practices, some of which—­wearing dreadlocks, eating quicksilver, pills and herbs to attain supernormal powers, employing mantras for nefarious purposes, and conducting tantric healings—­were often associated with the Nāth yogīs.162 On the one hand, from this (among other Dādupanthī sources) we can see that even as the Dādū ­Panth distinguished itself from the vast majority of bhakti communities in Mughal India in (a) the great reverence they gave to the Nāth yogīs and their teachings and (b) the crucial place they gave to (haṭha and sāṃkhya) yoga in their devotional life, its members nonetheless shared in a broad bhakti sensibility that generally looked down upon certain tantric attitudes and practices and opposed extreme forms of tapas. On the other hand, while the inclusion and positive valuation of the Nāths in the literature of the Dādū-panthīs (and Nirañjanīs) made them bhakti outliers in North India in this period, when we consider the Dādū Panth’s respect for the Nāths alongside compositions of theirs that are overtly critical of tantra and extreme tapas, it should remind us of the caricatured nature of depictions of Nāths and other yogīs in many early modern bhakti compositions. In other words, perhaps these yogīs were not all as bad (i.e., deluded, egotistic, and power hungry) as many bhakti texts made them out to be. The reason Sundardās could simultaneously criticize tantric practices and praise the Nāth yogīs is that he and the members of the Dādu ­Panth (and the Nirañjanī sampradāy) seem not to have understood the Nāths as tāntrikas possessing a religious sensibility opposed to their own, but rather as exemplary practitioners of a simple asceticism and mystical yoga that melded naturally with their own bhakti religiosity. As the discussion in chapter 5 of the Nāths and the Gorakhbāṇī suggests, there was no single, coherent Nāth system of yogic practice, and it seems that there were significant regional and lineage-­based differences in practice among the many yogīs who considered themselves followers of Gorakhnāth (or other Nāth Siddhas). Just as the compositions of Jñāneśvar (Jñāndev) suggest a Nāth community in late medieval Maharashtra in which bhakti and tantric kuṇḍalinī yoga went hand in hand, it seems that in Mughal Rajasthan (the home of the Dādu Panth and Nirañjanī sampradāy), there may have also been certain communities of Nāth yogīs that were far more inclined to bhakti sensibilities—­specifically, Sant-­style nirguṇ bhakti—­than the rhetoric in the bhakti compositions under discussion

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would suggest. Indeed, some seventeenth-­century Nāth manuscripts (from Rajasthan) include, in addition to songs and utterances of the siddhas, poems of Nāmdev, Kabīr, Raidās, and other nirguṇ bhakti saints.163 With this in mind, despite the larger trend, the rise of a bhakti sensibility marginalizing yoga and tantra, perhaps it should not surprise that some bhakti communities in Mughal Rajasthan would have viewed Nāth teachings and practices as entirely compatible with bhakti.164 The fact that bhakti communities like the Dādū ­Panth, Nirañjanīs, Sahajiyās, and Pañca Sakhā did not object to yoga, yogīs, and tantric religiosity in the same way that most other Mughal bhakti communities did—­and instead actually gave an important place to them—­reminds us that the trend (i.e., the rising bhakti sensibility) under discussion was just that, a trend, a general but incomplete shift in North India, not an ironclad rule or an all-­encompassing social movement. Bhakti “outliers” like the Dādū ­Panth illustrate the complexity of the early modern bhakti landscape, highlighting the fact that tāntrikas, yogīs, and bhaktas in this period—­as in much of South Asian history—­were not three entirely discrete, coherent groups that could each be easily defined by any single religious disposition or set of practices and outlooks. Indeed, it may be somewhat misleading to call communities like the Dādū ­Panth, Nirañjanīs, Sahajiyās, and Pañca Sakhā outliers given that the sort of religiosity they practiced—­i nsofar as it amalgamated bhakti, yoga, tantra, and asceticism—­was largely continuous with and representative of a very common (perhaps even the most common) form of religious practice in the broad history of the Indian subcontinent. Nevertheless, in the specific context of early modern North India, wherein a newly exclusive variety of bhakti had emerged, these devotional communities were quite distinctive in their positive attitude toward and incorporation of tantric and yogic religiosity. Thus, the salient point is that these outlier communities stand out as just that, exceptions bringing into relief the historical phenomenon of a widespread early modern North Indian bhakti sensibility that understood itself largely in contradistinction to tantric and yogic practices and perspectives.

R

In the preceding I have not explored the many important differences between bhaktas such as Kabīr and Harirām Vyās, Nānak and Tulsīdās, or Raidās and Śaṅkaradeva; rather, I have focused on their commonality, their mutual participation in the composition of literature disparaging yogīs and Śāktas. In urban as well as rural settings, in cities, villages, and pilgrimage centers both old and new, from Panjab and Rajasthan across the Gangetic Plain into Bengal and Assam, whether devotees primarily of Kṛṣṇa, Rāmcandra, or the formless (nirguṇ)

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Divine, there was wide agreement among the bhaktas of early modern North India that their own devotional form and style of religion were quite different from, and superior to, the religious practice, outlook, and lifestyle of tantric yogīs and Śāktas. As a distinctive bhakti sensibility developed in North India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the simple, participatory devotion of bhakti was consistently contrasted with other forms of religiosity deemed confused or unnecessary, such as Vedic sacrifice (yajña), almsgiving (dān), and brahmanic learning and knowledge (gyān/jñāna); however, the poetic and literary moments isolated in this chapter suggest that, in many ways, the most important foil for this early modern bhakti sensibility was the twofold tantric other of the yogī and Śākta.

8

The Triumphs of Devotion The Sufi Inflection of Early Modern Bhakti

A

central contention of this book is that in early modern North India a transregional and transsectarian bhakti social formation arose, and with it a new and Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility that defined itself especially against the “other” of the tantric yogī. In this chapter, I explore in more depth the Sufi inflection of this early modern bhakti sensibility as I examine bhakti and Sufi literature in which the power of humble, loving devotion triumphs over tantric-­yogic religiosity. The chapter is divided into two parts. First, I discuss the ways in which—­i n both Hindavi Sufi literature and bhakti poetry—­devotion comes to subsume yoga, with yoga practice becoming a metaphor for one-­pointed, passionate, ego-­d issolving love for God, the powerful symbolism of the yogī co-­opted into a devotional message. After examining the Sufi premākhyāns and the poetry of Sūrdās and Mīrābāī to illustrate this point, I turn to the genre of hagiography to see how the Sufi and bhakti traditions of early modern North India both articulate a particular devotional conception of God and appropriate religious behavior in contradistinction to tantric-­yogic understandings and approaches. Specifically, I analyze a type of story in Sufi and bhakti hagiographical literature in which model devotees—­in moments of need or in conflict with yogīs—­a re rewarded with miracles from God that illustrate the incomparable power of devotion and the folly of self-­ aggrandizing tantric magic. As noted, the Sufis and bhaktas of Sultanate and Mughal India were molded by the same historical environment and participated in many of the same historical trends—­the demise of mainstream, institutional tantra (alongside the rise of the Nāth yogīs, haṭha yoga, and Vedānta); an encounter between the

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cosmopolitan literary-­political cultures of Persian and Sanskrit; the emergence of a transsectarian religious culture centered on charismatic ascetics possessing occult powers; and the rise of vernacular literary composition and performance. It should not surprise us, then, that bhakti and Sufi religious sensibilities in early modern North India held important elective affinities. As I showed in chapter 2, many bhaktas and Sufis in Sultanate and Mughal India shared a similar emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility, one that was in significant dissonance with certain key aspects of tantric religiosity. Sufis and bhaktas alike tended to valorize humility, benevolence, selfless love, and the power of impassioned longing for an absent beloved, while criticizing hubris, envy, hatred, and greed. They also made use of similar aesthetic styles—­in song, music, and literature—­to express and evoke the emotions and ethical ideals they valued. While the traditions of bhakti and Sufism in early modern North India were obviously quite distinct—­separated by different theologies, ritual forms and obligations, sacred scriptures, religious authorities, and collective memories—­they grew up in conversation with each other and resonated on numerous levels. This resonance comes to the fore in this chapter’s analysis of the respective literatures of Sultanate and Mughal bhakti and Sufi communities, wherein I discuss their use of strikingly similar literary techniques and motifs to express strikingly similar religious attitudes, with the other of the tantric yogī playing a key role in the articulation of a shared devotional message.

Yogīs in the Sufi Premākhyāns As chapter 2 made apparent, Indian Sufi writing in the centuries prior to the North Indian bhakti poet-­saints was fundamental in shaping the poetic, metrical, and narrative conventions—­even the motifs and images—­that bhakti poets used in their compositions.1 The Sufi premākhyāns and the literary works of North India’s bhakti movement mirrored each other in celebrating passionate love—­the kind that overflows all bounds and draws the self outside itself (‘ishq/prema)—­a nd in placing special emphasis upon intense longing for an absent beloved (viraha/firāq) as a metaphor for (and a vehicle to the experience of) pure love for the Divine. In doing so, they also similarly appropriated the symbolic potency of the figure of the yogī. This chapter demonstrates that in both the Sufi premākhyāns and the bhakti poems of Sūrdās and Mīrābāī, the yogī has an important presence, not as the object of direct criticism—­as in the literature examined in the previous chapter—­but as an artfully deployed symbol serving, and heightening the effect of, the devotional message. In these Sufi and

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bhakti texts, the devotee triumphs over the yogī by becoming a yogī, by redefining the “true yogī” as no yogī at all but as a selfless, impassioned lover of God. The principal Indian Sufi romances—­Maulānā Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan (1379), Qutban’s Mirigāvatī (1503), Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (1540), and Manjhan’s Madhumālatī (1545)—­use the imagery of the Nāth yogīs and give the figure of the yogī a crucial role in their plots. A basic plotline of these works is that the protagonist sees an idealized heroine representing Truth/Beauty, experiences intense suffering in separation from her, and is impelled to take on the garb of the yogī, seemingly renouncing all to set out in search of the Beloved. In the Padmāvat, King Ratansen falls in love with the princess Padmāvatī and, tortured by viraha, embarks on an ascetic quest for her. Jāyasī describes how love’s suffering leads King Ratansen to take on the guise of a yogī to find his beloved Padmāvatī: The king left his kingdom and became a Yogi. Lover-­like he took his viol in his hand. His body was uncared for, his mind was distraught and drooping: love was fixed [in his mind] and a tangled knot of hair was on his head. He whose face was bright as the moon and whose body was fragrant as sandal wood, reduced his person to a clod of earth, smearing it with ashes. [He was provided with] string girdle, horn whistle, ring and gorakhdhandha, with Jogbāṭ, rudraksha necklace and crutch. Clothed in patch-­work he gripped his staff in his hand, with a view to becoming a siddha, as Gorakh prescribed. In his ears were ear-­rings, round his neck a rosary, in his hand his drinking bowl, on his shoulder a tiger’s skin, on his feet were wooden clogs, and he had an umbrella over his head. He carried a begging bowl and had put on ochre attire. He set out to beg for happiness, having made outward show of penance and Yoga in his body. “May I win Padmavati [he said] whose love is implanted in my heart.”2

Here Jāyasī makes specific reference to Gorakhnāth and the paraphernalia of the Nāth yogīs. The prevalence of Nāth figures, imagery, and ideas in Sufi romances and hagiographies makes it clear that they were important players interacting and competing with Sufis on the religious scene of fourteenth-­to-­ sixteenth-­century North India. In the Madhumālatī, the hero, Manohar, falls deeply in love with the beautiful Madhumālatī, and, overwhelmed by the pain of separation from her, he resolves to set out to find her, first taking on the guise of—­once again—­a Gorakhnāthī yogī. Manjhan writes, Whoever loses his senses on the path of love can comprehend nothing in the two worlds. So acute was the pain of separation he [Manohar] could not control himself. He asked for a begging bowl and a yogi’s staff and crutch. He

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marked his forehead with a circle, smeared his body with ashes, and hung shining earrings in both his ears. He took his drinking cup firmly in hand, and tightened the strings of his ascetic’s viol. Letting down his matted locks, he donned the patched cloak and the girdle of rope. With loincloth tied around his waist, the Prince took the guise of a Gorakh yogi. The yogi forged within his trident suffering, indifference, and renunciation. His rosary was a basil-­bead necklace. Around his neck hung the horn whistle. On his shoulder was the crutch for meditation. With his staff and the thread of Gorakh, he controlled his mind and his breath. He put on his feet the sandals of love, and arranged on himself the deerskin of renunciation. He assumed this guise for a vision of Madhumālatī. For her sake he assayed wretchedness. He sat in meditation, thinking, reflecting, and his eyes and ears were steeped in love. He took on this guise for a vision of his beloved, but it seemed as if Gorakh had awakened.3

In these passages from the Padmāvat and Madhumālatī, Ratansen and Manohar each take on the appearance of a Nāth yogī, but there is something amiss; this is no endorsement of the Nāth ascetic’s path of nonattachment, for it is clearly passionate love that is driving all their actions. Indeed, Ramya Sreenivasan has noted a sharp distinction between the Sufi and Nāth perspectives. In the Nāth yogīs’ own legends, when “protagonists like Gopichand and Bhartrhari renounce their kingdoms and become ascetics in pursuit of a spiritual goal, their renunciation is a step toward overcoming attachments and conquering passion; love for the queens is here an impediment to spiritual self-­realization.” 4 In the Sufi romances, however, the hero’s actions are fueled by love, and the final goal is the consummation of that love; i.e., union with the Beloved. As Aditya Behl states, “The characters in the story, and by implication the Sufis, are not exactly yogis; they are like yogis, only better, as they can use yogic practices and language framed within a Sufi romantic poetics.”5 The Sufi romances not only feature yogīs as central characters, but key elements of their plot design also symbolically mirror the inner path and progression of tantric yoga practice. Simon Weightman describes how Manjhan “included a complete model of the Tantra yogic psycho-­spiritual process” within the plot structure and symbolism of the Madhumālatī.6 “But,” he says, “the yogic symbolism is a disguise. . . . ​It is as if he was indicating that in his eyes the whole yogic process is valuable only in so far as it sets [the character] free to awaken the heart to Love, which is the real means of mankind’s salvation.”7 Here is a clear instance where the bhakti and Sufi textual perspectives merge: they both mark love for the Divine as the one true path, a religiosity far above and beyond the methods and goals of tantra and yoga.

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What do we make of the fact that the yogī is so central in the plots of these Sufi premākhyāns? Focusing on the provincial elites and military leaders who patronized these texts, Ramya Sreenivasan has argued that the prominence of the Nāth yogī in the Candāyan and Padmāvat—­as well as in another Hindavi work, Nārāyaṇdās’s Chitāī Carita (ca. 1526)—­is all about “the promise of Nath yogic discipline for rural gentry and local warlords with modest resources—­a promise of physical and spiritual perfectibility that will improve the chances of success, with the potential bonus of miraculous powers.” In her opinion, these texts “represent an outsider’s perspective on the Nath worldview,” from which Nāth skills and abilities were seen as “a valuable asset in the pursuit of one’s political and military goals as a petty chief or warlord.”8 There is another way to read the consistent presence of Nāth yogīs in these texts, which, as has been pointed out, was neither an instance of happy, peaceful “syncretism” nor an endorsement of tantric-­yogic practices. As Heidi Pauwels remarks, “While the yogi symbolizes the seeker for the divine, isn’t there also a certain amount of irony involved in casting the love-­lorn prince precisely as an ascetic, someone who is supposed to have risen above worldly ties? Does this discredit the ascetic garb as a guise rather than a sign of rejection of worldly joys?”9 There is an unmistakable dimension of satirical critique in the Sufi romances’ presentation of the yogī. In the Padmāvat, when Ratansen storms the fort at Singhal to be with Padmāvatī, he is captured in his yogic garb and the text states, “The people said ‘This is not a Yogi: it is some wandering love-­lorn prince. For someone’s sake he has become an ascetic.’ ”10 Later, a bard says about Ratansen, “This is a prince, he is not a Yogi: he has become a pilgrim of love, on hearing of Padmavati.”11 In these Sufi literary depictions of yogīs—­as well as in certain of the bhakti poems in which Kṛṣṇa or the virahiṇī takes on the garb of the yogī—­there seems to be an element of parody and satire. While it is not always the case, in a number of instances in bhakti and Sufi literature, the incorporation of yogic figures and imagery is done in order to mock yogīs and mark their religious path as insufficient. There is no doubt that yogīs constituted a rival group for both Sufis and bhaktas, whose literary appropriation of yogic elements, sometimes done in a humorous fashion, demonstrates an implicit criticism of and challenge to the yogī’s authority. This element of satire is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a scene in the Padmāvat in which Ratansen, having attained Padmāvatī’s hand in marriage after a challenging ascetic quest, at long last goes to meet her. When he arrives at Padmāvatī’s bedroom, he sees her and instantly “the yoga which he had accomplished became useless.” At this moment Padmāvatī’s attendants hide her away and begin to taunt Ratansen. Jāyasī describes the scene with a careful and deliberate choice of words, writing that, after the maidens took Padmāvatī away,

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it was as if Ratansen had lost an “invaluable mantra” or “a precious herb,” as if he had eaten a drugged sweet that had caused him “to lose all knowledge of tantra-­mantra.”12 He could not laugh or cry he was so overcome by her being taken away. Here, the mere sight of the beloved brings about the loss of all the yogī’s most cherished tools: his charms, healing herbs, and tantra-­mantra. Once again we see how paltry these things are beside the power of love and longing in separation (viraha). The maidens proceed to mock the supposed yogī, saying, “How is the sun all alone without his moon? You have learnt, O Yogi, to practice alchemy: how have you now become unmettled and separated?”13 Ratansen tells the maidens, “If after I have obtained the beloved she is separated from me, this sets my body on fire. Either by obtaining her will the burning of my body be extinguished, or it will be extinguished by my death.”14 At this, the maidens only laugh, remarking, “That moon is now hidden in the sky: How will you obtain her, O Yogi, by coveting her?” The satire is heavy here, and the large gap separating the yogī’s path of detachment and the burning passion of Ratansen’s love could not be clearer. The maidens continue their mocking: “You are a yogī and should roam about performing asceticism [tapas] and yoga. How can a yogī know the story of a king?”15 At last, the maidens bring Padmāvatī before Ratansen, whispering in his ear with jest, “Gorakh has come and is standing by you: rise, O disciple.”16 Yet the fun is not over, for now Padmāvatī tells him, “Be gone. . . . ​ The very sight of the ashes [with which you are smeared] is a defilement to me: the moon trembles and flees from the sun. O Yogi, your ascetic’s body will throw a shadow upon my limbs. . . . ​No Yogi or beggar can effect an entrance to this house.”17 At this point Ratansen comes clean, revealing the not-­so-­yogic motives behind his yogic guise and ascetic quest: “It was for your sake, my dearest love, that I left my kingdom and became a beggar. It was when your love filled my heart that I left Chitaur and changed my condition. . . . ​I became a beggar, lady, for your sake: I became a moth for the lamp and endured the flame. . . . ​When I heard of your fame in the world, I undertook Yoga and buried my body. When as an ascetic I took the viol in my hand, the fire of love was renewed.”18 Still Padmāvatī remains unconvinced, remarking, “I am a princess and you are a beggarly Yogi: what acquaintance can there be between a votary of yoga and a votary of pleasure? All Yogis play frauds like this: you, the beggar-­man, are preeminent in it. . . . ​Yogis are full of tricks: they do not refrain from them.”19 Eventually, Ratansen convinces Padmāvatī of the truth of his words, and the two consummate their love, but not before his yogic identity has been thoroughly mocked and satirized. While the Sufi romances do poke fun at the yogī at times, it is clear that in them the yogī also plays a respected role and is a figure symbolizing the inner purification, the difficult emptying of ego and abandoning of worldly concern,

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that is necessary for the Sufi to experience divine love.20 Even then, however, for the heroes of premākhyān literature, the identity of the yogī is a temporary and ultimately false one entirely inappropriate and insufficient to the deepest goals and meanings of the devotional life. The religious environment in North India’s Sultanate and Mughal periods was one in which yogīs, Sufis, and bhaktas did not usually represent sealed communities; on the contrary, interaction, competition, and mutual exchange of ideas and practices between them was the order of the day. If one imagines that many Sufis and bhaktas regularly rubbed elbows with yogīs, respecting and even borrowing aspects of their thought and practice (and furthermore, that some Sufis and bhaktas were themselves also yogīs), then head-­on hostility and vitriolic attack would hardly seem an appropriate means for articulating difference and asserting superiority. At one end of the spectrum of devotional critiques of yoga and tantra, genuine dislike and clear disapproval certainly do emerge, as noted in the previous chapter, yet in the dialogical cultural atmosphere of much of early modern North India, humor, playful satire, and clever appropriation were literary and performative tools often better suited to the task of subtly disparaging those religious “rivals” who may have less often been one’s enemies than one’s fellow participants in debate, collaboration, and competition.21 With this in mind, it now seems clear that the Sufi heroes of the premākhyān genre do not become Nāth yogīs; rather, Nāth imagery is used—­w ith a mix of seriousness and satire—­to represent an Indianized Sufi spiritual vision in which a desire for the beloved is transformed and purified into divine love. Though this religious vision differed in certain respects from that seen in Hindu bhakti literature, the Sufi romances—­much like the Mīrābāī and Sūrdās poems discussed in the following—­appropriated (and thus in some sense affirmed) yogic imagery, symbols, and values while simultaneously undercutting (sometimes satirizing) and transcending them with a different perspective, a religiosity centered on love.

Yogic Imagery in the Poetry of Mīrābāī and Sūrdās In a fashion often quite similar to the Sufi romances, both Sūrdās and Mīrābāī make frequent use of yogīs and yogic imagery in their compositions and do so most commonly in depictions of the quintessential bhakti (and Sufi) emotion of viraha, “love in separation.”22 One of the most widespread themes of medieval Indian folklore and literature is that of separation, especially that of lover and beloved. Men in agricultural families often went away for long periods of

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military service or commercial enterprise, and the virahiṇī, the wife separated from her husband, thus became one of North India’s most common literary heroines. In poems attributed to Sūr and Mīrā, we see how the virahiṇī, driven by passionate longing for Kṛṣṇa, considers and sometimes adopts the way of the yogī in order to seek him out. The yogī-­themed poetry attributed to Mīrā comes especially out of a tradition of folk songs and bārahmāsās expressing the virahiṇī’s feelings of abandonment and desire.23 These poems often represented the absent beloved as one who performed his far-­away trade or warfare in the garb of a yogī.24 In one poem, Mīrā sings, “Now it’s been many days that I’ve watched for that yogī, and still he hasn’t come: The flame of loneliness is kindled inside me—­inside my body, fire (tapan). . . . ​Yogī, the pain of you has burrowed inside me: see that I am yours and come—­To Mīrā, a desperate, lonely woman. The life in me, without you, writhes.”25 Mīrā describes Kṛṣṇa as a yogī here and in other poems like this in order to express the nature of the love that she feels for Him, an anguished love given to a Beloved whose whereabouts are unknown and who does not come when He is called or appear when He is desired. She describes the pain of loneliness and separation as a fire, deliberately using the word tapan, from the Sanskrit root tap-­, which refers not just to the heat of fire but also to a specifically ascetic heat. It is the term used by renouncers and yogīs for the inner heat and power produced in ascetic practices that conserve, refine, and concentrate bodily energy that would otherwise be expended in desire. The poem thus suggests that the intensity and single-­mindedness of Mīrā’s devotion are essentially yogic and ascetic in nature. Poetry attributed to Sūrdās also makes use of this specific term (tāp, tapas) to describe the pain felt by the gopīs in separation from Kṛṣṇa, alluding to the yogic character of their devotion even as it contrasts that devotion with, and shows its superiority to, the traditional path(s) of yoga.26 The connection between the devotee and the yogī-­ascetic is made especially clear in a number of poems attributed to Mīrā in which she explicitly takes on the identity of a yogī.27 In one, the poet says, “For you, I’ll make myself a yoginī, wandering town to town looking for you, looking in every grove. Ash on my limbs and an antelope skin pulled up to my neck, my friend: that’s how I’ll burn my body to ash for him.”28 If the Beloved seems to have gone away, wandering as a yogī, then His devotee will also take on the garb of a yoga-­practicing ascetic—­ like the heroes of the Sufi romances—­and wander in search of Him. Just as Kṛṣṇa has left everything, so too will she abandon all in a single-­minded search for Him. Mīrā sings, I’m not staying here, not staying where the land’s grown strange without you, my dear,

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But coming home, coming to where your place is; take me, guard me with your guardian mercy, please. I’ll take up your yogic garb—­your prayer beads, earrings, begging-­bowl skull, tattered yogic cloth—­ I’ll take them all and search through the world as a yogī does, with you—­yogī and yoginī, side by side.29 Here is a model of devotion in which the devotee is willing to abandon family, home, modesty—­everything except her Beloved. In striking similarity to Ratansen in the Padmāvat and Manohar in the Madhumālatī, Mīrā will happily wander the earth with only the meager possessions of a yogī if it means finding and being with the Beloved. Based partly on poems such as this, Maya Burger has gone so far as to say that “Mīrā was a yoginī before she was made into a bhakti model,” stating further that “her yoga cannot be simply classified as belonging to either the classical line of yoga or to the more popular Nātha tradition, but shows a very personal character.”30 I disagree with Burger’s assessment here. In fact, the reason that Mīrā’s yoga cannot be classified as belonging to either the classical or Nāth yoga traditions is that it is no yoga at all. Mīrā is a bhakta through and through, even if her emotional devotion is expressed in a yogic idiom. Poems such as this do not describe (or demonstrate knowledge of) the practice of yoga; they reference the external trappings of the yogī, but in contrast to certain poems of Kabīr’s, for instance, they give no indication of the details of the physical disciplines, inner physiology, supernormal powers, or experiential realities of yogic praxis. Rather, these poems use yogic imagery and the figure of the yogī as metaphors to highlight the desperate passion, restless intensity, and single-­minded focus of the devotee’s love for God. Here we see—­again, just as in the premākhyāns—­ the appropriation of the yogī and all he stands for in the interests of asserting a different religious mode, bhakti, as being above and beyond that of yoga. Many of the poems of Sūrdās also take on the voice of a virahiṇī separated from her beloved Kṛṣṇa and make use of yogic imagery in much the same way as Mīrā’s poems. As Hawley explains, “It is relatively commonplace in the Sūrsāgar for a comparison to be made between the rigors endured by a woman separated from Krishna and those that yogis (or yoginīs, their female counterparts) undertake in the cause of spiritual discipline.”31 In fact, in her devotion to Kṛṣṇa the virahiṇī naturally attains, and even goes beyond, the levels of ascetic discipline and mental concentration to which yogīs aspire. In Hawley’s words, The gopīs, separated from Krishna, endure mortifications by virtue of the sundering of their love that are deeper by far than any austerities yoga can

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concoct. They manifest all the marks of yogic discipline naturally. A yogi must learn through years of practice the art of keeping awake for long periods of time; for the women of Braj separated from Krishna, sleep is out of the question. The one-­pointed concentration for which yogis strive is also all too easily theirs: they can think of nothing but their lost love. They go about their daily tasks with the indifference that yogis so carefully cultivate; their egos are mere husks. . . . ​As for the internal heat (tapas) that yogis learn to fan and channel so as to make all this possible, it is theirs without even asking. Love is an unquenchable forest fire, as they often say: robbed of its object it scorches everything in sight.32

As this passage clearly suggests, the virahiṇī, in many respects, can be considered the supreme yogī; yet the unquenchable love she holds for the Divine clearly distinguishes her spirituality. If bhakti poets like Sūr and Mīrā highlighted certain parallels between the bhakta and the yogī in order to measure the profundity of the devotional path, they—­like their Sufi counterparts—­also made it clear that yogic asceticism was utterly unnecessary and, if not grounded in and powered by love for God, fundamentally misguided. We see this in the following Sūr poem, which—­with its references to the horn (sīṅgī) and to Gorakhnāth—­ depicts the devotee specifically as a Nāth yogī. If I knew where to find Gopāl, I’d go—­ Go with horn (sīṇgī), earring (mudrā), begging bowl in hand And wearing the clothes that yogi women do; I’d don a patchwork cloak, slather ashes on my skin, And bind my hair in an unkempt mound. If I thought I could meet Hari, I’d rouse old Gorakh By carrying on like Shiva, that great god. I’d burn my mind and body and cover myself with dust—­ The sort of thing gurus tell lonely women to do—­ For without Sūr’s Dark One, all Braj is empty (sūnau) Like a cobra that’s lost the jewel in its crown.33 As in the Mīrā poems, here the virahiṇī takes on the role of the yogī, saying that she would gladly give up her current life and wander about as an ascetic if it would mean finding her beloved Kṛṣṇa. The implication throughout the poem, however, is that doing this—­living as a yogī—­would in fact not help the devotee reach her goal of love-­infused (re)union with God. Hawley’s insightful analysis of the last line of the poem makes this point clear. Sūr says that without Kṛṣṇa, all Braj is empty, or sūnau. This is the term Nāths often use to designate ultimate

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reality, the state of “emptiness” sought in their practices of tantric asceticism. Yet as Hawley points out, Sūrdās uses the term here to subtly question the value of the Nāth’s yogic path, highlighting the fact that “the emptiness that yogis strive so hard to achieve is precisely the state that Krishna’s virahiṇīs would love to escape.”34 In similar fashion, the following Mīrā poem uses yogic paraphernalia and practice as its fundamental metaphors but ultimately undercuts the goals and methods of yogic asceticism. Your secret [maram], yogi, I have not found. I’ve sat in a cave, taken a yogic pose [āsaṇ], and meditated [dhyān] on Hari With beads around my neck, a bag of beads in my hand, limbs smeared with ashes. Mīrā’s Lord is Hari, the indestructible. My Fate has been written and that’s what I’ve found.35 Here, even after retreating to a cave and trying out the practice of yoga, the virahiṇī cannot determine the yogī’s secret, she cannot make sense of his ways. The specific word used here for “secret” is maram, meaning “core,” “heart,” or “essential truth.” In the yogī’s āsanas (postures) and dhyāna (meditations), Mīrā finds no essential truth; instead, she finds only her Fate, an anguished love in perpetual separation from her beloved Kṛṣṇa. Clearly, yoga and yogīs feature quite prominently in the poems of Sūrdās and Mīrābāī. The fact that yogic imagery is so marked in many of their viraha-­bhakti compositions speaks to an environment in which yogīs were visible figures inspiring a certain measure of awe or respect, yet these poems do not celebrate yoga; rather, they artfully question its value while co-­opting its symbolic potency. Neither yogīs nor the yogic life is idealized or endorsed; rather, bhakti is. In fact, what we see in these poems is a crafty move in which the poets subtly appropriate the yogic ideal even as they supersede it with the ideal of bhakti. If yogīs—­in their attire, lifestyle, and practices—­were supreme exemplars of an intense mental focus, selfless abandon, and ascetic discipline in search of spiritual goals, these bhakti poems, like the Sufi romances, use them as metaphors to ascribe those very qualities to the devotional life. In other words, the bhakti of the virahiṇī is celebrated for possessing all the admirable spiritual traits associated with yogic practice, yet at the same time the yogic ideal is undercut, for these poems—­some more explicitly than others—­mark the yogī’s lifestyle as being insufficient and confused. Indeed, in the end these poems make it clear that neither tantric asceticism nor yogic dispassion can meet the needs of the

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bhakta; they are inferior to the devotional path and fundamentally miss the point—­the joyful essence—­of the true religious life, an intimate personal relationship with the Divine.

The Bhakta Versus the Tantric Yogī I turn now to another satirical Islamicate text, this time to set the stage for a consideration of a different, and more confrontational, set of representations of devotional and tantric-­yogic sensibilities. The Kanhāvat is a Hindavi text attributed to the Sufi author Jāyasī and claiming the same date as his Padmāvat (1540). Heidi Pauwels has shown that it is unlikely that Jāyasī authored the text and that it was probably composed after the Padmāvat, though definitely prior to the mid-­seventeenth century. She argues convincingly that the Kanhāvat’s narrative, a rather folksy, masnavī retelling of the story of Kṛṣṇa, was intended as a work of comedy and satire, meant to entertain even as it discredited the religious paths of both Nāth yogīs and Kṛṣṇa bhaktas.36 The end of the text features a fascinating scene in which Kṛṣṇa and Gorakhnāth encounter each other in Mathura. Francesca Orsini, who has also examined the work, explains that Gorakhnāth, accompanied by a host of yogīs, comes to Mathura “because the fame of [Kṛṣṇa’s] bhakti has spread through the whole world.” Gorakh is “disappointed to see [Kṛṣṇa] enveloped in bhoga [enjoyment]: he should take advantage of the time he has left to become a yogī, so as to acquire an immortal body and the powers that come with it.”37 He tells Kṛṣṇa to give up the life of the householder and become a yogī, saying, “If one does yoga properly in this world, you will live for many years. You will become bodily immortal, and you will live for age after age. And if you wish, then you can travel by flying, you can in a moment reach what you glance at. Whatever you look at, there (and then) that [you obtain], if you master asceticism and yoga.”38 Kṛṣṇa responds, “What would I do with your yoga?. . . ​your teaching has no use for me.”39 He rejects Gorakh’s advice on a variety of grounds, defends the value of bhakti-­based bhoga in a world manifested for the sake of God’s līlā (play), and exhorts Gorakh and his party to convert to bhakti. Both sides of the debate seem to be caricatured, for—­in words that few if any bhakti authors would agree with—­Kṛṣṇa consistently emphasizes the bhoga dimension of bhakti, remarking, “Why not just enjoy yourself and fulfill craving? A long life [spent] in yoga is stale; I’d rather live a short life [spent] in enjoyment.” 40 After this debate, Kṛṣṇa and Gorakh decide to fight each other, but it is a brief and comical battle with no injuries and no clear winner. The scene ends with the line “For the yogī, yoga is good; for the bhogī, bhoga is fine.” 41

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There is more to the story, but what is of special interest here is, first, the clear use of satire to poke fun at and undermine the religiosity of both Kṛṣṇa devotees and Nāth yogīs. Second and perhaps even more noteworthy is the very existence of the confrontation between Gorakh and Kṛṣṇa in this work. It is unclear who the author of the text is; he seems to have been sympathetic to neither bhaktas nor yogīs, yet—­despite following certain Islamicate literary conventions—­his writing also does not evince any clear elements of Sufi spirituality.42 The fact that such a figure would compose a narrative in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, in which the most revered figures of sagun bhakti and tantric yoga openly challenge each other, illustrates just how clear the confrontation between bhakti and tantra had become to everyone in the North Indian religious landscape of the time. In chapter 4, I discussed another narrative representation of this burgeoning early modern conflict between bhakti and tantra: the tale of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī’s encounter with Tārānāth at Galta. It is useful to briefly recount the story. The Kacchvāhā king Pṛthvīrāj (r. 1503–­1527) was initially a disciple of the Nāth yogī Tārānāth, who resided in the hills of Galta. When Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, a Rāmānandī ascetic and bhakta, arrived in Galta one day, a confrontation ensued between him and Tārānāth. Using his yogic powers, Tārānāth took the form of a ferocious tiger to attack and frighten Payahārī away, but the Rāmānandī ascetic calmly responded by transforming Tārānāth from a tiger into a jackass (gadhā) and sending him off into the forest. Later, at Mahārāj Pṛthvīrāj’s request, Payahārī brought the defeated Nāth yogī back to Galta and reinstated him to his human form. Once restored to his human self, however, Tārānāth told the king, “This Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī is far more powerful than me. From now on, he shall be your guru. And I too will be his disciple.” There is a crucial dimension of this story that we have not yet discussed: How and why is Payahārī able to defeat Tārānāth? Pinch analyzes this tale and asserts that while these two resembled each other in many important respects—­both were ascetics capable of effecting supernormal powers—­they differed importantly in that one’s power issued from God, the result of devotion to an ever-­ present, all-­powerful Divine, while the other’s came from himself, the fruit of tantric yoga and the ascetic practice of tapas. In his words, “The key difference that separated them was the manner in which they conceived of and related to God.” On the one hand, the Nāth yogī “Tārānāth affected a yoga-­tantric asceticism, the sole purpose of which was to cultivate supernormal power within—­in effect, to turn himself into a God,” while, on the other hand, the Rāmānandī bhakta Payahārī “only appeared to conjure Tārānāth’s transformation into a jackass,” for this was in actuality “the work of a distant yet ever-­present Lord, God as a thing apart, God with an upper-­case ‘G’—­a being who inspired total

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self-­abandonment, and offered a sheltering refuge of love in return.” 43 Both Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and Tārānāth possessed siddhis, but Payahārī’s attitude toward these siddhis had roots in the Vaiṣṇava devotional tradition represented in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), which tended to see these powers as gifts bestowed by the Supreme God. BhP XI.15.2, for instance, describes God as “the Bestower of siddhis on the yogīs,” and in XI.15.35, the Lord states, “I am the Custodian and Controller of all siddhis.” The Nāth yogīs, on the other hand, typically saw these powers as personal attainments via the yogic divinization of their bodies or as the natural, automatic results of their performance of tantric ritual, mantric recitation, or laya yoga. In Pinch’s analysis of the legend, Payahārī is victorious over Tārānāth because of his bhakti approach as opposed to the Nāth yogī’s tantric approach; however, there is actually no evidence in the tale itself that this is the case. The only thing that is clear from the story is that Payahārī’s power is understood as being more powerful than that of Tārānāth, but the precise reason why this is so is never specified. We must remember that this story is a folktale, a popular oral tradition in which overt theological differences and explanations would likely have played little role in comparison with the articulation of perceived differences in pragmatic power. While we cannot confidently treat the encounter between Payahārī and Tārānāth as a historical event, the story of their “miracle battle” nevertheless conveys information about a real historical occurrence in which the Kacchvāhā king Pṛthvīrāj shifted his allegiance and patronage to the Rāmānandī bhakti community led by Payahārī at Galta. Let us then reframe the question: why would Payahārī have been more attractive to Pṛthvīrāj than Tārānāth? What would have made this Rāmānandī appear to be more powerful to the king than his Nāth yogī competitor? Put differently, what would have made allegiance with Payahārī and his bhakti community seem more advantageous to Pṛthvīrāj than allegiance to Tārānāth and his community of tantric ascetics? At the most basic level, the Payahārī-­Tārānāth story suggests an increasingly popular understanding that a devotional relationship with an all-­powerful God was more potent, efficacious, and formidable than any yogic-­tantric practices and their resultant siddhis. I wonder if we might consider this change in allegiance in terms of a broader shift by Hindu rulers toward a more (post-­Mongol) Persianate religiopolitical model in which Sufi-­like saints—­i n their intimate devotional relationship with God—­provided the primary avenue to sacred power needed for kings to legitimate their sovereignty. In other words, might we see the rising importance of the figure of the bhakti saint in Mughal India as related to the respect commanded by the Sufi pīr? More specifically, might the trend among Hindu rulers—­particularly those in the orbit of Mughal rule—­to increasingly link themselves to Vaiṣṇava bhakti saints and institutions be related to

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the fact that, since the early Sultanate period, the sovereignty of Islamicate kings had been modeled on—­a nd dependent upon the power of—­Sufi saints? In Sultanate India, a ruler’s sovereign power depended upon the blessing and spiritual authority of a Sufi shaikh, who was usually understood to have divine jurisdiction (wilāyat) over a specific territory. The leaders and great saints of Vaiṣṇava bhakti institutions in Mughal India, in some sense, seem to have increasingly served as Hindu parallels to the Sufi shaikh in their spiritual legitimation and empowerment of Indian kings, for which their bhakti institutions received royal patronage. In this respect, Pṛthvīrāj’s shift to Payahārī and the Rāmānandīs might be considered emblematic of the beginning of a larger shift among Hindu rulers toward Sufi-­i nflected, Islamicate models of sovereignty. A study of Mughal-­era bhakti hagiographies suggests that Hindu kings increasingly understood bhakti saints in a manner very similar to how Muslim rulers understood Sufi saints; that is, as individuals who—­through their intimate devotional relationship with God—­possessed abilities to influence “the trifling affairs of individuals” as well as powers “for the making and unmaking of kings and kingdoms.” 44 The basic structure of this spiritual-­political economy, in which professional religious ascetics and their monastic institutions legitimated state power (and connected rulers to their communities of lay devotees), had long been in place in India, but the specific ascetic communities operating in this economy—­and their particular religious sensibility and ideology—­changed with the times, and this change was not an inconsequential one. That it was Sufi and bhakti saints and their associated monastic and lay communities—­with their characteristic devotional (emotional-­aesthetic-­ethical) sensibilities—­who came to be at the heart of early modern North India’s economy of spiritual and political power is a fact that both reflected and drove other aspects of social change in this period. From one perspective, the story of King Pṛthvīrāj’s shift in allegiance from the tāntrika Tārānāth and his Nāth yogī community to the Vaiṣṇava bhakti saint Payahārī and his community may suggest the subtle influence of Persianate, Sufi-­inflected understandings of sovereignty and spiritual power. At the same time, the dramatic confrontation between Payahārī and Tārānāth points toward the expanding sphere of bhakti and is symbolic of its historical confrontation with the sphere of tantric religiosity represented most prominently by the pervasive Nāth yogīs. As William Pinch states, “For their part, bhakti reformers were adamant in their disdain for yogis who claimed special powers by virtue of their hathayogic and/or tantric prowess. The bhakti literature is rife with examples of puffed up yogis who are deflated and sent packing by humble, God-­loving sadhus.” 45 In the following I draw out this point more fully through

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an examination of miracle narratives in North Indian bhakti and Sufi hagiographical literature.

Hagiography, Miracles, and Religious Competition Beginning in the thirteenth century, the shrines and hospices associated with South Asia’s different Sufi orders spread across the Indian subcontinent and functioned together to incorporate local cultural systems into a larger Indo-­ Persian, Islamicate culture that would have a clear impact on developing bhakti sensibilities. One specific area of Sufi influence on the development of North India’s bhakti tradition seems to have been in hagiographical writing. Bruce Lawrence has argued that the Sufi tradition of hagiographical literature was well established and flourishing prior to the North Indian bhakti movement and was clearly influential in molding the hagiographical writing of early bhakti communities.46 Simon Digby points out more specifically that “Vaishnava bhaktamālas, Sikh janamsākhīs and other vitae of non-­Muslim men of religion repeat the emphasis and structure of Sufi anecdotes, particularly regarding contests of superiority, magical displays, and a general lack of charity towards opponents and doubters.” 47 In the next section, I illustrate some important parallels between Sufi and bhakti hagiographies (and their devotional messages) through a comparative analysis of hagiographical tales in which devotees (Sufis and bhaktas) encounter and triumph over yogīs. Sufis and Indian yogīs shared much in common and seem to have interacted regularly, as indicated by multiple instances of Sufis adopting and “Islamizing” Nāth conceptions, terminology, and yogic practices (discussed in chapter 2). Yet they were also in clear competition with each other. In order to win over and spread their influence among the masses, Sufi pīrs and fakīrs had to confront siddhas and yogīs, as attested in the numerous Sufi hagiographical stories in which a Sufi saint encounters and defeats a siddha or yogī in a “miracle battle.” 48 The sheer number of this type of story indicates an atmosphere of religious competition between yogīs and Sufis, for, as Nile Green has pointed out, while such stories “are ostensibly demonstrations of the strength of the saintly victor, they are by their very existence in fact testament to insecurity and potential weakness” and suggest an environment of competition.49 Richard Davis has similarly noted how stories of miracles usually “occur in situations of conflict” where different religious groups are in competition and “questions of faith and power are directly at issue.”50 As I demonstrate here, the specific “situation of conflict”

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reflected by many of the miracle stories of early modern North India is one between self-­effacing devotional (Sufi and bhakti) religious sensibilities and more siddhi-­oriented, self-­asserting tantric and yogic perspectives.

Sufi Miracle Tales (I): God Power Beats Yoga Power A fourteenth-­century example of a miracle contest between a Sufi and a yogī appears in what is perhaps the earliest authentic collection of descriptions of Indian Sufi saints,51 the Fawā’id al-­Fu’ād (Morals of the heart),52 in which the poet Amir Hasan records the conversations of Shaikh Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā’ of Delhi: The conversation that occurred on 5 Safar 710/4 July 1310 turned on the topic of levitation. . . . ​[Nizām al-­Dīn] recalled how a Jogi had come to the town of Ucch (in the Panjab) to dispute with Shaykh Safi al-­Din Gazaruni. The Jogi challenged the Shaykh to display any powers which he could not equal. To this the Shaykh replied that it was the Jogi who was advancing a claim and he should show his accomplishment first. The Jogi rose from the ground into the air until his head reached the ceiling, and then he came down to the ground in the same fixed position, and then he invited the Shaykh to show his power. The Shaykh turned his gaze towards heaven, and he said: “O Lord! You have given this power to one who is a stranger to You! Bestow upon me this grace!” The Shaykh then rose from his place and flew away towards the qibla. From there he flew to the North and then towards the South, and he finally came back to his own palace and sat down. The Jogi was astonished, and, laying his head at the Shaykh’s feet, said: “I can do no more than rise straight upwards from the ground and come down in the same way. I cannot go to the right and to the left. You turned whichever way you wished! This is true and from God: my own powers are false.”53

It seems that Indian Muslims generally took it for granted that yogīs could perform extraordinary feats and demonstrate supernatural powers. The issue, however, was the source and level, or quality, of these powers. The crucial line comes at the very end of the story when the yogī marks the Sufi’s display as “true” and “from God” while labeling his own levitation powers as “my own” (i.e., not from God) and “false.” In Rizvi’s translation of this same line, the yogī accepts his defeat and says, “Your miracle was possible because of Divine Grace; mine was the result of human efforts.”54 Note that, in contrast to the yogī, the shaikh calls on God to bestow upon him the grace to perform the miraculous

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feat of flying. Furthermore, the shaikh’s “levitation” is not only superior to the yogī’s but also dramatically so; in this way the miracle reveals the unbounded power that is God. While yogīs may obtain powers through their austerities and ascetic practice, they are hard-­earned and limited, unlike the infinite power of God for which the Sufi is a conduit. In these hagiographies, the Sufi saints’ miracles are typically marked by a specific word, used in contradistinction to the term employed to identify the magic powers of the yogīs. An example of this occurs in Nizām Gharīb Yamanī’s Latā’if-­e-­ Ashrafī, which tells a story from the late fourteenth century in which Jamāl al-­ Dīn Rawat, the disciple of Shaikh Ashrāf Jahāngīr, is sent to compete against a yogī named Kamal, who is occupying the site where Ashrāf Jahāngīr means to establish a khanqah. Jamāl al-­Dīn arrived at the site and said to the yogī, “We do not think it becoming to give a display of miracles (karāmāt). Nevertheless we will give an answer to each of the powers (istidrāj) that you display!” Jamāl al-­Dīn then easily dealt with a series of attacks conjured by the yogī, including columns of black ants from all directions and an army of tigers. Next, “when the Jogi had exhausted his tricks, he said: ‘Take me to the Shaikh! I will become a believer.’ ” The yogī said the profession of faith before the shaikh, and he and all his five hundred disciples became Muslims and burned their religious books.55 In this story, we see the Sufi referring to the feats that he can bring to bear as “miracles,” while he marks the yogī’s abilities as mere “powers.” Both Digby and Rizvi note that in the Sufi contest anecdotes of the Sultanate period, the term most frequently used for the display of powers by yogīs is istidrāj,56 while the separate term karāmāt, “a beneficence, or special grace,” is reserved for the miracles of the Sufi shaikhs.57 The essential point here about the karāmāt—­something attributed only to saints and never to yogīs—­is that it is not performed by the saint but rather through divine grace.58

Sufi Miracle Tales (II): The Superfluity of Yogic Powers Before moving to the bhakti sources, we must note one other important type of miracle story in the Sufi hagiographical tradition. In many anecdotes, the Sufi shows his superiority to the yogī by performing a miracle from God. Perhaps even more commonly, however, after witnessing the yogī’s display of power the Sufi shaikh responds simply by demonstrating the superfluity of such “magic” to true religion. In other words, while some stories show that because the Sufis’ power comes from God it is always stronger than yogic powers, other stories emphasize that such powers are utterly trivial since devotion and humble

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submission to God are what really matter. Nizām al-­Dīn was particularly emphatic on this point. According to the Fawa’īd al-­Fu’ād, he once stated to an assembly of followers, “God Almighty has commanded His saints to conceal their miracles (karāmāt)” and that a saint who “performs a miracle is disobeying God.”59 In another instance, he remarked to those gathered around him, “To perform miracles is not a commendable work for saints. Rather a Muslim should be a helpless beggar seeking only Truth.” 60 He then proceeded to tell two stories about the harm that came to two Sufi shaikhs who were in the habit of openly, arrogantly performing miracles.61 A particularly revealing episode emphasizing this theme of the triviality of miraculous powers occurs in the Jawāmi‘ al-­Kalīm of Sayyid Muhammad Akbar Ḥusaynī, a text recording the conversations of his father, the great Chishti shaikh Sayyid Muhammad Gesūdarāz, after he left Delhi in 1398 in the wake of Timur’s invasion. This story relates the shaikh’s refusal of a series of gifts proffered by the Nāth yogī Bālgundāī in the year 1400. We see the kind of magical materials and powers popularly attributed to such yogīs as the visiting Nāth successively offers the secret of alchemy (rasāyan), knowledge to preserve the shaikh from his enemies, a substance that gives invisibility to its wearer, and a drug for the retention of semen during intercourse. Finally, he offers to make the shaikh’s cot move by itself. Realizing that such yogic gifts can lead only to corruption and away from God, the shaikh promptly rejects all of them, to which the Nāth responds, “Listen! I have come from far away, and I am being put to shame. You have accepted nothing of mine.” The shaikh replies, “Why are you ashamed? You have told well all that you can do, but why should I stretch forth my hand for what is of no use to me? What is the use of superfluities?” Later, the shaikh relates a similar encounter with another yogī who, after having his gifts denied, said, “Why are you turning me away from your door? The whole world is mad about me!” The shaikh responded, “As God is my Refuge, why should I take a thing which is of no use to me?” 62 The message here is clear: God is the source, the goal, and the refuge—­these other powers are not from God and not for God; they are superfluous. Another example of this perspective on yogic magic comes from the narrative poem Shajarat al-­Atqiyā describing an encounter between the Chishti Sufi Amīn al-­Dīn A‘lā (d. 1675) and a Hindu saṃnyāsī (renunciant). The saṃnyāsī presents a philosopher’s stone to Amīn al-­Dīn after having demonstrated its gold-­ producing qualities, but Amīn al-­Dīn merely throws it into a large reservoir of water. When the saṃnyāsī begins weeping for his lost philosopher’s stone, Amīn smiles and says, “ ‘Go in the water and find the stone, And if you find it take it.’ The saṃnyāsī went there and discovered that many philosopher’s stones were in the water. Thereupon he became a believer in Amin and having said the kalima

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[the Muslim confession of faith] he became his murīd [disciple].” 63 This story is mirrored by a nearly identical one in the seventeenth-­century Siyar al-­Aqtāb in which a yogī gives a philosopher’s stone—­that he had discovered “after a thousand exertions and labors” and fancied as infinitely valuable—­to Shaikh Jalāl al-­Dīn Kabīr al-­Awliyā’ (ca. fourteenth century), who considers it worthless and promptly throws it into a stream. When the yogī goes to retrieve his stone in the stream, he finds “thousands upon thousands of Philosopher’s Stones were lying there” and, amazed, asks the shaikh to teach him how to get beyond such desires, recites the kalima, and becomes his disciple.64 The bhakti hagiographer Mahīpati’s eighteenth-­century Bhaktavijay (Victory of the devotees) tells a strikingly similar story in which the bhakti poet-­saint Nāmdev takes away the philosopher’s stone of a man named Parisā Bhāgavat and throws it into the river. Once very poor, this man had achieved great wealth with the stone but had come to live a greedy, duplicitous life. For this reason, Nāmdev finds a way to acquire the stone and then promptly throws it into the river. Greatly angered, Parisā Bhāgavat goes to the river to find his stone; however, when he pulls his hands from the riverbed they are filled with philosopher’s stones, causing him to realize the superiority of Nāmdev’s spiritual path—­that of bhakti—­and the superfluity of, and potential corruption in, magic and alchemy.65 Here we have an instance of a specific narrative trope shared by the bhakti and Sufi hagiographical traditions. This sort of sharing of literary tropes and themes emerges persistently in the tales from the bhakti hagiographies, reflecting key attitudes and beliefs held in common by bhaktas and Sufis regarding the nature of God and proper religious behavior.

Bhakti Miracle Stories (I): Marathi Sources I turn now to the bhakti hagiographical literature, with an eye toward the Sufi inflection in its expressions of a devotional sensibility defined against tantric-­ yogic modes of religiosity. The bhakti literary sources I draw on range in date from the late sixteenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century and come from Rajasthan, the Gangetic Plain, Panjab, and Maharashtra. The examples I present do not proceed chronologically, but this is of no real import since they all fall within a nearly two-­hundred-­year period (ca. 1600–­1775) that saw the explosive growth of bhakti communities across northern and west-­ central India. I begin with the Tīrthāvalī, a Marathi hagiographical text attributed to the great bhakti poet-­saint Nāmdev in the fourteenth century but whose oldest

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manuscript dates to the early seventeenth century.66 The text tells the following story about Nāmdev and Jñāndev (Dnyāndev), the thirteenth-­century Maharashtrian Nāth yogī, Vedānta-­influenced bhakta, and author of the Jñāneśvarī. Nāmdev and Jñāndev were traveling together in an arid land and became intensely thirsty. They had no water and began to fear for their lives. Unexpectedly, they came upon a deep well, but they seemed to have no way of obtaining any water that might be at the bottom. Jñāndev then said to Nāma, “I have one special way I can retrieve some water,” and using his yogic powers, he made himself very light, descended along the wall of the well, and drank some water. After having his fill of water, he came out of the well and said to Nāmdev, “I could bring water from the well and pour it into your hands. I don’t see another way for you to get it.” Nāmdev replied, “I have no fear at all of my thirst” and then said to Jñāndev, “Be patient for a minute, O Swami, and I’ll show you a miracle.” At this point, Nāmdev cried out to Viṭṭhal (a regional form of Kṛṣṇa), going deep into prayer and emotionally imploring him for help. According to the text, the very moment that he heard of Nāmdev’s affliction, Kṛṣṇa sped off to help him and “at the same time the dry well began to burst with water just as the Sindhu River used to flow ferociously thousands of eons ago.” Seeing the miraculously overflowing well, Jñāndev remarks, “A wondrous thing has occurred. How has God come to be Nāma’s debtor?” Nāmdev, who had passed out from thirst, awakes and explains to Jñāndev, “Viṭhobā [Kṛṣṇa] takes care of all my worries.” Jñāndev then replies, “I have known yogīs who can sit in the highest state of meditation, yet none of them can create peace in their own minds. I can’t think of any one else who can immediately indenture God to himself but you, slave [dāsa] of Viṣṇu.” 67 In the Maharashtrian hagiographer Mahīpati’s later retelling of this story in his Bhaktavijaya (1762), not only are Nāmdev and Jñāndev supplied with water but also the well flows over with such vigor that it provides much-­needed water to the entire drought-­stricken village.68 Here, as in the earlier Sufi tale, the power of God, and of devotion to God, is shown to be dramatically superior to the powers of yoga. Again we see the boundlessness of God revealed through the miraculous, this time in the image of the overflowing well. The tale ends with Jñāndev admitting the superiority of bhakti over “the meditative techniques of the yogīs” and his own mystical yogic knowledge ( jñāna). As Christian Novetzke explains, “Jñāndev’s yogic powers serve only him; though he might perform a service for someone else, he commands this power. This is not a social power. However, in Nāmdev’s case, his plea for help transcends individual ability, and the result, likewise, extends far beyond his own needs.” 69 Mahīpati (1715–­1790) is the author of several Marathi bhakti hagiographical collections.70 While he wrote from Maharashtra in the mid to late eighteenth century, he seems to have largely recycled stories already in circulation,

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including many from North India. In fact, Mahīpati relied considerably on Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl (ca. 1600), composed in Rajasthan, and explicitly cites it as a model for his own. Jon Keune and Christian Novetzke have both remarked on how Mahīpati made a conscious effort to affiliate Maharashtrian bhakti with North India in order to enhance the Marathi bhaktas’ legitimacy and prestige.71 In Mahīpati’s third hagiographical collection, the Bhaktalīlāmṛt (1774), he tells a fascinating story involving Jñāndev, but this time in his role as bhakti saint (rather than as Nāth yogī foil to Nāmdev’s bhakti). Jñāndev’s dual identity as both a Nāth yogī and a bhakti saint speaks to the interesting religious environment of Maharashtra in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Catharina Kiehnle argues that the songs attributed to Jñāndev “reflect the opinions of what one could call a school of Nātha Vaiṣṇavas” in Maharashtra at that time, a group of yogīs among whom bhakti was quite central, even if that bhakti was rather different and more contemplative in nature than that associated with and advocated by most of the poet-­saints of early modern North India.72 While Jñāndev and his peers may have practiced both tantric yoga and an intellectual, mystical variety of bhakti devotion (and have been praised for both), Mahīpati’s hagiographies (written centuries later) indicate clearly the superiority of love and humble reliance on God to any yogic powers.73 In contrast to the story involving Nāmdev and the well (which showcases Jñāndev’s yogic siddhis and Vedāntic jñāna-­based perspective), in this tale Mahīpati places complete emphasis on Jñāndev’s bhakti dimension in his encounter with a famous yogī named Chāngdev. Having learned of Jñāndev’s miraculous abilities, the yogī Chāngdev states, “Though I have performed wonders by dint of superhuman power, this power (of Jñāndev’s) is not in me.”74 Riding a tiger and using a snake as a whip, Chāngdev sets off to visit Jñāndev, who miraculously causes a wall to leap forward to meet the fast-­approaching yogī. Mahīpati writes, [Chāngdev] had studied the fourteen sciences, he had mastered the sixty-­ four arts, he had protected his body for fourteen centuries, and by his power he had conquered death. But all his power had vanished at the sight of Dnyāndev [Jñāndev], just as the stars disappear at dawn; just as one, who is proud of knowing by heart some poems, feels ashamed in the presence of a saint who has inspiration. . . . ​In the same way was it with the power of Dnyāndev, for he had made the wall of lifeless stone to move a mile from Ālandī, and at that sight Chāngdev was overcome with shame. Dismounting from the tiger, he let go of the snake he had used as a whip. With an unusually reverent attitude and with loving devotion, he rolled himself with delight at Dnyāndev’s feet.75

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At this point in the text, Mahīpati mourns those yogīs like Chāngdev who have achieved profound mystical absorption but do not know the pleasures of bhakti, lauding Jñāndev as a rare exemplar of one who possesses knowledge of nonduality while also delighting in loving devotion to the saguṇ form of God.76 While this story was likely originally a fourteenth-­century tale about the superiority of Jñāndev’s tantric-­yogic powers to those of Chāngdev,77 in Mahīpati’s eighteenth-­century editorialized retelling we clearly see a Sufi-­inflected bhakti perspective that subordinates tantric and yogic religiosity to the power of bhakti. In Mahīpati’s tale, Chāngdev asks Jñāndev how he was able to move the wall, a feat that, despite his own superhuman powers, he calls “beyond the power of all understanding.” Jñāndev responds by explaining that “if God wills to do a thing, what is there that He will not do?. . . ​Ants will forever subsist on the rays of the sun, and even crops will grow on a fiery tableland, but all this is only by the power of Shrī Hari. . . . ​It was He who by His prowess easily moved the wall.” He goes on, emphasizing the divine origin of this miracle and the fact that he (and his own efforts and abilities) had nothing to do with it: “He [Hari] it was who in order to fulfill your longing made the wall move by His own power. The Husband of Rukmini [Kṛṣṇa] alone knows that it was not our power at all.”78 Here we have a theme that emerges repeatedly throughout the bhakti and Sufi hagiographical literature: the notion that the devotee’s power is so great—­a nd so much better than that of the yogī—­because it is not his power at all; it is the power of God, who can accomplish anything. Another tale from Mahīpati’s writings further illustrates this point. In a story from the Bhaktalīlāmṛta (1774), the Maharashtrian bhakti saint Eknāth (ca. 1533–­1599) harshly rebukes an ascetic yogī by the name of Śrīpad for displaying yogic powers to the public by responding to a challenge from a group of brahmans to raise a donkey from the dead. Ashamed of his behavior, Śrīpad volunteers to be buried alive as penance. Eknāth buries the yogī alive but then finds himself confronted by brahmans accusing him of killing Śrīpad out of jealousy at not possessing such yogic power (siddhāī) himself. The brahmans threaten to excommunicate Eknāth on the charge of murder if he does not perform a miracle by having the stone image of Nandī eat kadabā stalks from his hands. When the stone bull devours a sheaf of stalks before their eyes, they are filled with amazement and free Eknāth from the penalty of excommunication. They remark to each other, “This miraculous deed performed by Eknāth is an act that cannot be acquired through the practice of Yoga. This astonishing deed comes from Bhakti. Because of his former devotion to his Guru, his service to saints, and his loving worship of Śrī Hari, Pāṇḍuraṇg [Kṛṣṇa] has become pleased with him, and protects him moment by moment.” All seems well until another group of brahmans arise, claiming that they did not see the supposed miracle

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and that unless he can perform it again, he will still be excommunicated. Eknāth prays to Nandī to find a way to remove these brahmans’ doubts, and as soon as he utters the prayer, the stone bull rises, runs, and jumps into a deep hole in the Godavari River. The brahmans finally believe Eknāth’s holiness, saying, “[This] is a deed that does not belong to man,” and then, “There is now no excommunication for you. You may return to your home. Blessed is your loving devotion. You have brought life to a stone Nandi. The God-­of-­Gods is pleased with you. We now recognize the real meaning of what has happened.” The reader is left free to decide exactly what this “real meaning” is, but one key message the hagiographer Mahīpati wants to convey through the story is clear: God’s power (not man’s) is greatest and bhakti is the only way to access this boundless power. As the text states, such a miraculous feat “cannot be acquired through the practice of Yoga” and is a deed that “does not belong to man” and comes only from loving devotion to God.79

Bhakti Miracle Stories (II): Panjabi and Hindi Sources I take up next a story from the bhakti hagiographical literature of the Sikhs. That Panjab was not only home to the Sikhs but also a major center of Nāth presence can be seen in the large number of compositions that Guru Nānak is said to have addressed to Nāth yogīs. As W. H. McLeod writes, “The part played by Gorakhnāth in the janam-­sākhī traditions reflects a substantial reputation, one which is surpassed only by a few distinguished disciples of Baba Nānak. Anecdotes in which he or other Nāths appear also imply a considerable awe,” often involving “an impressively fearsome display of magical powers.”80 Their presence in Sikh hagiographical literature suggests that the Nāth yogīs were relatively widespread in Panjab in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and “commanded both fear and a grudging respect” from the people because of the powers they were thought to possess.81 In the Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās, a Sikh text from the early seventeenth century, Guru Nānak confronts and debates a group of yogīs and siddhas led by a figure named Bhangarnāth. Challenging Nānak, these yogīs invoke their tantra-­mantra, transform themselves into tigers, fly around like birds, hiss like cobras, and shoot fire from their bodies.82 The siddhas mockingly prod Nānak to respond to their display with a miracle (karāmāti), but he says, “I have nothing worth showing to you. I have no support except God (Guru), the community (saṅgati) and the Word (bāṇī).” Hearing this, the yogīs “exhausted themselves with tantra-­mantra but the Word of the Guru would not allow their powers to come forth.” Realizing they

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are out of their league, the yogīs submit themselves before Nānak. The text then states, “The Guru [God] is the giver and no one can gauge his bounties.”83 Here we have a message closely mirroring that of the Sufi tales: Why display supernormal powers? They serve no real purpose and have no real authority, for true power comes from (i.e., is given by) God alone and cannot be accessed by paltry means such as tantra-­mantra. In the B-­40 janam-­sākhi, written in the 1730s, a very similar incident (perhaps even a different account of the same incident) is related in which Nānak visits the Nāth siddha location of Achal in Panjab, where he has a confrontation with the same yogī, Bhangarnāth. Bhangarnāth calls in “the eighty-­four Siddhs, the nine Naths, the six Jatis, the unseen and the visible, demons of the air and dwellers on the earth, the fifty-­t wo Virs, and the sixty-­four Yoginis” to engage Nānak in spiritual competition.84 The siddhas showcase their supernormal powers by causing deerskins to fly, stones to move, and walls to walk, but Nānak is unimpressed and challenges them to a match of hide-­and-­seek. The siddhas hide first and Nānak easily finds them. It is now Nānak’s turn to hide, and he becomes invisible by merging into the four elements. Unable to find him, the siddhas finally acknowledge their defeat. As soon as they make their submission, Nānak reappears and utters the following lines from stanza 19 of the Vār Mājh: If I were to clothe myself with fire, build my dwelling in the snows, and subsist upon a diet of iron; If I were to turn all suffering into water and drink it, [or] reduce the [entire] world to my command; If I were to lay the heavens upon scales and weigh them against a copper coin; If I were to distend [my body] to infinite dimensions, [or] bind all in subjection; If my mind possessed such power that I could act and command as I chose, [all would be profitless]. Just as He, the Lord, is glorious so too are His gifts glorious, gifts which he bestows in accordance with His will. He upon whom the [Lord’s] gracious glance rests—­he it is, Nānak, who acquires the glory of the True Name.85 Here Nānak stresses that yogic powers and austerities are profitless; they are utterly futile in comparison with the glorious gifts of God. True power comes not from tantric incantations and bodily regimens but from God alone, and when God bestows His gifts—­not in response to ritual action, ascetic feats, or

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recitation of mantras, but only in accordance with His will—­then the limitless power of the Divine makes itself known in the miracle.86 For another noteworthy tale from the bhakti hagiographies, I turn to Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī, an important commentary on Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl composed in Vrindavan in 1712.87 While this story does not involve an encounter with a yogī, it speaks directly to the set of themes addressed here. Priyādās tells the tale of the bhakti saint Tulsīdās’s visit to the Mughal emperor in Delhi. Upon arrival, the emperor (who remains unidentified but would have been Akbar or Jahāngīr) states that Tulsīdās is world-­renowned for his miraculous powers and demands that Tulsī perform a miracle for him. Tulsī replies by stating that such powers are nonsense; i.e., it is a lie that he is responsible for such miracles, and only God (Rām) should be recognized.88 Angered, the emperor locks Tulsī in prison. Tulsī then prays to Hanumān, who answers his devotee’s call by sending an army of monkeys to wreak havoc upon the palace, “scratching eyes and noses,” “tearing clothes off the emperor’s women,” and “heaving down bricks from the ramparts.”89 Realizing what is happening, the emperor falls at the poet’s feet and begs for mercy, to which Tulsī replies, “Enjoy the miracle [karāmāt] a little bit longer.”90 Finally, with the emperor “drowning in shame,” Hanumān’s assault ends.91 In this story, we see a trope common in both Sufi and bhakti miracle stories: the refusal of the miracle worker to perform a marvel requested of him. In the eyes of both Sufis and bhaktas, displays of magical powers are looked down upon as petty, self-­aggrandizing, and spiritually futile, since ego-­transcending devotion and humble submission to God are what really matter. Tulsīdās refuses to perform a marvel for the emperor, but the miraculous power of God nevertheless manifests itself when God sends Hanumān to Tulsī’s rescue out of tender mercy and sincere love for his supplicant’s devotion. In the miracle, then, as opposed to the magical display, attention shifts from the individual to God—­ and equally perhaps to devotion to God—­as the source of genuine power. As Pinch states, “Those who would claim supernormal abilities as a function of their own human effort—­in other words, those who would claim to be gods—­ were, in the eyes of the newly pious, whether bhakta or Muslim, simply tricksters. Hence Priyādās’ need to deride such claims as ‘jhuthi karamat’—­false marvels.”92 Pinch goes on to say that “Tulsīdās scoffed at the very idea of performing a marvel for the emperor not simply because ‘all I know is Rām’ but because he did not dabble in the kind of marvel the emperor was interested in witnessing.”93 For Tulsīdās and devotees like him, tantric rites, mantras, ascetic physical regimens, and magical displays were worthless in the authentic religious life of devotion to the Lord.

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I shift now to the hagiography of Kabīr, arguably the most famous bhakta of them all. In his late sixteenth-­century Kabīr parcaī, the Rāmānandī Anantadās tells a story in which the Lord sends an apsarā (a heavenly nymph) to test the firmness of Kabīr’s devotion with various temptations, all of which Kabīr successfully resists. In reward, Keśav (Viṣṇu) presents himself before Kabīr, first offering him wealth and worldly enjoyments, then lordship over the world, and finally all the siddhis, “in short, every aspiring [tantric] yogī’s dream.”94 The great bhakta Kabīr, however, has no interest in these magical powers, treasures, or pleasures. He tells Viṣṇu, “I will request nothing, King of the Three Worlds. . . . ​ How can an ant lift up a mountain? How can a firefly outshine the moon?”95 In other words, how could such powers compare with the power of God? Kabīr here proves himself to be a model of firm, intense, and humble devotion that—­like that of the Sufi saints—­has no use for yogic powers or the arrogance and misplaced priorities bound up with seeking and displaying them. In another section of his Kabīr parcaī, Anantadās tells the tale of how Shāh Sikander Lodī once came to Kashi (Banaras), where a delegate of Muslim judges (qāzīs) and clerics (mullahs), brahmans, and merchants together approached him with a complaint about Kabīr. This heterogeneous group explains to Sikander that Kabīr has abandoned the customs of Muslims and Hindus, scorned the sacred places and rites, and in this way has corrupted everyone and tarnished the reputation of both Hindu and Muslim religious authorities. Sikander orders that Kabīr be brought before him to be killed. Standing before the shah, Kabīr states, “If Rām is my protector, no one can kill me. Badashah, I am not afraid. Whatever God does, that is what will be.” To this, Sikander replies, “You are a fool not to fear me. Now let’s see a true miracle (karāmāt). Tie Kabīr’s feet and bind him with chains. Drown him in the water of the Ganges.” This is done, but as soon as Kabīr is dropped into the river, his chains inexplicably come loose and he begins to float. Enraged, Sikander then ties Kabīr up, throws him into a house, and sets it on fire. However, when Kabīr recites the name of God the fire becomes “cool as water” and he emerges unscathed. In describing this incident, Anantadās writes, “The gods and men witnessed a true miracle (sācī karamātī).” (It is interesting to note how frequently both Anantadās and Priyādās use the Persian word karāmāt rather than any word from the Sanskritic lineage to refer to miracles in their hagiographies.) Angered by Kabīr’s inexplicable escape, the qāzīs and brahmans tell Sikander that Kabīr has used “magic arts,” and thus his apparent miracle must not be accepted as such. Sikander next calls upon a frenzied elephant famed for its ferocity in battle. The elephant is brought and made to attack, but Kabīr does not budge, feeling no fear as he remains there “absorbed in the love of Ram.” At this point, Kṛṣṇa appears in the form of a lion and seats himself in front of Kabīr, causing the elephant to flee backward and refuse to

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advance. When Sikander sees the lion he is astounded and says, “Elephant driver, take the elephant away. A miracle (karāmāt) has just occurred.” Sikander humbly admits the power of Rām (“the true God”) and begs Kabīr to spare his life. In the end, Kabīr returns home, saying, “Bhakti to Hari destroys millions of sins. Hari comes running for his devotees. . . . ​Without bhakti to Hari, no work can prosper. I recognized the guru and Govinda through devotion. That is why Sikander could do nothing to me.”96 As in the Tulsīdās story, the focus here is completely on God. Kabīr does not actually do anything—­other than remain absorbed in devotion to God—­rather, it is God who does everything. The Sufi-­inflected bhakti message could hardly be more explicit. All one needs is devotion to the Lord, who provides power and protection greater than any magic art, tantric ritual, or yogic discipline could possibly offer. Kabīr refuses to perform a marvel himself, yet nevertheless not one, not two, but three miracles occur in the story as God repeatedly protects his cherished devotee.97

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In its comparative analysis of Sufi romances, bhakti poetry, and hagiographical episodes, this chapter has brought to light the remarkable resonance between early modern Sufi and bhakti religious sensibilities and their literary expressions. In the premākhyāns and the poetry of Sūrdās and Mīrābāī, yoga featured prominently, but was always subsumed by devotion. These texts seemed to say that, in a world of false yogīs, to be a true yogī is to not be a yogī at all but to be a bhakta, since impassioned, steadfast, self-­effacing devotion naturally produces a yoga more powerful and authentic (without false pretenses) than any other. The Sufi romances and bhakti poems of Mīrā and Sūr both artfully co-­opted the figure of the yogī, with all its potent spiritual symbolism, into the service of a message about the unparalleled power of devotion. The hagiographical literature illustrated a rather different kind of resonance between Sufi and bhakti perspectives—­and a different use of the figure of the yogī. In these stories, the miracles of devotion to God were contrasted with the magic of tantric-­yogic religion in order to stress a shared understanding of God (as the lone source of real power) and ideal religious behavior (humility, love, and trust) and to celebrate the incomparable power of selfless, passionate, unwavering devotion to God. We can now see clearly the Sufi inflection of—­and perhaps even the Sufi influence upon—­early modern North Indian bhakti. Considering the immeasurably rich history of Hindu thought and practice, it would be foolish to say that the manner in which early modern bhaktas related to the Divine was entirely new or entirely a function of Sufi influence; however, there is no doubt that the

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Islamic presence in North India after the thirteenth century, mediated at the popular level especially via the Sufis, brought to the fore and distinctively colored those tendencies in Hindu devotion that resonated most with Sufi religious attitudes and approaches. When it comes to the bhakti of Kabīr, Tulsīdās, Nānak, Mīrābāī, Nābhādās, and all the other great North Indian devotee-­saints, there is much that was continuous with preceding forms of bhakti in Indian history, but there is also much that was novel and distinctive to their specific early modern social, political, and religious environment. As I have stressed, one key thing new was early modern North Indian bhaktas’ Sufi-­inflected understanding of devotion in relation to tantric and yogic-­ascetic religiosity.

Conclusion Bhakti Religion and Tantric Magic

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he religious landscape of present-­day North India attests to the enduring success of early modern North India’s bhakti movement, for the practices, attitudes, temples, narratives, songs, and symbols of bhakti—­especially Vaiṣṇava bhakti—­make up one of the most important dimensions of mainstream Hindu religiosity today. Tantra, on the other hand, has not always fared as well, at least not on the surface. As numerous scholars have observed, many modern-­day Indians think of (and dismiss or fear) “tantra” as a tradition of black magic, sinister trickery, and secretive rituals utilizing dark power for unethical ends.1 These negative perceptions of tantra do not tell the whole story—­for tantra is no marginal phenomenon in modern India—­but they are widespread, important, and in clear contrast to the approving tones and wholesome associations that usually characterize modern Indian attitudes toward bhakti religiosity. The marginalization and stigmatization of tantric practices and perspectives as “magical” in modern India is typically attributed to the British colonial importation of Western post-­Enlightenment, post-­Reformation categories.2 Late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Western scholars drew on their Christian—­ and especially Protestant—­conceptions of religion as monotheistic, personal, and faith oriented to present bhakti as a kind of reformed Hinduism, an Indian instance of Christian-­like monotheistic devotion to a personal God.3 Tantric forms of Hindu tradition, on the other hand, with their focus on power and sometimes bloody and erotic imagery and rites, served as the “magical” foil to bhakti “religion” and were “quickly singled out as India’s darkest, most irrational element—­as the Extreme Orient, the most exotic aspect of the exotic Orient itself.” 4

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The work of Monier Monier-­Williams (1819–­1899) is a perfect illustration of this. He wrote that bhakti, which he identified with Vaiṣṇavism, “is the only Hindū system worthy of being called a religion”5 and stated furthermore that bhakti “alone [among Hindu religious forms] possesses the essential elements of a genuine religion. For there can be no true religion without personal devotion to a personal God.” 6 When it came to tantra, however, Monier-­Williams had an entirely different opinion. It was he who first used the term “Tantrism” as “a singular, monolithic class”7 of religion, remarking disparagingly that Tantrism “is Hinduism arrived at its last and worst stage of medieval development” and asserting that “the Tantras are generally mere manuals of mysticism, magic, and superstition of the worst and most silly kind.”8 Here bhakti, with its more familiar (“rational” and Christian-­like) devotional approach, is clearly defined as “religion” in opposition to tantra, which is, with its unfamiliar and unapproved perspectives and practices, labeled as “magic” and “superstition.” As the story typically goes, these Western colonial perceptions were absorbed or appropriated by Indian reformers of Hinduism from Rammohun Roy to Bhāratendu Hariśchandra to Swami Vivekananda, who extolled bhakti and Vedāntic philosophy while criticizing tantra as a corrupt tradition of magic and superstition that needed to be cleansed from Hinduism. While this would seem like a rather open-­a nd-­shut case of Western colonial perspectives making their way into the outlooks of the Indian people, in fact the situation is not so simple. The evidence discussed in the preceding chapters suggests that the origins of certain common modern-­d ay North Indian understandings of bhakti and tantra actually lie in the early modern period, roughly 1450–­1700, well before the British had a major presence in India. While colonial and Orientalist authors undoubtedly expanded upon and intensified a particular view of bhakti and tantra that was consonant with their own predilections, their understanding of these traditions was in many ways drawn from preexisting indigenous Indian perspectives. In early modern North Indian bhakti reformers’ Sufi-­inflected caricatures, appropriations, and criticisms of tantric figures and religious approaches, we can see the indigenous roots of widespread present-­day Indian attitudes associating devotion with proper religious practice and tantra with power-­obsessed magic and ineffective mumbo jumbo. More work needs to be done to determine to what degree, and precisely how, preexisting bhakti perceptions informed colonial and Orientalist thought, but we can confidently say that the modern Indian tendency to see bhakti and aspects of tantra as two distinct, and even opposed, forms or categories of religiosity emerges during North India’s bhakti movement in the early modern period. In making this point, I offer confirmation that, as Richard Eaton has said, “a careful reading of pre-­British historical data can turn up historical continuities

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where postmodernist and postcolonial scholarship, inclined as it is to privilege European discursive traditions and the epistemological disruptions they brought, perceives only discontinuities.”9

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Dismissive, suspicious, and fearful perceptions of tantra may be widespread in India today, but they do not give a complete picture of tantra’s real presence in modern India. Tantric practices and notions are, in fact, pervasive in Hinduism today, though Hindus rarely recognize them as “tantric.”10 Most Hindus generally do not appreciate the great impact that the tantric traditions have had on Hindu religious practice, particularly in daily worship at private shrines and public temples, wherein tantric ritual forms and techniques have had an enduring presence.11 As André Padoux states, “Nowadays, one often finds Tantric elements, notions or practices, in a non-­Tantric context.”12 One aspect of tantra’s presence in modern India, then, consists of ubiquitous tantric ritual procedures that, detached from tantric religiosity as such, are found primarily in nontantric (bhakti, Vedāntic, and yogic) contexts and are not considered as tantric (because of the word’s associations with dangerous, disapproved, and dismissed “black magic”). Even so, this is certainly not to say that respectable, self-­ consciously tantric practices have no place in India today. While many in modern India intentionally keep their distance from things tantric, others have no qualms about visiting tāntrikas for the powerful practical services they can provide.13 Tantric rites offering quick access to esoteric power actually seem to be in some demand in India today, for there is an abundance of popular vernacular publications on them, often sold near temples, indicating that despite what many say and think about tantra, tantric religiosity is still prevalent in practice and perhaps even on the rise in the context of postindependence India’s expanding culture of consumer capitalism.14 As Madhu Khanna has observed, modern Indians’ responses to tantra are “somewhat contradictory.” In her research on popular modern-­day tāntrikas and their clients, she found that many Indians associated tantra with black magic and depraved ethical behavior but simultaneously felt that the tāntrikas in the bazaars had access to powers that brahman priests did not and that the tāntrikas were “very powerful individuals who had [a] variety of ‘mantra-­yantra’ and ‘tantra śaktis’ to alleviate human suffering.”15 Khanna discusses the pervasive circulation of tantric imagery in modern Indian popular culture and, relatedly, the widespread presence of what she calls “bazaari tantra”; that is, popular forms of tantra (quite different from the tantric tradition found in Sanskrit scriptures) that have been molded to the values and ethos of consumer capitalism, focusing entirely on

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ritual and yogic prescriptions for acquiring powers to solve life’s problems and attain one’s desires.16 Engaged with by Indian film stars, politicians, and high-­ powered businesspeople, these forms of “white” (i.e., nonthreatening, sāttvik) tantra increasingly wield cachet among India’s urban middle classes, catering to their consumerist tastes and aspirations.17 Along these lines, Philip Lutgendorf has discussed the postindependence-­period proliferation of inexpensive popular tantric literature and iconography centered on Hanumān, which “disseminates purportedly esoteric techniques and images aimed at individual satisfaction and empowerment” while placing allusions to Vaiṣṇava narrative within a squarely tantric Śaiva-­Śākta ritual context.18 He calls this “an example of the ‘Tantrification’ of Vaiṣṇavism,” reflecting the desire of many modern-­day middle-­class Indians for “the ‘quick-­fix’ of Tantra but within the context of . . . ​ respectable Vaiṣṇava piety.”19 I bring up these examples of modern tantra in order to illustrate how Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s success and its supplanting (or devotionalization and sanitization) of tantric traditions have clearly not been complete.20 Tantra and tantric religiosity are alive and well, if in forms and contexts often quite different from the Tantric Age of medieval India. One of this book’s primary goals has been to explain the phenomenal rise of bhakti traditions in early modern North India, but another has been to explore bhakti’s crucial (shifting yet constitutive) historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and asceticism. The efforts of early modern North Indian bhakti reformers to construct new boundaries around bhakti—­through especially a critique of tantric-­yogic religiosity—­had real and lasting impacts, helping to produce a distinctive, widely shared (but differentiated) bhakti emotional, aesthetic, and ethical sensibility; yet as I have demonstrated, they could never completely relegate tantra to the margins. This may be because tantra attends to certain religious needs that bhakti simply cannot satisfy, but there is another reason. Despite the efforts of various actors in Indian history to create boundaries between them, in the end bhakti, tantra, and yoga are not properly bounded entities. They are forever intertwined, often blurring into one another in practice. At a very general level, we might understand their interactions in Lutgendorf’s terms, as part of “an ongoing dialectic between two contrasting (though not necessarily opposing) religious orientations,” one focused more on empowerment, mastery, and self-­autonomy and the other on ego-­dissolving love, service, and sacrifice.21 Even so, as this book has shown, a historical study of the different, specific ways that India’s religious communities have constructed the relationships between bhakti, tantra, and yoga (and the boundaries around them) can be a very productive approach to understanding those communities and South Asian social and religious history more broadly.

Conclusion = 309

In this regard, my main concern has been understanding the way that bhakti communities in the specific historical context of early modern North India came to conceive the relations between bhakti, tantra, and yoga and exploring the causes and impacts of the new perspectives they expressed. This book has highlighted how the influx of Persianate Turks and Afghans in North India was a momentous event that brought about major changes in India’s social and religious landscape. While tantric sectarian traditions and their rituals, ideologies, and institutions had been a fundamental aspect of medieval Indian religious and political life since roughly the seventh century, the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the corresponding military and political dominance of Persianized Turks resulted in the collapse of most of the infrastructure sustaining institutionalized and brahmanical forms of tantric religion. Alongside the expanding influence and institutional presence of Vedānta, non-­ (or less-­) institutionalized forms of tantra would nonetheless adapt, persist, and—­in the case of the Nāth yogīs—­even flourish in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in a religious culture that allowed for boundary-­blurring collaboration, borrowing, and dialogue among diverse spiritual practitioners. The new, “post–­Tantric Age” environment of Sultanate India witnessed the spread of cosmopolitan Persian literary-­political culture, the expansive growth of popular Sufism, and, relatedly, the rise of vernacular (Hindavi) literary composition and performance alongside the emergence of a transsectarian North Indian culture of charismatic asceticism. Each of these historical developments—­alongside key material improvements (e.g., new networks of roads) and economic changes (e.g., urban growth, expanding commerce and artisanal production, agrarian exploitation)—­was crucial in paving the way for the bhakti poets and communities of early modern North India. With the Mughal Empire, and particularly during the reign of Akbar in the second half of the sixteenth century, a Mughal-­Rajput political alliance formed and led to the development of a court culture and religiopolitical idiom in which institutional forms of Vaiṣṇava bhakti became valuable symbols of power and deportment for aspiring Hindu rulers, and thus bhakti communities became the beneficiaries of extensive patronage. While the rise of bhakti in early modern North India was linked to all these sociopolitical developments, it also had a force of its own. It was bound up with the formation of a new and Sufi-­inflected bhakti sensibility, a common aesthetic, moral, and emotional disposition formed by and expressed in the bhakti poetry, songs, and stories that circulated throughout North India’s bhakti public. The sensibility developing among bhakti authors and communities of Sultanate and Mughal India resonated with Sufi dispositions while it often opposed or

310 9 Conclusion

marginalized dimensions of tantric and yogic religious modes that had long been interfused with devotional practice. I have devoted a significant portion of this work to an analysis of the Rāmānandī devotional community at Galta, comparing and contrasting it to the Nāth yogīs in order to exemplify the development of this new bhakti sensibility in early modern North India and the way it formed especially in contradistinction to certain key perspectives and attitudes of the tantric tradition. The example of the Rāmānandīs suggests, in a well-­delineated form, processes that were far more widespread. Reviewing them provided an opportunity to challenge some popular scholarly notions of bhakti and yoga and to reconceive them in improved, historically contextualized and contingent form. The early Rāmānandīs’ community of yoga-­practicing ascetic bhaktas and literature-­producing rasik bhaktas served effectively to challenge the boundaries of the modern-­day categories of Bhakti and Yoga and to show us the initial unraveling of the once closely interwoven threads of bhakti, tantra, and yoga. My case study of the Rāmānandīs also helped to highlight one of the book’s more minor themes: the centrality of professional ascetics and, more specifically, monastic institutions in the religiopolitical economy of India over the longue durée. A study of the work of Agradās (and his disciple Nābhādās) showed the critical role of bhakti literature—­with its artful combination of heartfelt sentiments and strategic considerations—­in articulating a new bhakti sensibility and bhakti community that would attract both a popular following and elite patronage. After this specific case study of an important but relatively unknown Rāmānandī figure, the book shifted to a much broader examination of early modern bhakti poetry and hagiography in order to highlight the rise of new bhakti attitudes toward certain key aspects of tantric and yogic religiosity and to show how these new bhakti perspectives had a clear Sufi inflection. This investigation brought to light how bhakti authors with different theological positions and from a wide range of social and geographical locations all came together in asserting a devotional sensibility in fundamental conflict with ordinary tantric-­yogic approaches and much more closely aligned with Sufi notions regarding the nature of (and proper attitude toward) God and the meaning of the religious life. The striking parallels between the themes, symbols, and literary strategies of bhakti and Indian Sufi devotional works suggest that Sufism played a key role in the formation of bhakti sensibilities that—­in some degree—­have persisted in India ever since. In the history and culture of the vast and endlessly diverse Indian subcontinent, few things if any are clear-­cut or universal, and the arguments I have advanced here are certainly no exception. Nevertheless, the evidence I have compiled strongly suggests that throughout North India, beginning in the

Conclusion = 311

sixteenth century (especially in the new sociopolitical conditions of the Mughal Empire under Akbar), Vaiṣṇava devotional forms increasingly took the place of previously dominant tantric Śaiva-­Śākta traditions and—­owing in no small part to their resonance with Sufi perspectives that had become rooted in Indian soil in the Sultanate period—­came to be considered by many Hindus, whether they be kings or peasants, as the most proper and effective way to achieve their varied desires. Bhaktas achieved this coup through the beauty and contagious emotion inherent in their poetry and its performance, combined with a Sufi-­inflected devotional critique of key tantric attitudes and perspectives, a tantric magic against which they defined their own bhakti religion. Their efforts and vision, never entirely undisputed, have nonetheless left a remarkable and enduring legacy.

Appendix Manuscripts Containing Compositions by Agradās

This does not claim to be a comprehensive list of Agradās’s compositions; it is, rather, a record of the findings of my manuscript searches in the archives and libraries of North India (and London). Poetry Anthologies Containing Verses by Agradās 1670—­Pad Sangrah—­Jodhpur Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute (RORI) #13498 (2) 1718—­Rāg Pad Sangrah—­Udaipur RORI #3785 (9) (Agradas, Surdas, etc.) 1731—­Sphuṭ Pad Sangrah—­Jodhpur RORI #15613 (18) (Surdas, Agradas, Gadhadhar, Vyas) 1742—­Pad Sangrah—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #918/939/11 (Hitramray, Nanddas, Tulsidas, Ramdas, Surdas, Kabir, Agradas, etc.) 1742–­1743—­Spuṭ Sādhu Padāvalī—­Vidyā Bhūsaṇ Sangrah—­Jaipur RORI #12 (12) (Surdas, Pipa, Jangopal, Sundardas, Rajjab, Agradas, etc.) 1754—­Agradās Padāvalī—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #960/734/2 1774—­Sphuṭ Pad—­Udaipur RORI #4242 (1) (Kabir, Agradas, Tulsi, Parmanand, etc.) 1796—­Caubīs Avatār Kavit—­Vidyā Bhūsaṇ Sangrah—­Jaipur RORI #91 (13) (Agradas) 18th century—­Pad Rāmajanma kā—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #848/833 18th century—­Agradās ke Pad—­Jodhpur RORI #12380 (24) 18th century—­Rāg Pad Sangrah—­Jodhpur RORI #24426 (Tulsidas, Agradas, etc.) 18th century—­Sphuṭ-­Kavitt—­Udaipur RORI #4325 (5) (Agradas, Gosain Ramgiri, Sur, Kabir)

314 9 Appendix

1843—­Vaiṣṇava Poems—­British Library, MSS Hindi A​­.12​­.ac (from 392 foll. Nirañjanī manuscript) 1840—­Agradās kī Vāṇī—­Jodhpur RORI #14473

Compositions Attributed to Agradās Dhyān Mañjarī 1818—­Nāgarī Pracāriṇī Sabhā #772 1872—­Jodhpur RORI #25307 1873—­Jodhpur RORI #12226 (2-­3) 1876—­Jaipur City Palace #2156 (36) 1891—­Jaipur City Palace #3001 1894—­Udaipur RORI #2127 19th century—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #715/179 19th century—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #1553/450 19th century—­Jaipur RORI #2565 (incomplete) 19th century—­Udaipur RORI #3196 19th century—­Udaipur RORI #3096 (48) 1907—­Nagari Pracarini Sabha #2268 1911—­Udaipur RORI #1867 1914—­Nagari Pracarini Sabha #543 1931—­Vrindavan Research Institute #9680

Undated Vrindavan Research Institute #14187 (incomplete, fair) Vrindavan Research Institute #9094 (complete, poor) Vrindavan Research Institute #10180 (incomplete, poor) Vrindavan Research Institute #10446 (incomplete, damaged) Nagari Pracarini Sabha #3156 Nagari Pracarini Sabha #692 Nagari Pracarini Sabha #872 Nagari Pracarini Sabha #885 Nagari Pracarini Sabha #1898

Kuṇḍaliyā (Hitopadeśa-­bāvanī / Viṣṇu-­bāvanī) 1692—­Jaipur City Palace #1489 (15) 1739—­Jaipur City Palace #3676 (1) early 19th century—­British Library, MSS Hindi C.32.b

Appendix = 315

19th century—­Jaipur City Palace #197 (4) 19th century—­Jodhpur RORI #13511 (29) undated—­Jaipur City Palace #3320 undated—­Vrindavan Research Institute #4418-­C (complete, good) undated—­Nagari Pracarini Sabha #3312 undated—­Nagari Pracarini Sabha #1658

Nām Pratāp 1758—­Jaipur City Palace #1541 (2) 1813—­Jaipur City Palace #2469 (6) 1821—­Jaipur City Palace #1334 (2) 1876—­Jaipur City Palace #2156 (25) 1930—­Sanjay Sharma Museum #759/944/14

Prahlād Caritra 1724—­Jodhpur RORI #12380 (23) 18th century (ca. 1750)—­Jaipur City Palace #1194 (2) 18th century—­Jaipur City Palace #1406 (6) 1859—­Jaipur City Palace #3524 (13) 19th century—­Jaipur City Palace #1935 (49) undated—­Jaipur City Palace #3519 (9)

Dhruv Caritra 18th century (ca. 1750)—­Jaipur City Palace #1194 (1) undated—­Jaipur City Palace #3319 (3)

Caturviśati-­avatāranāmāni (Sanskrit work) undated—­Jaipur City Palace #3090 (2)

Bhāgavat Pad Prasaṅg (contains more than three hundred poems by Agradās) 1742—­Jaipur City Palace #1616 (3)

Sītārām-­nāmlīlā 19th century—­Udaipur RORI #1927 (2)

Rāmjī kī Badhāī 19th century—­Alwar RORI #6017 (2)

316 9 Appendix

Nāmamāhātmya undated—­Vrindavan Research Institute #4343 (complete, good)

Gurujī-­aṣṭa undated—­Vrindavan Research Institute #16882-­A

Rānīmaṇgau 1799—­Vrindavan Research Institute #8089-­C

Sītā-­svayamvar-­gīt undated—­Chaupāsanī Shodh Sansthān #11984

Notes

Introduction





1. In using the term “early modern” to describe India circa 1500–­1750, I follow John Richards, whose classic essay identifies South Asia as being linked to the following six large-­scale (global) processes that he sees as distinguishing marks of the early modern world: (1) the creation of global sea passages linking the world through a transportation network; (2) the rise of a truly global world economy in which long-­d istance commerce connected economies on every continent; (3) the growth of large, stable, efficient states with largely unprecedented power and political unification; (4) the doubling of the world population; (5) the intensified use of land to expand production; and (6) the diffusion of new technologies including crop cultivation, gunpowder, and printing (Richards 1997). While I adopt the term “early modern,” it is an imperfect one, and we must keep in mind Daud Ali’s perceptive critical observation that “the arguments for ‘early modernism’ or ‘early modernity’ in South Asia . . . ​have often relied, rather ironically, on the very tropes of the ‘medieval’ once used to consign the Mughal Empire itself to a backward ‘medieval period.’ At this level, early modern historiography has not so much rectified images of medieval stagnation as simply pushed back their boundaries to pre-­Mughal times” (Ali 2012, 12). 2. Nandakumar 2003, 794, 857. 3. Ramanujan 1973, 40. 4. Hawley 2015b; see also Krishna Sharma 1987. 5. The narrative of the bhakti movement has complex roots, but especially important was Hindi scholarship produced in the context of twentieth-­century Indian nationalist agendas, which sought to create a sense of national identity by propagating the notion of a shared pan-­Indian bhakti religious heritage. Hawley’s A Storm of Songs (2015b) offers a detailed investigation of the historical origins, functions, and influences of the bhakti movement narrative (and the closely linked motif of “the four sampradāys”). 6. Along these lines, David Lorenzen (2004, 208) has also discussed the historical development of bhakti in terms of a plurality of bhakti movements, each associated with different regions, languages, social ideologies, and theologies (e.g., Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Śākta, nirguṇ, etc.).

318 9 Introduction









7. In addition to “early modern North India,” I regularly employ the designation “Mughal India” (with the understanding that Mughal India was early modern) in order to highlight the fact that most of the processes and communities I discuss took shape and flourished within the North Indian territorial and cultural sphere under Mughal imperial control and were fundamentally influenced by that fact. 8. The term “vulgate Vaiṣṇavism” was coined and elaborated by John Stratton Hawley (2005, 285–­300). 9. Keune 2016, 729. 10. Keune 2016, 745. 11. Throughout the book, in certain places I make a somewhat arbitrary, artificial distinction between the scholarly categories of Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga, on the one hand, and the Indian terms and historical phenomena of bhakti, tantra, and yoga on the other. In many cases, the distinction between one and the other is not at all clear, thus I have generally opted for the capitalized, nonitalicized forms only in those instances where I specifically wish to emphasize Bhakti, Tantra, and Yoga as broad subfields of scholarly study. 12. For a discussion of the bhakti traditions’ ambivalent position on caste and a critique of bhakti as a movement of and for social egalitarianism, see Burchett 2009. If bhakti has a social ideology, it certainly should not be conceived as a unitary presence inherent in bhakti songs, poetry, and hagiographical stories but rather as a range constructed variously by different readers and listeners in their encounters with the many historically specific forms and expressions of bhakti. 13. Nirguṇ bhakti poets and communities have tended to be lower caste, socially inclusive, and antibrahmanical in orientation, while saguṇ traditions have typically identified with caste-­ based Hinduism and purāṇic deities and tended to be more accommodating to orthodox ritual practices and brahmanical social customs. The nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction has considerable heuristic value; however, there was normally no clear-­cut division between nirguṇ and saguṇ conceptions and approaches, and while the distinction did become increasingly more meaningful over the course of the early modern period, bhakti poets and communities did not usually identify themselves as exclusively one or the other. See Hawley 2005, 70–­86; Williams 2007. 14. Krishna Sharma 1987. 15. Prentiss 1999, 153–­54. 16. Holdrege 2015, 24; emphasis in original. 17. Novetzke 2008, xi. 18. Novetzke 2007, 255. 19. Novetzke 2008, 19. 20. Novetzke 2007, 259. 21. Novetzke 2008, 22. 22. Hawley 2015b, 4. 23. Hawley 2015b, 295–­312. 24. Hawley 1984, 244. 25. Pechilis 2016. 26. Prentiss 1999, 6. 27. Prentiss 1999, 23. 28. Cort 2002, 61. 29. Cort 2002, 62.

Introduction = 319 30. Sangari 1990, 1464. 31. Krishna Sharma 1987, ix–­x iv, 41–­43. Sharma was particularly concerned to expose the way in which scholars have unjustifiably tended to present bhakti in terms of Vaiṣṇava monotheism and to falsely contrast it with the monism of Advaita Vedānta. More recently, Ankur Barua (2017, 320) has eloquently discussed the “conceptual fluidity of jñāna and bhakti” and the way they are variously, subtly interwoven in the works of medieval Hinduism, showing how “textual affiliations to or borrowings from scriptures such as the Bhagavad-­gītā, the Bhāgavata-­purāṇa, and others are compatible with diverse positions on a fine-­g rained continuum stretching from ‘pure’ Advaita to bhakti-­inflected Advaita to ‘pure’ bhakti universes.” 32. Keune 2015, 71. 33. Keune 2015, 71. 34. Brooks 1990, 5–­6. 35. The relatively few scholarly works that have offered explicit discussions of the interrelations of bhakti, tantra, and yoga seem to be confined largely (though not entirely) to three areas: (1) Scholarship on religious traditions of Bengal, a region in which the threads of bhakti, tantra, and yoga remained more interwoven after the early modern period than in most other parts of North India, where they unraveled into more distinctive, exclusive, and oppositionary religious categories; see especially the work of Edward C. Dimock Jr. ([1966] 1989), June McDaniel (1989; 2012), and Rachel McDermott (2001). (2) Scholarship on the relationship between Nāth yogī tantric practice/ideology and the devotion of the Sants, particularly Jñāndev, Kabīr, and the Dādū ­Panth; see especially the work of Monika Horstmann ([Thiel-­Horstmann] 1983; 2012; 2014) (on the Dādū ­Panth), Catharina Kiehnle (1997; 2000; 2005) and Charlotte Vaudeville (1968–­1969; 1996) (on Jñāndev), and Charlotte Vaudeville (1974) and Linda Hess ([Hess and Singh] 1983; 2015) (on Kabīr). (3) Scholarship on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and early modern Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava interpretations and developments of its Pāñcarātra-­influenced yogic bhakti praxis; see especially the work of Barbara Holdrege (2015). 36. Carman (1987) 2005, 857. 37. Frazier 2013, 105–­6. 38. Dobe 2015, 16–­17. 39. Hawley 1983. 40. See Indrani Chatterjee 2013, Sears 2014, and Stoker 2016. On the similar social and political role of Sufi monastic institutions, see the classic works by Eaton 1978 and Ernst 1992. 41. Indrani Chatterjee 2013, 1. 42. The Kāpālikas are a group of ascetic devotees of Bhairava Śiva known for their transgression of mainstream values and brahmanical purity restrictions. By the seventh century, Sanskrit literary references to Kāpālikas had become fairly commonplace—­t ypically portraying them as charlatan ascetics who wander about with a skull begging bowl, drinking liquor, and covered in the ashes of the dead. 43. Eaton and Wagoner 2014. 44. Behl 2007, 319. 45. Dalmia and Faruqui 2014, xii. 46. Dalmia and Faruqui 2014, xii. 47. Behl 2007, 322. 48. See, for instance, the essays in Orsini and Sheikh 2014; Dalmia and Faruqui 2014; de Bruijn and Busch 2014; and Orsini and Schofield 2015.

320 9 Introduction 49. Eaton 1978, 283. Eaton sees the three most fundamental variables defining and distinguishing different Sufis as “(1) how [they] interacted with the Muslim religious establishment or ‘ulama; (2) how they interacted with the court; and (3) how they interacted with the non-­ Muslim population,” while other key variables include their relation to Islamic doctrine, their social class, their place of residence, and their affiliation by order/lineage (284). 50. Finbarr Flood 2009, 9. 51. Finbarr Flood 2009, 9. 52. Finbarr Flood 2009, 4. 53. See Novetzke 2008. Novetzke also diverges from and adds to Warner’s work by stressing that publics “by their nature, remember and are constituted by a shared memory . . . ​publics are systems of memory” (18). 54. Warner 2002. 55. Warner 2002, 54. 56. Warner 2002, 75. 57. Using the term in a different fashion and historical context than I do here, the illustrious A. K. Ramanujan, in speaking about sixth-­to-­n inth-­century South India, also made reference to a bhakti “sensibility,” defining it as a “complex of concepts, practices, patterns of feelings coupled with their artistic expression in texts, temples, etc.” (1981, 103). 58. See Ricci 2011, 2–­3. 59. Meyer 2009, 5. 60. Ahmed 2004, 119–­20; emphasis in original. 61. Rosenwein 2006, 2. 62. Rosenwein 2016, 3. 63. Lincoln 1989, 18, 20, 25. 64. Cf. Pellegrini 2007, 918. 65. Pellegrini 2011, 71. 66. Schaefer 2015, 8; emphasis added. 67. In the field of affect theory, some scholars (e.g., Brian Massumi) sharply distinguish between affect and emotion, positing an important epistemological gap between how bodies feel (affect) and how subjects make sense (consciously and discursively) of how they feel (emotion), while other scholars (e.g., Sara Ahmed, Barbara Rosenwein) question this polarized emotion-­a ffect gap, arguing that the two cannot be so easily distinguished. 68. Throughout the book, in considering the history of bhakti I want to keep in mind, whenever relevant, the insights of affect theory and critical animal studies that suggest that our individual and social lives are fundamentally shaped by affects that flow through the body “at or beneath the threshold of cognition” and “outside of, prior to, or underneath language” (Schaefer 2015, 4, 24). 69. Hess 2015, 156. On the crucial interrelation of sound/music, emotion, and embodied religious participation, see also Wilke and Moebus 2011, 792, 807. 70. Williams 2014, 111. 71. If bhakti poems are not so much poems as songs, then our understanding of them cannot be separated from their performance. This is not to say that we cannot also analyze and appreciate a song as a poem, a stable written work of literature, nor is it to say that such songs were not appreciated in this way (indeed, to be a rasik meant, in part, to savor the subtle artistry in the words of a poem), but it is to say that such poems were by and large meant to be performed and heard as songs, assimilated not in a relation of eyes and brain to

1. The Tantric Age = 321



72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

words on a page but digested in the embodied terms of sonic vibrations and animal affects. To privilege text (and its discursive content) above performed song (and its affective impact) is to privilege sight over sound in a fashion characteristic of Western modernity and to diminish and obscure the affective power of the aural. Meyer 2009, 9. Schaefer 2015, 78–­79. Warner 2002, 81. Hirschkind 2005, 41. Hirschkind 2005, 40. While I speak in general terms here, of course there would have been differing registers of participation and resonance among members of the bhakti public, therefore we must avoid conceiving bhaktas as unitary or homogeneous in the way they responded to or participated in performances of bhakti songs and stories. Hirschkind 2009, 2. This formulation owes much to Joel Lee’s wonderful work on the sensuousness of caste; see Lee 2015, 42–­80. Lofton 2011, 16. Wedemeyer 2013, 6. Wedemeyer 2013, 38–­42. Doniger 2011, 166–­67. Keune 2015, 71. Jonathan Smith 1982, 35. Gottschalk 2012, 338.

1. The Tantric Age







1. Benoytosh Bhattacharyya seems to have coined the term “Tantric Age” in An Introduction to Buddhist Esoterism (1932) to describe South Asia’s early medieval period. More recently, Christian Wedemeyer has taken up the term in Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism (2013) to describe the late-­first-­millennium period of Indian religions. Gavin Flood (2006) has similarly spoken of a “tantric civilization” that flourished “during the medieval period before the rise of the hegemony of the Delhi Sultanate” (71). This period also generally corresponds with what Alexis Sanderson (2009) has called the “Śaiva Age,” and my characterization of it as the “Tantric Age” relies heavily on the evidence he has marshaled. 2. Gavin Flood 2006, 73. 3. Sanderson 1988, 661, 663. While the tantric scriptures are most often termed tantras, āgamas, and saṃhitās, they also include texts called sūtras, yāmalas, nigamas, and siddhāntas, among other names ( jñānas, vidyās, ḍāmaras, āmnāyas, arṇavas, rahaysa, etc.). 4. Goodall 1998, xxxvi–­x xxix; Hatley 2007a, 7n20. A general tendency emerged for non-­ Saiddhāntika (Śaiva-­Śākta) tantric texts to be termed tantras, Vaiṣṇava (Pāñcarātra) tantric texts to be termed saṃhitās, and orthodox Śaiva (Siddhānta) tantric texts to be termed āgamas, but this was not a hard-­a nd-­fast rule. Śaiva Siddhānta scriptures were designated as both āgamas and tantras (and occasionally as saṃhitās), and Pāñcarātra scriptures were termed tantras in addition to their more common designation as saṃhitās. 5. For more on this important text, including a translation of its first three (of five) sūtras, see Goodall 2015.

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6. Sanderson 1988, 660. 7. Nevertheless, the tantric tradition depends heavily upon the Vedic ritual framework and is in many respects continuous with the earlier Vedic tradition (and, just as much, the Atharvedic tradition); Goodall 1996, xxxi–­x xxii. 8. See Sanderson 2012–­2013, 12–­13. He notes that women were usually made “passive beneficiaries of initiation rather than . . . ​active initiates with access to office.” 9. Fisher 2017, 36. 10. Fisher 2017, 36. 11. The samayin receives samayadīkṣā, which allows him or her to take on the community’s identifying marks and to follow its basic rules of conduct. This is usually followed by the special initiation (viśeṣa-­dīkṣā) in which the disciple completes his ritual rebirth as a samayin and thus becomes eligible to worship Śiva on his own behalf and to study the Śaiva tantric literature. One becomes a putraka after undergoing the quintessential tantric initiation rite of nirvāṇadīkṣā, open only to those who had proven their spiritual “ripeness” to the guru and which ensured liberation at death. In the nirvāṇadīkṣā rite of Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, the guru—­v ia the power of tantric mantras—­ritually transforms himself into Śiva, enters the disciple’s body, extracts his soul, homologizing it with the various core elements and levels of the cosmos and (in a process involving ritual gestures, detailed visualizations, and the uttering of appropriate mantras) gradually purifying it of all previous karma and impurities—­revealing its full divinity—­before reinstalling it in the initiate, thereby virtually ensuring his liberation at death. Sādhakas receive the sādhakābhiṣeka, allowing them to seek out siddhis and bhukti, while the ācārya goes through a special consecration, the ācāryābhiṣeka. See Brunner 1994, 431–­32. 12. Sanderson 2006b, 3; Sanderson 1988, 660. 13. Sanderson 2006b, 2–­3. 14. Gavin Flood 2006, 11. While scholars have often identified the notion that “to worship a god one must become a god” as distinctively tantric, in fact, as Walter Kaelber (1989, 51–­52) has shown, earlier Vedic ritual necessitated the divinization of the body as well (though not through the imposition of mantras). 15. Fisher 2017, 37. 16. Hatley 2007a, 8. 17. As Annette Wilke explains, “What is most characteristic of Tantric mantras is the idea that they incorporate—­like a ‘seed’—­in their mere sound pattern the respective god or goddess (or another numinous force) in a very real sense” (2014, 135). Technically, mantras refer to the sonic forms of male deities, while vidyās refer to sonic forms of female deities. 18. Śakti is originally a theological concept developed in tantric Śaivism, thus it can be problematic to project it onto other tantric traditions that used different terminology with different metaphysical connotations. Nevertheless, śakti-­like conceptions of the sacred as tremendous cosmic power pervaded all tantric traditions. In the Buddhist context, for instance, Glen Wallis has argued that the principle underlying the practice of esoteric Buddhists in early medieval India “was the assumption of the Buddha’s power in the world, and that the design of the practice was to enable the practitioner to mediate that power and manipulate it toward particular ends” (2002, 1). 19. Padoux 2017, 16. 20. Brooks 1992, xix. 21. In this sense, David Gordon White is quite right to have stressed the role of demonology in tantric systems (2012b, 164–­66) and to have described tantra as, in large part, an array of

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ritual techniques for the control of various powerful spirit beings, “both for one’s own benefit and as tools to use against others” (2003, 13). 22. Relatedly, some aspects of tantric ritual seem to have developed out of post-­Vedic, pretantric śānti (pacification/appeasement) rituals in which the non-­Vedic astrological tradition ( jyotiḥśāsta) appropriated late-­Vedic Atharvan ritual methods for protecting rulers (and others) from omens and malevolent astrological forces (e.g., adbhuta, utpāta, bhaya, duḥsvapna). If tantric initiation ceremonies were modeled on royal consecration ceremonies such as the rājyābhiṣeka, as argued by Ronald Davidson (2002), Marko Geslani (2012) has shown that these royal coronation rites had a core apotropaic function that has not been adequately emphasized, making use of non-­Vedic mantras and invoking the power of a wide array of cosmic deities to protect the king (and his subjects) from misfortune and inauspicious omens. For an argument (drawing on Geslani’s work) that the esoteric Buddhist maṇḍala initiation ceremony modeled itself on the paradigm of these post-­Vedic śānti rituals, see Shinohara 2014, 64–­90. 23. See White 2009, 196. 24. Rastelli 2000, 320–­22. 25. Rastelli 2000, 340. 26. Rastelli 2000, 340–­43, 354–­55. The sādhaka who has mastered his mūla-­mantra is said to have also acquired the ability to successfully perform any of the infamous sinister six rites, or ṣaṭkarman. The sādhaka achieves any of these various goals by ritually actualizing the mantra and its power through recitation ( japa) of the mantra, supported by visualization meditation (dhyāna) and imposition (nyāsa) of the mantra upon the body or a physical object (e.g., an amulet) (349–­50). 27. White 2011, 574. 28. Padoux 2017, 132. 29. Sanderson 1995, 22. 30. Ferrario 2015, 16–­20. 31. Ferrario 2015, 20–­24. See Gupta 1986; Oberhammer 2007, 37–­54; Czerniak-­Drożdżowicz 2003. 32. Gupta 1986. 33. Ferrario 2015, 28–­29. 34. Dominic Goodall, email message to author, August 29, 2017. 35. Ferrario 2015, 30. 36. Ferrario 2015, 31. 37. Ferrario 2015, 24, 28–­29, 59. 38. On stotra literature and its relevance to the study of bhakti, see Stainton 2019. 39. Ferrario 2015, 31–­32. 40. The Mataṅgapārameśvara tells the story of a sage named Mataṅga who is meditating intently on Śiva when he becomes distracted by the sweet sound of wind passing through stalks of bamboo, loses his focus, snatches a stalk of bamboo, and fashions it into a flute, then fervently plays the flute with “supreme bhakti,” such that Śiva himself comes down and appears before Mataṅga, who is then further possessed by the fervor of bhakti toward Śiva. For a discussion of this text and how tantric Śaiva brahmans in the ninth century interpreted it in such a way as to minimize or eliminate the value of bhakti while reiterating the power and salvific efficacy of tantric ritual, see Schwartz 2012a, 216–­225. Schwartz offers an insightful analysis of the Kashmiri Siddhāntin Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s commentary on this text and its subordination of bhakti to ritual; however, it seems to me that he errs in suggesting that the devotional voice of the lay Śivadharma tradition is present in the early

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tantric tradition, since all our evidence suggests that bhakti had a very different, and less important, place in early tantric Śaivism than it did in the Śivadharma. See Ferrario’s (2015, 50–­58) detailed analysis and critique of Schwartz’s position. 41. Dominic Goodall, email message to author, August 29, 2017. 42. Hardy 1983. 43. Champakalakshmi (1996) 2004, 50. 44. Champakalakshmi (1996) 2004, 64. 45. Pechilis 2016. Pechilis is specifically interested in the way in which Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār emphasizes the potency of the cremation ground, drawing on certain prototantric (Atimārga) and early tantric (Mantramārga) practices and conceptions but reframing them in the terms of a bhakti disposition averse to tantra’s elaborate ritual procedures. 46. Peterson 1989, 12. 47. Translated and discussed in Judith Martin 1983, 114–­15. 48. Hudson 2008, 10. 49. Hudson 2000, 206. 50. I am indebted to Archana Venkatesan (email message to author, November  15, 2017) for making me aware of, and sending me a rough translation of, this passage. 51. Hudson 2008, 25–­26. 52. White 2011, 575. 53. Sanderson 2009. 54. Sanderson 2009, 58–­61. 55. Sanderson 2006b, 4. 56. Sanderson 2006b, 6. 57. Wedemeyer 2013, 31. 58. Davis 1991, 4. 59. An early form of Pañcarātra Vaiṣṇavism likely existed before tantric Śaivism, but this early Pañcarātra did not have a tantric ritual system and later came to adopt the popular ritual system developed within tantric Śaivism (i.e., the Śaiva Mantramārga); Sanderson 2009, 58–­70. 60. The mistaken idea that the Śaiva Siddhānta and Pāñcarātra are marginal to the study of Tantra proper is linked, in part, to the artificial distinction some scholars have made between texts that designate themselves as Tantras, Āgamas, and Saṃḥitās. These three designations were, in fact, synonymous and interchangeable terms for tantric scriptural revelation, with both Pāñcarātra and Śaiva Siddhānta scriptures at times referring to themselves as Tantras (in addition to Āgamas or Saṃhitās). See Goodall 1998, xxxvi–­x xxix; Hatley 2007a, 7n20. 61. Thanks to the research of Alexis Sanderson, along with scholars such as Dominic Goodall, Harunaga Isaacson, Mark Dyczkowski, Diwakar Acharya, Shaman Hatley, and Somdev Vasudeva, among many other tantric studies experts, as well as ongoing (mostly text-­ critical) studies of the lay Śaiva traditions of first-­m illennium India (by scholars such as Peter Bisschop, Florinda De Simini, Timothy Lubin, Nirajan Kafle, and Nina Mirnig, among others), our knowledge of tantric and Śaiva traditions, and of early medieval religiosity more generally, has grown in leaps and bounds and will only continue to do so in the coming decades. Unfortunately, however, this specialized (and predominantly European) tantric studies scholarship has, for the most part, not made its way into the basic formulations of nonspecialist scholarship on South Asian religious history and practice, something I

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hope to address in some small way in this chapter. For a useful assessment of the field of tantric studies, including discussion of key authors and publications that have advanced scholarly understandings of Tantra in recent decades, see Goodall and Isaacson 2011. 62. For my present purpose, blood sacrifice and offering of alcohol will not be considered radically transgressive practices. Sanguinary rites did involve impure and polluting substances, but they seem to have been so widely practiced in medieval India that they cannot be understood to have violated fundamental social codes and shocked or aroused social censure in the same way that (the far more rarely performed) tantric sexual and mortuary rites clearly did. 63. A major branch of Śaiva tantric scriptures known as the Vidyāpīṭha, for instance, discusses the performance of mortuary and sexual rites centered on the offering of conventionally impure substances (including blood, alcohol, and sexual fluids) to feminine deities (goddesses and yoginīs) in order to acquire their extraordinary powers. Later tantric texts of the Kaula tradition offered domesticated, private versions (for householders) of such transgressive practices, detailing ritual copulation with “polluted” outcast women and consumption of alcohol, human feces, and sexual fluids as a means to achieve and perform nondual spiritual enlightenment, with its transcendence of the dualities and arbitrary moral codes of the social world. 64. The term “practical magic” is meant to refer to a wide spectrum of this-­worldly ritualized practices with more pragmatic, worldly aims, including making protective amulets, love potions, and spells, or power-­g iving pills, performing weather and crop-­related rites, and conducting rites to defeat or harm enemies. 65. Sanderson 2013, 214. While generally not public or mainstream in the way that Saiddhāntika rituals and institutions were, non-­Saiddhāntika Śākta-­oriented communities also conducted rituals for the protection of the king and state, especially in times of danger. 66. Sanderson 2006a, 146. 67. Davidson 2002, 26. 68. Sanderson 2001, 8–­11. These three kings were from the Deccan, Orissa, and the Tamil south. Around the same time (seventh to eighth centuries) it seems Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇava tantra began to be important in royal cults in Kashmir and the Tamil country. 69. White 2011, 579. 70. White 2011, 578. 71. Sanderson 2009, 254. 72. Sanderson 2009, 258–­59. 73. Sanderson 2009, 249–­52, 301–­3. 74. Davidson 2002, 177. 75. Davis 1991, 8. 76. On the economic role of temples, temple patronage, and the ways that temple building was linked to the expansion of brahmanical authority, agricultural development, and political integration, see Talbot 2001, 94, 102–­3, 117–­20. 77. Sears 2014, 10. 78. Sears 2008, 26. 79. Sanderson 2009, 266. 80. Sears 2014, 6. 81. Misra 1997, 75–­77. Misra’s research, relying predominantly on epigraphic records, suggests that maṭhas of the Mattamayūra order—­a branch of the tantric Śaiva Siddhānta school—­in

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the Kalacuri state of central India (ca. seventh to thirteenth centuries) supported the state by garrisoning war forces, manufacturing armaments, offering training in warfare, and perhaps even themselves recruiting a combatant force. 82. Sears 2014, 10. 83. Sears 2008, 26. 84. Sanderson 2009, 268. 85. Sanderson 2009, 267. 86. Medieval kings allied themselves primarily with Saiddhāntika Śaiva tantric communities and institutions, which subsumed and preserved the brahmanical social order; however, the broad shift of tantra (from esoteric, private contexts) into mainstream, public settings also involved elements of the heterodox non-­Saiddhāntika tantric traditions, particularly in rituals conducted to assist and protect the king and state against enemies and calamities. India’s well-­k nown yoginī temples, constructed mostly in the tenth through twelfth centuries, are a case in point. Shaman Hatley remarks that, by the tenth century, the originally esoteric yoginīs “became prominent in the wider Indic religious landscape, as attested by their entry into the purāṇic literature and the unique, circular, open-­a ir temples enshrining them across the subcontinent” (2012, 107). Citing evidence of the integration of yoginī temples into major state-­sponsored temple complexes, their proximity to royal capitals, and the royal patronage of these temples, Hatley argues that the yoginī temples reflect “the adaptation of esoteric pantheons and secretive praxis systems to a more public, calendrical liturgy suiting the aspirations of elite patrons and performed in permanent structures” (2014, 216). In the public context of the yoginī temples, tantric and purāṇic modes of worship melded. Rituals involving sex or sexual fluids seem to have been abandoned, but offerings of blood (animal sacrifice) and alcohol, night vigils, and fire rituals were central. Relatedly, Judit Törzsök (2012) has shown that Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī, a Sanskrit work of twelfth-­century Kashmir, recommends a king’s engagement with tantric mantras and magic but sees participation in polluting, transgressive (Kaula and Krama) tantric rituals (including yoginīsādhana) as undesirable and dangerous, even as causes of a king’s downfall. 87. Sanderson 2013, 224. 88. Sanderson 2013, 224. 89. Sanderson 2015. 90. The Śivadharma corpus, which has not yet been critically edited, consists of the Śivadharma, Śivadharmottara, Śivadharmasaṃgraha, Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, Uttarottaramahāsaṃvāda, Śivopaniṣad, Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha, Dharmaputrikā, and Lalitavistara. The first two texts (the Śivadharma and Śivadharmottara) of this corpus are broadly attested and were clearly composed against a Pāśupata (Śaiva Atimārga) background, but the full corpus is attested only in Nepal, with the later texts of the corpus reflecting the concerns of other (non-­Pāśupata) communities; Florinda De Simini, email message to author, June 6, 2018. 91. De Simini 2016a, 22; De Simini 2016b, 236. 92. De Simini 2016a, 49. 93. Śivadharma 1.36; translation in Schwartz 2012a, 211. 94. Translation of this passage is mine, based on the Sanskrit text provided in Ganesan and Sathyanarayanan 2010–­2011, 54. I have consulted Ganesan and Sathyanararyan’s translation as well as that in Schwartz 2012a, 212, 227–­28. I am grateful to Florinda De Simini for checking the Sanskrit text used by these scholars against an earlier manuscript of the text in her possession (Asiatic Society of Calcutta, G4077, dated 1036). She found only very minor differences in the text that did not substantively change the meaning of the passage. The

1. The Tantric Age = 327 manuscript used by Schwartz inserts kīrtan into the description of bhakti, a word not present in the other manuscripts used by De Simini or Ganesan and Sathyanarayanan. 95. The Śivadharma and its eight-­limbed description of bhakti precede the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and its well-­k nown ninefold classification of bhakti by nearly half a millennium. It would seem to be earlier than even the vernacular “emotional bhakti” expressed by the Vaiṣṇava Tamil poet-­saints. Nammālvār’s impassioned hymns come from the seventh century (i.e., most likely after the Śivadharma), and the few Tamil Vaiṣṇava bhakti saints (Ālvārs) preceding him seem to have expressed a more intellectual devotion related to the theistic yoga of the Bhagavad Gītā. For some other brief comments upon the nature of the Śivadharma’s bhakti and its relationship to that of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and later bhakti traditions, see Schwartz 2012a, 212, 227–­28. 96. Travis Smith 2016, 363. 97. On this topic, see De Simini’s outstanding study Of Gods and Books (2016a). 98. The Devīpurāṇa (91.23) states that “[from] listening, bhakti emerges; [urged] by bhakti, one sits intent upon the guru, and this explains the scriptures of knowledge (vidyā-­āgamān). Knowledge resides in manuscripts (granthā), o king!” (De Simini 2016a, 79–­80n222). 99. Sanderson 2012–­2013, 4. He remarks that “the text probably envisages its being chanted in Sanskrit with each verse or group of verses followed by an explanation in the vernacular.” 100. Holdrege 2015, 81, 82–­84. 101. Holdrege 2015, 81; emphasis in original. 102. For a fascinating discussion of the bhaktajana as a devotional public representing the political power of the quotidian world, and bhakti as “a fulcrum around which social cohesion adheres,” see Novetzke 2016, 93–­102. Novetzke discusses a series of Marathi inscriptions, 1189–­1311, in which the Yādava state of Maharashtra invokes a bhakti public—­the bhaktajana—­in a display of beneficence meant to appeal to a quotidian populace of devotees (and thus acknowledging them as a political force). 103. It appears that the lay Śaiva devotional tradition of early medieval India was more socially liberal than its lay Vaiṣṇava counterpart, and this may have had something to do with Śaivism’s great success. Timothy Lubin (2017) has discussed how the Śivadharma makes far more significant moves toward social inclusion (particularly for women and śūdras) than the Viṣṇudharma (the authoritative lay Vaiṣṇava scripture likely composed around the same time as the Śivadharma), whose conception of Viṣṇu-­bhakti mostly adheres to classical Smārta brahmanical status hierarchy and its prerogatives. 104. Lubin 2011, XXX. 105. Hazra 1952–­1953, 12. 106. Hiltebeitel 2012, 159. 107. Hiltebeitel 2012, 160 108. De Simini 2016a, 46, 66. 109. De Simini 2016a, 66. 110. De Simini 2016a, 67n194. 111. De Simini 2016a, 58. 112. Sanderson 2013, 212; De Simini 2016a, 50. 113. Bisschop 2014, 134–­35; De Simini 2016a, 51–­52. 114. On the dating of the Pāśupata sect (and debates surrounding it), see Lorenzen (1972) 1991b, 173–­92. Some scholars date the Pāśupatas to the second century BCE, but Lorenzen gives compelling evidence for a second century CE date. 115. Bisschop 2010, 484–­85.

328 9 1. The Tantric Age 116. Davidson 2002, 85, 186. 117. Bakker 2014, 14. 118. According to Bisschop, “the earliest explicit epigraphical references to Pāśupatas that we possess are at the same time among the earliest examples of copper-­plate grants recording endowments for temple worship” (2010, 485). These are late fourth-­century inscriptions that refer to Pāśupatas as recipients of grants for the performance of worship in temples. This is not to say that Pāśupatas “created” the Śaiva temple cult, for the evidence suggests that the tradition of temple-­based lay devotion was an independent and preexisting phenomenon with which initiatory communities like the Pāśupatas later integrated. See Sanderson 2012–­2013, 2–­8. 119. Travis Smith 2007, 85, 313. 120. Travis Smith 2007, 301–­2. 121. The Īśvara Gītā, a circa eighth-­century Pāśupata philosophical poem (part of the popular Kūrma Purāṇa) studied and translated by Andrew Nicholson (2014), teaches a yoga (seemingly open to śūdras and women) in which visualization meditation exercises facilitate the yogī’s self-­deification. I have highlighted the divinization of the self as one of the distinctive elements of tantric practice, thus the goal of the Īśvara Gītā’s Pāśupata yoga—­to identify with and “become” God (Śiva)—­speaks to how fuzzy the boundaries were been between “tantric” (mantra-­mārga) practice and atimārga Pāśupata practice in the eighth century. 122. Travis Smith 2007, 295, 313. 123. For evidence of how the patronage of temples and monasteries that spurred the growth of early Śaivism was not undertaken primarily or exclusively by political elites but was significantly dependent upon the religious giving (dāna) of local collectives of merchants, traders, and artisans, see Cecil 2016. 124. Alvarez 1990, 407–­14. Relatedly, Ronald Davidson identifies a list of more than a hundred probable Pāśupata sites all over India (2002, 184, 341–­43). 125. De Simini 2016a, 59. 126. Bonazzoli 1993, 348. Śivadharma 12.109 states, yathā śivas tathā yogī yathā yogī tathā śivaḥ // 127. De Simini 2016a, 51n46. The “sixfold yoga” mentioned by the text is likely the same as the six-­limbed Pāśupata yoga taught in the Skanda Purāṇa, a yoga that, S. D. Vasudeva notes, has many parallels with the yogas of the Śaiva Mantramārga, an indication of tantric yoga’s Pāśupata prehistory (2017, 3). 128. While the yogī is the spiritual ideal in these texts, the Śivadharma and Śivadharmottara do sometimes give hints that others (i.e., not only initiated yogins but also lay devotees) can attain liberation through the power of the śiva-­jñāna; Florinda De Simini, email message to author, June 19, 2018. 129. My translation from the Sanskrit text in Hazra 1952–­1953, 13n28. tan nirvedāc ca vairāgyaṃ vairāgyāj jñāna-­saṃbhavaḥ / jñānat pravartate yogo yogād duḥkhāntam āpnuyāt // Thanks to Hamsa Stainton for his assistance with this verse. 130. White 2009, 167–­94; Coleman 2014. 131. White 2009, 168. 132. Travis Smith 2007, 304, 307–­9. 133. Travis Smith 2007, 307. 134. Davis 1991, 15. Particularly influential was the Mattamayūra branch of the Śaiva Siddhānta, based in central India but with a network of monasteries extending from Kashmir to the seacoasts of the south. On this important tantric lineage, see Sears 2014, 12–­33.

1. The Tantric Age = 329 135. 136. 137. 138.

Travis Smith 2012, 173. Chattopadhyaya 1993, 37. Sanderson 2009, 42. Ronald Davidson (2002, 173, 225–­26) notes a striking change in early medieval literature, which contains far more positive attitudes toward, and depictions of, “tribal” peoples than earlier literature, a trend correlated with state/brahmanical expansion into forest/jungle areas, increased contact with “tribals,” and feudalization of “tribal” clans. 139. Brahmans, of course, are not a homogeneous community; there are enormous regional variations and complex internal differentiations among brahman communities, yet there is still great heuristic value in the notion of a “brahmanical tradition.” As Kunal Chakrabarti puts it, “We cannot challenge the proposition that if in India’s diverse cultural traditions there is one way of life and one medium of expression that can claim a semblance of pervasive influence these are Brahmanism and Sanskrit. The brahmanical tradition has decidedly the widest horizontal spread which cuts across regional boundaries. It is a continuous, overarching tradition with an essential unity of content and purpose compared to the many localized traditions which, though rich in cultural content, are nevertheless varied and fragmented” (2001, 95–­96). 140. Yokochi 2004: 15. Jaya Tyagi describes how the inclusion of goddesses (and certain vratas) in purāṇic and tantric literature of the period had much to do with a realization that women were important patrons and promoters of religious cults (Tyagi 2014: 89–­136). 141. Yokochi 2004, 16. 142. Sanderson 1988, 660; White 2003, 127. 143. See especially Chakrabarti 2001. 144. Chakrabarti 2001, 190. 145. Sanderson 2013, 217. 146. Sanderson 2006b, 15. Sanderson also states, “In Purāṇic texts such as the Uttarabhāga of the Liṅgapurāṇa, the Kālikāpurāṇa, the Devīpurāṇa, and the Agnipurāṇa, the boundary between Smārta and Tantric domains has almost completely dissolved” (2009, 250). 147. Kafle 2015, 33, 61. The dating of this text was proposed by Anil Kumar Acharya. Kafle’s research shows that the Śivadharmasaṅgraha has significant parallels with the Skanda Purāṇa and Vāyu Purāṇa, contains five full chapters that closely parallel the Niśvāsamukha (the introductory text of the canonical Śaiva Tantra, the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā), and two chapters identical to, or corresponding closely with, parts of the Guhyasūtra, the fifth and final sūtra of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. 148. Schwartz 2018; Davis 2005. 149. Schwartz 2018, 7. 150. Schwartz 2018, 16–­17. 151. R. S. Sharma argues that, in the context of early medieval agrarian expansion, śūdras who had been enlisted by brahmans as cultivators (karśakas) of newly settled lands “naturally came to have some rights” in those lands and “this became inconsistent with the traditional ritual status of the śūdras which had to be raised by providing initiation for them in the tantric sects” (1974, 179–­80). 152. Mirnig 2013, 292, 298. Mirnig’s research on the different modes of śrāddha (postmortuary ancestor worship) rites offered to householders by the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition in pre-­t welfth-­century sources shows how tantric communities reached out to the broader populace of Hindu householders while suggesting that modes of worship prescribed for

330 9 1. The Tantric Age entry-­level (samayin) tantric initiates were at times the same as those prescribed for lay devotees. 153. Sanderson 2013, 237–­39. On mass tantric initiation ceremonies, see also Nandi 1973, 81. 154. Sanderson 2013, 239. 155. Indrani Chatterjee 2013, 6. The “payments” or “gifts” made to a guru (and his monastic order) ranged from labor services or foodstuffs (grain, wine, meat) to artisanal bronze, silver, or gold items to tax-­exempt land grants. On the topic of tantric initiates’ surrendering portions of their wealth (to the guru) for use by the community they have just joined, see Schwartz 2018, 19–­20. 156. Travis Smith 2012, 173. 157. Gavin Flood 2006, 73. 158. Gavin Flood 2006, 28. 159. Frederick Smith 2006, 376. 160. Frederick Smith 2006, 369. 161. Frederick Smith 2006, 383. 162. Frederick Smith 2006, 385. 163. Slouber 2017a. 164. Slouber 2017a, 16. Diwakar Acharya (2016, 157–­58) notes that the Gāruḍa Tantras are usually paired with the Bhūta Tantras, probably because both are concerned with healing. The Bhūta Tantras incorporated (into tantric scripture and ritual systems) and expanded upon the branch of Āyurveda known as bhūtavidyā, which deals with rituals of appeasement to various semidivine and demonic beings to pacify these possessing spirits and to heal and free people from their grip. 165. Slouber 2012, 153. 166. Slouber 2012, 152. 167. Slouber 2012, 50. The Bhūta Tantras describe the same basic procedure for the exorcist, though he is to visualize himself not as Garuḍa but as Bhairava (or Skanda) in order to pacify or banish the demon/spirit possessing the patient. For details of the gāruḍika’s tantric ritual procedure, see especially Slouber 2017a, 67–­74. 168. Indeed, in other work, Slouber (2017b) has suggested that tantric exorcists probably drew on the practices of tribal shamans and sought to spread these practices in an altered form, merging them with Sanskritic tantric ritual and developing them “in conjunction with the idiom of Śaiva mantra-­śāstra.” 169. Slouber 2012, 51; Slouber 2017a, 127–­28. 170. Slouber 2017a, 127–­28. Kṣemendra’s eleventh-­century satirical poem Narmamālā (2.142.145) describes an untouchable leather worker who raises his status by, at one point, “landing a job as a protector of crops because he knew the Gāruḍa Tantras” (128). 171. Babb 1975, 178–­79. 172. In emphasizing that the tantric ritual process and pattern were relatively constant and shared, I do not mean to imply that sect-­and text-­specific doctrinal, theological, and metaphysical content (the specific deities, mantras, descriptions of the levels of the cosmos, etc.) were not important. Indeed, they were absolutely central in teaching practitioners to “inhabit a tradition-­specific subjectivity”; however, what I wish to emphasize instead is a shared pan-­Indian tantric culture of ritual forms/methods and cosmological assumptions, “a shared substrate of ritual and cosmology in spite of divergent metaphysical claims” (Gavin Flood 2006, ix, 28). Specific sectarian philosophical commitments certainly influenced how

1. The Tantric Age = 331 these shared ritual technologies were used and understood, thus we might imagine a religious world characterized by the multinodal interaction of reinterpretations of a stable core of tantric ritual procedures, with each sectarian reinterpretation inspiring further competition and development. 173. Sanderson 2001, 38–­39n50. Dominic Goodall’s (2011) study of the enthronement of a central deity (in visualization meditation) as a central practice in nearly all tantric cults provides further evidence for this notion of “a single ‘Tantric’ language.” In other work, Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson (2016) have offered a detailed identification and discussion of the specific elements of a “shared ritual syntax” among tantric traditions. 174. Slouber 2012, 153. 175. White 2003, 150. 176. At the scholastic level, the rise of Vedānta centered on competing interpretations of Bādarāyaṇa’s Brahmasūtras (a.k.a. the Vedānta Sūtra), a summary and systemization of the Upaniṣads’ ideas regarding the nature of the universe and the path to liberating knowledge. Unfortunately, a proper analysis of the pivotal role Vedānta played in late medieval and early modern religious developments (including especially developments in the bhakti and yoga traditions) in both North and South India is a topic beyond the scope of this book. 177. On Advaita Vedānta and yoga, see Schwartz 2017 and Mallinson 2014a; and on Advaita Vedānta and bhakti, see, for example, Venkatkrishnan 2015 and Barua 2017. 178. Nicholson 2010, 2, 200–­201. Andrew Nicholson has argued that “the perceived threat of Islam” motivated Sanskrit intellectuals in the twelfth century to create, for the first time, “a strictly defined category of āstika philosophical systems, systems that professed belief in the authority of the Veda.” Before this the category of āstika had been an indistinct one potentially admitting Buddhists and Jains, but between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries Advaita Vedāntins came to permanently classify Buddhists and Jains as “deniers” (nāstikas), while simultaneously the category of nāstika underwent “a subtle blurring with categories like ‘barbarian’ (mleccha), allowing foreigners to be classed together with Buddhists and Jainas” (200). Drawing on the earlier arguments of David Lorenzen (2005) and Sheldon Pollock (1993), Nicholson thus suggests that it was the presence of Islam that sparked these intellectual efforts to conceive a distinct, unified Hindu identity. 179. Fisher 2017, 38–­48. While pre-­t welfth-­century tantric Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions had positioned themselves as independent religious systems whose basis of authority in tantric revelation required no reference to the Veda, with the influential works of Rāmānuja and Śrīkaṇṭha—­which utilized Vedāntic exegesis to present their respective Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva traditions as emblematic of Vedic orthodoxy—­this began to change. Sectarian theistic communities in South India that had until then relied solely on tantric scriptural authority now increasingly deferred to norms and doctrines grounded in the authority of Vedic revelation; see Clark 2006, 215, 221–­22. Using the philosophy of Vedānta, theologians were able to variously meld bhakti and yoga (including the techniques of tantric yoga) with jñāna, thereby constructing a host of new, competing sectarian Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva forms of orthodox brahmanical religiosity. 180. Allen 2014, 883; Minkowski 2011, 218. Michael Allen (2014) argues that “the late medieval developments discussed by Nicholson [2010]” (­i.e., intellectual efforts to conceive a distinct, unitary Hindu philosophical tradition) “might arguably be seen as a natural unfolding of  scholastic commentarial traditions—­with their commitments to systematizing ideas,

332 9 1. The Tantric Age refining terms and categories, and resolving apparent contradictions—­rather than as a direct response to Islam” (883). Though Allen does not establish a meaningful intellectual trend prior to the twelfth century, he complicates Nicholson’s argument (see n. 178) by offering some examples of pre-­t welfth-­century scholars (e.g., Vācaspati Miśra, tenth century) who drew a sharp line between schools that accept the Vedas and those that openly rejected them (Buddhists, Jains, Kāpālikas) and even associated the non-­Vedic schools with mlecchas. Relatedly, Christopher Minkowski (2011) has suggested that the key shift of the powerful Śṛngerī and Kāñcīpuram maṭhas from tantric Śaivism to a brahmanical Advaita Vedāntic Śaivism in the late medieval and early modern periods (see Clark 2006, 177–­226) was not any sort of reaction to Islam but rather was “probably in response to the growth of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava institutions” (218). 181. Indian intellectuals and social elites, unlike much of the Indian populace at large, do seem to have perceived Turko-­A fghan invasions and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate as a threat—­specifically a threat to the traditional brahmanical social and political order (i.e., to brahmanical privilege)—­though they generally did not conceive them or the threat they posed in religious terms. See, for instance, Talbot 2003 and Ernst 1992, 29–­37. 182. White 2011, 577. 183. White 2011.

2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs



1. It was Marshall Hodgson (1974, 59) who coined the term “Islamicate” to distinguish “the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims” from the religion of Islam (e.g., its doctrines, rituals, etc.) itself. Hodgson also coined and elaborated the term “Persianate” (1977, 293–­314). 2. Eaton 2003a, 9. 3. Eaton 2003a, 9. 4. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, xxii. 5. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, xxv. 6. Pollock 2006. 7. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, 21. 8. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, 24. 9. Digby (1986) 2003, 235. 10. Eaton 2003a, 11. 11. O’Hanlon 2007a, 364. 12. Richard Eaton (2000b) has shown that the Turks’ destruction and desecration of temple sites was generally not done for religious motives but out of strategic political considerations. Since temples were important symbols of political power for Hindu kings, violence to temple sites was intended to delegitimate the previous royal authority in newly conquered realms. For these same reasons, competing Hindu kings engaged in desecration of each other’s temples well before the Sultanate period. Thus, the temple destruction/desecration of the Sultanate period was a continuation of an established Indian military-­ political practice and was not based in anti-­Hindu religious sentiment but rather was a way to seize resources/wealth and to undermine the authority of enemy kings (whose power was considered to be embodied in the temples). Nevertheless, it is true that destructions of

2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs = 333











Hindu monuments were sometimes celebrated in Afghan documents as a religious achievement as part of the rhetoric of Islamic rule; see also Davis 1993. 13. See Talbot 2003, 90–­93. 14. Ernst 1992, 31. 15. See Chandra 1996, 122–­30. 16. Willis 1993, 51. 17. Wink 1997, 294. Wink explains, “It was only in South India that the building of large temple complexes remained embedded in a Hindu polity and continued to be organically linked to the other institutions of kingship and social organization in a variety of complex ways. . . . ​ Nowhere in the North did the Hindu temple building tradition perpetuate itself without hindrance” (324, 327). 18. Davis 1991, 17–­18. 19. Davis 1991, 17–­18. 20. Sears 2009, 27. 21. Sears 2009, 8. 22. Sears 2009, 10, 24. 23. Satish Chandra remarks, in the context of the changes wrought by Sultanate power, “it would appear that the first beneficiaries of the diminished influence of the brahmans were the Nathpanthi yogis. This sect seems to have reached the height of its prestige and influence during the 13th and 14th centuries” (1996, 124). 24. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, 25. 25. Alam 2004, 118. 26. Eaton and Wagoner 2014, 26. 27. See Wagoner 1996. It seems that in many cases, the “Islamicate” (Wagoner’s term of choice in the article cited here) was, in fact, mediated by the “Persianate.” 28. Sheikh 2017, 38–­39. 29. Eaton 2005, 25–­26. Eaton explains how the Sultanate was able to use the iqtā‘ system to penetrate “the grass roots of local politics by co-­opting and redefining local revenue systems and personnel.” In some cases, the sultans in Delhi recognized lands held by entrenched local chiefs as iqtā‘ and designated those chiefs as the overseers (iqtā‘ holders) of that land, thus seeking to transform potential enemies into servants of the state. 30. Behl 2012a, 16. 31. Emblematic of this process is the great Persianate Indian poet and musician Amīr Khusrau Dihlavī (1253–­1325), patronized by both Khalji and Tughlaq sultans. Born of an Indian mother, he proudly modeled a distinctly Indic tradition of Persian poetry, was a disciple of the Chishti shaikh Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā’ and is famous for his influence on Indian musical traditions, credited with begetting the South Asian Sufi musical form of qawwālī. 32. Stewart and McGregor 2018; emphasis in original. 33. Stewart and McGregor 2018. 34. Richards 1998b, 10. 35. Ernst 1992, 25. 36. Ernst 1992, 25–­26. 37. Hawley 2015b, 90. 38. Ernst 1992, 38. 39. Lorenzen 2005, 53; Nicholson 2010, 2–­3, 200–­201. 40. Moin 2012a, 33–­34.

334 9 2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs 41. Eaton 2005, 45. 42. Digby 1975, 17–­18. 43. On the spread of Sufi khānqāhs in lineage-­based networks across India, see Nizami 1961, 175–­77. 44. Digby 2004, 302–­5. 45. The Chishti order began in central Afghanistan but became the largest and most popular of South Asian Sufi traditions. It was established in India by Mu’in ud-­Din Chishti (d. 1236), who settled in Ajmer, Rajasthan, in the wake of the Ghurid conquest of North India. 46. Digby (1986) 2003, 242–­52. A key factor in the success of Nizām al-­Din and the Chishtis was also the popularity and impact of Nizām al-­Dīn’s master, Bābā Farīd (d. 1265), in the Punjab. On Bābā Farīd, see Eaton 2003b. 47. For a historical introduction to the Chishti, Suhrwardi, Naqshbandi, and Kubrawi Sufi orders in India, see Rizvi 1978, 114–­300. 48. Bulliet 2004, 36. 49. Moin 2012a, 7–­8. 50. Eaton 2003b, 263. 51. Eaton 2003b, 264. 52. Moin 2012a, 100. 53. Sears 2009. 54. Ernst 2005, 23. 55. Quoted in White 2009, 232. 56. Joel Bordeaux, email message to author, July 4, 2014. 57. Behl 2012a: 155. 58. Behl 2012a, 261–­62. 59. Digby 1975, 51. 60. Hatley 2007b, 367. 61. Shaikh Ghawth’s Baḥr al-­ḥayāt (ca. 1550) is a Persian translation, revision, and expansion of the most important Islamic work on yoga, the Hawd al-­ḥayāt (The pool of life), which was itself an Arabic translation (composed in Bengal in 1210) of a nonextant Sanskrit work on tantric yoga known as the Amṛtakunda (The pool of nectar). The history of this text and its uses attest to a long-­r unning Indian Sufi interest in, and Islamization of, tantric yoga practice. See Ernst 2003. 62. Ernst 1996, 13. 63. Accardi 2015. 64. Dobe 2015, 33. 65. As Christopher Shackle has explained, Sufis understand “divine love as the core organizing principle of the universe” and conceive of “a hierarchy extending upwards from the interpersonal loves of the phenomenal world to the transpersonal connection with the Divine which is perceived as their real exemplar.” Sufis defined “the twin force of love as ‘phenomenal love’ (‘ishq-­e majāzī) and ‘real love’ (‘ishq-­e ḥaqīqī) in which the human is seen as the mirror of the divine” (2006, 88). 66. Pinch 2006, 65–­66. 67. See White 2001; Digby 2000, 140–­220. 68. Stewart 2000, 47. 69. Stewart 2004, 14. Satya Pīr is prominent among middle-­and low-­class Hindus and Muslims in West Bengal, Orissa, and Bangladesh; he has more Bengali texts dedicated to him than anyone except Caitanya.

2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs = 335 70. Stewart 2004, 15. 71. Hawley 2015b, 4. 72. See, for instance, Tara Chand’s Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (1936) and Muhammad Hedaytullah’s Kabir: The Apostle of Hindu-­Muslim Unity (1977), in addition to the works cited hereafter by Diana Eck, Shahabuddin Iraqi, Satish Chandra, and Aziz Ahmad. These authors rarely analyze specific instances of the “historical influence” they assert, do not provide explanations of the actual dynamics of the “symbiotic/syncretic” relationship they suggest, and too often posit bhakti and Islam as firmly bounded, discrete entities, the one responding to and reacting against the other. For a useful discussion of some of this scholarship, see Hawley 2015b, 89–­94. 73. Eck 2012, 90. 74. Iraqi 2009, 253, 258. 75. Chandra 1996, 127–­28. 76. Ahmad 1964, 136, 140. 77. As Samira Sheikh (2017, 35–­36) has argued—­drawing on Simon Digby’s important essay “Before Timur Came” (2004)—­contrary to its common scholarly portrayal, Timur’s invasion was more of a tipping point than a transformative cataclysm. The decentralization, increased mobility, extension of trade routes, sprouting of new towns, and linguistic experimentation usually associated with the (post-­Timur) fifteenth century were already well under way in the (pre-­Timur) second half of the fourteenth century but were given a great deal of further impetus by the devastation (and population dispersal) caused in Delhi by Timur’s invasion. 78. Moin 2012a, 25–­26, 28–­29. 79. Moin 2016, 127. 80. Occult practices such as lettrism, astrology, geomancy, divination, and spirit communication and subjugation were not unusual among medieval and early modern Muslims, and post-­Mongol Persianate rulers often seized upon the occult sciences to harness sacred power for political purposes; see Melvin-­Koushki 2016, 143. In the many manuscripts of occult texts that circulated throughout the Islamic world at this time, Neoplatonic theories are used to frame all occult powers as deriving from the one God and all occult operations as “sanctioned and even effected by the power of God acting through his angels and the spirits . . . ​of the celestial sphere,” conceived as the highest beings (divine ministers) with whom men could be in contact; see Pingree 1980, 3–­4. 81. As Carl Ernst (2009, 199–­200) has clearly shown, Indian tantric teachings were circulating within Islamic occultist circles in the Persianate world of Timur. Ernst explains that most Persianate Muslims would have understood occult aspects of tantric practice—­e.g., mantras and yogic practices for summoning yoginīs and acquiring their powers—­in terms of the familiar and largely accepted tradition of the Islamic occult sciences (al-­‘ulūm al-­gharība). He posits that Persianate Muslim rulers probably engaged more with the occult dimensions of tantric yogic practices than did any other sector of society because of the political-­ military use to which these occult arts could be put. 82. Digby 2004, 301–­2. The historical shift away from a more centralized Sultanate and toward the development of a set of distinctive regional centers was not, of course, the result of any single political event. Rather, Timur’s invasion was one crucial event precipitating—­a nd serving as a convenient historical marker for—­the rise of these vernacular political-­ cultural nexuses and a broader Indo-­Islamicate “shared local” culture. 83. In fact, the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan had declared independence from the Tughlaqs in 1349, beginning the decline and fracturing of the Tughlaq dynasty into multiple smaller regional sultanates.

336 9 2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs 84. Sreenivasan 2014b, 243–­47. 85. Ramya Sreenivasan (2014b, 243–­47) has demonstrated that some of the earliest literary works in (local forms of) the North Indian vernacular of Hindavi—­Dā’ūd’s Cāndāyan (ca. 1379), Nārāyaṇdās’s Chitāī-­carita (ca. 1526), and Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (ca. 1540)—­were patronized by and addressed specifically to the particular political concerns of rural gentry and local warlords in the hinterland; see also Behl 2012a, 48. 86. Orsini 2012, 227. 87. Orsini 2012, 228–­29. 88. Orsini quite rightly suggests that in understanding the use of language in Sultanate and Mughal India we should not think “purely in terms of High and Low but rather in terms of a continuum, something that makes us more aware of the importance of recognizing registers both within High and Low: ‘ornate Persian’ versus ‘simple Persian’; ‘Persian-­near’ or ‘Persian-­far’ and ‘Sanskrit-­near’ versus ‘Sanskrit-­far’ vernaculars” (2014c, 407). 89. Orsini and Sheikh 2014, 14–­15; Orsini 2005, 395. 90. Bangha 2014, 395–­96. 91. Orsini and Sheikh 2014, 14–­16. 92. Orsini 2014c, 404. 93. Though Nāmdev was not from North India and seems to have lived well before its great bhakti saints, his memory—­a nd Hindavi poetry attributed to him—­became crucial features of North India’s emerging bhakti public. Indeed, according to most sources, while Nāmdev flourished in the early fourteenth century in Maharashtra, he traveled north and was a founding figure of North India’s bhakti movement. 94. Hawley and Juergensmeyer 2004, 7. 95. Novetzke 2015, 176. 96. Novetzke 2015, 180. 97. Orsini 2014a, 199. 98. Orsini 2014a, 201–­2. 99. Behl 2012a, 286. 100. Ernst 1992, 166–­67; Orsini 2014c, 409, 415. 101. Orsini 2014b, 223; emphasis in original. 102. Behl 2007, 321. 103. Behl 2012a, 16–­22, 328–­29. 104. Digby 2004, 351. 105. Williams 2014, 88; Behl 2012a, 324. 106. Behl 2012a, 13. 107. Behl 2012b, 36. 108. Orsini 2014b, 228, 232. 109. Sheikh 2010, 168. 110. Green 2015, 13. Green uses this language to refer to nineteenth-­century religious economies, but I think it is certainly apt here as well. 111. Hawley 1984, 245. 112. Gāyā bin pāyā nahi, anagāvan se dūr / jin gāyā vishvās se, sahib hāl hazūr; Hess 2015, 32. 113. Hawley 1984, 249. 114. Hawley 1984, 247. Hawley explains that Sūrdās commonly concludes his compositions with the following expression: sur dās bhagavant bhajan binu; that is, “Sūrdās says, unless one sings to the Lord . . .” (246).

2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs = 337 115. Williams 2014, 110–­11. 116. Hawley 1984, 258. 117. Hawley 1984. 118. Hirschkind 2005, 30. As Tyler Williams (email message to author, August, 26, 2016) has pointed out to me, many bhakti hagiographies express ideal forms of community interaction and ethical behavior that “model the performance contexts, and consequently the social contexts” in which they are performed. In this sense, the singing of bhakti stories in a community “simultaneously reproduces both the community and ethical behavior within it.” 119. Hawley 1984, 251. 120. Mallison 2000, 292. 121. Geertz 1973, 129. 122. Geertz 1973, 127. While his essay “Religion as a Cultural System” has received far more attention (and its fair share of criticism), I find Geertz’s “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols” (from which the preceding quotes come) considerably more useful in thinking about religion and, particularly, the interrelated roles of aesthetics, emotion, and ethics in religious life. 123. Mallison 2000, 291–­92. 124. Lawrence 1992. 125. Nizami 1992, 10–­15. Importantly, Nizām al-­Dīn also stressed that miracle mongering has no place in spiritual life and is, in fact, a sign of spiritual imperfection. 126. Digby 1975, 24. 127. Schofield 2015, 408. 128. Schofield 2015, 416; Brown 2006, 62. 129. Schofield 2015, 410. 130. Behl 2012b, 34. 131. In technical terms, Sheldon Pollock explains, “Rasa—­a nd here is the common understanding—­is produced when certain ‘stable’ or primary emotions (sthāyibhāva) of ours are fully developed by stimulation from a suitable object (ālambanavibhāva) under appropriate external conditions (uddīpanavibhāva), and nuanced by more evanescent feelings (vyabhicāribhāva) that are themselves made manifest by physical reactions (anubhāva). All this activates our own latent dispositions (vāsanās, saṃskāras) to respond sympathetically” (2001, 208–­9). 132. Miller 1977, 14–­17; Behl 2012a, 66–­68. 133. Pollock 2016, 285–­86. 134. Classically, sṛṅgāra usually refers to an embodied, romantic, sexual passion between two comparable beings; e.g., a noble hero and heroine. The love between child and parent, disciple and guru, or, most certainly, devotee and God would not typically have been classified as sṛṅgāra since these are loves between beings quite unlike (incomparable to) each other; Hamsa Stainton, email messages to author, June 15, 2016. Bhakti rasa, then, was quite different from sṛṅgāra rasa. 135. Pollock 2016. 302–­3. 136. Behl 2012b, 35–­36; Behl 2007, 322; Behl 2012a, 74. 137. Behl 2012a, 81. 138. Behl 2012a, 64. 139. Behl 2012a, 64–­65.

338 9 2. Sultans, Saints, and Songs 140. The circulation of Kabīr’s poems clearly illustrates the complexities involved in distinguishing a general bhakti public from a general Sufi public (and in determining the boundaries of any given public). Poems attributed to Kabīr circulated among Sufi, Sikh, nirguṇ Sant, and saguṇ Vaiṣṇava communities (as well as in nonsectarian devotional and entertainment contexts). As Thomas de Bruijn has demonstrated, these poems shared images, semantics, and cultural references that could be decontextualized and relocated into contexts of meaning specific to particular religious communities, a fact instrumental to the circulation of such poems “in a field where the boundaries between religious communities were fluid and where culture was being transmitted and valorized in a dialogic exchange . . . ​[that] was not intended to bridge the differences between religions” (2014, 157). 141. Rosenwein 2006, 2. 142. Rosenwein 2006, 25–­26. 143. Cf. Finbarr Flood 2009, 5. 144. Cf. Lincoln 1989, 18.

3. Akbar’s New World







1. O’Hanlon 2007b, 889. 2. The term “Rajput” is a status title/category to which a variety of local groups, of differing ethnicity but often with warrior backgrounds, assimilated themselves over time. While entry of clans into the Rajput status group seems to have been relatively open at first (ca. eleventh to twelfth centuries), over time genealogical purity was increasingly stressed and by the seventeenth century Rajputs had essentially become a caste. See Tambs-­Lyche 1997, 86–­87; Kolff 1990, 71–­116. 3. Moin 2012a, 21. 4. Moin 2012a, 93. 5. Alam 2000, 229. 6. Alam 2000, 239. Far from a fixed Islamic “orthodoxy,” Islamic legal prescriptions in Mughal India were subject to considerable interpretation in their application, and judicial decisions were usually made according to local custom, not the injunctions of sharī‘a. See Eaton 2003a, 23. 7. Moin 2012a, 99, 103. This quote comes from the Tarikh-­i-­Rashidi (1540s), the chronicle of Babur’s cousin, Mirza Haydar Dughlat, which also says, “Shaikh Pul had donned the guise of a Sufi master and taught that spells and invocations were the best means to obtain one’s true desire, and even that one’s true desire should be the attainment of these means. Since [Humāyūn] had a temperament for such things, he soon became a disciple.” 8. We have clear evidence that the Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahāngīr, and Aurangzeb (and probably Shāh Jahān as well) were interested in yogīs (and vice versa). We know that Akbar visited and patronized certain Nāth yogī sites, summoned yogīs to court for lengthy private conversations, and even took up some of their practices and customs (e.g., performing alchemy with them and shaving the hair at the crown of his head); Jahāngīr regularly visited a gosain named Jadrūp; and Aurangzeb corresponded with yogīs and purchased quicksilver from them in the 1660s; see Pinch 2006, 33, 51–­52, 55. These Mughal interactions with yogīs should not be understood as instances of some sort of “interreligious dialogue,” for they were driven by a curiosity and a pragmatic interest in supernormal power and esoteric

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knowledge that were natural features of the shared (transreligious) culture of the occult in Mughal India. 9. Melvin-­Koushki 2016, 143; Moin 2012a, 125. 10. Moin 2012a, 126. 11. Until 1560, when Akbar took charge of his empire, ruling on his behalf was Bairām Khān (1501–­1561), who had served under Babur when he conquered North India, accompanied Humāyūn in his exile in Persia, and led Humāyūn’s army in defeating the Suris and reestablishing Mughal rule. Bairām Khān’s military skill and leadership were vital to the consolidation of Mughal control in Panjab, Delhi, Agra, and the Gangetic Plain during the contested early years of Akbar’s reign. 12. Moin 2012a, 167. 13. Richards 1995, 31. 14. Faruqui 2005, 514. 15. Faruqui 2005, 508. 16. Faruqui 2005, 516. 17. Faruqui 2005, 515. 18. Faruqui 2005, 488. 19. Moin 2012b, 518. 20. Moin 2012a, 137. 21. Among the works attributed to Suhrawardī are several that praise and invoke the angelic powers associated with (and occult properties of) the moon, planets, and stars. As John Walbridge notes, this sort of occult devotional concern with celestial spirits “makes perfect sense given the structure of his philosophical system, in which mystical apprehension of the celestial lights is a tool for understanding the metaphysical structure of the universe” (2011, 93). It is important to distinguish the Suhrawardī of our concern—­the Persian mystical philosopher Shihāb al-­Dīn Yaḥyā al-­Suhrawardī (d. 1191)—­ from his contemporary Shihāb al-­Dīn ‘Umar al-­Suhrawardī, the founder of the Suhrawardiya Sufi order. 22. Melvin-­Koushki 2016, 147. Regarding the occult elements in his rule, it is noteworthy that Akbar had his own Islamicate court geomancer, Hidāyat Allāh Muanjjim-­i Shīrāzī (fl. 1593), who, upon Akbar’s request, composed a comprehensive manual of geomancy called Methods of Guidance (Qavā’id al-­Hidāya) (146). 23. Kinra 2013, 261. 24. Sheffield 2014, 165. 25. Sheffield 2014, 165. 26. Sheffield 2014, 172. Dabistān 300–­01. As the Dabistān was itself composed by an Āzarī, the historical veracity of its specific claims about Akbar’s and Abu al-­Fazl’s writing letters to Āzar Kayvān and inviting him to India, and his sending them a book of his writings, must be regarded with some suspicion. Nevertheless, Sheffield’s case for the influence (whether direct or indirect) of Āzarī thought upon Akbar and his ṣulḥ-­i kull policy seems strong. 27. Alam 2003, 158. 28. Alam 2003, 159. 29. Lefèvre 2014, 87. 30. Alam 2003, 159. 31. Alam 2003, 162. 32. Truschke 2015, 252.

340 9 3. Akbar’s New World 33. Truschke 2016, 234. Truschke’s book demonstrates how “the Mughal kings expended considerable energy toward incorporating Sanskrit intellectuals, stories, and knowledge systems into their court culture” (231). 34. Truschke 2016, 246. 35. Lefèvre 2014, 79. 36. Busch 2014, 194. 37. Busch 2014, 194–­95. 38. The celebrated centralization of the Mughal state can give the false impression that the Mughal Empire was a stable, reified structure, when in fact it was more a process, a constant negotiation with a continuum of local actors and power centers whose fortunes constantly waxed and waned. As Ramya Sreenivasan explains, when we talk about the administrative centralization of the Mughal Empire and other early modern states, what we are really talking about is “the variable success of a ‘state’ in persuading local actors, both elite and non-­ elite, in accepting its writ for their own interests,” and since this persuasion “is perforce ongoing and contested” then “the writ of the state is therefore typically contingent and circumscribed” (2011, 987). 39. Habib 2002, 370–­85; Habib 1963. Habib’s basic argument has been disputed, and there is no doubt he considerably overemphasized the centralization, uniformity, and pervasiveness of the “Mughal agrarian system” (see Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998, 12–­16; Asher and Talbot 2006, 270–­72), but a general conclusion that many (though not all) peasant populations were impoverished and disempowered by exploitative agrarian revenue policies is attested by the reports of European travelers to Mughal India and, in my view, seems sound. For a useful analysis, qualification, and complication of Habib’s original argument (1963), attending to differences in types of peasantry (those in khalisa lands versus those in jagir lands) and types of villages (zamindari versus raiyati villages) and to the impact and extent of the monetization of the Mughal economy, yet confirming how the Mughal agrarian system (and its revenue demands) furthered urbanization and commerce while depriving many peasants of the vast majority of the agrarian surplus they produced, see Raychaudhuri (1965) 1998. 40. For a summary (and critique) of Habib’s speculations on how the Sultanate-­Mughal economic system affected North India’s bhakti movement, see Krishna Sharma 1987, 31–­34. For some fascinating insights on seemingly parallel developments in the Deccan at roughly the same time, where the rising presence of bhakti institutions and soldiering groups (often linked to monasteries) seems to have been linked to the dispossession of the peasantry by the political economy developing in the Deccan in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Devadevan 2016, 111–­60. Drawing on a combination of the work by Habib (1963, 2002), Dirk Kolff (1990), William Pinch (1996, 2006), and Devadevan (2016), one might speculate that the phenomenon of warrior monks (i.e., organized sectarian ascetic militias) in early modern North India, which peaked in the unsettled political landscape of the Mughal eighteenth century, was intimately linked to the desperate economic situation of peasants who sought food and employment at or through sectarian monasteries. These monasteries’ rising economic-­political power and interests (as landholders and major players in transregional networks of commerce) increasingly required the support of military labor, which peasants and organized ascetic militias could provide. 41. Dalmia and Faruqui 2014, xii–­x iv. 42. Moin 2014, 263.

3. Akbar’s New World = 341











43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Dalmia and Faruqui 2014, xiv. Asher and Talbot 2006, 108. Pinch 2009. Sheikh 2010, 130–­75. Sheikh 2010, 135. Orsini and Sheikh 2014, 42–­43. Vaudeville 1976, 204–­8. Eck 1991. Pauwels 2009, 210–­11, 223. Erndl 1993, 43. Ghosh 2005. Dold 2009. McDermott 2001, 8. Gold and Gold 1984; Gold and Nath 1992. Pinch 2006, 195–­211. See also, on the Śaktism of Rajput martial culture, Tambs-­Lyche 1997, 96–­120. On the expanding military labor market of Sultanate and Mughal India, see Kolff 1990; Sunil Sharma 2014. Tambs-­Lyche stresses how indispensable the Goddess ( Śākti) is in the martial culture of the Rajputs, in particular as “the power behind the foundation of each Rajput lineage” (111). 58. As the work of Rachel McDermott (2001) (on Bengali goddess traditions) and Ann and Daniel Gold (1984) (on the Nāths in Rajasthan) attests, in some cases tantric Śaivism and Śāktism were not supplanted or demoted and actually maintained a central place, but often in modified, “devotionalized” forms reflecting the rise and influence of bhakti attitudes and approaches. 59. Moran 2013, 22–­24. 60. Vaudeville 1976, 204–­13; Vaudeville 1980, 12, 15n36; Rana 2006, 127–­28, 131–­34. 61. Rana 2006, 125. Rana argues as follows: “Vaishnavism in the Braj country was primarily the religious universe of high-­caste Hindus. It could even be termed an official religion, for it was closely aligned to the Mughal empire and the Amber state during the seventeenth century. Its patrons and practitioners lived off the surplus product of the peasants, who largely belonged to the lower castes. These peasants and the peers of their caste had their own views on religion” (131–­32). 62. Guha 1997, 47–­50. Following a Marxist line of interpretation seemingly originating with D. D. Kosambi, Guha says the bhakti mode of religion is “an ideology of subordination par excellence” that has been used throughout Indian history as a means to “spiritualiz[e] the efforts and frustrations experienced by the lower classes in the labor they provided to the elite” and thus make submission “appear self-­induced, voluntary, and collaborative.” 63. Sangari 1990. David Lorenzen (1995b, 189–­92) has also written eloquently on this paradoxical bhakti sociology in which bhakti can support (especially in its saguṇī forms) or challenge/ subvert (especially in its nirguṇī forms) traditional hierarchical varṇāśramadharma ideology. Krishna Sharma (1987, 29–­34) has usefully shown how the Marxist historical approach to bhakti can be and has been used to present bhakti in completely contradictory fashions, as either “a corollary of the feudal order” (justifying servitude) or as “a revolt of the lower classes,” depending on the orientation of the particular scholar. 64. In its first century of existence, the Dādū Panth comprised Hindus, Muslims, and castes ranging from brahman to artisan to Jāṭ; Horstmann 2017, 2.

342 9 3. Akbar’s New World 65. Lorenzen argues, importantly, that North India’s nirguṇ bhakti communities tended to originate among artisan and other lower-­middle-­class groups and then to have spread among peasants in the countryside, and that their nirguṇ devotion should be seen as “an ideological and religious contestation to saguṇ bhakti (at the same time that it appropriates many of the latter’s basic beliefs and practices)” (1995a, 21). Undoubtedly, there are major differences in the social ideologies of saguṇ and nirguṇ bhakti traditions, which Lorenzen’s essay clearly highlights; however, in this book I deliberately highlight aspects of bhakti sensibilities that were shared across class and caste, nirguṇ and saguṇ, boundaries. 66. As Hawley states, “the garment we call Vaishnavism was never a one-­size-­fits-­a ll affair.” Hawley has argued that in late Sultanate and Mughal India, despite differences (even conflicts) of perspective within it (e.g., Kabīr versus Tulsīdās), there was a common, nonsectarian “vulgate Vaishnavism” that was both broad and strong in its shared use of specifically Vaiṣṇava names of God and, I would add, in its shared ethical, aesthetic, and emotional sensibilities; see Hawley 2016, 155–­56, 160–­61. The loose Vaiṣnavism of nirguṇ bhakti traditions is also illustrated by their use of the word “Vaiṣṇava” as a synonym for bhakta and their active, fond remembering of the stories of ideal bhaktas (e.g., Dhruva, Prahlād), all drawn from Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, especially the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. See Lath 1999, 102–­3. 67. Mahesh Sharma 2009, 72–­76, 135–­37. 68. Śīlā-­devī was the tutelary deity of the Bengali king Pratāpāditya (1561–­1611), but Mān Singh Kacchvāhā, trusted general to the Mughal emperor Akbar, took the śakti-­filled murti of Śilā-­ devī upon defeating Kedār Rājā (who served Pratāpāditya) in Jessore, bringing it (along with its hereditary priests) from Bengal to Rajasthan, where he installed it (and where it is still worshipped today) in the Kacchvāhā family fortress at Amer. 69. Schwartz 2012b. 70. Cf. White 2003, 147–­50; see also Tambs-­Lyche 1997, 96–­170. 71. The sixteenth-­century poet and Kṛṣṇa devotee Harirām Vyās, for instance, is, in a number of poems, quite critical of warlords and rulers who see bhakti as a “trendy status symbol for the socially upwardly mobile,” even advising bhaktas to give up the company of kings, since they are lechers who will make you forget God; Pauwels 2009, 221–­22, 217–­18. 72. Pinch 2006, 19. 73. Orsini and Sheikh 2014, 43. 74. Davidson 2002. 75. O’Hanlon 2007b, 889. 76. Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998, 21; Richards 1995, 56. 77. Kumkum Chatterjee 2009, 157–­58. 78. Kumkum Chatterjee 2009, 157–­58. 79. Richards 1998a, 128–­29. 80. Richards 1998a, 129. While Richards presents the Mughal imperial system of Akbar as the agent responsible for a change in Rajput values, the work of Norman Ziegler suggests a more complicated picture in which Rajput kingdoms were centralizing and, relatedly, Rajput values were shifting prior to Akbar’s reign. Ziegler shows that in the early sixteenth century, prior to Akbar’s accession to the throne, a strong centralization of authority occurred in the various Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan based on the exercise of “prebendal domain,” a system in which land was not inherited through membership in a kinship group, as it long had been, but was given by a ruler to his officials in return for loyalty and military service to the state. By the time of Akbar’s rule, these “new patterns of authority and control

3. Akbar’s New World = 343



81. 82. 83. 84.



85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.



93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

had become established norms in Rajasthan and did much to shape the Rajput response to and eventual incorporation into the Mughal empire” (1994, 198–­200, 210). Ziegler 1998, 276. Ziegler 1998, 268. Richards 1998a, 129. Rajputs had little difficulty accepting Mughal authority because the Mughals appeared like them in assigning status and rank primarily “in terms of power to protect and to give sustenance and rewards” (Ziegler 1976, 241). Alam 2004, 139. Truschke 2016, 40. Bhagavati Singh 1957, 110–­11. Truschke 2016, 204–­5. Truschke 2016, 39. Famous for ecstatic public dancing and the singing of the names of God, Kṛṣṇa Caitanya based himself in Puri but wandered the Indian subcontinent, supposedly meeting Rūpa and Sanātana on his way from Braj to Bengal. The corpus of literature dedicated to his life—­nine biographies within less than one hundred years of his death—­attests to the enthusiastic following he generated (Hawley 2015b, 166–­68). He is considered by many Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas to have been a divine incarnation of Kṛṣṇa Caitanya himself in inseparable union with Rādhā. Haberman 1994, 32. The other four members of the Six Gosvāmīs are Gopāl Bhaṭṭ, the supposed author of the Haribhaktivilāsa; Raghunāthdās; Raghunāth Bhaṭṭ; and Jīva Gosvāmi, the nephew of Rūp and Sanātan who succeeded them as the highest authority on matters of doctrine. Entwistle 1987, 146–­47. Haberman 1994, 33, 48. Hawley 2015b, 162. Asher and Talbot 2006, 116. Asher and Talbot 2006, 34–­35. In the sixteenth century, “the collection of principalities in the region of Rajasthan was culturally homogeneous with the adjacent regions of Gujarat and Sindh, and had no distinctive collective identity that distinguished it from them. Only later, at the close of the eighteenth century, did they become identified with the unifying force of the ruling caste and referred to as ‘Rajasthan’ or ‘Rajputana’ ” (Hastings 2002, 48–­49). Hastings 2002, 52. When Rāja Bhārmal’s eldest daughter, Hira Kunwar (a.k.a. Harkah), became the first Rajput wife of Akbar, she was given the title Mariam-­u z-­Zamānī, but today she is often popularly known as Jodhā Bāī. There is, however, no evidence that the name Jodhā Bāī was ever used during her lifetime; rather, it seems to have been first used in eighteenth-­century historical writings. Confusion and controversy have resulted—­particularly in the wake of the release of the Bollywood film Jodhaa Akbar in 2008—­f rom the fact that the wife of Jahāngīr, Princess Manmati of Jodhpur, has also been addressed as Jodha Bai. See Ashley D’Mello, “Fact, myth blend in re-­look at Akbar-­Jodhabai,” Times of India, December 10, 2005, https:​­// timesofindia​­. indiatimes​­. com​­/city​­/mumbai​­/ Fact​­- ­m yth​­- b ­ lend​­- ­i n​­- ­r e​­- ­l ook​­- ­a t​­- ­A kbar​ ­-­Jodhabai​­/articleshow​­/1326242​­.cms​­?. Sarkar 1984, 37. Sarkar 1984, 36.

344 9 3. Akbar’s New World 103. 104. 105. 106.

Hastings 2002, 63. Keay 2000, 313. O’Hanlon 2007a, 365. The power of the Kacchvāhās of Amer in Rajasthan itself, particularly in terms of territorial control, was far more limited than their imperial position and influence might suggest. In her research on Mān Singh, Ramya Sreenivasan (2014a, 554–­56) shows how their regional power and control were actively contested by other Kacchvāhā clan segments in other parts of Rajasthan, such as the Shekhavats. 107. Chandra 1993, 23, 32. Research by Omkar Nath Upadhyay indicates that at Akbar’s death in 1605 nearly 70 percent of the Rajputs within the nobility of the Mughal court were Kacchvāhās (Hastings 2002, 64n74). Regarding “hiccups” in Kacchvāhā influence at the Mughal court, Mān Singh’s relationship with Jahāngīr was somewhat fraught because Mān Singh had supported Akbar’s younger son Khusrau’s claim to the throne over Jahāngīr. On the key role of Mīrzā Rāja Jai Singh I in Mughal rule and the decline of Kacchvāhā influence at the Mughal court after his death, see Kling 1993, 61–­181. 108. Richards 1995, 38. 109. Bilgrami 1984, xix. 110. Haberman 1994, 35. 111. Horstmann 1999, 2. 112. Kumkum Chatterjee 2009, 156. For a look at the specific contents of these Mughal documents related to the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas in Vrindavan (ca. 1560–­1730), collected by Tarapada Mukherji, see Habib 1996. 113. Richardson 1979, 32, 35–­37. 114. Asher and Talbot 2006, 137–­38. 115. Haberman 1994, 35. 116. On how “the dynamics of a healthy pilgrimage center bound together the mutual interests of king, temple, and merchants,” see Peabody 1991, 750–­51. 117. Kumkum Chatterjee 2009, 157. 118. Rana 2006, 126–­29; Habib 1963, 319–­46. 119. Eaton 1978, 217. 120. Novetzke 2016, 97–­101. Novetzke discusses Yadava patronage of the Viṭṭhal temple in Pandharpur, Maharashtra (ca. 1189–­1317), as an indication of the state acknowledging the bhakti public as a political force and seeing the value in supporting the quotidian world of bhakti. 121. Mughal patronage of Vaiṣṇavas in Braj, as elsewhere, also served to appease and gain the trust of Hindus, who from time to time came into conflict with Muslims. Edwin Richardson cites a specific incident in Mathura in 1577 in which a brahman was executed by the local qazi for cursing the Prophet and building an “idol temple” using materials intended for the construction of a mosque; he asserts that it was no coincidence that Akbar’s first grant to the nearby Vallabha sampradāy occurred just a few months after this potentially rebellion-­ inciting event. This incident is recorded in al-­Badāunī’s Munktakhab al-­Tawārīkh and discussed in Richardson 1979, 40–­42. 122. In 1608, Jahāngīr married another Kacchvāhā princess, Mān Singh’s granddaughter Kolia Kumārī. See Glynn 2000, 231. 123. There is no doubt the Mughals were in Mān Singh’s debt, for as perhaps their greatest military commander, “No less than one half of the conquests of Akbar’s reign were [made] possible mainly due to [his] matchless valour,” and at great sacrifice, for nine out of ten of Mān Singh’s sons gave their lives in imperial military operations; Tikkiwal 1974, 5–­6.

3. Akbar’s New World = 345 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

Entwistle 1987, 160. Horstmann 1999, 2. Asher and Talbot 2006, 149. Haberman 1994, 36. Horstmann 1999, 7. In 1633, Shāh Jahān put the Kacchvāhās in direct charge of Govindadev (after which the administration of grants to the temple became vested in the Kacchvāhā chancery), and their close link with that divine image endures today. Housed in Vrindavan until the reign of Aurangzeb, at that time fear of the image’s destruction led devotees to remove it to the safety of Rajasthan, where it was eventually housed by Savāī Jai Singh II in the Govindadev temple of Jaipur’s royal palace, where it presently stands. Entwistle 1987, 160. The Shekhavat Kacchvāhās were based to the northwest of the Rajavat Kacchvāhas of Amer, were independent of their control, and “achieved a measure of imperial recognition in their own right from the Mughal emperors,” thus “limit[ing] their Amber cousins’ territorial expansion to the north” (Sreenivasan 2014a, 556). Haberman 1994, 36. Horstmann 1999, 7. Hawley 2015b, 115. Horstmann 2002, 156. This evidence, a confirmation of Akbar’s grants dated 1640, unfortunately does not list the precise date of the grant to the Galta Rāmānandīs. Pinch 1999, 392–­93. That the earliest two temples in Galta were dedicated to Hanumān specifically is a significant fact that I discuss in detail in chapter 4. Horstmann 2002, 155–­57. The honorific title of mīrzā was usually reserved for male members of the Timurid royal line. That Shāh Jahān bestowed this title upon the Hindu Rajput Jai Singh I speaks volumes about the importance of, and respect allotted to, this Kacchvāhā king in the Mughal Empire. See Glynn 2000, 233–­34. Horstmann 2002, 157. Asher and Talbot 2006, 225–­26. Kinra 2013, 263. Asher and Talbot 2006, 227. Asher 1996, 215. Asher notes that Mān Singh built temples for personal reasons (e.g., to honor deceased family members) and political reasons, and that “local lore or cult images frequently played a role in the rājā’s patronage, in particular when associated with a military or political victory” (1996, 220). Asher and Talbot 2006, 148–­49. As Catherine Asher shows, “Rāja Mān Singh can be considered an innovator of Mughal taste, not simply an imitator” (1992, 185). Asher 1992, 183. Hastings 2002, 64–­65. Williams 2014, 93. Williams 2008. Williams 2014, 252. Williams 2014, 249–­50. Williams 2014, 250. Busch 2015, 255.

346 9 3. Akbar’s New World 154. See, for instance, Bangha 2015, 359–­60. 155. Hastings 2002, 16; Williams 2014, 64–­65n123. Despite this new and massive production of written texts among bhakti communities, in early modern India knowledge continued to be “located primarily in persons” rather than in written texts, which “were not considered independent sources of knowledge, but were appendages to the personal pedagogical relationships through which knowledge was transferred. . . . ​Correspondingly, those in search of knowledge looked for a master rather than a bookshop or library” (Green 2009, 3, 24). 156. The introduction of paper to India occurred in the fourteenth century and does not explain the sudden growth of vernacular writing and manuscripts in North India in the late sixteenth century. Despite the availability of paper beginning circa 1400, many Hindu artists and craftsmen continued to use the traditional, but far more restrictive, medium of palm leaves, only slowly shifting to the use of paper, which even then they seldom bound but rather kept in loose stacks that were wrapped in cloth and tied in bundles. See Beach 1992, 1–­2. 157. Williams 2008. 158. Williams 2014, 277. 159. As James Hastings writes, “From the time of Akbar, there was no attempt by the Emperor or his administration to meddle in internal affairs of the loyal Rajput states, with the exception of succession disputes, as long as they provided no threat to Mughal hegemony. . . . ​ There was no political turmoil and no war to contend with, for the wars were always fought somewhere else; and succession, supervised by the Mughal Emperors, was for the most part orderly. . . . ​For religious communities in Amer in the late sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century, there was relatively more freedom to experiment and to express their spirituality, a good deal of patronage, and not much need for a high degree of organization” (2002, 66–­67). 160. Williams 2014, 102, 281. 161. Busch 2011, 167. 162. Pauwels 2009, 210–­11. 163. Pauwels 2009, 223.

4. Between Bhakti and Śakti





1. Bhairava Śiva is typically represented as a fearsome ascetic, standing nearly naked with gaping fanged mouth, rage-­filled eyes, disheveled matted dreadlocks, a garland of skulls around his neck, and live serpents coiled around his arms and ankles. Accompanied by a dog, Bhairava usually holds a skull, a trident, a sword, and a noose. 2. Lutgendorf (2007, 238–­39) notes that both Hanumān and Bhairava are commonly found on the outskirts of rural villages, where they are worshipped as protective deities guarding against the entry of malevolent spiritual forces. 3. The version of the legend that follows was related to me by several sādhūs and devotee pilgrims during visits to Galta in 2007–­2008 and has been confirmed and slightly supplemented with accounts from several Hindi sources, including an 1889 account by Sukhsāraṇ and the account given by Rūpkalā in his early twentieth-­century commentary on Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. See Sant Sukhsāraṇjī 2000; Nābhājī 2009, 305. For another scholarly narration of this popular story, see Pinch 2006, 18–­19.

4. Between Bhakti and Śakti = 347











4. Some scholars discuss Payahārī’s feeding the tiger from the flesh of his own leg as a separate incident from his encounter with Tārānāth meant to show the extent of his self-­ effacing generosity and hospitality to guests. 5. In the Indian popular imagination, the donkey (gadhā) is known for its constant grazing, seemingly eating all the time and never getting full. Like the English “jackass,” the word gadhā is also a term of derision for a fool or idiot. 6. Nāth yogīs are often called Kānphaṭas because of their split (phaṭa) ears (kān) and huge earrings. In the final stage of their initiation ceremony, the guru splits the central hollows/cartilage of both ears with a knife or razor; the slits are plugged with nīm wood, and, after they have healed, large rings (mudrā) are inserted. These earrings are a marker of full initiation and major symbol of faith and power for Nāths. Some explain that splitting the ears opens a nadi (mystic channel) that assists in their acquisition of yogic power (Briggs 1938, 6). One Nāth yogī explained to Ann and Daniel Gold that “the [ear] cartilages were the site of a nexus of bodily senses; thus, boring holes through the cartilages would bring the senses under control and give inner peace” and that there was constant tension in wearing the earrings, for if they “should ever tear through the ear and fall to the ground” the yogī would lose all his power (1984, 127). In some versions of the Galta legend, Payahārī causes the earrings of all the Nāth yogīs at Galta to fall out and gather into a pile before him. James Mallinson notes that while many kinds of ascetics wore earrings, only the Nāths came to be known for wearing them through the cartilages (not the lobes) of their ears, though there is some debate about when they adopted this distinctive sectarian identity marker. He also points out that the label “Kānphaṭa Yogī” is considered derogatory and eschewed by Nāths themselves, who prefer the designation “Darśanī Yogī” (2011b, 418–­19). 7. Still today one can visit the cave in Galta to see Payahārī’s continuously burning dhūnī and the place where he is said to have meditated and performed tapas. 8. G. N. Bahura, for instance, writes that Tārānāth “had a discussion with Kṛṣṇdāsa Payohārī to preach the supremacy of his sect but was ultimately defeated by the Rāmānandī sage” and then left Galta (1976, 25). Similarly, Motīlāl Menāriyā (2006, 49) states that Payahārī defeated Pṛthvīrāj’s Nāth guru—­whom he identifies as Caturnāth, not Tārānāth—­in śāstrārth, i.e., doctrinal debate, and thus obtained the gaddī of Galta. Menāriya is one of several scholars to identify Pṛthvīrāj’s Nāth guru as Caturnāth. Ghurye ([1953] 1964, 166) and Bahura (1976, 25) state this Caturnāth was in fact the disciple of Tārānāth but supply no evidence. 9. Horstmann 2002, 145–­46. 10. Chappay 116; Nābhājī 2009, 724. 11. While their social influence is beyond doubt, whether the Nāths exercised widespread or significant political influence is a matter of debate. Scholars such as David Gordon White and Véronique Bouillier argue that they were important political players, while scholars such as James Mallinson point out that the reliable historical evidence we have at hand speaks to only a few isolated incidents of Nāths exercising political power in Rajasthan and the Himalayas. Datable evidence aside, a host of oral traditions in Rajasthan, Nepal, and Kullu do suggest—­at least in memory and in these specific areas—­a close relationship between yogīs and kings. 12. Davidson 2002, 234. 13. White 1996, 7. 14. Pinch 2006, 20.

348 9 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti 15. Against the grain of the larger trend toward Vaiṣṇavization, Nāth yogīs maintained a close relationship with royal power in Nepal and in some places in Rajasthan. On the Nāths in Nepal, see Bouillier 1997; Bouillier 1992. In Rajasthan, particularly noteworthy is the case of Mahārāja Mān Singh (r. 1803–­1842) of Marwar, who obtained the Jodhpur throne with the help of a Nāth yogī, Ayas Dev Nāth, and thereafter resolved to rule Marwar in accordance with the advice of the Nāths, who consequently enjoyed nearly forty years of unprecedented wealth and power in his kingdom. See Gold 1995; Diamond 2000. 16. Tobdan 2000, 18. 17. Tobdan 2000, 51. 18. Part 2, sect. 38 of Hardayal Singh, Majmua Tawarikh Riyaste Kohistan-­Panjab, Part III, Kullu (1885), translated in Tobdan 2000, 83. On the potential agenda/bias in the Pahari administrator Hardayal Singh’s late nineteenth-­century history, see Moran 2013, 3–­4. 19. Conversation with Kamal Kishore Sharma “Kaushik,” a Kullu rājpurohit, scholar, and family member of the overseers of Raghunāth Mandir (Kullu, July 15, 2011). 20. Tobdan 2000, 51–­52. Tobdan gives a more detailed telling that relies upon two versions of a no longer extant text, the Kullu royal family genealogy, the Vaṃśāvalī, which records the history of Kullu and its rulers’ lives. 21. Tobdan 2000, 52. 22. Conversation with Danvender Singh, priest in Kullu’s Raghunāth Temple (Kullu, July  15, 2011). 23. Kavitt 199–­220; Nābhājī 2009, 303–­4. 24. Jyāī 1968, 17. 25. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 7. 26. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 7–­8; Goswamy 1997, 552. 27. Jyāī 1968, 18; Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 1, 6. 28. Pindori tradition is firm in claiming Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī as Bhagvān-­jī’s guru, but in a number of Rāmānandī written sources (including Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl) and at all the Rāmānandī sites I have visited in Rajasthan, Bhagvān-­jī is remembered as a disciple of Agradās’s (who was Payahārī’s direct disciple), a scenario that fits far better with the chronology of the available evidence. 29. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 5. 30. Burghart 1978, 127. 31. Jyāī 1968, 11. 32. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 10; Jyāī 1968, 31–­34. 33. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 5–­6. 34. Goswamy and Grewal 1969, 6. 35. Tales that specifically construct themselves as being about “Rāmānandīs” and “Nāths” very likely cannot date before the eighteenth century because it was probably not until then that these labels were used as community designators. The term “Rāmānandī” does not seem to have been used as a self-­designation prior to the 1730s. Similarly, Mallinson has argued that the term “Nāth” does not refer to an organized sampradāy until the early eighteenth century. See Horstmann 2002, 145; Mallinson 2011c, 331n20. 36. Pauwels 2002, 15. For an in-­depth study of the Bhaktamāl and its commentarial tradition, see Hare 2011a. 37. There are debates surrounding the dating of Rāghav’s Bhaktamāl, with 1713 and 1720 also having been posited, but the weight of the evidence is heavily on the side of the 1660 date,

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since, as Monika Horstmann (2000, 515n9) has astutely pointed out, only this year correlates with the weekday and lunar timing in Rāghav’s colophon. See also Rāghavdās 1965. 38. Of the fifty-­t wo Vaiṣṇava dvārās (initiatory lineages, or “gateways to the Lord”) established—­ reputedly at an early eighteenth-­century conference held in Galta—­thirty-­six were founded by Rāmānandīs, and of those thirty-­six clans founded by the supposed disciples of Rāmānand, twenty-­seven came from Anantānand and his lineage. 39. Chappay 38; translated in Horstmann 2002, 150–­51. Horstmann follows the verse numbers in the Rūpkalā edition of the Bhaktamāl (i.e., Nābhājī 2009). 40. In chappay 39, Nābhādās lists Payahārī’s twenty-­three disciples, all of whom “crossed the ocean of existence” by his grace: Kīlha, Agar, Keval, Caraṇ, Nārāyaṇ, Sūraj, Puruṣoṃ, Pṛthu, Tipur, Padmanābh, Gopāl, Ṭek, Ṭīlā, Gadādharī, Devā, Hem, Kalyān, Gaṇgā, Vishnudās, Kanhar, Raṇgā, Cāndan, and Sabīrī. Our next oldest source, the Dādūpanthī Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl, lists twenty-­one of these disciples but fails to mention Gadādharī and Ṭek as Payahārī’s disciples (chappay 154); Rāghavdās 1965, 69. 41. Kuṇḍaliyā 213; translated in Horstmann 2002, 151. 42. Chappay 116; translated in Horstmann 2002, 153. 43. McGregor 1983, 237. In my own research in the manuscript archives of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the only texts I have been able to find attributed to Payahārī are the Dānlīlā (which seems to be incorrectly attributed to him rather than Kṛṣṇadās of the Puṣti Mārg’s aṣtachāp) and the Sahasranāmāvalī, a text that seems to be essentially a list of names of God. I found two manuscripts of this latter text attributed to Payahārī, one in Udaipur from the nineteenth century and another, older one in Jodhpur, dated v.s. 1808 (1751 CE). 44. Chand 152a; translation mine. When not otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 45. Horstmann 2002, 152. 46. The very fact of a Rāmānandī—­not a Gauḍiya, a Puṣṭi Margi, or Rādhā Vallabhī—­w riting in Vrindavan, that great center of Kṛṣṇa devotion, and writing on haṭha yoga (not bhakti), is itself noteworthy and speaks to the diversity, shared spaces, and porousness of boundaries in the Hindu religious world of even early eighteenth-­century North India. 47. Mallinson 2005, 112. 48. Mallinson 2005, 112. 49. Payahārī did present Rājā Pṛthvīrāj with the deity Sītārām-­jī, in the form of a śālagrām stone, and the deity’s name could possibly allude to an amorous unity of Sītā and Rām suggestive of a rasik sensibility. Yugalpriyā’s Rasik-­P rakāś-­Bhaktamāl (v. 12) clearly describes Payahārī as a rasik, calling him a “worshipper of the tradition [rītī] of ras” and a “pledge holder [vratdhari] of Sītā”; however, this late (1839) sectarian text can hardly be trusted to give us an accurate historical depiction of the sixteenth-­century Payahārī’s actual religiosity. See Yugalpriyā-­śaraṇjī 1961 (v.s. 2018). 50. The word bhajan has come to take on the limited meaning of “devotional song” and is often translated in this way, but the word is actually a verbal noun indicating the doing of bhakti, which includes but exceeds devotional songs and chanting. Some scholars have translated bhajan as “worship,” but the connotations of that word are also not sufficient. While the performance of bhakti certainly involves devotional singing as one of its key components, it goes well beyond both that practice and those normally associated with pūjā (the word that “worship” usually translates), thus in most cases, as here, I have chosen to translate bhajan as “doing bhakti.”

350 9 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti 51. The word sumiraṇ, translated here as “remembrance,” in the early modern bhakti context usually refers to remembering the Lord either in chanting the divine Name or in rasik visualization meditation practice. 52. Chappay 40. In this and all other of my translations of Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl, I use the numbering and text of the oldest extant version of the work, that available in Jhā’s edition (Nābhājī 1978). 53. Dohā 4. śrī guru agradev ājñā daī bhaktan kau jasu gāy / bhavsāgar ke taran kau nāhin ān upāy // 54. Pinch 1999; Hare 2011b, chap. 2. 55. Dohā 1a. bhakta bhakti bhagvant guru catur nām vapu ek  / 56. Chappay 180:5. agar anug gun baranate sītāpati tihi hoī bas / 57. Chappay 39 (Nābhājī 1978). Translation based on Horstmann 2002, 155, but with a few revisions of my own. I am grateful to Dalpat Rajpurohit for his assistance with this verse. The chief alteration I have made to Horstmann’s translation comes in 39:4, brahmarandhra kari gaun bhaye hari tan karnī bal, which she renders, “He proceeded to the brahmarandhra, by the grace of Hari subduing his body.” The difficulty comes in adequately translating the second half of the verse—­hari tan karnī bal—­which, among many possibilities, could also be “by the power [bal] of [his] practice/deeds [karnī], he removed [hari] [himself] [from his] body [tan]”; or, “through the power [bal] of Hari [God] acting [karnī] within/upon his body [tan].” 58. In the context of bhakti literature, the “recollection” that is smaraṇa refers especially to recalling the narratives of Kṛṣṇa or Rām in ritual retelling, recitation, or visualization. 59. Mallinson states that the brahmarandra “usually refers to either the region at the top of the Suṣumṇā nāḍī or the nāḍī itself” and that it corresponds to the area on the top of the skull called the daśamadvāra, or “tenth door,” noting that it is also often identified with the sahasrāra cakra (2007, 205n240). 60. Fitzgerald 2012, 48. 61. Ghurye (1953) 1964, 175. 62. The Fatehpur manuscript consists mainly of the pads of Surdās (262 in total) but also contains 149 pads by other bhakti poets, including Nāmdev (11), Kabīr (15), Raidās (8), and others such as Kīlha. It was most likely commissioned by a Kacchvāhā ṭhākur residing in Fatehpur (Śekhāvaṭī) in eastern Rajasthan. See Bahura 1983, 21–­22. 63. Or, “I am not this body, I am no one, and I do not do anything.” 64. Bahura 1982, 192–­93. I am indebted to Dalpat Rajpurohit for his crucial assistance in transcribing and translating both these Kīlha poems from the manuscripts. 65. Kīlha jī kā Pad (Vidya Bhuṣan Sangrah—­Jaipur RORI), MSS no. 34 (102). 66. Chappay 155. 67. Bhāgavata Purāṇa XI.15.1–­36. 68. Rāthaur 2003, 24; emphasis added. 69. In some bhakti communities (the Sikh P­ anth, Dādu ­Panth, and Kabīr Panth, for instance) definitive forms and compilations of this literature would become the focal point of devotional activities. 70. Chand 160. The use of the word pativrat may suggest a rasik sensibility; i.e., Nābhā’s devotional practice may have involved visualizations in which he took on a feminine role in serving Rām and Sītā. 71. Chappay 165. 72. Chappay 174. aṣṭāṅg jog tan tyagiyau dvārikadās jānai dunī /  . . . ​bal bhajan ke jñān khaḍag māyā hanī / 73. Dohā 193. kāhū ke bal jagya jog kau kul karnī kī ās / bhaktanām mālā agar ur basau narāyandās //

4. Between Bhakti and Śakti = 351 74. Hare 2011b, 43. Nābhādās’s authorship of two aṣṭayāms is more evidence of a rasik orientation, since these texts describe in detail the activities of Rām and Sītā during the eight periods of the day, information vital to rasik smaraṇa (“recollection” practices). 75. Moran 2013, 6–­7. 76. Matthew Clark’s work on the origins of the Daśanāmi sampradāy supports this general picture, for he suggests that in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Daśanāmi order brought together ascetic lineages of quite disparate backgrounds, including more orthodox, brahmanical, sedentary monastic lineages and more heterodox, peripatetic, low-­caste, and (sometimes) militant lineages (2006, 227). 77. Bouillier 2018, 322. 78. Bouillier 2018, 82–­83, 322. 79. Bouillier 2018, 322. 80. Chappays 166 and 167. 81. Rāghavdās names Kīlha’s and Agra’s disciples in chappays 158 and 159. 82. Rāghavdās, chappay 169. 83. Though the compound bhakti yoga is used only once in the entire text (14.26), in the Bhagavad Gītā, bhakti is presented primarily as a devotional type of yoga—­that is, as a disciplined concentration of all one’s mental faculties on Kṛṣṇa. Bhakti is integrated with yoga as a sort of nonattached, God-­focused, everyday orientation toward social duties (karma) and as a theistic meditational technique to achieve liberating divine gnosis ( jñāna) without social renunciation (saṃnyāsa). Having redefined the true saṃnyāsi (renouncer) as a yogī-­in-­the-­ world—­one who “renounces” selfish intention and thus performs necessary actions without attachment to their fruits (6.1–­2)—­K ṛṣṇa goes on in the text to place the yogī above all other religious practitioners (6.46) and to state furthermore that, “Of all the yogīs, the one most yoked to Me is he who does bhakti to Me with faith [śraddhāvān bhajate] and whose inner self is absorbed in Me” (6.47). Kṛṣṇa remarks that it is “by devotion [bhakti] alone” that He, as He really is, can be “known and seen and entered into” (11.54; echoed in 18.55) and then, importantly, proclaims that the devotees (bhaktas) who are wisest about yoga are those who “fix their mind [man] on Me” (12.2), who “worship Me by meditating [dhyāyanta] on Me with undistracted yoga [ananyenaiva yogena]” (12.6), “whose consciousness [cetas] is absorbed in Me” (12.7), who “make [their] intellect [buddhi] dwell in Me” (12.8), and who “concentrate the mind [citta] firmly on Me” (12.9). Clearly, bhakti—­in its highest form (though not its only form)—­is here synonymous with the mental concentration of yogic meditation. Several verses (12.9–­12; 7.16–­22) rank different types of bhakta, while other verses (9.26–­32) stress the benefits of bhakti—­in its simplest forms—­for all devotees regardless of caste, class, gender, past sins, or yogic capacities, but the Gītā clearly presents the yogic form of bhakti as is its ideal form. On this point, see Malinar 2007, 189–­91. In 18.50–­55, the Gītā seems to present bhakti as paradoxically both the experiential result of realizing the Absolute through moderate asceticism, meditation (dhyāna-­yoga), and dispassion (vairāgya) and as the means to that ultimate knowledge ( jñāna) of God. In the Gītā, Friedhelm Hardy explains, “Yoga remains the technique, and jñāna the goal, of bhakti, which in turn brings to both meditational technique and its goal a theistic modification” (1983, 29). Similarly, Krishna Sharma states, “Bhakti, jñāna and yoga stand interwoven in the Bhagavad Gītā. In the discourse on the Bhakti-­yoga, not only bhakti is clearly connected with jñāna and yoga, but both the bhakta and jñānī are described in similar terms. The virtues attributed to the bhakta are the same as those attributed to the yogī, and the true yogī is also called a bhakta” (1987, 115).

352 9 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti 84. Skanda Purāṇa 27.38–­40, 46; Travis Smith 2007, 111–­12. 85. Colas 2003, 233. 86. While most scholars agree that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa was composed around the tenth century in South India (a position laid out especially by Friedhelm Hardy and D. Dennis Hudson), Edwin Bryant has thoughtfully questioned this view, positing that much of the text may have been composed considerably earlier and actually have influenced the Tamil Āḷvār saints, rather than the other way around. Anand Venkatkrishnan highlights the fact that, regardless of these debates about the provenance of the BhP, it is clear that there was virtually no intellectual engagement with the text until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that this engagement occurred not in the Tamil South but in Maharashtra and Orissa. See Venkatkrishnan 2015; 30–­32; Bryant 2002; Hudson 2010, 125–­40. 87. Hopkins 1962, 13. 88. Hardy 1983 argues that it was through the influence of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which imbibed the attitudes of the Tamil Āḷvār poet-­saints, that the conception of bhakti in North India transformed from an intellectual bhakti of reverence and loyal service (seen in the Bhagavad Gītā) to an ecstatic, emotional, and intoxicating bhakti. Hardy emphasizes that the BhP expresses an emotional viraha-­bhakti, for the first time in Sanskrit, that is rooted in the earlier emotional bhakti of the Tamil Āḷvārs, but Tracey Coleman has argued that, in fact, “viraha-­bhakti is found in Sanskrit and Pāli literature much earlier than the Āḻvārs” and actually “originates in the heterodox traditions of Buddhism and Jainism, when the beloved saviour, embodied in human form, departs or dies, and devotees subsequently suffer and long for the saviour’s return—­thus embracing relics, creating stūpas, recalling discourses, and remembering in elaborate and loving detail the biography of their beloved guru, whose carita then becomes central to various cults of bhakti” (2014, 58). 89. Haberman 2003, xxx. In Barbara Holdrege’s words, the BhP “adopts the canonical form of a Purāṇa and incorporates the South Indian devotional traditions of the Ālvārs within a brahmanical Sanskritic framework that reflects North Indian ideologies” (2015, 25). 90. BhP XI.15.24. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa are my adaptations of the translations in C. L. Goswami 1971. 91. BhP II.2.19–­21. 92. BhP II.2.22–­23. 93. Bryant 2017, xiii. For Bryant, the BhP’s bhakti is a particular method of yoga that contrasts with the classical yoga of Patañjali in that it “involves immersing the mind and senses in God,” not withdrawing them from sense objects or stilling the mind (as in Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras); this bhakti yoga “is a process that transforms the focus of the mind and senses, rather than attempting to shut them down” (xxix). 94. Holdrege 2015, 273. 95. BhP XI.14.20–­22. 96. BhP XI.14.24. 97. BhP XI.14.27–­29. 98. BhP XI.14.31–­46. 99. BhP XI.15.1–­32. This section concludes by remarking that these siddhis are obstacles that delay the one seeking the ultimate goal of union with the Divine. 100. BhP III.32.28–­30. 101. Guy Beck highlights the importance of congregational singing and chanting of God’s name in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, suggesting that its scriptural/theological support helped propel

4. Between Bhakti and Śakti = 353 vernacular singing into “prominence in the liturgical and devotional contexts of the emerging Bhakti traditions throughout various regions” (2012, 133). 102. This continues to be the case in present-­day India. See DeNapoli 2014 on the crucial relationship between bhakti (particularly bhajan singing) and asceticism among female Hindu sādhus in modern-­day Rajasthan. 103. According to Nābhādās, it was Rāghavānand who brought the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition from the south to the north, settling in Banaras, where he initiated Rāmānand (Bhaktamāl, stanza 34). Richard Burghart and Peter van der Veer discuss various stories intended to explain how the Rāmānandīs are linked to yet separate from the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas. In these, it is said that (depending on the version) Rāmānand or his guru, Rāghavānand, either (a) left the Śrī Vaiṣṇava fold when denied commensality after breaking caste rules or (b) was excommunicated for following tantric practices and doctrines; Burghart 1978, 123–­24; van der Veer 1989, 87–­89. 104. Chappay 30:5, 29:6 (Nābhājī 1978); Hare 2011b, 54–­55. 105. Pinch 1999, 380–­81. 106. The Agastya Saṃhitā demonstrates the institutional presence of Rām devotion in Banaras as early as the twelfth century; however, this text appears to have no relationship with the Śrī sampraday. On the basis of oral tradition, Hans Bakker (1986, 139) suggests that the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas may have been present in North India—­in Ayodhyā—­by the sixteenth century. 107. Burghart 1978. 108. Assuming an actual link between the Rāmānandīs and Śrī Vaiṣṇavas, Burghart states that “it was more advantageous for the Ramanandis to profit from the established reputation of the Sri sect . . . ​than to abrogate this link and to fend for themselves in the competition with other ascetic sects,” adding that the community’s liberal social attitudes and initiation practices reveal “the broadening of criteria for recruitment into a Vaishnavite sect thereby enabling the sect to compete more effectively for devotees and disciples” (1978, 133). 109. Bakker 1986, 70. 110. Vaudeville notes that “the Rāmānujīyas castigate the Rāmānandīs as a ‘non-­Vedic’ sect since they use a formula [mantra] which excludes the praṇava [OṂ]” (1974, 114–­15). Furthermore, these two communities differ in the basic fact that Rāmānandīs worship Rām and Sītā, whereas Śrī Vaiṣṇavas tend to worship Viṣṇu Nārāyaṇ and Lakṣmī. 111. Śiva is second (initiated by Brahmā) in the Agastya Saṃhitā’s lineage of great Rām bhaktas, while in Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl he is third, after Brahmā and Nārada. See Paramasivan 2010, 43. 112. Paramasivan 2010, 104; Bakker 1986, 98–­99. This tree-­lotus-­throne image is not altogether uncommon and admittedly could have made its way into the Dhyān Mañjarī via other means. 113. Bakker 1986, 72. 114. Bakker 1986, 73. 115. Bakker 1986, 77. 116. Bakker 1986, 73. 117. Bakker 1986, 78. 118. Bakker 1986, 78. The text also devotes an entire chapter (6) to the greatness of tulasī leaves, which can be offered in worship to Rām by men and women of all castes without a guru or initiation. 119. In chapter 7 of the text, the AgSaṃ cleverly uses the name of Rām to explain and appropriate the ancient tradition that Śiva grants liberation to those who die in the precincts of Banaras. The text explains that many worshippers were coming to Banaras seeking liberation and continuously repeating, “Śiva, Śiva, Śiva.” Hearing them, but unable to help, Śiva wondered,

354 9 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti

120. 121.

122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

“How can I grant liberation to these devotees?” He then approached Brahmā, who told him the way, initiating Śiva in the ṣaḍakṣara mantra of Rām. Śiva then practiced devotion and japa of this mantra until eventually Rām appeared before him. At this point, says the AgSaṃ, Rām told Śiva that (a) when anyone worships with this ṣaḍakṣara mantra, he (Rām) will make himself present, and (b) if he (Śiva) should whisper the name of Rām into the right ear of anyone who longs for liberation, that person will be released (Bakker 2009, 69–­70). Interestingly, the great sixteenth-­century bhakti saint Tulsīdās’s views on Śiva and the holy Name (Rāma) precisely mirror those of the AgSaṃ. In his Rāmcaritmānas, Tulsīdās depicts Śiva as Rām’s most devout bhakta and states that he continually repeats the mahāmantra of the divine Name Rāma, compassionately bestowing it upon those dying in Banaras in order to grant them liberation. Just as much as the early Galta Rāmānandīs, Tulsīdās seems to have followed in the tradition of the AgSaṃ, for his conception of Rām as both nirguṇ and saguṇ, and of the Name as the bridge between these two dimensions, also matches the AgSaṃ’s conception of Rām and the Name. Furthermore, Tulsīdās is said to have settled in Banaras at a location (now called Tulsī Ghāṭ) adjacent to the temple of Lolārka, a Vaiṣṇava temple that dates back to at least the twelfth century and was likely the center for the community that composed the AgSaṃ (see Bakker 2009, 69–­71). While Tulsīdās was not a member of the Rāmānandī community, he is closely associated with it. Nābhādās (a contemporary of Tulsī’s) praises him as the poet Valmiki himself, taken birth in the Kali Age, and Priyādās’s commentary on the Bhaktamāl mentions a meeting between the two. Furthermore, Tulsī’s Rāmcaritmānas and the Hanumān-­ cālīsā (universally attributed to Tulsī, though probably not authored by him) became so central to the religious life of the Rāmānandī sampradāy that later sectarian hagiographies (e.g., the Rasik-­prakāś-­bhaktamāl of 1839) invented ways to co-­opt him into the community (Paramasivan 2010, 12). Tulsīdās was a brahman who maintained a concern with propriety, orthodoxy, and caste that would have placed him in tension with aspects of the socially liberal early Rāmānandīs and the heterodox views of the Sant poets, like Kabīr, whom they claimed as their own. In verse 554 of his Dohāvalī, Tulsīdās “condemns the heterodoxy represented by the Sants,” writing, “By means of sākhīs, śabdīs, dohās, tales and stories, these vile poets expound bhakti, while scorning the Vedas and the Purāṇas” (Schomer 1987a, 73–­74). Bakker 1987, 23. Pollock 1993, 266. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (2004) has offered a probing critique of many aspects of Pollock’s essay. In particular, he criticizes Pollock’s suggestion that Rām’s story had new appeal because its depiction of the villain Rāvana and his demon cohort resonated with hostile Hindu attitudes toward the Muslim Turks. While this dimension of Pollock’s argument may indeed be flawed, there is nevertheless solid evidence of a clear rise in devotion to Rām as a deity-­k ing in this period, a rise that was probably related in some way to the transformed social and political order instituted by the Sultanate. Bakker 1987, 21. Bakker suggests that the figure of Rāma “lent itself perfectly to the role of principal deity, a symbol of the desperate Hindu struggle against a new and uncompromising power that threatened to subvert its traditional patterns and values” (20). Pollock 1993, 279. Bakker 1987, 22. Bakker 1986, 123. McGregor 2003, 932. Nāmdev and the other nonsectarian (or “vulgate Vaiṣṇava”) bhakti poet-­saints in Maharashtra are also referred to as Sants. For a discussion of the major similarities and key

4. Between Bhakti and Śakti = 355 differences between these “southern” (Maharashtrian) Sants and the “northern” Sants (who are the focus here), see Vaudeville 1987a; 1987b. 128. Callewaert 2011, 532. 129. Schomer 1987a, 76–­82. 130. Callewaert 2011, 532. 131. Alam 2004, 82. 132. Bakker 1986, 121. 133. Nābhādās seems to have conceived all the bhaktas he praised in his Bhaktamāl to have been Vaiṣṇavas in some sense. In dohā 184 (Nābhājī 1978), he states, “All you Vaiṣṇavas, all you sacred images, great and small, all of your virtues are boundless / Some are mentioned earlier and others later, please do not think it a crime” (śrī mūrti sab vaiṣṇava laghu dīragh gunani agādh / āge pīche baran te jinni mānau aparādh //). Thanks to Tyler Williams for drawing my attention to this verse. 134. Agrawal 2008. Agrawal shows indisputably that the Sanskrit texts attributed to Rāmānand are actually products of the early twentieth century. 135. Historically speaking, Rāmānand remains shrouded in mystery, and while some scholars (e.g., William Pinch, John Stratton Hawley) have suggested he may be a pious invention, in my mind there is little doubt that he did in fact exist. Beyond references to him in sectarian Rāmānandī sources, as just mentioned, poetry attributed to him is found in the anthologies of the Sikhs and the Dādū ­Panth. Perhaps most interesting of all, he is praised by the nonsectarian bhakti poet Harirām Vyās (fl. 1535–­1570), whose compositions seem to precede all Rāmānandī writings. In one of his poems (pad 46), Vyās writes, “Truly a holy man [sādhu] was Rāmānand, who knew how to love the Lord, having realized that all else is sorrow and duality.” In the next line, he describes Kabīr as Rāmānand’s sevak (servant). While a number of scholars have been interested in this poem insofar as it relates to the ongoing scholarly debate over whether or not Kabīr was actually the disciple of Rāmānand, perhaps more significant is the simple fact that among the bhaktas that Vyās praised—­w ith no sectarian allegiance—­was none other than Rāmānand. This powerfully suggests that he was no invented figure but a real person who was worthy of note in the North Indian bhakti milieu. See Pauwels 2002, 105, 264–­68. 136. Agrawal 2008, 158–­59. For a brief summary of an in-­depth study of the Hindi verses attributed to Rāmānand, see Caracchi 2002. Caracchi discovered that many of the songs attributed to Rāmānand are very similar or identical to passages in Nāth and Sant literary works. She gives no persuasive reasons why Rāmānand could not have composed these verses himself but—­ reasonably, perhaps—­concludes they were most likely composed by a poet of the Rāmānandī ascetic-­yogic stream. 137. It is worth noting that while Rāmānand and many of his supposed disciples (Kabīr, Raidās, Pīpā, Dhanā, Sen) seem to have been Sants, we know virtually nothing about Anantānand, the disciple of Rāmānand who was Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī’s guru and is thus the critical link between Rāmānand and the Rāmānandī community at Galta. In the course of my research, I have not encountered any poetry attributed to Anantānand or any hagiographical references that might give a clear sense of his life or religious practice. 138. Agrawal 2011, 11. 139. Agrawal 2011, 11–­12. We might reasonably be suspicious of Barthwal’s claims for the influence of the Nāths specifically on Hindi literature, considering that (a) the earliest manuscript evidence we have of Nāth yogī writings in “Hindi” comes from the seventeenth century and (b)

356 9 4. Between Bhakti and Śakti Barthwal’s assertions may have been motivated by a nationalist agenda that sought to give Hindi literature an ancient (and Hindu religious) pedigree. See Barthwal 1936. 140. Schomer 1987b, 8. 141. Vaudeville 1987a, 36. 142. Gadon 1987. 143. Leonard Wolcott’s (1978) ethnographic research (in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) suggests that in the popular religiosity of village India, Hanumān is far more important to devotees for his extraordinary strength and power (bal/śakti) and his ability to protect from or gain power over enemies and malicious spirits (bhūt, pret, etc.) than for his devotion, service, and loyalty to Rām. 144. Horstmann 2002, 155–­56. Horstmann actually states that “these oldest shrines, either dated or connected with the first two generations of Rāmānandīs in Galta, are dedicated to Śiva and Hanumān,” but in Galta itself I am not aware of any Śiva temples or shrines. Nearby in Jāmṛolī there is a Hanumān temple with a very old Śiva shrine (its inscription dates to v.s. 1212), but it is not in the gorge that was and still is the heart of the Galta community. 145. Horstmann 2002, 156. Specifically, we have a revenue grant dated 1640 that confirms a grant originally issued by Akbar (and thus no later than 1605, his last year as emperor) in which the Galta Rāmānandīs are granted the revenue of 2,592 bīghās in Raṇthambhor in the ṣūba of Ajmer. 146. Horstmann 2002, 155–­56. 147. Horstmann 2002, 156. 148. Lutgendorf 2007, 389. 149. Lutgendorf 2007, 287. 150. Agrawal 2008, 137, 157–­58; Śukla (1929) 2009, 133. 151. McGregor 1984, 109. In 1610, Prāṇcand Cauhān composed a Brajbhasha version of this retelling of the Rām story emphasizing the deeds of Hanumān, and, in 1623, Hṛdayrām (a.k.a. Kavi Rām) wrote another Brajbhasha rendering of the tale. Rāmcandra Śukla ([1929] 2009, 152–­54) also discusses both these figures. 152. Lutgendorf 1994, 232–­33. 153. Lutgendorf 2007, 84. 154. Lutgendorf 1994, 240. 155. Lutgendorf (1994, 227) notes that scholars who have ventured to make historical claims about Nāth veneration of Hanumān, such as Peter van der Veer and Charlotte Vaudeville, seem to have based their remarks solely on the early twentieth-­century ethnographic research of George W. Briggs (1938), who offers no evidence that this practice has any historic pedigree. The modern-­day Nāths’ worship of Hanumān is likely part of a general Vaiṣṇavization and devotionalization that occurred within various Śaiva and Śākta tantric communities as a result of the success of North India’s bhakti movement and the pervasive spread of its religious attitudes and modes of expression. Ann Gold states that while “the relation between Nath and Sant traditions is usually seen in terms of Nathism’s influence on the iconoclastic teachings of the fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century Sants,” the situation is curiously reversed in the rural Rajasthani village where she did fieldwork, where the Nāths “seem to have appropriated and become the purveyors of a somewhat altered Sant tradition” (Gold and Nath 1992, 43). 156. Lutgendorf 2007, 390.

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1. Caracchi 2002, 36. 2. Mallinson 2011b, 411. 3. Mallinson 2012, 263. The Nāth tradition and most scholarship place Gorakhnāth in the north (usually either in Panjab or Bengal) and claim that he was a celibate ascetic, but James Mallinson (2011b, 413, 417; 2014a, 233n28) has argued compellingly that Gorakh was most likely from the Deccan region, perhaps Maharashtra or Karnataka, and was probably a married householder whose tantric practice involved tantric laya yoga (not haṭha yoga). 4. Jālandharnāth—­sometimes also known as Hāḍipā, Bālnāth, or Bālgundāī—­is a tantric ascetic mentioned in texts dating back to the thirteenth century and is often said to be the disciple of Matsyendranāth and the guru of Kānhapā and Gopīcand. See Mallinson 2011b, 410, 425. 5. The wearing of the horn and earrings—­worn in the lobes, not the cartilage of the ear—­ seems to have represented distinct external markers of a Nāth Siddha affiliation since at  least the thirteenth century, and perhaps earlier. At some later point, the Nāths also become associated with the use of the greeting “Ādeś” ([please give me your] order), the wearing of their distinctive hooped earrings in the cartilage (not the lobe) of the ear, and the wearing of a distinctive (often heavy, patchwork) cloak (kanthā). Many of the other external features often associated with the Nāth yogīs (e.g., those described in bhakti poetry and the Sufi premakhyāns) are, in fact, not exclusive to the Nāths but common to ascetics in many traditions. These include the wearing of ash (vibhūti), dreadlocks ( jatā), the rosary ( japa-­mālā), the use of a staff (daṇḍā), the begging bowl (khappara), the meditation crutch (adhārī), the water pot (udapātra), and an antelope or tiger skin for meditation. For a detailed consideration of the various insignia associated with the Nāths and other ascetics, see Mallinson forthcoming (a). 6. A couple of northwestern lineages did not claim allegiance to Gorakhnāth until the nineteenth century, and even today not all Nāths recognize Gorakh’s authority. See Mallinson 2011b, 410–­11. 7. Mallinson 2011b, 425. 8. A manuscript of the Nujūm al-­‘ulūm, completed in Bijapur in 1570, lists twelve yogī panths; see Flatt 2011, 242. Slightly later (early seventeenth century) Sikh sources also refer to the twelve panths of the yogīs and the ten names of the saṃnyāsīs; namely, Gurū Granth Sāhib 9.2, 34.2, and Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās 8.13. 9. Van der Veer 1989, 95. 10. Van der Veer 1989, 89. 11. Van der Veer 1989, 95 12. Horstmann 2002, 152. 13. Fitzgerald 2012, 46. 14. Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6:10–­11. 15. Brockington 2003, 17. 16. Brockington 2005, 132; Fitzgerald 2012, 45–­46. 17. Fitzgerald 2012, 50; Malinar 2011, 41–­42. 18. For a brief discussion of the varying meanings of the word yoga in the Bhagavad Gītā, for instance, see Malinar 2012, 58–­59. 19. Kaelber 1989, 52–­55. 20. Kaelber 1989, 29.

358 9 5. Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas 21. According to Johnannes Bronkhorst (1998, 3, 76), early textual evidence shows that Indian asceticism—­defined as “the whole range of physical and mental exercises from extreme mortification to certain forms of ‘gentle’ meditation”—­had two separate sources, one Vedic, the other non-­Vedic (śramaṇa), and that these two currents influenced each other and became increasingly indistinguishable over time. He sees the Vedic stream as an extension of ascetic acts performed in connection with the Vedic sacrifice that typically aimed at heaven, siddhis, and achievement of worldly desires. Non-­Vedic asceticism, on the other hand, “aim[ed] primarily at inaction, with the ultimate goal of liberation from the effects of one’s actions” (karma); i.e., disciplining the body and its desires and stilling the mind completely in order to attain a state of consciousness or insight leading to liberation. 22. In ancient India, semen was associated with the energy of life; the loss of this vital energy—­ via ejaculation—­was thought to lead to morbidity and death. The ascetic who retained his seed (retas, bīja) was a model of virility who not only enjoyed robust physical health, strength, and mental acumen but also accrued godlike powers. Indeed, “sages who remain[ed] chaste for long periods and who combine[d] this with advanced level of meditation [could] even challenge the gods in terms of power and wisdom” (Powers 2009, 79). 23. On the relationship of meditation and asceticism in early Hindu scriptures, see Bronkhorst 1993, 20–­28. By and large, it seems that in the ascetic yoga of the early Hindu and Jain traditions, the ascetic conquering of the body and breath was deemed necessary for the meditational goal of stilling the mind’s activity completely. 24. The eight limbs of Pātañjala yoga are (1) yama—­ethics/restraint (nonviolence, telling the truth, not stealing, celibacy, not being greedy); (2) niyama—­discipline (cleanliness, serenity, asceticism, study, devotion to the Lord); (3) āsana—­posture; (4) prāṇāyāma—­breath control; (5) pratyahāra—­withdrawal of the senses; (6) dhāraṇā—­concentration; (7) dhyāna—­meditation; and (8) samādhi—­objectless (nondual) meditative absorption. 25. Chapple 2012, 118. 26. Maas 2013, 57–­58. For a good summary of Maas’s key arguments and several prominent alternatives to his theory current among scholars of the Yoga Sūtra, see White 2014, 226–­34. 27. Maas 2013, 66. 28. Michel Angot makes the intriguing argument that the Yoga Sūtra’s first three chapters were a Buddhist work composed by Patañjali, ca. 0–­100, but that the final chapter was composed by a Hindu named Vyāsa several centuries later. This theory would explain why the first three chapters of the Yoga Sūtra are so very Buddhist in orientation and language (i.e., why they are best understood as a composition of Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit—­using Buddhism-­ specific terminological meanings—­a nd not one of classical Sanskrit) while the fourth chapter and the commentary attributed to Vyāsa have an orthodox brahmanical orientation and are overtly critical of Buddhism and thus appear to be an intentional “translation” of the Yoga Sūtra into a Hindu idiom. See White 2014, 232–­33; Angot 2008. 29. Patañjali’s famous definition of yoga, in the second verse of his text—­as “the cessation [nirodha] of the fluctuations [vṛtti] of the mind [citta]”—­is, in fact, somewhat misleading in that it suggests the more ascetic goal of complete motionlessness of mind, whereas the entirety of the text clearly shows a more gnostic orientation in which knowledge of (insight into) the true nature of reality/the Self is the liberating end goal. While samādhi is the final limb of this yoga system, the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra actually describes eight levels of samādhi, the highest/deepest of which is egoless, objectless, “seedless” (nirbīja), pure witnessing consciousness. See Bronkhorst 1993, 46–­52; Larson 2012, 81–­88.

5. Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas = 359 30. Nicholson 2014, 9. 31. White 2014, 168. 32. Early tantric texts all speak of raising the prāṇa. Only later, in conjunction with developing theories about the feminine divine energy of śakti, did certain tantric traditions conceive kuṇḍalinī, the serpent power coiled at the base of the spine, as that which the yogī was to raise along his spine. The circa tenth-­century Kubjikāmata Tantra, composed in the Paścimāmnāya Kaula tradition, is the first text to present a fully developed notion of kuṇḍalinī, and it also presents one of the most historically influential models of the subtle body and its cakras and nāḍīs. See Mallinson and Singleton 2017, xix. 33. For a very helpful chart of the various articulations and orderings of the limbs (or ancillaries) of yoga in a wide variety of scriptures, see Vasudeva 2004, 380–­81. Six-­limbed yoga systems typically did not include yama and niyama, and, in most cases, they also removed āsana and added the limb of tarka (defined as transcendental contemplation, insight, or perfected reason) or sometimes japa (recitation of mantras). 34. Realizing one’s equality or identity with God was often associated with gnosis (especially in nondual tantric systems), thus knowledge ( jñāna) could play a central role in both meditational and tantric forms of yoga. 35. Jason Birch argues that in the texts of haṭha yoga, the word haṭha is never used to refer to forceful effort required by haṭha practices but rather to their forceful effect. The “force” of haṭha yoga has to do with the fact that its techniques have a forceful effect “in forcing what normally moves down (i.e., apāna, bindu) and what is usually dormant (kuṇḍalinī) to move upwards” (2011, 531, 537–­38). The Yogabīja (ca. fourteenth century) would later provide a folk etymology, often repeated in subsequent texts, in which haṭha does not mean “force” at all but is broken up into ha, meaning “sun,” and ṭha, meaning “moon,” suggesting that the primary aim of haṭha yoga is the union (yoga) of sun and moon; e.g., the union of fiery Śakti (kuṇḍalinī/rajas) with the cooling Śiva (amṛta/bindu). This “union of sun and moon” can also refer to the uniting of upper and lower breaths (prāṇa and apāna), or the piṅgalā and iḍā nāḍīs. See Mallinson 2011a, 772. 36. Birch 2015, 8. On this point, see also Mallinson 2014a, 238; 2012, 257. 37. Mallinson forthcoming (a). The Amṛtasiddhi does not call its yogic method haṭha yoga; however, its teachings are foundational to (and borrowed directly by) later (non-­Buddhist) haṭha-­yoga texts. A twelfth-­century manuscript of the text exists and clearly indicates Vajrayāna authorship; however, in later manuscripts of the text its Buddhist features are altered or omitted. Interestingly, this text states that the core method of tantric yoga—­ visualization of oneself as a deity—­is, in fact, entirely ineffective for realizing the yogī’s spiritual goals. Instead, it recommends practices involving bodily postures and breath control as means to raise the breath along the central channel to arrest the fall of the life essence (bindu) and to raise and unite the feminine principle (rajas) with the masculine principle (bindu/bīja) at the top of the yogī’s head. 38. Cf. Mallinson 2016, 122. 39. These ten distinctive haṭha-­yoga techniques are mahāmudrā, mahābandha, khecarīmudrā, the three bandhas ( jālandharabandha, uḍḍiyāṇabandha, and mūlabandha), viparītakaraṇī, vajrolī, amarolī, and sahajolī. See Mallinson 2011a, 771 (and 778 for brief descriptions of each). 40. Mallinson 2012. 41. Sanskrit texts on yoga composed in the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries identify and discuss especially four types of yoga: mantra yoga, laya yoga, haṭha yoga, and rāja yoga. In the majority of these texts, the term rāja yoga does not refer to a particular yogic method

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but to the yogic goal—­i.e., it is a synonym for samādhi (the “no-­m ind” state, nondual consciousness)—­and mantra yoga, laya yoga, and haṭha yoga are different (variously ranked but potentially complementary) ways to reach that goal. See Birch 2013, 406. With Svātmārāma’s mid-­fifteenth-­century Haṭhapradīpikā, considered the authoritative synthesis and codification of haṭha-­yoga practice, mantra yoga is completely eliminated and laya yoga and haṭha yoga are fully integrated (under the name of haṭha yoga, whose physical techniques are to serve the purpose of raising the kuṇḍalinī) as the necessary means for achieving the end goal of rāja yoga (samādhi). See Mallinson 2016, 110. 42. There came about a proliferation of different Vedāntic philosophical systems beginning in the twelfth century, often integrated with new sectarian bhakti theologies; see Fisher 2017, 38–­46. The influence of Vedāntic thought—­especially Advaita Vedānta—­in the early modern period seems to have manifested in the popular sphere particularly in the growth of nirguṇ bhakti and simplified forms of yoga with Vedāntic (brahman-­g nosis-­focused) soteriological orientations. Vedānta’s rise in the Sultanate and Mughal periods must also have had something to do with the fact that, on the one hand, it could be adapted to give diverse sectarian religious systems an orthodox, brahmanical Hindu standing, while, on the other hand, it could serve as a key philosophical basis for various forms of Hindu-­Muslim dialogue and hybridity. On the social history of Advaita Vedānta in the early modern period, see Minkowski 2011. 43. Krishna Sharma 1987, 152–­56. 44. Schwartz 2017, 341. Classical Advaita Vedānta viewed knowledge as the only path to liberation and consistently criticized yoga practice as a form of action binding living beings in saṃsāra. 45. Schwartz 2017, 386. 46. Mallinson 2014a, 238. 47. Mallinson 2014a, 231–­39. 48. We might consider many of these late medieval and early modern (mostly haṭha) yoga texts as part of what Michael Allen (2017, 277, 291) has called the “Greater Advaita Vedānta” tradition. Allen makes the point that the narrow realm of scholastic, Sanskrit, classical Advaita Vedānta should not be considered synonymous with the Advaita Vedānta tradition as a whole. He coins the term “Greater Advaita Vedānta” to refer to a more expansive and less clearly defined tradition that expressed core Advaita Vedānta teachings through the medium of vernacular, nonphilosophical, and syncretic works (blending Vedāntic teachings with bhakti, yoga, tantra, etc.). 49. Birch 2015, 8. 50. Kiss 2011, 162. 51. While earlier forms of tantric yoga required initiation and typically involved a progression of meditations upon increasingly subtle elements (tattvas) specific to a given sectarian tradition’s particular ontology/cosmology, in this period texts on yoga typically removed complex sect-­specific ontological systems, “restrict[ing] such practices to dhāraṇās on the five elements accepted by all Indic metaphysical systems or laya, dissolution, into those five elements, often in the course of Kuṇḍalinī’s rise up the central channel” (Mallinson 2014a, 230). 52. For example, in earlier forms of tantric practice, some traditions had called for an external sexual ritual and female consort in order to produce and combine the power-­laden human sexual fluids, but now these power substances (the male bindu and female rajas) were to be located within the yogin’s own body and could be united through his yogic practice. See Mallinson 2012, 272.

5. Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas = 361 53. For example, instead of (or in addition) to the use of mantras and visualization meditation, one might sit cross-­legged with the heel under the perineum, then raise the body and gently drop it in order to press the heel against the perineum to force the prāṇa or kuṇḍalinī up the suṣumnā. See Mallinson 2007, 26–­28. 54. While haṭha yoga was, in some sense, open to anyone willing to put in the necessary work—­ some texts suggested that householders and even women can practice it—­most haṭha-­yoga texts are clearly aimed at male renouncers. 55. Véronique Bouillier, email message to author, September 13, 2013. 56. Mallinson 2014b, 173. It would not be accurate to understand all Nāth lineages as primarily siddhi-­seeking “magicians,” but as a widely applicable feature of the broad Nāth yogī community, this characterization does hit the mark. 57. Mallinson 2014b, 167–­68. 58. Mallinson 2014b. 59. Mallinson 2005, 112. 60. The definitive text of classical haṭha yoga, Svātmārāma’s Haṭhapradīpikā (ca. 1450)—­which made the raising of kuṇḍalinī (as opposed to the preservation of bindu) into the primary goal of haṭha yoga’s distinctive physical techniques and breathing practices—­was actually composed by a lineage of ascetics claiming descent from Matsyendranāth and Gorakhnāth. However, the various yogī lineages that would coalesce into the Nāth panth by the early seventeenth century seem to have gone in a direction entirely different from that of the Haṭhapradīpikā, for since the time of that text’s composition (ca. 1450) there have been no new texts on haṭha yoga composed by Nāths and not a single one of the many modern schools of yoga comes from a Nāth milieu. In the Haṭhapradīpikā, we see a move toward orthodoxy and brahmanical respectability and away from tantric mantra practice and the acquisition of siddhis, which are certainly not indicative of the overall direction pursued by the slowly coalescing Nāth yogī community. See Mallinson 2011a, 775. 61. McGregor explains, “The language of the received texts is very mixed. This may be due to their former wide circulation or to vicissitudes of transmission. Some forms are eastern, others of Rajasthan, while the general character of the language is that of the mixed speech of the Delhi region (Old Khaṛī bolī) with additional admixture of Brajbhasha” (1984, 23). The poems of the Gorakhbāṇī frequently include both (a) sandhyābhāṣā, or “twilight language,” which hints at esoteric content through language and metaphors of ordinary life, and (b) ulṭabāmsī, or “upside-­down language,” which uses paradox to mirror (in its form) the process of reversal involved in yogic practice. For a good discussion of the difference between these two forms of expression and how each is used in the Gorakhbāṇī, see Djurdjevic 2008, 101–­10. 62. The poems of the Gorakhbāṇī were collected and edited as such by P. Barthwal. The oldest of the manuscripts he used dates to 1658. While it is quite possible that some poems of the Gorakhbāṇī could date back to as early as the mid-­fourteenth century, at this point we have no way to know this, and the situation is complicated by the fact that a number of the Gorakhbāṇī’s poems contain references clearly borrowed from the literature of the Sants. See McGregor 1984, 22. As Mariola Offredi (2002, 136n19) notes, “The oldest surviving manuscripts of the [vernacular] works attributed to Gorakh were written in a period when ideals and practice of bhakti had become widespread,” and several of the verses attributed to Gorakh have been found as works attributed to Dādū, Kabīr, and Nānak, while others have taken on the form of popular sayings. 63. Sabdī 141b states, “Those who, in making love, preserve the bindu, they are Gorakh’s brothers.” This verse stands in contrast to the majority of the Gorakhbāṇī, which express a clearly

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negative attitude toward sex and women; e.g., pad 48, which proclaims, “The vagina is a vampire; without teeth, she devoured the whole world. . . . ​[Man] does not understand the nature of sexual lust, so he keeps and nurtures the tigress in his own home.” The haṭha-­yogic practice of vajrolī-­mudrā has typically been understood as the reabsorption of ejaculated semen during intercourse (i.e., the physical ability to draw semen back into the urethra); however, Mallinson (2018) has shown that this feat is, in fact, physiologically impossible, and that the practice of vajrolī-­mudrā actually involved inserting a thin pipe/catheter into the urethra in order to suck fluids into (and thus to cleanse) the bladder. This practice has the side effect of desensitizing the verumontanum (a part of the male anatomy near the bladder that is key to ejaculation) and thus, over time, can allow one to have control over the ejaculatory impulse. In other words, through repeated practice of inserting a catheter in the urethra as far as the bladder (as part of vajrolī-­mudrā), a yogī could acquire control over ejaculation and could, theoretically, have intercourse without “releasing his seed.” 64. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the Gorakhbāṇī are from Djurdjevic and Singh 2005. 65. While the Nāth yogīs’ siddha roots and tantric tendencies are clear in the Gorakhbāṇī, the diversity (and sometimes incompatibility) of teachings in the text also make it clear that the various yogī lineages who linked themselves to Gorakhnāth did not have a uniform practice. 66. The Haṭhapradīpikā (IV.65–­66) actually attributes the teaching of the laya-­yoga method of concentration (meditation) upon the nāda (internal sound) to Gorakhnāth and calls it the most important of the lāya methods. 67. Ondračka 2015, 219. 68. Mallinson 2016, 119. 69. Mallinson 2016, 119. 70. Chappay 38. 71. Mallinson 2011a, 779. 72. Chappay 40. 73. As noted in the preceding chapter, the reference to bal (power) in Kīlha’s yogic practice seems to further link Kīlha to Bhīṣma and Bhīṣma’s style of yoga. In Mahābhārata 12:289.11–­56, Bhīṣma expounds on the practice of yoga, placing great emphasis on its bal and the bal of its practitioners. See Fitzgerald 2012, 48. 74. Chappay 165. 75. Larson 2008, 28–­29. 76. Mallinson 2014b, 165; White 2009, xii–­x iv, 37–­42. 77. White 2009, 37. 78. McDaniel 2011, 540. 79. Brockington 2005, 136. 80. Yoga Sūtra III.37, 50–­51. 81. White 2009, 39, 42. 82. Mallinson 2014b, 167. As Mallinson says, “The powers are not the practice.” 83. Nābhā calls Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī a “paragon [avadhi] of renunciation” in two separate verses but uses the words nirved and udāsīntā for “renunciation” (rather than saṃnyās). 84. Callewaert 1996, 939, 941. 85. Mallinson (2013) makes the fascinating argument that the Rāmānandī ascetics were originally a lineage that was a part of a larger saṃnyāsi collective that eventually became the

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Daśanāmī order and acquired a Śaiva orientation but previously included a significant number of Vaiṣṇava lineages. At some point, possibly in the early sixteenth century with Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, the proto-­Rāmānandī lineage broke off from this confederation of saṃnyāsīs, perhaps because of the saṃnyāsīs’ growing Śaiva orientation (likely a function of the dominance of the Śaiva-­oriented Śṛṇgeri maṭha) or their own turn toward a bhakti-­ centered Vaiṣṇava asceticism. Mallinson points out that the organization and initiation procedures of the Daśanāmīs and Rāmānandīs are very close, they both worship Hanumān and gods and sages associated with the ancient ascetic yoga tradition (e.g., Dattātreya and Kapila), they share a secret vocabulary, and both have a military unit (akhāṛā) called (Mahā) Nirvāṇi. Also, “the nominal suffix -­ānanda found in the names of early Rāmānandī gurus prior to the adoption of the suffix -­dāsa is still used by certain subdivisions of the Daśanāmīs.” Indeed, Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, the grand-­d isciple of Rāmānand who founded the community at Galta in the early sixteenth century, is the first to adopt the -­dās suffix, and this change within the lineage to a nominal suffix with Vaiṣṇava and lower-­caste associations may speak to the moment when the proto-­Rāmānandīs seceded from the proto-­Daśanāmī confederation of saṃnyāsīs. 86. Mallinson 2011b, 411. 87. Mallinson 2014b, 174. 88. A brief overview of the confusing situation surrounding the term yogī: In some tantric texts, the yogī, intent upon liberation (mukti), is contrasted with the sādhaka, who seeks enjoyments (bhukti) and siddhis. In other tantric texts, it is the yogī who is considered the seeker of bhukti, in contrast with the jñānī, who seeks knowledge and liberation. In a wide range of texts, the yogī is synonymous with the siddha, with their tantric, kuṇḍalinī-­based practice and power-­oriented perspective considered separate from the tapas-­based practice and mokṣa-­oriented perspective of munis and ṛṣis. In early modern texts, the term yogī often refers to members of the ascetic lineages that were coalescing into the Nāth order, but there are still plenty of instances when the term also refers to Rāmānandīs, Daśanāmīs, and their forerunners. In modern times, the yogī is often considered the respected practitioner of orthodox yoga in contrast to the jogī, a term tending to connote a seedy, tantric magician but also often referring to a specific caste group of snake charmers or bards. 89. Bouillier 2018, 1. 90. In haṭha yoga’s early phase, Nāth and Siddha lineages clearly adopted and experimented with its physical techniques, contributing to the growth of the haṭha-­yoga tradition in vital ways (even introducing certain of its physical techniques and breath-­restraint practices), as demonstrated by multiple texts (composed in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries) out of lineages linking themselves to Gorakhnāth: the Sanskrit Gorakṣaśataka, Vivkeamārtaṇḍa, Amaraughaprabodha, and the authoritative Haṭhapradīpikā, as well as the vernacular (Marathi) Jñānesvarī. These texts tended to use haṭha-­yogic physical techniques in the context of a stripped-­down kuṇḍalinī-­style laya-­yoga practice. Perhaps the Nāth lineages interested in haṭha yoga were absorbed into the coalescing Daśanāmī order in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or perhaps they simply lost interest in its physical practices, but in any case, by the sixteenth century, the evidence indicates that Nāth yogīs had for the most part abandoned the practice of haṭha yoga. 91. Bouillier 2011, 347–­48. 92. Dasgupta 1962, 211. 93. Eliade 1970, 306.

364 9 5. Nāth Yogīs and Rāmānandī Bhaktas 94. Briggs (1938) 2007, 186–­91, 199. 95. Djurdjevic 2008, 26. 96. Djurdjevic 2008, 26. 97. Djurdjevic 2008, 39; emphasis in original. 98. Callewaert 2013, 12–­13. 99. Sabdī 200. 100. The irreverent attitude of the Nāth yogīs was not reserved for Hindu deities but was also sometimes directed at holy figures of Islam. Sabad 10 states, “The whole world was enslaved by saying ‘Lord.’ / By saying ‘Gorakh’ it disappeared. / Muhammad was a master of kalima [holy words; profession of faith] / But he still died nonetheless.” Most Indian Muslims would not have appreciated this lack of respect and humility toward the holy Prophet. 101. Ajap-­jap is meditation on the mantra of the (sound of) the in and out breaths. 102. The “fire of Brahman,” or brahmāgni, is equivalent to the fire of kuṇḍalinī śakti, the concentrated divine energy within the human body. 103. The nād is the primal “sound,” often referred to in Nāth literature as the “unstruck sound” (anāhat nād), and refers, in sonic terms, to the spiritual experience arrived at when, through yogic practice, Śiva (bindu, moon) and Śakti (bīj, rajas, sun) are united in the uppermost cakra (“the circle of the sky”). 104. Gorakhbānī, sabdī 17–­19. 105. Gorakhbāṇī, sabdī 147–­48. 106. As Djurdjevic notes, to the bhaktas “it appears as if the yogis are obsessed with the self-­ empowerment. But for the yogis, to obtain and experience the siddhis means to gain access to the sacred as power” (2008, 41). 107. Jñāndev’s guru was Nivṛttināth, whose guru was Gahinīnāth, whose guru was Gorakhnāth. At one point the Jñāneśvarī (18.1127) equates realization of śakti, knowledge of the ātman, and the highest devotion (bhakti) as one and the same thing, effectively synthesizing (Śaiva) Tantra, Vedānta, and (Vaiṣṇava) Bhakti. Nāmdev and other members of the devotional Vārkarī community of Maharashtra are also remembered to have been, or to have had important links with, Nāths. 108. On the synthesis of Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, tantra, and bhakti in Maharashtra’s Vārkarī (Sant) tradition, see Vaudeville 1996, 241–­58; Dhere 2011. On the Jñāneśvarī’s teaching on kuṇḍalinī yoga, see Kiehnle 2005. On the message, intent, and social impact of the Jñāneśvarī, see Novetzke 2016, 213–­84. 109. Horstmann 2017, 2, 14, 16. 110. Horstmann 2017, 2–­3. In chapter 8 I discuss the Dādū ­Panth’s relationship with the Nāths and its implications for my larger argument about the attitude of early modern North Indian bhaktas toward tantric yogīs. 111. Prithīnāth lived after Kabīr, whom he mentions, but before 1615, the date of the manuscript in which his works appear and which is copied from an earlier source. Other relevant if far less historically reliable information also places him in the sixteenth century: Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl (1660) includes an entry on Prithīnāth referring to a debate he had with Akbar (r. 1556–­1605) in Agra. See Horstmann 2017, 15–­16. 112. Horstmann 2017, 17–­24. On these pages Horstmann translates and comments on Prithīnāth’s Jaina-­vāra-­dharma-­s īla-­samādhi-­g rantha, as well as (in n. 50) a verse from his Nakṣatra-​joga-­g rantha. 113. White forthcoming. 114. Pinch 2006, 195.

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6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti









1. Cf. Green 2015, 12. 2. Several Hindi scholars say Agradās established fourteen initiatory lineages, Ghurye says twelve, and Lutgendorf says eleven. I have been unable to ascertain which of these is correct, but regardless, within the North Indian rubric of the four Vaiṣṇava sampradāys, Agradās clearly established more initiatory lineages than any other figure. 3. At the time of writing, to my knowledge the only Western-­language scholarship engaging with any of the works of Agradās is that of R. S. McGregor. In a short essay, McGregor gives a brief but useful description of the contents of Agra’s Dhyān Mañjarī but does not translate any of the verses; see McGregor 1983. He also briefly discusses Agradās and the Dhyān Mañjarī in McGregor 2003, 936–­37. In my research, I also have not come across any Hindi-­ language scholarship that seriously engages the manuscript archive of Agradās’s work or considers his historical influence in North India’s bhakti movement. 4. Rām-­rasik tradition holds that Agradās was born in 1496 in Pīkasī village and traveled to Galta and became a disciple of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī in 1513 or 1514; however, in my estimation, these dates seem a bit too early. Indian scholar Ratanlāl Mishra states that the Kacchvāhā king Āskaraṇ, who ruled but a single year, 1548, wrote pads while in power in which he identified himself as a devotee of Kīlha, and that by virtue of this fact Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī must have died by this time and Kīlha taken over as mahant of the Galta community, which means that Agradās would have gone to Raivasa by this time as well (if he went there at all). I have not been able to view these pads myself but have met with Mr. Mishra, who claims to have seen them with his own eyes. Corroborating his claim, Rāghavdās’s Bhaktamāl (chappay 192) dedicates a passage to Āskaraṇ that describes him as a disciple of Kīlha. According to the Miśrabandhu Vinod, one of Agradās’s works can be dated to 1603 (v.s. 1660), suggesting that he must have lived at least that long; Miśrabandhu Vinod 1980, 1631 (#242). 5. Regarding Agradās’s departure from Galta, according to one popular Rām-­rasik story, Kīlha and Agra were bathing together there and Agra accidentally put on Kīlha’s laṅgoṭī (loincloth). Kīlha became extremely angry about this, to the point that Agra left Galta, unable to understand why he would get so angry about such a trivial thing. Agra’s name means “first,” and in informal conversations with Rāmānandī rasiks and Indian scholars, I have heard several people speculate that he—­not Kīlha—­was actually the first (senior) disciple of Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī and the rightful successor to the seat at Galta. Some with this view maintain that Agra was so virakt (passionless) that he had no interest in the prestige, leadership, or administration of this position and declined it in order to focus on his devotional practice and writing. Others have suggested that Kīlha was elevated to the seat of Galta because of his social status and connections—­his father was the governor of Gujarat—­while Agra was not seen as the appropriate choice for the seat because he was of low caste. In this context, it is interesting to note that Nābhādās explicitly states the caste status of both Payahārī and Kīlha but never mentions the social status of his own guru, Agra. Tradition maintains he was a brahman. These are fascinating claims, but I have found no evidence to either validate or invalidate them. 6. Chand 159. 7. It was especially Rūpa Gosvāmī (fl. ca. 1500–­1550) who systematized emotional bhakti religion in terms of aesthetic theory. Rūpa met Caitanya in 1514, settled permanently in Vrindavan in 1516, completed his Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu (Ocean of nectar of the essence of devotion)

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in 1541, and died around 1557. He saw bhakti rasa as the only true rasa, conceiving it not as a temporary aesthetic experience but as the spiritual experience that is the core and culmination of the genuine religious life, one based on devotion. See Haberman 2003, 385, 73. 8. Lutgendorf 1991, 311; 1992, 219. For more detailed discussions of rasik practice in the (especially Gauḍiya) Kṛṣṇa-­centered bhakti tradition, see Haberman 1988; Stewart 2005. 9. Lutgendorf 1991, 310. 10. For a study and translation of these verses in the Bhaktamāl, see Lutgendorf 1981. 11. Kumkum Chatterjee 2009, 155, 158. 12. Bhagavati Prasad Singh 1957, 88. As noted, Payahārī presented Rājā Pṛthvīrāj with the deity Sītārām-­jī in the form of a śālagrām stone, and the deity’s name could allude to an amorous unity of Sītā and Rām suggestive of a rasik sensibility; however, Nābhā’s descriptions of Payahārī indicate a far more ascetic, yogic, Sant sensibility than that of a rasik. 13. The only full-­length study of the Rām-­rasik tradition is in Hindi, Bhagavati Prasad Singh’s Rām bhakti mem rasik sampradāya (Balarampur: Avadha Sahitya Mandira, 1957). For the historical development of Rām-­rasik bhakti, in addition to Singh’s study, see Paramasivan 2010; Lutgendorf 1992. 14. Because mādhurya and śṛṅgār, or erotic love/passion, have long played central roles in rasik visualization practice, rasik texts and gurus have often advocated strict secrecy and warned against revealing their teachings to the uninitiated. Rasik literature cautions further that its meditative practices should not be externalized. While the tradition has had much historical success and influence, it also received criticism from British colonialists, nationalist Hindu reformers, and even some segments of the broader public attached to the image of Rām as maryādā-­puruṣottam. I was once told by a Jaipur resident that there is a local saying about Galta, where Rām-­rasik bhakti flourished (and may have originated): Galtā meṃ galtī bhayī; rām karat hai rās; that is, “In Galta, a mistake was made; that Rām does rās līlās.” 15. Lutgendorf 1992, 220–­21. 16. Stewart 2013, 55. This is not to suggest, as some scholars have, that the interiorized practice of rasik bhakti was a retreat from—­or the establishment of a world of meaning beyond—­the “Muslim-­controlled” sociopolitical sphere. See, for example, Haberman 1988, 43–­44. As Lutgendorf has rightly pointed out, “The practice of visualization and of the fabrication of inner bodies has a very old pedigree in the subcontinent, extending back long before the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate,” and rasik practice “came to prominence precisely during a period of generally amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims . . . ​when Hindu nobles occupied powerful positions in the imperial administration and large temples were again being constructed in North India under princely patronage” (1992, 229). 17. The fact that this signature (chāp), Agra-­ali, does not occur in any of the seventeenth-­century manuscripts of his work and tends to occur only in sectarian Rām-­rasik collections makes me skeptical that Agra ever identified himself in this way. The presence of this chāp is probably linked to hagiographical accretions and new works attributed to Agradās that occurred in conjunction with the later (eighteenth to nineteenth century) rise of Rām-­rasik bhakti. 18. Chappay 40. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this chapter are mine. 19. In this important set of verses, Anantadās states (Pīpā-­parcāī 35:25–­28), “If a person stays in one of the four sampradāyas, he will be loved by Hari. He will be called pure, and if he does not find liberation, he will at least not be unfortunate. / If Hari maintains the respect for your appearance, even death cannot touch you. Anantānand, the disciple of Rāmānanda, was pure, appearing like the full moon. His disciple was Krishnadās Adhikārī, known to all

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as dūdhādhārī or ‘having only milk as food.’ His disciple was Agra who excelled in love [prem] and strictly observed the rules of meditation [sumiran]. / Vinod received the teachings of Agra, and I Ananta came as his disciple. By his grace I completed this parcaī, listen, saints, to my true testimony (sākhī)” (Callewaert 2000a, 225). 20. Sumiran is also commonly seen as simraṇ, sumaraṇ, sumiraṇ, and smaraṇ. The very first word of Agra’s Dhyān Mañjarī is the imperative form of this verb: sumirau śrī raghuvīr—­“Remember [meditate on] Rām!” 21. Among rasik bhaktas, it seems that remembrance (sumiran, smaran) of the Name came to be thought of as purifying and preparing the rasik practitioner for the more difficult remembrance of meditation on (visualization of) the līlās of God. 22. Chappay 157:1–­3. bahut bāg sūṃ prīti rīti hari kī jin jāṇīṃ / nīndai gaundai āp āp parvāhai pāṇī / jo upajai phal phūl soī prabhujī kauṃ arapai / 23. Lutgendorf 1991, 315. 24. Jhā 1978, 34. 25. Kavitt 123. Nābhājī, Śrī Bhaktamāl, with the Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary of Priyā Dās, 314. See also Pinch 1999, 393. 26. The tradition at Raivasa adds further details to Priyādās’s account. When Agradās emerged from meditation, Mān Singh gave him pranām, and, accepting his respectful greeting, Agradās ordered Nābhā to distribute ten bananas apiece as prasād to all of Mān Singh’s assembled men. According to this oral tradition, Mān Singh was on his way to war and had with him an army of ten thousand men. When Agra ordered Nābhā to distribute ten bananas to each soldier, Mān Singh noticed that Nābhā held a single bunch of ten bananas in his hands. Nevertheless, Nābhā went around and gave ten bananas each to everyone present, arriving back before Agra and Mān Singh holding the same ten bananas he had begun with. Amazed by this miracle in which God had seemingly provided an inexhaustible abundance of bananas to his devoted servants, it is said that the seed of Vaiṣṇava bhakti was then firmly planted in Mān Singh’s mind, and thereafter he became a great patron of the Vaiṣṇavas. See Rāthaur 2003, 22–­23. 27. McGregor 1983, 237–­38. 28. Rāthaur 2003, 21. 29. For the full argument with detailed evidence for why the Rāmānandī community at Raivasa

may not have existed until the early eighteenth century, see Burchett 2018. 30. It is important to note that the word for servant here is the feminine sevikā, indicating that in his rasik visualization practice, Agra served the divine couple in the role of a female mañjarī, or “handmaiden,” of Sītā, a fact made even clearer in Yugalpriyā’s next stanza. 31. Of the twenty-­four Dhyān Mañjarī manuscripts I have found, fourteen come from the nineteenth century, nine are undated, and one comes from the eighteenth century (1761). See the appendix. 32. For a discussion of the role that Agradās (and his authority as a rasik saint) has played in modern-­day debates within the Rāmānandī community, and the ways his memory has been constructed over time, see Burchett 2018. 33. See the appendix for a list of all the manuscripts of works attributed to Agradās that I found during my research. In addition to the thirteen titles I have found (all of which are in addition to the many scattered pads of his found in manuscripts of bhakti poetry anthologies), if we include the names of texts that the Miśrabandhu Vinod and various Hindi scholars attribute to Agradās, we can add at least four (and perhaps more) to that list. Of the thirteen

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compositions I have seen, I found at least five manuscripts of the following: the Dhyān Mañjarī (24), the Kuṇḍaliyā, also called the Hitopadeśa-­bāvanī (10), the Prahlād Caritra (6), and the Nām Pratāp (5). A number of Hindi scholars mention a collection of Agra’s verses called the Agrasāgar that they regret is no longer extant. In the Jaipur City Palace I found a manuscript dated 1685 and titled Bhāgavat pad prasaṅg that (though incomplete and partially damaged) contains more than three hundred poems of Agra’s and may be this seemingly lost Agrasāgar. 34. Pad Sangrah, v.s. 1670, Jodhpur RORI #13498 (2). This collection includes ten continuous manuscript pages of poetry with the chāp (signature) of Agradās. The scribe’s handwriting is not always entirely legible, thus I am still analyzing and attempting to transcribe and translate these verses. 35. These ten poems attributed to Agradās were found in the 1707 manuscript used by Brajendra Kumar Siṃhal in his published edition of Rajjab’s anthology. For more information on the Sarvāṅgī literature of the Dādū ­Panth, see Rajpurohit 2012. Rajpurohit convincingly establishes the circa 1600 date of composition of Rajjab’s Sarvāṅgī (49–­55). 36. Whereas these translations are mine, I am grateful for Dalpat Rajpurohit’s expert assistance in editing and polishing them. All translations are based on the Devanāgarī text found in Rajjab kī Sarvāṅgī, ed. B. Siṃhal (2010). 37. Ang 20 (nām mahīmā kau ang), pad 9. 38. Ang 22 (bhajan pratāp kau ang), pad 14. 39. Ang 41 (bhaki pasāv kau ang), pad 6. Another of Agradās’s poems in Rajjab’s Sarvāṅgī—­Ang 39, pad 10—­similarly emphasizes his lowness and powerlessness and begs for the mercy and compassion of the Lord (Mādhav), “the crest-­jewel of benevolence.” 40. Alternatively, this final verse could be rendered, “Agradās begs Hari to hear the stories [of the saints], those who rest in the ocean of nectar.” 41. Ang 73 (upadeś citāvaṇī kau ang), pad 36. 42. Ang 43, pad 14. 43. Legend has it that the kasturi mṛg (musk deer) was roaming around in the forests when it suddenly became aware of a beautiful scent that stirred it so profoundly it resolved to find its source. Day and night, it desperately searched all over for the source of the sweet scent, eventually falling off a cliff to its death. As it lay there taking its last breaths, the deer realized that the scent that had inspired all its searching actually came from its very own navel and thus it found inexpressible peace and happiness in its last moment. Presumably, the pervasiveness of the invisible, intangible scent and its ultimate source within the deer itself symbolize, respectively, the brahman and ātman. Agradās follows tradition in likening the determined searching of the musk deer to the noble pursuits and efforts of the genuine spiritual seeker. 44. agra svāmi ānan ānand nidhi vṛndāban ke cand kau// 14d. Agradās, Bhāgavat Pad Prasaṅg, Ms 1616 (3), Jaipur City Palace, v.s. 1742 (1685 CE). 45. A devotion to Kṛṣṇa, as well as Rām, characterized the Galta community of Rāmānandīs even into the mid-­eighteenth century, as indicated by a Sanskrit text titled the Gālavgītam. This text was written in the mid-­1700s by a figure named Dwārkānāth, who was the son of Jaisingh II’s court poet, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Bhaṭṭ. The Gālavgītam praises the natural beauty and sacredness of Galta while singing the praises of a Kṛṣṇaized Rām (who wears yellow, has a peacock-­feather crown, and plays the flute) and a Rāmaized Kṛṣṇa (carrying a bow and arrow), referring to them both as being eternal residents of Galta. The last line of the poem

6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti = 369









stresses that there are only two vessels for crossing the ocean of existence and achieving contentment, Rām and Kṛṣṇa. The Sanskrit text (consisting of fifteen three-­line stanzas), with a Hindi commentary, can be found in Bhatt 2007, 246–­53. 46. In the Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās’s verses on the Kacchvāhā king Pṛthvīrāj (chappay 116) make it clear that, through his guru, Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī, he became acquainted with the Truth and had a vision, not of Rām but of Kṛṣṇa, in his form as Lord of Dvārka (Dvārkanāth). 47. Horstmann 2002, 148. 48. Chappays 5, 6, and 28; see Horstmann 2002, 152. 49. Paramasivan 2010, 37. 50. Translated in Paramasivan 2010, 38. 51. Rāmcaritmānas 1.21.4b; my translation. aguṇa saguṇa bica nāma susākhī / ubhaya prabodhaka catura dubhāṣī // 52. Nām Pratāp, v.s. 1758, Jaipur City Palace, Ms 1541(2). 53. rasnā nām kyauṃ hauṃ jau āvai / jam jātnā kabhū nahi pāvai //  43. 54. ulṭi bhūp tahā prasan ju kīnī / nām mātra kaisai gati dīnī //  50. 55. In Raidās Vānī 32.1 (AG), Raidās states, kali keval nām adhār. 56. In Rāmcaritmānas, Uttarkāṇḍ (VII) 102:2b–­4a, Tulsīdās says the following (in addition to the meaning of this passage, which closely parallels Agra’s verses, note also that Tulsī here makes use of the phrase that would become the title of Agra’s work): kalijug keval hari gun gāhā / gāvat nar pāvahi bhav thāhā // kalijug jog na jai na jñānā / ek adhār rām gun gānā // sab bharos taji jo bhaj rāmhi / prem samet gāv gun grāmhi // soi bhav tar kachu sansay nāhīṃ nām pratāp pragaṭ kali māhīṃ // 57. Busch 2011, 26. 58. Caturviśati-­avatāranāmāni, Jaipur City Palace, Ms 3090 (2), undated. 59. In my research, I have found five manuscripts of Agradās’s Prahlād Caritra and two manuscripts of his Dhruv Caritra (see the appendix). For translations of these famous bhaktas stories in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, see Bryant 2017. 60. Venkatkrishnan 2015, 70. 61. Hawley 2015a, 218. 62. Orsini 2015, 331–­32. 63. Meyer 2009, 9. 64. Some verses in Agradās’s larger corpus contain Rajasthani language mixed with Braj. 65. The rolā meter consists of eleven plus thirteen mātrās per line. A mātrā is a metrical instance; short vowels are of one mātrā, and long vowels are of two. 66. McGregor 1983. 67. The Brajbhasha text of the following translations of the Dhyān Mañjarī is based on my transcription of the earliest manuscript of the Dhyān Mañjarī I have found, which comes from the Nāgarī Pracāriṇī Sabhā (#772) in Banaras and is dated v.s. 1818 (1761 CE). I compared this manuscript against the second oldest Dhyān Mañjarī manuscript I have found, Ms 25307 from the Jodhpur RORI, dated v.s. 1872 (1815 CE), and found for the most part only minor differences in spelling (e.g., dhare versus dharaiṃ). I also checked these manuscripts against the two printed versions of the text I have been able to obtain. To my knowledge there are only two published sources available of works attributed to Agradās (beyond those verses found in published versions of Rajjab’s Sarvāṇgī). The first is the Agradās Granthāvalī (which includes the Kuṇḍaliyā, Dhyān Mañjarī, and Sādhan Gītāvalī), ed. Balbhadra Tivārī (Ilāhābād: Saryendra Prakāśan, 1985). Tivārī’s edition of the Dhyān Mañjarī relies solely on a manuscript

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from the Pune Vidyāpīṭh dated v.s. 1911 (1854 CE). His edition is littered with misprints and errors in transcription from the manuscript. The second available published source is the Agra-­Granthāvalī printed (in 1994) and distributed by Raivasa Dhām itself, which consists of two parts (each a small pamphlet without proper binding). The text of this edition of the Dhyān Mañjarī has far fewer errors and misprints and matches more closely the manuscripts of the Dhyān Mañjarī I have in my possession; however, the manuscript source(s) for the text is not identified. 68. For more on this subject, see Haberman 1988, 108–­14. 69. Stewart 2005, 266. 70. Stewart 2005, 266. 71. avadhpūrin ko avadhi yahi śruti samṛti varanī / dhyān dhare such karani nam ucarat agh haranī // 12. 72. Paramasivan 2010, 104–­5. 73. bhumi rahe lagi bhār ḍār phal phūlan bhārī / pāthik janan phal den man hu yeh bhujā pasārī // 17. 74. For a similar analysis of Kṛṣṇa rasik practice, see Stewart 2005, 267. 75. rām rūp ko nirakhi vibhākar koṭik lāje // 47b. 76. atulit jugal svarūp kavan as upamā jinkī / jetik upamā dīpti sakti kari bhāsit tinhkī // 65. 77. Lutgendorf 1992, 222. 78. Bhagavati Prasad Singh 1957, 94. The Sadāśiva Saṃhitā seems to have been a canonical text for rasiks, and parts of it survive as quotations in rasik literature, especially in the work of Rāmcarandās (1760–­1831). R. S. McGregor (1983, 240–­41) points out that the tree-­throne-­lotus theme was, however, well known and thus Agra’s source need not have been the Sadāśiva Saṃhitā. While a number of scholars, including McGregor, have considered the Bhuśuṇḍi Rāmāyaṇa—­a Rāmaite adaptation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa published in three volumes by  Bhagavati Prasad Singh—­a likely source for Agradās’s Dhyān Mañjarī (and Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas), Alan M. Keislar (1998) has argued that the version of the Bhuśuṇḍi Rāmāyaṇa used by Singh was actually composed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century and thus could not have been a source text used by Agra (or Tulsī). 79. McGregor 2003, 936–­37. 80. Jhā 1978, 243. 81. McGregor 2003, 923, 925. Nandadās (fl. 1570) sought to make Sanskrit texts and aesthetic conventions available to a growing Brajbhasha reading community and composed vernacular versions of several important Sanskrit texts, often significantly altering the originals to fit his own purposes. His works included Brajbhasha renderings of Bhānudatta’s Rasamañjarī and Kṛṣṇa Miśra’s Prabodhacandrodaya, the Rāsapañcādhyāyī (Five chapters on the round dance, from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa), and two oft-­referenced Braj dictionaries—­the Mānamañjarī (a thesaurus) and Anekārthamañjarī (a versified vocabulary of difficult Sanskrit words)—­based on the Amarakośa. See Busch 2011, 116. 82. “Rīti poetry” generally refers to a refined genre of Brajbhasha poetry and literature produced, usually in and for royal courts, according to a distinct method or way (rīti) based on time-­honored Sanskrit literary-­aesthetic codes and concepts regarding rasa, nāyikābheda (catalogues of female characters), alaṅkāra (figures of speech), etc. 83. Busch 2011, 62. 84. Busch 2011, 46. 85. Busch 2011, 173. 86. Tyler Williams, email message to author, November  24, 2011. Williams’s research on the Nirañjanī sampradāy suggests that they, like the Rāmānandīs, had a rather “hard-­core”

6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti = 371 ascetic, yogic first generation but that in the second and third generations they started producing rasik and rasik-­like texts. 87. Busch 2011, 163. 88. A proper analysis of Agra’s Kuṇḍaliyā and translation of its sixty-­six stanzas (seventy-­six in some manuscripts) is beyond the scope of the present monograph, although I hope to carry out this important work in a future publication. 89. I have kept dhyān untranslated in these verses so that a greater depth and breadth of meaning might speak forth, but if this rich term must be translated, perhaps the best sense of the word here is “meditative vision.” 90. The cātak (cātṛk), or “pied cuckoo” (papīhā), is a bird believed to survive on only falling raindrops it catches with its beak. 91. Busch 2011, 110. 92. Busch 2011, 110, 271n36. 93. Busch 2011, 128. 94. Busch 2011, 116. Agradās was probably not a rīti poet if by “rīti poet” we mean one who designed his poetry for more courtly, literary, and “secular” contexts or whose attentions were primarily on producing works in tune with refined Sanskrit literary codes. Of course, the line between bhakti poetry and rīti poetry is regularly so blurry as to be meaningless. 95. Katherine Butler Schofield explains that “in the person of the rasika, connoisseurship is overtly privileged in Indic aesthetic theory. . . . ​In Sanskrit and Brajbhasha literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rasika was the generic term most often used to denote connoisseurs of poetry and music” (2015, 409–­10). 96. Lutgendorf 1991, 314. 97. Kiss 2009, 57. 98. Kiss 2009, 58. 99. Kiss 2009, 59. 100. Holdrege 2015, 304. 101. Holdrege 2015, 307–­8. 102. Not just tantric methods and ritual technologies but also tantric theology was sometimes employed by early modern bhaktas. The six Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Gosvāmīs in Braj were influenced by tantric and āgamic works and utilized tantric theological and metaphysical notions (within a bhakti paradigm) to describe the ultimate meaning of Rādhā’s union with Kṛṣṇa. Rūp Gosvāmī’s Ujjvalanīlamaṇi (Rādhāprakaraṇa, v. 6) boldly states that the śakti of the tantric tradition is, in fact, Rādhā herself (hlādinī yā mahāśaktī-­varīyasī / tatsāra-­ bhāvarūpayamiti tantre pratiṣṭhitā). See Shrivatsa Goswami 1996, 275. 103. The caste of Nābhādās (who was also called Nārāyandās) is not entirely certain, but the available evidence suggests that he was of low status, probably the Ḍom caste of untouchable bards. His initiation into the order would thus have been emblematic of the early Rāmānandīs’ liberal social views and heterodox caste practices. On the question of Nābhā’s caste, see Pinch 1999, 384–­88; Hare 2011b, 32–­33. 104. Dohā 4. śrī guru agradev ājñā daī bhaktan kau jasu gāy / bhavsāgar ke taran kau nāhin ān upāy// 4. 105. Chappay 180:5. agar anug gun baranate sītāpati tihi hoī bas/ I have found this entire chappay (180) of the Bhaktamāl in some manuscripts of Agradās’s Kuṇḍaliyā, begging the question of whether it may be a direct quotation (by Nābhā) of a poem actually composed by Agradās. 106. What has long perplexed me is the fact that Anantadās, despite the importance of his parcāīs in bhakti scholarship, does not seem to be remembered by the Rāmānandī tradition

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107. 108. 109.

110.

111. 112. 113.

114.

115. 116. 117.

today in any significant way. Nābhā’s samādhi is at Galta and he is a focal point of worship and remembrance at Raivasa, but in neither place is there any living memory of Anantadās. Anantadās clearly saw himself as a Rāmānandī and a member of one of the prestigious cār-­ sampradāya. In Pīpā-­parcāī 35:25–­28, he traces his genealogy from Rāmānand to Anantānand to Kṛṣṇadās Payahārī to Agradās to his guru, Vinod. Yet his parcāīs seem to have been influential and remembered only among the nirguṇ-­oriented Rajasthani communities of the Nirañjanīs and Dādū ­Panth, in whose manuscript collections his parcāīs are most often found (perhaps because they focus on nirguṇ-­oriented devotee-­saints). Burghart 1978, 126, 133. Pinch 1999, 369, 379, 399. One South Indian precedent to Nābhādās’s hagiography is the mid-­t welfth-­century Periya Purāṇam (or Tiruttoṇṭar Purāṇam), Cēkkiḷār’s accounts of the sixty-­three canonical nāyanmārs, poet-­saints of the Tamil Śaiva tradition. Another is the Basava Purāṇa, Somanātha Pālkuriki’s account of the life of Basava and (approximately one hundred) other key members of the Vīraśaiva tradition in Karnataka. Others include the twelfth-­century Sanskrit Divyasūricaritam, about the twelve Tamil Vaiṣṇava Āḷvārs, and the fourteenth-­century Tamil Guruparamparāprabhāvam. As James Hare points out, Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl “is not the first Hindu text to celebrate the lives of devotees in order to assemble a canonical community. It differs from its earlier, southern predecessors, though, in that its community is far more expansive in its boundaries than the community imagined by these earlier collective hagiographers” (2011b, 6). Hawley (2012) has offered some thought-­provoking observations and speculations on this topic. Considering that Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl was “a work of astonishing novelty so far as Hindu writings were concerned” and considering Nābhā’s complete ignorance of earlier (South Indian) collective bhakti hagiographies, Hawley remarks, “I wonder whether Nābhādās or his teacher Agradās got the Bhaktamāl idea from the historiographical writings of Muslims. Was Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl meant to be, in effect, ‘our tazkirā?’ ” Even though there are hardly any Persian-­derived words used in the Bhaktamāl and Nābhādās does not include a single Muslim (unless you count Kabīr) in his hagiography, still Hawley gives reasons why “it may not be unreasonable to think that Nābhādās may in some way have been influenced by Islamic hagiographical practices that were current in his day and region.” See also Hermansen and Lawrence 2000 and de Bruijn 2014. Heidi Pauwels (2002, 264–­68) convincingly establishes these dates in her excellent book on Harirām Vyās and early modern North Indian bhakti. Pauwels 2002, 162. Vyās often grouped them based on their low caste, writing in one poem, “A barber (Sen), a farmer (Dhanā), a leather worker (Raidās), a weaver (Kabīr), a cotton carder (Nāmdev) . . . ​ That’s whom God cherished” (pad 41b) (Pauwels 2002, 101). Nāmdev simply lived too much earlier than the other devotees to have possibly been considered a disciple of Rāmānand. On the topic of why and how early modern North Indian bhakti communities (which had little to do with the south) claimed links to South Indian Vaiṣṇavism, see Hawley 2015b, 99–­147. Hare 2011a, 153. Hare 2011a, 154. Hare 2011a, 155.

6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti = 373 118. Hawley (2015b, 136–­39) has also—­in a different context and with different conclusions—­ briefly addressed the omission of Dādū, Nānak, and any Sufis in Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl. 119. Dādū frequently references Nāmdev and Kabīr by name in his poetry. Jan Gopāl, in his bio­ graphy of Dādū, the Janmā Līlā (ca. 1620), states, “He continually sang Kabīr’s poems and verses and became his equal in word and deed” (2:4a) (Callewaert 1988, 37). 120. Thiel-­Horstmann 1983, 3. 121. If any vision of bhakti community deserves to be called radically and wildly inclusive, it is not that of Nābhādās but that of Rāghavdās, whose anthology of bhaktas, composed in 1660 (see Rāghavdās 1965), includes virtually everyone in Nābhā’s work while also devoting hagiographical passages to Nāths, Śaiva saṃnyāsīs, Nirañjanīs, Nānak and his successors, and, of course, Dādū and his followers. Rāghavdās relied heavily on Nābhādās’s text and worked with its rubric of the “four sampradāys” but also articulated a new quartet, the “four panths” of Nānak, Dādū, Kabīr, and Haridās (Nirañjanī), which he presented (in contrast to the cār-­ sampradāys) as a foursome united by nirguṇ bhakti. 122. One of Islam’s most foundational and passionately held principles is that God is One, ­absolutely indivisible without form or qualities, thus it seems reasonable to assume that (whether via their family backgrounds or interactions with Sufis) the influence of Islam had a significant role to play in the strict nirguṇ perspectives of Dādū and Nānak. We should also note here that Dādū’s followers (Rajjab, Rāghav, et al.) did not necessarily share all his theological views and were not all as exclusively nirguṇ as he was. 123. Chappay 116; translated in Horstmann 2002, 153–­54. 124. G. N. Bahura’s (1976, 25–­27) translation of four pads attributed to Pṛthvīrāj during “the time of his adherence to the Nātha-­pantha” supports this view, as they articulate a thoroughly nirguṇ devotional vision with allusions to Nāth kuṇḍalinī yoga. 125. It seems that the nirguṇ understanding of the Divine was not an obstacle in theory or practice for devotees of Rām and Kṛṣṇa, as long as—­a nd this was crucial—­one’s notion of a nirguṇ Divine also made room for saguṇ conceptions. To the contrary, for many Sufis, Sikhs, Dādū-panthīs, and Nāths who worshipped God as absolutely unqualified, saguṇ conceptions of the Divine constituted an error, even an affront. 126. It is important to keep in mind that the early Dādupanthī community may not have been organizationally unified or held an entirely consistent theological position, and that Agradās was criticizing and satirizing Dādū, not his followers. Some of Dādū’s early followers, as their works would suggest, were considerably more open to saguṇ devotional options than he was, even if they maintained a primarily nirguṇ orientation. As Thiel-­Horstmann (1983, 3) explains, it was not Dādū but his first-­generation disciples who incorporated their community into the system of sagūn Vaiṣṇavism. 127. Kuṇḍaliyā, Jaipur City Palace, Ms 1489 (15), v.s. 1692 (1635 CE). The translated poem is no. 65 in a manuscript of the Kuṇḍaliyā consisting of sixty-­six poems. Later manuscripts include as many as seventy-­six poems. I am grateful for the expert insights of Tyler Williams and Dalpat Rajpurohit in making sense of this challenging poem. 128. I have not translated the second line of the poem, which is an exact repetition of the first line. Ordinarily, a kuṇḍaliyā stanza consists of a dohā couplet (thirteen plus eleven mātrās) followed by a rolā (eleven plus thirteen mātrās) quatrain, with the first pāda of the rolā repeating the last pāda of the dohā (and the last line of the poem returning to the phrase with which it started). It appears that Agradās has altered that standard metric structure

374 9 6. Agradās and the Circulation of Mughal Bhakti here, imitating the kuṇḍaliyā’s repetitive aspects but seemingly in a poem consisting of seven lines (not six), with the second and third lines in rolā and all others in the meter of a dohā. 129. Ṭek could also be translated as either “shelter” or “stubbornness,” substantially altering this line’s meaning. Other possible renderings are “Dādū held to his stubborn ways and without proper dress he corrupted his body,” or “Dādū took the shelter [of Rām], but without proper dress he ruined his body.” 130. I have chosen to translate this line in a manner that makes its meaning in tune with an alternative version of the line given in two other manuscript sources: kahanī karanī ek ras man hiyau na cālan—­“In his words and deeds, not a single rasa moved in his heart and mind.” The line in the manuscript I have relied upon could also be translated as “All his words were excellent and he would not let his mind be distracted (moved),” i.e., he was a master at both meditation and composing poetry. In any case, the overall meaning is not much changed, for the next line clearly implies that whatever his virtues, Dādū’s practice was missing something essential; it lacked the all-­important taste, or rasa, of the Divine. The other two versions of this poem I consulted come from the Agradās Granthāvalī edited by Balbhadra Tivārī (1985), which relies on a manuscript from the Pune Vidyāpīṭh dated v.s. 1911 (1854 CE) and the Agra-­Granthāvalī printed in 1994 as a small pamphlet and distributed by Raivasa Dhām itself (the manuscript source or sources for this text are not identified). 131. This line might also be translated, “Without the taste of a bit of salt all the sauce is ruined [wasted].” Either way, here Agradās clearly advocates an aesthetically based experience of the Divine. It was common for poets to talk about the sweet essence (rasa) of God in terms of flavors, food, and eating. As Tyler Williams (email message to author, July 6, 2012) has suggested to me, this line may be “a reference to the ontology prevalent at that time: God is the salt in the sauce, or the water—­he permeates it, and gives it its flavor (i.e., joy), although you can not see Him or separate Him from this sauce (the phenomenal world). The one who recognizes God/salt in the sauce has bliss; the one who perceives no salt misses out on God and the joy of existence.” 132. This is perhaps the most difficult and most crucial line of the poem. It is not clear whom svām (svāmī) refers to in the verse. Agradās sometimes used “Agra Svāmī” as his chāp, though the word here seems more likely to refer to God, or to mean “religious leader.” The word svāṅg in this line is equally troublesome and can be variously translated as “garb,” “disguise/guise,” “pretense,” “sham/farce,” “show/drama,” “role in a play,” or “pretender.” Here it is probably meant to refer back in some way to the word bheṣ (dress) in the third line, thus I have rendered it as “garb.” Alternative translations might be, “Agra says, without the garb of a svāmī [religious leader], he [Dādū] just looks like a ghoul.” It seems most likely that the use of bhūt is meant to parallel the use of ḍāyan; i.e., that Dādū sees the “garb” of Rām as an evil spirit and thus he calls his own mother (the feminine, immanent dimension of the Divine) a demon. 133. Callewaert 1988, 41. Janma Līlā 2:5a states that Dādū “ignored all Muslim customs and abandoned Hindu practices”; turkī rāh ṣodi sab gaḍī arū hīnduni kī karnī chāḍī/ 134. Callewaert 1988, 52. dhyān manaū sukhdev sarīra jog jugati gorakh thai nīrā/ 135. Dādū’s inappropriate attention to dress mirrors his inappropriate understanding and perception of the “garb” of the Divine, the feminine māyā/śakti that is his very own mother but that he calls a witch. Dādū did not acknowledge either the saguṇ Rām or, crucially, Rām’s wife—­in the rasik sense, his śakti—­Sītā.

7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra = 375 136. My translation. Janma Līlā 2.6: svāṅg bheṣ paṣ panth na mānai pūranbrahm sati kari jānai / devī dev na pūjā pātī tirath brat na sevā jātī // I have deliberately left svāṅg and bheṣ untranslated in order to highlight this verse’s resonance with the specific words and criticisms in Agradās’s poem. 137. Callewaert 1988, 82. jo nirguṇ mat maiṃ rahasī bhāī tākī abagati karai sahāī/ iṣṭ bhiṣṭ kauṃ ṭhāhar nāhīṃ samajhi dekhau apaṇaiṃ man māhīṃ// 15:18.13. Along the same lines, in his rules of conduct for Dādūpanthī monks (Panth-­parakhyā), Dās (a grand-­d isciple of Dādū’s) warned against the “singing of love songs” and “saguṇa songs” and advocated nirguṇ “songs of salvation” as the only appropriate type of bhajan. See Horstmann 2012, 111. 138. Behl 2012a, 65. 139. Behl 2012a, 65; Cāndāyan v. 173. These verses come from the mouth of the nurse Biraspati in response to the heroine Cāndā’s request to hear a tale “full of love’s savor” to ease the pain of yearning for her absent beloved. 140. Dhyān Mañjarī, v. 72; Nām Pratāp, v. 69. 141. See Krishna Sharma 1987, x, 6n1.

7. Yogīs and Tantra-­Mantra in the Poetry of the Bhakti Saints







1. Pauwels 2010. 2. Since Nāth yogīs have roots in the Kaula tradition of tantric Śāktism, they would seem to be a bridge between yogīs and Śāktas, but, as noted, with the passage of time most (though not all) of the followers of Gorakhnāth took on a more celibate, misogynistic, and theologically nirguṇ stance, abandoning or internalizing (within the yogic subtle body) tantric practices widely considered morally depraved (e.g., sexual rites). 3. Callewaert 2013, 81. 4. Bryant and Hawley 2015, xxvi. Bryant’s comments refer specifically to the corpus of Sūrdās poems, though they can certainly be applied far more broadly. 5. Bryant and Hawley 2015, xxvii. 6. Hess 2015, 75. 7. As Hess remarks, “It may be futile to search for the ‘authentic’ or original version of a particular poem that has come down to us embedded in the broad current of a living tradition borne for centuries by predominantly oral and performative presentations that involve a significant degree of improvisation” (2015, 119). 8. To my knowledge, a sustained analysis of early modern bhakti materials focused on representations and criticisms of tantric and yogic religiosity has yet to be conducted. I discuss the key factors of social and geographic location in representations of yogīs and tāntrikas, showing distinctive emphases in poetry from particular regions, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze the specific period, region, and sectarian environment in which each poem (or the manuscript from which each poem comes) was composed. 9. Dvivedi (1942) 2000, 22–­24; quoted and translated in Agrawal 2011, 15. 10. Vaudeville 1974, 120. 11. Vaudeville 1974, 121. 12. Hawley 2005, 273. 13. Offredi 2002, 133. 14. Hawley 2005, 274.

376 9 7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra









15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Hawley 2005, 304. Lorenzen 2011, 43. Vaudeville 1974, 120. Bījak, sākhi 42; Hess and Singh 1983, 94. Bījak, sākhi 43; Hess and Singh 1983, 94. Bījak, śabda 90; Hess and Singh 1983, 71–­72. Hess and Singh (1983, 183) explain this comparison of the Nāth to a crane: “Though white on the outside, the crane or heron is cunning and violent. It stands still as if in meditation, but is only waiting for its chance to grab fish. Bak dhyān (crane’s or heron’s meditation) is proverbial for hypocritical meditation.” 22. Bījak, śabda 104.1–­3; Hess and Singh 1983, 76. I have not quoted the entire śabda. 23. Mallinson 2011b, 411, 426. 24. Granthāvalī pad 128; translated in Vaudeville 1974, 88. 25. Bījak śabda 74; Hess and Singh 1983, 66. In the last line of this quotation, Kabīr contrasts the “true yogī” with the herb-­carrying tantric healer. 26. Granthāvalī pad 174; Hawley 2005, 275. 27. Bījak śabda 38; Hess and Singh 1983, 53–­54. 28. Callewaert 2000b, 420; Lorenzen 2011, 33–­34. 29. Callewaert 2000b, 420; Lorenzen 2011, 34–­35. 30. Lorenzen 2011, 29. Lorenzen uses the word index of Callewaert and Op de Beeck’s Kabīr-­bījak and that of P. N. Tiwari’s edition of the Kabīr-­granthāvalī to analyze the frequency of these key terms in Kabīr’s poetry. Here are some of the numbers of occurrences: yogī/jogī—­52, Gorakh—­15, śākta—­17, brahman—­37, pīr—­23, shaykh—­7, mullah—­7. 31. Yatī (or jatī) is another word for an ascetic. This verse actually comes from a poem praising the “true devotion” of Kabīr; translated in Pauwels 2002, 95. 32. Callewaert 2000a, 138–­39. 33. Callewaert 2000a, 139n99. 34. Trilochan parcaī 16–­17. My translation from original text in Callewaert 2000a, 128–­29. 35. The text is attributed to Guru Nānak, and tradition holds it was composed in the latter years of his life, ca. 1524–­1539. See Nayar and Sandhu 2007, 59–­61. 36. Piar Singh (1996, 20) argues that the Siddh Goṣṭ represents the product of a number of actual discussions between Nānak and the Nāth yogīs that occurred at different places and times. 37. Siddh Goṣṭ 7 and 9. 38. Siddh Goṣṭ 10:1–­3. All translations from the Siddh Goṣṭ are mine but come from the Devanagārī transliteration of the original Panjabi text provided in Piar Singh 1996 and draw on Singh’s own useful but inadequate English translation. 39. Siddh Goṣṭ 11. 40. Piar Singh 1996, 87. 41. Siddh Goṣṭ 34.3–­4. 42. Nāth yogīs could, of course (and clearly did) also call out one another for just this sort of false spirituality. A bani attributed to Charapat Nāth states, “In their ears the earrings and around their necks the rudraksha beads. / Roaming around they recite meaningless verses; / Gorakha says, Listen O people! / This is a livelihood but it is not Yoga” (Digby 1975, 64). 43. Śrīnāmdev Gāthā, abhanga 1797; translation in Hawley 1983, 463. 44. Dohāvalī 550. All translations of the Dohāvalī are mine from original text in Chhawchharia 2006a.

7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra = 377 45. Granthāvalī sākhī 25.5; translated in Vaudeville 1974, 281. 46. Granthāvalī sākhī 25.12; translated in Vaudeville 1974, 282. 47. This poem’s reference to yogīs probably does not refer to the Nāths but to militarized Śaiva Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs. 48. Bījak ramainī 69; translated in Pinch 2006, 194. 49. Pinch 2006, 195. 50. Gītāvalī, Uttarakāṇḍ 15.4. All translations of the Gītāvalī are mine from original text in Chhawchharia 2006b. 51. Vinay Patrikā 173.3. All translations of the Vinay Patrikā are mine from original text in Chhawchharia 2006d. 52. Vinay Patrikā 173.6. 53. Rāmcaritmānas, Araṇyakāṇḍ 6 (so.). Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Rāmcaritmānas are mine from original text in Prasad 1988. 54. Kavitāvalī, Uttarakāṇḍa 7.105. All translations of the Kavitāvalī are mine from original text in Chhawchharia 2006c. 55. Rāmcaritmānas, Araṇyakāṇḍ 46. 56. Pīpā parcaī 35.31. My translation from original text in Callewaert 2000a, 276. 57. Redington 2000, 160. For analysis and interpretation of this passage, see also Horstmann 1997, 230. 58. Redington 2000, 160; Horstmann 1997, 230; see also Hawley 1983, 471–­72. 59. Raidās Vānī 17; Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 114. 60. Raidās Vānī 38.1; Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 127. 61. Raidās Vānī 13.2–­3; Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 112. 62. Kavitāvalī, Uttarkāṇḍa 7.109. 63. KB 387, NPS 59; translated in Bryant and Hawley 2015, 696. (KB = Kenneth Bryant’s edition of the Sūrsāgar, published in Hawley and Bryant 2015; NPS = Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā edition of Sūrsāgar). 64. Bryant and Hawley 2015, 696–­97. 65. Flying from flower to flower, gathering sweet nectar, the bee personifies the seemingly fickle Kṛṣṇa. At the same time, Ūddho, because he is dark like Kṛṣṇa and serves as his messenger, is also the bee. The bhramargīt poems—­most famously composed by Sūrdās but also by other poets such as Nanddās—­have their origin as elaborations on a minor vignette in Bhāgavata Purāṇa X.47, in which the gopīs see a passing bee and address it as Ūddho, reproaching the bee for Kṛṣṇa’s faithless and hard-­hearted ways. 66. KB 248, NPS 4107; Hawley 2009, 129. 67. KB 278, NPS 4282; Hawley 2009, 134. 68. KB 253, NPS 4132; Hawley 2009, 130. 69. KB 266, NPS 4208; Hawley 2009, 132. 70. Nancy Martin 1999. 71. James Mallinson, email message to author, January 10, 2012. 72. Kavitāvalī, Uttarakāṇḍa 7.84. 73. While Tulsī is most often thought of as a poet with a saguṇ perspective, and while most of his work focuses on God in form (especially as Rāmcandra but also Kṛṣṇa and Śiva), he also acknowledged the nirguṇ (qualityless) perspective, seeing the saguṇ and nirguṇ aspects of the Divine as inextricably linked and viewing their distinction as an artificial one that should be transcended.

378 9 7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra







74. Digby 1970b, 307. 75. Vaudeville 1976, 208. 76. Śrīnāmdev Gāthā, abhanga 1801; translation in Hawley 1983, 463. 77. Śrīnāmdev Gāthā, abhanga 2300; translation mine. See also the translation in Machwe 1990, 89. 78. Chitre 1991, 71. 79. Dimock 1999; Caitanya-­caritāmṛta 2:22.14–­15. 80. Stewart 2010, 74; LCM 2:1 [10]381–­403. 81. Stewart 2010, 174–­75; Caitanyacandrodaya 7.13. 82. Granoff 2005, 156. 83. Granoff 2005, 158. 84. Kabīr parcaī 1.1. 85. Kavitt 472–­73; Nābhājī 2009, 715–­17. 86. Pauwels 2010, 510. 87. KG 21:10; Vaudeville 1974, 266. 88. KG 21:12; Vaudeville 1974, 267. It should be noted that anti-­Śākta poems can be found in all three of the major manuscript traditions of poetry attributed to Kabīr. 89. As Pauwels (2010, 530) explains, earthenware pots are often worshipped as manifestations of the Goddess on the eighth and fourteenth days of the lunar month. 90. Pauwels 2010, 530. 91. Translated in Pauwels 1994, 37–­38. 92. Complicating stereotypical descriptions of a stock Śākta are figures such as the Bengali Baṛu Caṇḍīdāsa (servant of Caṇḍī), who, as his name (along with other evidence) suggests, was likely a Śākta, yet tells the story of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in his Śrīkṛṣṇakīrtana (ca. 1350–­ 1600?). Similarly, the fourteenth-­to-­fifteenth-­century Maithili poet Vidyāpati, though often remembered as a Vaiṣṇava for his poetry depicting Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa as ideal lovers, was actually not a Vaiṣṇava at all (he certainly did not worship Kṛṣṇa as a prime means to salvation), and much of his work lavishes attention on Śiva and the goddess Durga. The point is that both these figures seem to have been Śāktas who also made space, in some form, for the praise of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā. In fact, these Śākta “exceptions”—­i f they were that—­a re even today quite fondly remembered by adherents of Caitanya’s Vaiṣṇava bhakti tradition. 93. Rachel McDermott has studied this tradition in depth, translating, contextualizing, and analyzing the work of major Bengali Śākta poets such as Rāmprasād Sen and Kamalākānta Bhattācārya. She writes, “This new vernacular genre expressed an unprecedented love and intimacy toward Kālī and Umā, and marked a radical change in Bengali Śākta worship; after a fifteen-­hundred year career in the Sanskrit religious texts as a dangerous and blood-­lusting battle queen and as a Tantric deity incorporated into esoteric rituals and philosophical speculations, Kālī started to develop in the eighteenth-­century Bengali poetry an additional dimension—­that of a compassionate divine mother” (2001, 3). 94. Caitanya’s biographers report that on at least one occasion, Śāktas in Bengal protested against Caitanya’s followers by dumping blood from their animal sacrifice on the doors of a prominent Vaiṣṇava devotee. See Stewart 2010, 51. In Assam, Śaṅkaradeva’s Vaiṣṇava devotional movement “drew intense hostility from the brāhmaṇs of the region, who complained to the Ahom kings. Mādhva [Śaṅkaradeva’s closest disciple] was imprisoned and another disciple was beheaded, while Śaṅkaradeva returned to the Koch kingdom, where he was

7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra = 379 initially met with hostility by king Naranārāyaṇa, who arrested and tortured two of his disciples” (Urban 2010, 150). 95. Caitanya-­Bhāgavata Ādi II, 86; quoted and translated in Dimock (1966) 1989, 112. 96. Quoted and translated in Dimock (1966) 1989, 112. 97. Quoted in Neog (1965) 1985, 81. 98. Urban 2010, 149. 99. Urban 2010, 151. Urban cites Śaṅkaradeva, Kīrttana-­ghoṣa 3.23. 100. Urban 2010, 151. Urban cites Śaṅkaradeva, Kīrttana-­ghoṣa 3.52. 101. Zysk 1991, 16. 102. Slouber 2016, 74. The gāruḍī, a snake charmer and tantric healer, derives his title from Garuḍ, the legendary eagle and “king of the birds,” who is the enemy and devourer of snakes. 103. White 2003, 265. 104. For a detailed investigation of the theme of snakes, snakebites, and tantra-­mantra in North Indian bhakti literature, see Burchett 2013. 105. Madhumālatī 158–­59; Manjhan 2000, 67. 106. Madhumālatī 167; Manjhan 2000, 70. 107. Madhumālatī 166; Manjhan 2000, 70. 108. Padmāvat 11.1–­2; Jāyasī 1944, 83–­84. 109. Fascicle IV, Assembly 22; Lawrence 1992, 251. 110. Lawrence 1992, 251. 111. Rajab Vāṇī 10.14; Callewaert 2013, 15. 112. KG 2.2; translation adapted from Vaudeville 1974, 160. 113. KG 2.11; Vaudeville 1974, 163. 114. Dimock 1999; Caitanya-­caritāmṛta, Antya Līlā 15.66. 115. KB 315 (NPS 1367); translated in Hawley 2009, 142. 116. KB 314 (NPS 1365); Bryant and Hawley 2015, 545. Hawley notes that the snake in this poem is described as dark or syām, one of the more common titles of Kṛṣṇa, making it clear that Kṛṣṇa is both cause and cure of the pain of viraha. 117. Bryant and Hawley 2015, 546. 118. Translation slightly adapted from Hawley 2005, 105. 119. KG 2.1; my translation, adapted from Vaudeville 1974, 160. 120. My translation; original text in Hawley 2005, 111. 121. Pīpā parcaī 1.5; Callewaert 2000a, 142. 122. Pīpā parcaī 2.4–­5; Callewaert 2000a, 145. 123. Pīpā parcaī 3.7; Callewaert 2000a, 147. 124. Pīpā parcaī 3.8–­12; Callewaert 2000a, 147. 125. Pīpā parcaī 3.17–­18; Callewaert 2000a, 148. 126. Raidās parcaī 1.5–­6; Callewaert 2000a, 307. 127. Raidās parcaī 1.8; Callewaert 2000a, 307–­8. 128. Raidās paricaī 1.13; Callewaert 2000a, 308. 129. Raidās paricaī 1.15; Callewaert 2000a, 308. 130. Raidās Vāṇī 23; translation adapted from Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 116–­17, 190–­91. According to Callewaert and Friedlander, nāgadamanī is “a flowering shrub found in the Himalayas which is believed to have the power to drive out the fever caused by snake bites” (117).

380 9 7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra 131. Particularly for celibate ascetic yogīs like the Nāths (and those influenced by them, like Kabīr), the snake is also commonly used as a metaphor specifically for woman, or for lust (engendered by women). Kabīr says (KG 30.18), “A beautiful woman is like a snake: those who touch it get bitten! But it dares not come near those enamoured of the feet of Rām” (Vaudeville 1974, 298). 132. Coming from a Kṛṣṇaite perspective, Rūpa Gosvāmin makes a similar point in his sixteenth-­ century work, the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu. Citing the Garuḍa Purāna, Rūpa writes, “A person becomes free after hearing the Vaiṣṇava mantra ‘Kṛṣṇa,’ which is the sole remedy for a life destroyed by the bite of this snake-­like world” (1.2.171) (Haberman 2003, 57). 133. Guru Nānak expresses a parallel sentiment in verse 38 of his Siddh Goṣṭ (a sixteenth-­century hymn included in the Ādi Granth): “Without the Guru, one is stung by the poisonous snake of māyā, and dies. O Nanak without the Guru, all is lost.” See http:​­//www​­.unp​­.me​­/f15​­/siddh​ ­-­gosht​­-­conversations​­-­w ith​­-­the​­-­siddhas​­-­159235​­/​­#ixzz1fgFhy8eG. In a more saguṇ vein, Tulsīdās states in his Dohāvalī (v. 180) that the only healing herb (auṣadhi) for the confusion brought on by māyā’s snakebite is devotional meditation on Rām. 134. Fatehpur manuscript, poem 11; Hawley 2005, 299. 135. Fatehpur manuscript, poem 7; Hawley 2005, 288. 136. I am grateful to Jack Hawley (communication to author, December 23, 2011) for this clever insight. 137. Hawley 1985, 125. 138. Vaudeville 1968–­1969, 404. Vaudeville notes that Kabīr, for instance, ignores Viṣṇu as a deity but uses the term “Vaiṣṇava” to refer to those who practice singing and remembrance of the divine Name. Similarly, O’Hanlon et al. discuss a circa fifteenth-­century conservative Smārta Śaiva brahman, Gopīnātha, who labels and criticizes “Vaiṣṇavas” as those “delud[ing] themselves that repeating the name of God was the summit of virtue and a substitute for following their own prescribed place in the social order” (O’Hanlon, Hidas, and Kiss 2015, 111). 139. As Wilke and Moebus note, “Even though in Northern India, Tantra and bhakti were potential antitypes, the bhakti traditions absorbed the fundamental Tantric intuition of deity and mantra being one, by regarding their supreme deity’s name(s) as powerful mantra(s)” (2011, 668). 140. Machwe 1990, 83. 141. Urban 2010, 151. 142. Many early modern bhaktas believed the divine Name to have a power above not only that of tantric mantras but also all other traditional forms of sacred sound in the Hindu tradition. As one Nāmdev pad states, “Foolish are the speakers and foolish the listeners who do not cherish the Name of the Lord of Life. Mere noise: the Vedas; putrid: the Purāṇas; They do not know the secret of the name Rām” (Callewaert 2013, 135). 143. Fatehpur manuscript, poem 7; Hawley 2005, 288. 144. Raidās Vāṇī 23; translation adapted from Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 116–­17, 190–­91. 145. McLeod 1995, 129–­30. McLeod posits that the Sukhmanī, a lengthy hymn included in the Ādi Granth, was most likely composed shortly before 1604 CE. 146. McLeod 1995, 129–­30. 147. Callewaert 2013, 131. 148. Stewart 2010, 214–­15. 149. Tony Stewart (forthcoming) has written insightfully on the key structural parallels and differences between Sufi dhikr and Vaiṣṇava devotional repetition of the divine Name. He

7. Yogīs and Tantra-­M antra = 381 points out that while singing/chanting the Name establishes the presence of God’s very being for the Hindu devotee, dhikr works differently, gradually elevating the Sufi practitioner’s consciousness to a communion with God. 150. Stewart 2010, 215. Haridāsa has long been understood as a converted Muslim who became a Vaisnava, but Stewart argues that, in fact, no “conversion” is implied in any textual evidence: he seems to be simply a kīrtana-­practicing Sufi; See Stewart forthcoming. 151. Holdrege 2015, 174–­75; see, for example, BhP XII.13.23. 152. Venkatkrishnan (2015, 30) highlights the fact that, while the Bhāgavata Purāṇa seems to have been completed in South India around the tenth century (though portions of it may be considerably earlier), we find no intellectual engagement with the text until three to four centuries later, in regions to the north (Maharashtra and Orissa). 153. At the same time that bhakti poets writing in vernacular languages were championing nāmakīrtana in the late Sultanate and Mughal periods, authors writing in Sanskrit—­a nd in considerably more scholarly, philosophical forms of discourse—­were doing the same. Notable in this respect is Lakṣmīdhara’s fifteenth-­century work, the Bhagavannāmakaumudī (Moonlight of God’s Name), which devoted itself to systematically developing and defending the all-­purifying power of this practice of singing God’s name, as proclaimed in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. See Venkatkrishnan 2015, 88, 125. Guy Beck suggests that the Bhāgavata Purāṇa provided the scriptural and theological support that propelled vernacular singing into “prominence in the liturgical and devotional contexts of the emerging Bhakti traditions throughout various regions” (2012, 133). 154. Granoff 2005, 156. 155. See Dimock (1966) 1989 for an excellent study of the Vaiṣṇava sahajiyās. 156. For more information on the historical development, literature, and religious practices of the Nirañjanīs, see Williams 2014, 137–­95. 157. Callewaert and Friedlander 1992, 99. 158. Thiel-­Horstmann 1983, 3. 159. Schuhmann 2006, 273–­80. 160. Thiel-­Horstmann 1983, 15. In his Sarvāṅgayogapradīpikā, Sundardās once again discusses the paths of bhakti yoga, haṭha yoga, and sāṃkhya yoga, praising his guru, Dādū, along with the line of great Nāth yogīs—­Ādināth (Śiva), Matsyendra, Gorakh, Carpaṭ, Mīn, Kāṇerī, and Cauraṅg—­a nd then also offering praise to Sāmkhya teachers such as Kapila, Dattātreya, and Vaśiṣṭha. See Horstmann 2012, 100. 161. Horstmann 2012, 100; Thiel-­Horstmann 1983, 147. 162. For a translation and discussion of some fascinating passages in which Sundardās criticizes a long list of deluded and worthless religious forms, including tantric and occult practices, astrology, and a variety of specific austerities and ascetic practices, see Horstmann 2012, 103–­7. 163. Callewaert 2013, 85. 164. In addition to the Dādū ­Panth and the Nirañjanīs, in certain respects we might also consider the ascetic branch of the Rāmānandīs an exception to the trend I have identified in early modern North India. As noted, they had a complicated relationship with tantric-­ yogic practice and were far less hostile to it than what the increasingly more mainstream devotion articulated by their rasik Rāmānandī counterparts showed. Indeed, the ascetic Rāmānandīs have been major practitioners of and contributors to the classical haṭha yoga tradition.

382 9 8. The Triumphs of Devotion

8. The Triumphs of Devotion









1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Behl 2007, 320. Padmāvat 12.1; Jāyasī 1944, 87–­89. Madhumālatī 172–­73; Manjhan 2000, 72–­73. Sreenivasan 2007, 42. Behl 2012a, 176. 6. Weightman 2000, 233–­34. Weightman notes that the hero (Manohar) and heroine (Madhumālatī) are described as the sun and the moon, which in kunḍalinī yoga represent masculine and feminine essences/energies with the body that are to be united through yogic practice. He provides a fascinating diagram in which verses from the text of the Madhumālatī are correlated with different cakras (energy centers along the spine) and nāḍīs (energy channels) of the yogic subtle body. 7. Weightman 2000, 234. 8. Sreenivasan 2014b, 267–­68. 9. Pauwels 2012, 37. 10. Padmāvat 25.1; Jāyasī 1944, 158. 11. Padmāvat 25.13; Jāyasī 1944, 163. 12. Padmāvat 27.2; my translation from original text in Devanāgarī edition Jāyasī 1961 (v.s. 2018). 13. Padmāvat 27.3; Jāyasī 1944, 180. The Nāths were closely associated with the practice of alchemy; see White 1996. 14. Padmāvat 27.5; Jāyasī 1944, 181. 15. Padmāvat 27.6; translation mine. 16. Padmāvat 27.14; Jāyasī 1944, 186. 17. Padmāvat 27.15; Jāyasī 1944, 186. 18. Padmāvat 27.16, 27.20; Jāyasī 1944, 186, 188. 19. Padmāvat 27.17, 27.21; Jāyasī 1944, 187–­88. 20. From this angle, Ratansen’s yogic-­ascetic quest is the purifying ordeal he must undergo to pass the ultimate “test of love” and to unite with Padmāvatī, who represents none other than the Divine. 21. Along these lines, Tony Stewart has remarked that often “religious and moral issues are most eloquently adjudicated in parody,” especially of the generic holy man (pīr, yogī, ascetic, renouncer) (2004, 11). It is important to note that not all the early modern North Indian social world was so “dialogical,” and this pluralistic atmosphere of shared symbols and idioms is one we find more often in vernacular texts. In the texts of religious elites and conservatives of this period, whether brahmans writing in Sanskrit or Muslim clerics writing in Persian (or Arabic), there is sometimes a clear lack of dialogue, whether expressed in blissful ignorance or pointed criticism of the other. 22. A brief note about dating: Unlike the poetry of Sūrdās, a great deal of which we can confidently place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fewer than twenty-­five of the poems attributed to Mīrābāī can be dated to the seventeenth century; see Hawley 2005, 99, 197–­99. While a great many Mīrā poems, largely from the nineteenth century, thus cannot be used to support the chronological dimensions of my argument, the poems of many other bhakti poets serve that purpose more than adequately, and her poems nevertheless express

8. The Triumphs of Devotion = 383











key features of bhakti rhetoric and sensibility (in relation to tantra and yoga) that I want to highlight here. 23. The genre of the bārahmāsā, or “twelve-­month” songs, express the woman’s longing for her partner against the backdrop of the seasonal changes and ritual events that occurred with the passing of the months. See Orsini 2010. 24. Kolff 1990, 74–­75. 25. PC 44 (PC = Paraśurām Caturvedī’s edition of Mīrābāī poems published in Caturvedī [1932] 1973). See Hawley 2005, 119–­20. I have included here only the second and fourth verses of the poem. 26. See KB 248, NPS 4107 (vv. 2–­3) (KB = Kenneth Bryant’s edition of the Sūrsāgar, published in Bryant and Hawley 2015; NPS = Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā edition of Sūrsāgar). 27. One precedent for this sort of yogic metaphor comes in Baṛu Caṇḍīdāsa’s Śrīkṛṣṇakīrtana (ca. 1350–­1550), “the only surviving pre-­Caitanya Vaishnava text in the Bengali language” (Baṛu Caṇḍīdāsa 1984, 11), which makes use of yogic imagery at multiple points as it tells the story of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. In one poem, Rādhā exclaims, “Like an ascetic intent upon yoga, I am aware of no other than Krishna” (272, Song 10). In another, she tells him, “If, forsaking everything, you turn into a yogi, I’ll become a yogi too, attending on you, Krishna!” (286, Song 32), and later she cries, “What is my life? What are my home and possessions? As an ascetic, I’ll roam every land if I’m deprived of my Krishna!” (296, Song 47). 28. PC 94; Hawley 2005, 123. 29. PC 117; Hawley 2005, 124. 30. Burger 2000, 429. It is worth noting here that in the popular Rajasthani folk song tradition known as the Mīrā Janma Patrī, Mīrā actually becomes the disciple of a Nāth yogī. In this episode, Mīrā’s guru is none other than Raidās, who is depicted not only as a camār (untouchable leatherworker) but also as a Nāth yogī. This is an oral tradition and cannot be accurately dated, but, like most of the poems attributed to Mīrā, probably comes from the nineteenth century, a time when the Nāth tradition had been thoroughly “devotionalized” and taken on many aspects of nirguṇ bhakti traditions (in fact, neither Raidās nor Mīrā does or says anything particularly yogic or tantric in this tale). Moreover, it comes out of a specific Rajasthani folk context in which Mīrā “does not belong to any particular sectarian lineage” but “fits easily into the religious world of low-­caste groups in Rajasthan whose devotion often takes an inclusive and noninstitutional form, blending devotion to Rāmdev with Vaiṣṇava and Nāth influences” (Nancy Martin 1999, 237). 31. Bryant and Hawley 2015, 289. 32. Hawley 1992, 234–­35. 33. KB 201, NPS 3844; translated in Hawley 2009, 115. 34. Hawley 2009, 229–­30n201.6. 35. PC 188; translation mine, adapted from Hawley 2005, 121. 36. Pauwels 2012, 38–­42, 58–­62. 37. Orsini, unpublished paper. 38. Kanhāvat 349. All translations from this text are from Pauwels 2012. She relies on two editions of the text (both of which make use of a manuscript dated to 1657): Parmeśvarī Lāl Gupta, ed., Malik Muhammad Jāyasī kṛt Kanhāvat (Banaras: Annapūrṇā Prakāśan, 1981), and Śiv Sahāy Pāṭhak, ed., Kanhāvat (malik Muhammad Jāyasī kṛt) (Allahabad: Sāhitya Bhavan, 1981).

384 9 8. The Triumphs of Devotion







39. Kanhāvat 350. 40. Kanhāvat 352. 41. Kanhāvat 354.9. 42. Pauwels 2012, 59. 43. Pinch 2006, 19. 44. Digby (1986) 2003, 241. 45. Pinch 2006, 211. 46. Lawrence 1987, 371–­72. 47. Digby (1986) 2003, 238. 48. Śukla (1929) 2009, 63. 49. Green 2004, 222. 50. Davis 1998, 6. 51. Rizvi 1970, 127. 52. I am grateful to Pasha Mohammad Khan for his generous assistance with several of the Persian sources referenced in this chapter. 53. Digby 1970a, 4–­5. 54. Rizvi 1970, 126. 55. Digby 1970a, 9–­10. Regarding this story, see also Lawrence 1984, 116–­18. 56. The word istidrāj typically refers to abilities, good fortune, etc., bestowed by God upon a sinner (nonbeliever), who, despite these divine gifts, continues to live sinfully, ignorant of the error of his or her ways. God is thought to give these gifts (istidrāj) in accordance with his own plans, commonly interpreted as deliberately increasing the sinners’ arrogance and pride in order to destroy them. 57. Digby 1970a, 4; Rizvi 1970, 128. Islamic tradition distinguishes karāmāt (miracles of saints) not only from istidrāj but also from mu’jizat, the miracles of prophets. 58. Cf. Mohammad Ishaq Khan 1994, 206. 59. Fawa’īd al-­Fu’ād, Fascicle IV, Assembly 3; Lawrence 1992, 216. 60. Fawa’īd al-­Fu’ād, Fascicle IV, Assembly 36; Lawrence 1992, 278. 61. Lawrence 1992, 278. Even as Nizām al-­Dīn saw little value in miracles and criticized their public display, he was well aware of the need for Sufi shaikhs to occasionally perform miracles as proof of their spiritual power and insight. In Fawa’īd al-­Fu’ād, Fascicle IV, Assembly 11, he tells a story about a Sufi who explains the situation to a ruler (who was seeking a show of miracles): “If a man claims that he has the ability to perform miracles, he is equivalent to that ass, but if he doesn’t make that claim and doesn’t perform any miracle, someone might suppose that he doesn’t possess spiritual insight.” 62. Digby 1970a, 5–­6. 63. Eaton 1978, 167. 64. Digby 1970a, 12–­13. 65. Novetzke 2008, 66–­67. 66. In recounting the narrative, I rely on an unpublished translation of the Tīrthāvalī by Christian Novetzke, based on a 1631 manuscript. This Tīrthāvalī—­w ritten in the third person and involving Nāmdev as one character among many—­is the best known of two very different versions of the text. For details about these two versions and how they differ, see Novetzke 2008, 42–­43, 147–­49. 67. Tīrthāvalī (B) 919:5–­922:11. I am grateful to Christian Novetzke for allowing me to use his unpublished translation of this text.

8. The Triumphs of Devotion = 385 68. Abbott and Godbole (1933) 1982, 187–­90; Bhaktavijaya 12:8–­40. 69. Novetzke 2008, 62. 70. For more information on Mahīpati and his first hagiographical work, the Bhaktavijay (1762), see Keune 2007. 71. Keune (2007, 184–­85) also points out that, despite Maharashtra’s lack of distinctive geographical boundaries with Karnataka to the south, Mahīpati and the Marathi bhaktas remain rather oblivious to South India and seem to have been somewhat disconnected to (or uninterested in) southern religious happenings. See also Novetzke 2008, 37. 72. Kiehnle 2000, 256. 73. In what we might construe as evidence of Vaiṣṇava bhakti’s enduring and pervasive success, the Nāth side of memories about Jñāndev are significantly downplayed among the broader populace in Maharashtra today, while the memory of him as founder of the Vārkarī (Viṭṭhal-­K ṛṣṇa) bhakti tradition (a memory with very little historical grounding) is emphasized. Vārkarī devotees remember him to have been a Nāth, but usually with no other related information beyond the word itself. While the Nāths are not demonized by the Marathi bhaktas, they are thoroughly (and seemingly intentionally) neglected (in conver­ sation with Jon Keune, December 2009). 74. Abbott, Godbole, and Edwards 1935, 51; III:183. 75. Abbott, Godbole, and Edwards 1935, 67–­68; IV:153–­59. 76. Abbott, Godbole, and Edwards 1935, 69–­70; IV:173–­76, 182–­83. 77. Christian Novetzke, email message to author, May 9, 2017. 78. Abbott, Godbole, and Edwards 1935, 70–­71; IV:188–­96. 79. Abbott (1927) 1981, 128–­34; v. 19:19–­99. 80. McLeod 1980b, 145. 81. McLeod 1980b, 145. 82. Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās 1.41; Jodh Singh 1998, 71. This text’s author, Bhāī Gurdās, was the nephew of Guru Amar Dās, the third Sikh Guru. 83. Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās 1.42; Jodh Singh 1998, 72. 84. McLeod 1980a, 137–­38. 85. McLeod 1980a, 139. 86. Gilbert Pollet’s extensive analysis of the Bhaktamāl of Nābhādās confirms this same bhakti conception of the miraculous. Pollet states that Nābhādās mentions fifty-­three miracles in





his text and that “in 42 of [those] 53 instances, the deity itself is at the origin of the miraculous event,” while in the other eleven instances it is implied that the miracle is done (by a devout bhakta) through the power of devotion to God (1967, 476, 478). 87. On the relationship between Nābhā’s mūl text and the commentary by Priyādās that nearly always accompanies it, see Hare 2007. 88. Nābhājī 2009, 768–­69. The line is jhūṭh bāt ek rām pahicāniyai (ka. 515), which William Pinch translates as, “It’s a lie, all I know is Ram” (2006, 218). 89. Nābhājī 2009, 769–­70 (ka. 516); Pinch 2006: 218. 90. Nābhājī 2009, 771. The line is karāmāt neku lījiyai (ka. 517). 91. Nābhājī 2009, 771 (ka. 517). The ending of this Brajbhasha kavitt is extremely difficult to interpret, and neither Pinch’s nor Rūpkalā’s explanation/translation—­which posit that the emperor prays to Rām for protection—­seems justifiable to me based on Prīyadās’s text. 92. Pinch 2006, 218–­19.

386 9 8. The Triumphs of Devotion 93. Pinch 2006, 218–­19. In this way, Pinch interprets the tale as “a Vaishnava bhakti response to the legacy of Akbar’s fascination with esoteric yogis and the mysteries of hathayoga.” 94. Pauwels 2010, 522. 95. Kabīr parcaī, sects. 11–­12; Lorenzen 1991a, 119–­24. 96. Kabīr parcaī sects. 7–­9; Lorenzen 1991a, 107–­15. 97. It is important to note that there are also miracle stories that present famous early modern North Indian bhaktas as being clearly more powerful than their opponents but that do not necessarily explicitly locate that superiority in the practice of devotion, as opposed to some other unnamed spiritual power. For instance, in a story from oral tradition, Gorakhnāth invites Kabīr to a miracle contest where he plants his iron trident in the ground, rises, and sits on one of its prongs, and then challenges Kabīr to come up and sit on one of the other prongs. Kabīr responds by taking out a ball of thread and, holding one end, throwing it up into the air. He then ascends and takes a seat on the other end of the thread, far above Gorakh on his trident. This sort of anecdote shows Kabīr to be more powerful than Gorakhnāth, but unlike the stories (found in sectarian written sources) that are the focal point of this chapter, these oral traditions offer no indication that Kabīr’s superiority results from his selfless devotion to and humble reliance on God, nor do we find any suggestion in them that Kabīr’s powers are understood as inconsequential. This story and others like it are briefly discussed in Lorenzen 1991a, 54–­55.

Conclusion



1. Douglas R. Brooks states that “the word ‘Tantra’ in contemporary vernacular Indian languages, such as Tamil or Hindi, is frequently used to conjure notions of effective black magic, illicit sexuality, and immoral behavior” (1990, 5). Echoing this, Hugh Urban remarks, “In most vernacular languages [in India] today, the term tantra is typically associated with a whole range of intense associations, usually relating to the darker realms of the magical, the immoral (sometimes the illegal), and the occult” (2003, 38). David  G. White similarly says that “many Hindus in India today deny the relevance of Tantra to their tradition, past or present, identifying what they call ‘tantra-­mantra’ as so much mumbo-­jumbo” (2003, 262). In another work, White remarks that “the great majority of modern-­day Hindus overwhelmingly reject—­or dissemble with regard to—­the tantric legacy of their own traditions, generally identifying tāntrikas (a modern usage) with evil charlatans practicing the dark arts” (2011, 577). Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus assert much the same: “The word ‘Tantra’ in common use up and down the country often has a completely negative meaning. The average decent Hindu thinks of a ‘Tantrist’ as a highly suspect and dangerous figure, probably a wicked, unscrupulous and power-­hungry practitioner of black magic” (2011, 684). Travis Smith adds his voice to the chorus: “Modern Indian languages frequently use tantra in a sense more or less equivalent to the concept of black magic. Tantrics are marginal and mysterious supposed practitioners of the dark arts, and as such they are regarded with suspicion by the mainstream culture, be it in a traditional village or modern urban context” (2012, 168). David Gray also notes that “the tantric traditions have, over the past few centuries at least, been associated with black magic in India” (2016). 2. To cite one telling example, in the preface to The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (2013), Robert Yelle asks, “What has happened to

Conclusion = 387







the worldview or cosmology represented by [the Tantras]?” (xi). Having studied the mantras and linguistic ideology of the medieval Hindu Tantras in depth, all while living in modern India, Yelle notes that while the tantric perspective and its “magical cosmologies” have not disappeared entirely in modern India, its marginal continuations clearly do “not amount to a coherent worldview.” Something, he says, seems to have “intervened to disrupt the worldview of the Tantras and the practices that these texts recorded.” “That,” Yelle remarks, “was the beginning of my study of the impact of British colonialism on India” (xii). Yelle’s book is a brilliant study of the ways in which British colonial discourses of disenchanted rationality and “secular” critiques and reforms of Hinduism were fundamentally informed by Protestant theological and linguistic understandings. My interest in it here, however, is simply to highlight the odd fact that, in seeking a cause for the disruption and decline of tantric perspectives, Yelle leaps entirely over the early modern period (and the impact of Central Asian Turks and Afghans), moving straight to the period of British colonialism. This appears symptomatic of a tendency in postcolonial scholarship to neglect the study of premodern India as a result of a focus on demonstrating how most forms of Indian modernity today—­i ncluding its dominant conceptual frameworks and ways of thinking—­a re deeply influenced by, and even a direct result of, the British colonial presence. 3. Krishna Sharma 1987. Sharma discusses M. Monier-­Williams, H. H. Wilson, Albrecht Weber, Franz Lorinser, and George Grierson as influential scholars of this period whose work presented bhakti in this very particular (and biased) fashion, identifying it first with Kṛṣṇa worship and later with the larger category of Vaiṣṇavism. 4. Urban 2003, 3. 5. Monier-­Williams 1891, 96. 6. Monier-­Williams 1882, 295–­96. 7. Urban 2003, 51. 8. Monier-­Williams 1890, 123, 129. 9. Eaton 2000a, 74; quoted in Pinch 2006, 17. 10. Padoux 2017, 154. 11. Gray 2016; Padoux 2017, 155. 12. Padoux 2017, 153. 13. Even those modern Indians not predisposed against tantric practitioners will still typically understand tantra (quite apart from bhakti) as a tradition of “complex ritual secrets that are intrinsically powerful, ancient, and dangerous in the wrong hands” (Glucklich 1997, 148). In other words, while tantra does not equate to disapproved black magic for many modern Indians, it is nevertheless nearly always the case that, “To call an image or ritual ‘Tantric’ suggests that it is charged with ambivalent occult energy or that it offers a secret shortcut to esoteric knowledge and powers” (Lutgendorf 2001, 272). 14. Padoux 2017, 162. 15. Khanna 2008, 7. 16. Khanna 2008, 5–­7, 20. 17. Dinnell 2017, 3, 6. Darry Dinnell’s ethnographic research on Jogaṇī Mātā sites in Gujarat shows how “tantra, as a sāttvik, Sanskritic power, can aid in an ongoing effort amongst members of relatively non-­elite groups . . . ​to cultivate and perform perceived hallmarks of high status such that their social rank can parallel their desired—­or, in some cases, actualized—­economic ascendancy” (3–­4).

388 9 Conclusion

18. 19. 20. 21.

Lutgendorf 2001, 287. Lutgendorf 2001, 287–­88. Lutgendorf 2001, 286–­87. Lutgendorf 1994, 240–­41.

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Index

Locators in italics signify illustrations. Ādi Granth, 162, 165, 245, 247, 248, 380n145 Abu al-­Fazl ibn Mubārak, 102–­105, 220 ācaryās, 38, 52. See also gurus; professional ascetics Accardi, Dean, 80 Acyutānanda Dāsa, 272 Advaita Vedānta, 61, 179, 319n31, 332n180, 360nn42, 44, 48 aesthetic theory. See rasa affect, 18–­19, 320nn67–­68. See also emotion Āgamas: and Agradās, 221, 222–­223, 224; bhakti in, 37, 323–­324n40; defined, 30, 321n4, 324n60; on initiate classes, 31; and mainstream integration, 39, 53 Agastya Saṃhitā, 158–­160; and Agradās, 158, 217–­218, 223, 353n112; on initiation, 159, 353n118; and Sants, 161; on Śiva, 353n111; and Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 353n106 agency, 7 Agradās, 137; and Agastya Saṃhitā, 158, 217–­218, 223, 353n112; Anantadās on, 200, 366–­367n19; and Bhagvān-­jī, 348n28; and Dādū Panth, 205, 368n35; and divine Name recitation, 141, 144, 200, 203, 205–­207, 211–­215, 350n58, 367n20; as founder of

Rām-­rasik tradition, 86, 142, 197–­198, 203, 204; as gardener, 143, 147, 200–­201; and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 197–­198, 216; and Hitopadeśa, 219–­220; importance of, 196, 365n2; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 208, 209, 210, 216–­217, 218; life of, 196–­197, 365nn4–­5; and Mān Singh, 200–­201, 367n26; on musk deer, 209, 368n43; Nābhādās on, 143–­144, 199–­201, 226, 227, 365n5; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 205, 208, 210–­211, 232–­234, 373nn125–­26; and Rām devotion, 158, 209, 216, 353n112; and Raivāsā community, 201–­202, 367nn26; and rasik practice, 142, 199, 206, 216, 220–­222, 223–­224, 235, 366n17, 367n30, 371n89; and religious marketplace environment, 195–­196, 204, 228, 235; and Sants, 195, 203, 204, 207–­208, 211; scholarship on, 196, 365n3; and tantra, 215, 222–­225; and two bhakti practice streams, 151; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 225–­226; and vernacular literature/culture, 86, 148, 204, 214–­215, 218–­219, 226–­227; written compositions of, 142–­143, 148, 204–­211, 367–­368nn33, 35, 39

414 9 index Agrawal, Purushottam, 161–­162, 355n134 Ahmad, Aziz, 82–­83, 335n72 Ahmed, Sara, 17, 320n67 Akbar the Great (Mughal emperor), 101–­107; accession of, 101, 116, 339n11; dynastic ideology of, 99, 102–­105, 112–­114, 339n22, 342–­343nn80, 84; and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 198; and Hitopadeśa, 219–­220; and Kacchvāhā clan, 108, 116–­117, 118, 119; manuscript culture under, 123–­124; and Mīrzā Muhammad Hakīm, 103; and Persianate culture, 105; and Rāmānandi community, 165, 356n145; and Sufism, 102, 103; wife of, 116, 343n100; and yogīs, 101, 338n8, 386n93 Akbarnāmā (Abu al-­Fazl ibn Mubārak), 103–­104 Alam, Muzaffar, 70, 100, 105 alchemy, 382n13 Ali, Daud, 317n1 Allen, Michael, 331–­332n180, 360n48 Āḻvārs, 38, 39, 153, 156, 327n95, 352n88 Ammaiyār, Kāraikkāl, 38, 324n45 Amṛtasiddhi, 178, 359n37 Anantadās: on Agradās, 200; critique of tantra and yoga, 248, 251, 258, 260, 265–­266, 302; on divine Name recitation, 366–­367n19; on Rāmānand, 157; and Rāmānandi community, 371–­372n106; and vernacular literature/culture, 226–­227 Ananta Dāsa, 272 Anantānand, 140, 349n38, 355n137 Angot, Michel, 358n28 Āṇṭāḷ (Āḻvār saint), 39 Appar (Nāyanār saint), 39 Arjan, 269–­270, 380n145 asceticism, 9–­11; contemporary practices, 353n102; and Hanumān, 165; Kāpālikas, 12, 319n42; in modern bhakti, 353n102; and monasticism, 10–­11; North Indian archetype of, 170–­171; professional ascetics, 9–­10, 44, 49, 50, 51–­52, 53; and religious marketplace environment, 80; scholarship on, 9; and siddhis, 33, 34; and Sufism, 80; and tantra, 34; and transsectarian medieval culture, 170–­171;

and Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 140, 171; warrior monks, 107, 340n40. See also ascetic (tapasvī) yoga ; Nāth yogīs; professional ascetics “Asceticism Denounced and Embraced” (Hawley), 9 ascetic (tapasvī) yoga: and Agradās, 144; and divinization of the body, 190; and Dvārkādās, 148, 150; and Kīlhadev, 145–­146, 169, 362n73; Mahābhārata on, 172–­173; and meditation, 358n23; and Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions, 184, 185, 188; overview, 173–­174, 358n22; and Payahārī, 140; and Rāmānand, 355n136; and Vedic tradition, 173, 358n21 Asher, Catherine, 108, 121–­122, 345n145 āstika philosophies, 331n178 Aurangzeb (Mughal emperor), 101, 338n8 Ayas Dev Nāth, 348n15 Āyurveda, 330n164 Āzarī thought, 104–­105, 339n26 Bābā Farīd, 334n46 Babb, Lawrence A., 58–­59 Babur (Mughal emperor), 100, 115 Bādarāyaṇa, 331n176 Badāʾūnī, 113–­114 Baḥr al-­ḥayāt (Ghawth Gwāliyārī), 80, 334n61 Bahura, G. N., 347n8, 373n124 Bairām Khān, 339n11 Bakker, Hans, 50, 159–­160, 353n106, 354n122 Balarāma Dāsa, 272 bārahmāsā genre, 283, 383n23 Barthwal, Pitambar Datta, 162, 243, 355–­356n139 Barua, Ankur, 319n31 bazaari tantra, 307–­308 Beck, Guy, 352–­353n101 Behl, Aditya, 13, 14, 79, 87, 88, 95, 279 Bengal, 319n35 Bhāgavad Gītā, 152, 185, 351n83 Bhagavannāmakaumudī (Lakṣmīdhara), 214 Bhāgavatamuktāphala (Vopadeva), 94–­95 Bhāgavata Purāṇa: and Agradās, 211–­215, 222, 224, 226; on bhakti, 47–­48, 153–­156, 327n95,

index = 415 352n88, 93; and bhramargit genre, 377n65; on divine Name recitation, 49, 270; and lay Śaiva religion, 49; origins of, 270n152, 352nn86, 89; on performance/song, 156, 352–­353n101; scholarship on, 319n35; on siddhis, 146, 154, 155, 289, 352n99; on tantric yoga, 154–­155; and transsectarian Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 342n66 Bhāgavatas, 46 Bhāgavat Pad Prasaṅg (Agradās), 209 Bhagvān-­jī, 135–­137, 151, 348n28 Bhagvantdās, 117, 119, 120 Bhairava Śiva, 129, 164, 346nn1–­2 bhajan, 144, 349n50, 353n102 bhaktajana, 38, 48, 327n102 Bhaktalīlāmṛt (Mahīpati), 297–­299 Bhaktamāl (Nābhādās), 227–­232; on Agradās, 143–­144, 199–­201, 226, 227, 365n5; on Bhagvān-­jī, 348n28; on disciples of Payahārī, 140, 349n40; exclusions in, 229–­234; on Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 198; inclusivity of, 227, 228; and Islam, 372n110; on Kacchvāhā patronage of Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 132; on Kīlhadev, 146; and Mahīpati, 297; on miracles, 385n86; and Nandadās, 218; on Payahārī, 138, 140–­141, 362n83, 366n12; precedents for, 227–­228, 372nn109–­10; Priyādās’ commentary on, 121, 135, 146, 226, 258, 301, 385n91; on Pṛthvīrāj, 369n46; on Rāmānand, 157; on Śiva, 158, 353n111; on Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 157, 353n103; on Tulsīdās, 354n119; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 229; on Vaiṣṇavism, 355n133; and vernacular literature/culture, 214, 226; on yoga, 152, 156, 182, 185; and yogi term, 187, 188 Bhaktamāl (Rāghavdās): on Agradās, 139, 197, 200, 365n4; dating of, 348–­349n37; on disciples of Payahārī, 349n40; inclusivity of, 373n121; on Kīlhadev, 139, 146; on Nābhādās, 148–­149; and Nāth yogīs, 230, 231, 272; on Payahārī, 138, 141–­142; on Puraṇ, 151; and two practice streams within Rāmānandi community, 166; on yoga, 182, 185; and yogi term, 187

Bhaktavijay (Mahīpati), 295, 296 bhakti: classifications of, 46, 327n95; definitions of, 2–­3, 5–­8, 152–­156, 351n83, 352n88, 93; diversity within, 7–­8, 13, 319n31; embodiment in, 5–­6, 7, 18, 19, 320–­321nn68, 71; etymology of, 6–­7; as ideology of subordination, 110, 341n62; inclusivity of, 110, 157, 159, 228, 341n63, 342n65; in medieval tantra, 36–­40, 323–­324nn40, 45; modern, 353n102; performance/song as intrinsic to, 89–­92, 336n114; scholarship on, 5–­8, 9, 13, 48, 319nn31, 35; as sensibility, 17, 18, 19–­20, 91, 320n57; as social movement, 5, 110, 318n12, 341n63; women in, 110 bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 3, 4–­5, 11–­12, 81–­82, 156–­157, 239–­275; in bhakti hagiographies, 295–­303, 385nn71, 73, 86; vs. British colonial impact, 12, 305–­307, 386–­387n2; and caste, 254; contemporary attitudes, 305, 386n1; dialogical spirit of, 282, 382n21; and diversity among Nāth yogīs, 192, 193; and divine Name recitation, 250, 267, 268, 269, 271, 380nn132, 142; and divinization of the body, 36, 208; exceptions to, 271–­274; and false spirituality, 246–­250; and geographical location, 255–­258; and hatha yoga, 180–­181, 361n54; in Kanhāvat, 287–­288; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 280, 281, 285–­287; Payahārī-­Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8; and performance/song, 92, 268; and power of bhakti, 193, 250–­253, 298–­299, 386n97; and Śāktism, 240, 256, 258–­260, 378nn89, 92; scholarship on, 239–­240, 375n8; and Sikhs, 255, 299–­301; sources for, 241–­243, 375n4; and Sufism, 81–­82, 254, 276, 277–­278, 280, 291–­295, 384n61; and tantric healing, 261, 264–­268; and two practice streams, 147; and written bhakti compositions, 130; and yogi term, 187, 245–­246. See also Kabīr’s critiques of tantra and yoga; yogic imagery, metaphoric

416 9 index bhakti poet-­saints: and bhakti inclusivity, 85–­86; caste of, 157, 254, 372n113; on divine Name recitation, 268; and healing metaphor, 262–­264; importance of, 3; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 210, 377n73; vs. Sants, 354–­355n127; and Sufism, 277; and vernacular literature/culture, 85–­86, 336n93. See also bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity; specific poets bhakti public, 320n57; and Agradās, 196, 235–­236; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 181; and definitions of bhakti, 6; and ethical values, 19, 91–­92; inclusivity of, 157, 159, 228; and lay Śaiva religion, 327n102; and performance/song, 16–­18, 91; and Sufi influences, 96–­97, 338n140; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 119, 344n120; and written bhakti compositions, 125, 147–­148, 196, 350n69. See also community bhakti rasa, 95, 366n7. See also Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition Bhaktirasabodhinī (Priyādās), 121, 135, 146, 226, 258, 301, 385n91 Bhaktiratnakāra (Śaṅkaradeva), 257–­258, 269 Bhārmal Bihārīmal (Kacchvāhā ruler), 115–­116, 118 Bhattacharyya, Benoytosh, 321n1 Bhīm (Kacchvāhā ruler), 115 Bhīṣma, 185, 362n73 bhramargit genre, 252–­253, 377n65 Bhūta Tantras, 330nn164, 167 Bihārīlāl, 124 Bījak, 245 Bilgrami, 88 Birch, Jason, 359n35 Bisschop, Peter, 50, 328n118 body. See divinization of the body; embodiment Bouillier, Véronique, 151, 188, 347n11 brahmanism: diversity within, 329n139; expansion of, 53–­54, 56–­57, 60, 329n138; and folk practices, 57–­58; and hatha yoga, 361n60; and Hindu religious identity, 73; and Rāmānandi community, 354n119; and

Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, 42; Sultanate period, 68, 332n181; and tantra as medieval mainstream, 43, 326n86; and temples, 44; and Vaiṣṇavism, 327n103; and Vedānta, 61, 331n179, 332n180, 360n42. See also Pāśupatas; Vedic tradition brahmarandhra, 144, 350n59 Brahmasūtras (Bādarāyaṇa), 331n176 Braj, 114, 119–­120, 256 Brajbhasha language, 86; and Agradās, 204, 214–­215, 218, 226; Mughal support for, 106; rīti-­granth genre, 218, 370n82. See also vernacular literature/culture Briggs, George W., 188–­189, 356n155 British colonial impact, 12, 14–­15, 305–­307, 366n14, 386–­387n2 Bronkhorst, Johannes, 358n21 Brooks, Douglas, 33, 386n1 Brooks, Douglas Renfrew, 8 Bryant, Edwin, 154, 352n86 Bryant, Kenneth, 217, 241, 375n4 Buddhism: divine power in, 322n18; mainstream integration of, 40, 41; and Pāśupatas, 50; professional ascetics in, 51–­52; and śanti rituals, 323n22; and tantra, 40, 41, 272; and yoga, 52, 172, 175, 178, 358n28, 359n37 Burger, Maya, 284 Burghart, Richard, 136, 157, 227, 353nn103, 108 Busch, Allison, 106, 124, 125, 218, 222 Caitanyacandrodaya (Kavikarṇapūra), 257 Caitanya-­caritāmṛta (Kavirāj), 257, 263 Caitanya-­caritāmṛta (Kṛṣṇadāsa), 270 Caitanya Maṅgala (Locanadāsa), 257 Caitanya movement. See Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Callewaert, Winand, 189, 241, 248, 272 Caṇḍīdāsa, Baṛu, 383n27 Cāndāyan (Dāʿūd), 71, 87, 95–­96, 170, 234, 278, 280, 336n85, 375n139 Caracchi, Pinuccia, 169, 355n136 Carman, John, 9 caste: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 254; of bhakti poet-­saints, 157, 254, 372n113; of Nābhādās, 371n103; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 110, 341n61

index = 417 Caturnāth, 347n8 Cauhān, Prāṇcand, 356n151 celibacy, 174, 176, 358n22 Chakrabarti, Kunal, 54, 329n139 Champakalakshmi, Radha, 38 Chandra, Satish, 82, 333n23, 335n72 Chand, Tara, 335n72 Chatterjee, Indrani, 10, 56 Chatterjee, Kumkum, 112–­113, 119, 198 Chattopadhyaya, B. D., 53, 354n121 Chinggis Khan, 83, 100 Chishtī, Salīm, 102 Chishti Sufism: and cultural hybridity, 333n31; influences on bhakti, 14; Mughal period mainstream integration of, 102, 103; and Nāth yogīs, 79; origins of, 334n45; Sultanate period growth of, 75–­76, 334n46 Chitāī-­carita (Nārāyaṇdās), 280, 336n85 Clark, Matthew, 351n76 Colas, Gerard, 153 Coleman, Tracey, 352n88 colonialism. See British colonial impact community. See bhakti public Cort, John, 7 critical animal studies, 320n68 Cuntarar (Nāyanār saint), 39 Czerniak-­Droẓdẓowicz, Marzenna, 36 Dabistān-­i Mazāhib, 104–­105, 339n26 Dādū: Agradās on, 205; and divine Name recitation, 159; and Kabīr, 231, 373n119; Nābhādās’ exclusion of, 229, 230–­234; and Nāth yogīs, 272; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 232–­234, 373n122, 374nn133, 135; and vernacular literature/culture, 86. See also Dādū Panth Dādū Panth: and Agradās, 205, 368n35; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­ yogic religiosity, 245; healing metaphor in, 263; inclusivity of, 110, 341n64; and Nābhādās, 229, 230; and Nāth yogīs, 192, 231, 245, 272, 273; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 165, 272, 373n126; and Rāghavdās, 373n121; and Rāmānand, 355n135; and yoga, 272–­273, 381n160. See also Rāghavdās

Daityāri, 257 Dalmia, Vasudha, 13, 107 dāna (giving): content of, 330n155; and inclusivity, 55–­56; in lay Śaiva religion, 49, 51, 52, 328n123; and tantra as medieval mainstream, 53 Daśanāmīs: and ascetic yoga, 184, 185; divisions of, 187; and hatha yoga, 182, 188, 363n90; and Nāth yogīs, 172, 184, 363n90; and Rāmānandi community, 362–­363n85; two practice streams in, 150, 351n76; and yogi term, 363n88 Dasgupta, S. N., 47, 188 Dattātreyayogaśāstra, 178–­179, 359n39 Dāʿūd, Maulānā, 71, 87, 95–­96, 170, 234, 278, 280, 336n85, 375n139 Davidson, Ronald, 42, 112, 323n22, 328n124, 329n138 Davis, Donald, 54 Davis, Richard, 291 de Bruijn, Thomas, 14, 338n140 Delhi Sultanate: decline of, 72, 83, 84, 335n77, 335nn82–­83; establishment of, 66–­67; iqtāʾ system, 71, 333n29; and Mongol invasions, 70; and Sufism, 74–­75. See also Sultanate period demonology, 322–­323n21 De Simini, Florinda, 49 Devīpurāṇa, 327n98 Dhanā, 161, 230 dharma, 49 Dharmakīrti, 43 dhikr, 270, 380–­381n149 Dhruv Caritra (Agradās), 214, 222, 226 Dhyān Mañjarī (Agradās), 215–­225; and Agastya Saṃhitā, 217–­218; on divine Name recitation, 367n20; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 216–­217, 218; manuscripts of, 367n31; and Nandadās, 218; on Rām devotion, 158, 216, 353n112; and Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition, 199, 203, 204, 215; on rasik practice, 219–­222, 371n89; and rīti poetry, 222; and Sanskrit literary authority, 214; and tantra, 222–­225 Digby, Simon, 67, 79, 93, 291, 293, 335n77 Dihlavī, Amīr Khusrau, 333n31

418 9 index Dihlawī, Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī, 93 Dinnell, Darry, 387n17 divine Name recitation: Agastya Saṃhitā on, 158, 159–­160, 353–­354n119; and Agradās, 141, 144, 200, 203, 205–­207, 211–­215, 350n58, 367n20; Anantadās on, 366–­367n19; Bhāgavata Purāṇa on, 49, 270; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 250, 267, 268, 269, 271, 380nn132, 142; and mantras, 269, 380n139; in rasik practice, 200, 350n51, 366–­367nn19–­21; and Sants, 159, 161, 162, 213; in Sufism, 76, 270, 271, 380–­381nn149–­50; and transsectarian Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 110; in Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 92, 141, 144, 162, 198, 200, 203, 213, 350n51, 354n119, 358n58; in Vaiṣṇavism, 158, 159–­160, 269, 353–­354n119, 380n138 divinization of the body, 32; Agastya Saṃhitā on, 159; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 36, 208; and folk practices, 57; and Nāth yogīs, 80, 81, 190–­191, 208; vs. rasik practice, 224; and tantric healing, 58; in Vedic tradition, 322n14 Djurdjevic, Gordan, 189, 364n106 Dobe, Timothy, 9 Dohāvalī (Tulsīdās), 249 Dold, Patricia, 109 Dvārkādās, 148, 149, 150, 166, 171, 181, 185 Dvija, Rāmānanda, 260 Dvivedi, Hazariprasad, 243–­244 Dwārkānāth, 368–­369n45 early modern period, 317n1 Eaton, Richard, 13, 14, 65, 74–­75, 76, 119, 306–­307, 320n49, 332n12, 333n29 Eck, Diana, 82, 109, 335n72 Eknāth, 298–­299 Eliade, Mircea, 188 embodiment: Bhāgavata Purāṇa on, 47–­48; in bhakti, 5–­6, 7, 18, 19, 320–­321nn68, 71; in lay Śaiva religion, 46; and music, 19. See also divinization of the body emotion, 18–­19, 94–­95, 153, 154, 320nn67–­68 emotional community, 17–­18, 96. See also bhakti public; community

Erndl, Kathleen, 109 Ernst, Carl, 68, 79, 80, 335n81 ethical values, 19, 91–­93, 337nn118, 125 exorcism, 330nn164, 167–­68 Farquhar, J. N., 47 Faruqui, Munis, 13, 103, 107 Fatehpur Manuscript, 145, 245, 350n62 Fawāʾid al-­Fuʾād (Dihlawī), 93, 292, 294, 384n61 Ferrario, Alberta, 36, 37 Fisher, Elaine, 31, 61 Flood, Finbarr Barry, 15 Flood, Gavin, 29, 32, 56, 57, 59, 321n1, 330n172 folk practices, 53, 56, 57–­58, 329n138 Frazier, Jessica, 9 Friedlander, Peter, 272 Gahinīnāth, 364n107 Gālavgītam (Dwārkānāth), 368–­369n45 Galta. See Rāmānandi community Gangohī, 88 Gangohī, ʿAbd al-­Quddūs, 79, 88 Gāruḍa Tantras, 57–­58, 330nn164, 170 gāruḍikas, 57–­58, 261, 330n170, 379n102 Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism: and Agradās, 197–­198, 216; on divine Name recitation, 213; mainstream integration of, 118–­119, 120, 198; origins of, 114–­115, 343n90; and Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition, 197–­198; and Śāktism, 109, 378nn92, 94; scholarship on, 319n35; Six Gosvāmis, 115, 120, 343n92, 371n102; and tantra, 224, 371n102 Geertz, Clifford, 92, 337n122 Geslani, Marko, 323n22 Gesūdarāz, Sayyid Muhammad, 294 Ghawth Gwāliyārī, Muhammad, 80, 101, 334n61 Ghaznavid dynasty, 66 Ghosh, Pika, 109 Ghurid dynasty, 66, 334n45 Ghūri, Muhammad, 66 Ghurye, G. S., 144, 347n8 Gītagovinda (Jayadeva), 94 Glucklich, Ariel, 387n13 goddess worship, 54, 111, 329n140, 342n68, 378n89. See also Śāktism

index = 419 Gold, Ann, 109, 347n6, 356n155 Gold, Daniel, 109, 347n6 Gonda, Jan, 47 Goodall, Dominic, 41, 331n173 Gopāl, Jan, 233, 373n119, 374n133 Gopāldās, 162, 230 Gopicand, 357n4 Gopinātha, 380n138 Gorakhbāṇī, 182–­183, 189–­190, 273, 361–­362nn61–­3, 65, 364n100 Gorakhnāth, 163; background of, 170, 357n3; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 287–­288, 386n97; and diversity among Nāth yogīs, 357n6; and hatha yoga, 363n90; and Jñāndev, 364n107; and laya yoga, 362n66; Nābhādās’ exclusion of, 229, 230; and Nāth yogīs, 299; and Nirañjanīs, 272; and origins of Nāth yogīs, 181; and siddhis, 188–­190; and yogi term, 246. See also Gorakhbāṇī; Nāth yogīs Gorakṣaśataka, 179, 363n90 Gosvāmi, Rūpa, 114–­115, 365–­366n7, 371n102, 380n132. See also Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Gosvāmi, Sanātana, 114–­115 Goswamy, B. N., 135–­136 Gottschalk, Peter, 22 Govindadev temple (Vrindavan), 120, 345n128 Granoff, Phyllis, 257 Green, Nile, 291, 336n110, 346n155 Grewal, J. S., 135–­136 Guha, Ranajit, 341n62 Gupta, Sanjukta, 36 Guru Caritra (Dvija), 260 Guru Granth Sahib (Dhanā), 228 gurus, 31, 44, 55, 322n11. See also ācaryās; dāna; yogīs Haberman, David, 120, 153 Habib, Irfan, 106–­107, 340n39 Hacker, Paul, 47 Hamida Banu Begum, 118 Hanumān, 164–­168; and Bhairava, 129, 346n2; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 301; contemporary worship of, 308; and Daśanāmīs, 363n85; and Nāth yogīs,

129–­130, 167, 356n155; and pragmatic religiosity, 356n143; and Rāmānandi community, 121, 164–­166, 345n135, 356n151 Hanumāncālīsā (Tulsīdās), 354n119 Haqāʾiq-­i Hindi (Bilgrami), 88 Hardy, Friedhelm, 38, 47, 153, 351n83, 352nn86, 88 Hare, James, 228, 372n109 Haridās, 272 Haridāsa, 270, 381n150 Hasan, Amir, 262, 292 Hastings, James, 346n159 Haṭhapradīpikā (Svātmārāma), 273, 361n60, 362n66, 363n90 hatha yoga: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 180–­181, 361n54; and Buddhism, 359n37; and Dādū Panth, 272–­273; etymology of, 359n35; and Nāth yogīs, 182–­183, 361–­362nn60, 63; and Rāmānandi community, 140, 142, 148–­149, 181, 182, 188, 349n46, 381n164; Sultanate period, 178; and tantra, 176; and Vedānta, 179 Hatley, Shaman, 32, 41, 79–­80, 326n86 Hawd al-­ḥayāt, 334n61 Hawley, John Stratton, 2, 6, 9, 82, 86, 90–­91, 121, 244, 269, 284–­286, 318n8, 336n114, 342n66, 355n135, 372n110, 379n116 healing. See pragmatic religiosity; tantric healing Hedaytullah, Muhammad, 335n72 Hemādri, 94 Hess, Linda, 18, 241–­242, 375n7 Hiltebeitel, Alf, 48–­49 Hindavi language, 71, 85, 86–­87, 336n85; premākhyāns, 87–­88. See also vernacular literature/culture Hindu religious identity, 73 Hīra Kunwar (Joshābāī) (wife of Akbar), 116, 343n100 Hirschkind, Charles, 19, 91 historiography of bhakti, 1–­2, 21–­22, 82, 317nn5–­6; Marxist approaches, 341nn62–­ 63; and period designations, 317n1, 318n7; and Sufi influences, 82–­83, 335n72 Hitopadeśa, 219–­220

420 9 index Hodgson, Marshall, 332n1 Holdrege, Barbara, 5–­6, 47, 154, 155, 224, 35289 Horstmann, Monika, 120, 142, 165, 171, 192, 349n37, 356n144 Hṛdayrām, 356n151 Hudson, Dennis, 39, 352n86 Humāyūn (Mughal emperor), 100, 101, 116, 339n11 Ḥusaynī, Sayyid Muhammad Akbar, 294 imagined community, 17 inclusivity: bhakti, 110, 157, 159, 228, 341n63, 342n65; lay Śaiva religion, 46, 48, 327n103; Nāth yogīs, 79; Rāmānandi community, 110, 157, 158, 159, 371n103; Sikhs, 110; and Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 158, 353n103; Sufism, 79; tantra, 31, 52, 55–­56, 329n151, 329–­330n152 Indian nationalism, 82, 317n5, 355–­356n139, 366n14 Indo-­Persian cultural hybridity, 13, 15, 65, 70–­72, 77, 87, 333nn27, 31, 360n42 initiation: Agastya Saṃhitā on, 159, 353n118; in tantra, 31, 43, 223, 322n11; and written bhakti compositions, 223; in yoga, 360n51 iqtāʾ system, 71, 333n29 Iraqi, Shahabuddin, 82, 335n72 Isaacson, Harunaga, 331n173 Islām Shāh Surī, 101, 116 Islam: Akbar’s attitudes toward orthodox, 102–­103; and divine Name recitation, 270; and Mongol invasions, 83–­84; and Nābhādās, 372n110; and Nāth yogīs, 191, 364n100; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 231, 373n122; and occultism, 335nn80–­81; role in Sultanate period cultural change, 65, 67, 68, 72–­74, 332–­333n12; and Vedānta, 331–­332nn178, 180; and yoga, 334n61. See also Sufism Islamicate culture, 332n1 istidrāj, 293, 384n56 Īśvara Gitā, 51, 328n121 Jagannātha Dāsa, 272 Jagat Singh (Kullu ruler), 134–­135 Jahāngīr (Mughal emperor), 101, 105, 118, 119, 121–­122, 338n8, 344n107

Jainism, 40, 358n23 Jālandharnāth, 170, 357n4 Janma Līlā (Gopāl), 233, 374n133 Jawāmiʿ al-­Kalīm (Ḥusaynī), 294 Jayadeva, 94 Jayadrathayāmala, 58 Jayākhya Saṃhitā, 35 Jāyasī: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 287–­288; on divine love, 382n20; and healing metaphor, 262, 264; and Indo-­Persian cultural hybridity, 87; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 278, 279, 280–­281, 284; and vernacular literature/culture, 336n85 Jayatrāma, 142 Jhā, Narendra, 200 jñāna (knowledge): in Kashmiri tantra, 38; in lay Śaiva religion, 51, 328n128; and origins of bhakti, 7, 319n31; and Pañca Sakhā, 271–­272; and Vedānta, 331n179; in yoga, 359n34, 363n88 Jñānasamudra (Sundardās), 272 Jñāndeśvarī, 191–­192, 364n107 Jñāndev, 191, 273, 296, 297–­298, 364n107, 385n73 jogīs, 363n88 Jogpradīpakā, 142, 182 Kāli, 378n93 Kabīr: and Agradās, 205; and bhakti public, 338n140; and caste, 254, 255; and Dādū, 231, 373n119; on divine Name recitation, 213, 268, 269; and divine Name recitation, 159; and healing metaphor, 263; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209; and Nāth yogīs, 162, 163, 243–­244, 272, 274; on performance/song, 90; and Rāmānand, 157; and Rāmānandi community, 161, 355n135; and Sikhs, 230; sources for, 241–­242; and vernacular literature/culture, 85, 86; and yogi term, 246. See also Kabīr’s critiques of tantra and yoga Kabīr-­parcaī (Anantadās), 258, 302 Kabīr’s critiques of tantra and yoga: Anantadās on, 302–­303; and divine Name recitation, 269; and false spirituality,

index = 421 246–­250; and Nāth yogīs, 244–­245, 376n21; and Śāktism, 240, 258–­259, 378n88; and tantric healing, 264, 267–­268, 376n25; and unspecified power of bhakti, 386n97; and yogīs, 247, 376n30 Kacchvāhā clan: and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 120; and Govindadev temple, 120, 345n128; and manuscript culture, 124; Mughal alliance with, 107–­108, 115–­117, 121–­122, 198, 343n100, 345n137; and Mughal multiculturalism, 117–­118; Payahārī-­ Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8; Rajasthan, 116, 343n98, 344n106; Shekkavat lineage, 120, 345n129; and social stability, 124, 346n159; and tantra, 111, 342n68; Vaiṣṇava bhakti patronage, 108, 115, 119–­121, 132, 198, 289, 345nn133, 135, 349n49; and written bhakti compositions, 124–­125 Kaelber, Walter, 322n14 Kafle, Nirajan, 54, 329n147 Kaivalyadīpikā (Hemādri), 94 Kalhaṇa, 326n86 Kānhapā, 357n4 Kanhāvat (Jāyasī), 287–­291 Kāpālikas, 12, 319n42 Kapila, 184 karāmāt, 293, 384n57 Kaṭha Upaniṣad, 172 Kaula tradition, 133, 170, 176, 181, 325n63, 359n32 Kauṇḍinya, 50 Kavikarṇapūra, 257 Kavirāj, Kṛṣṇadās, 257, 263 Kavitāvalī (Tulsīdās), 251 Kāyābelī (Dādū), 272 Kayvān, Āẕar, 104–­105 Keśavdās, 113, 222 Keune, Jon, 4, 7–­8, 297 Khalji dynasty, 67 Khanna, Madhu, 307 Khem, 151 Khusrau (Mughal prince), 119, 344n107 Kiehnle, Catharina, 297 Kīlhadev, 137, 144–­148; and Agradās, 144, 197, 365n5; and asceticism, 145–­146, 169, 362n73;

and Hanumān, 165; and Kacchvāhā clan, 121; life of, 142; and Sants, 162; and yoga, 144, 169, 171, 182, 185, 362n73 Kinra, Rajeev, 104, 122 Kirttana-­ghoṣa (Śaṅkaradeva), 261 Kiss, Csaba, 223–­224 Kosambi, D. D., 341n62 Kṛṣṇadāsa (Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism), 270 Kṛṣṇadās (Vallabha sampradāy), 205 Kṛṣṇa devotion: and Agradās, 208, 209, 210, 216–­217, 218; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 287–­288, 296; and definitions of bhakti, 351n83; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 283–­285, 380n132; and Rām-­rasik tradition, 197, 199; Rāmānandi community, 209, 229, 368–­369nn45–­46; and Śāktism, 260; and Sufism, 88; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 110, 134; and Vrindavan, 216–­217. See also Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Kṛṣṇa Gitāvalī (Tulsīdās), 209 Kṣemendra, 330n170 kuṇḍalinī: and hatha yoga, 179, 180, 361nn53, 60; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 382n6; and Nāth yogīs, 184, 363n90; in tantric yoga, 175, 176, 181, 359n32, 360n51, 382n6 Kuṇḍaliyā (Agradās), 203, 214, 219, 232–­233 Lakṣmīdhara, 214 Larson, Gerald, 185 Latāʾif-­e-­Ashrafī (Nizām Gharib), 293 Lawrence, Bruce, 291 laya yoga, 39, 176, 179, 181, 183–­184, 188, 362n66. See also kuṇḍalinī; tantric yoga lay Śaiva religion, 45–­50; bhakti in, 46, 48–­49, 50, 328nn98–­99; and bhakti public, 327n102; community in, 46, 48, 49, 327n102; dāna (giving) in, 49, 51, 52, 328n123; inclusivity of, 46, 48, 327n103; and Pāśupatas, 47, 50, 51; and Purāṇas, 46–­47; scriptures overview, 45–­46, 49, 326n90; and tantra as medieval mainstream, 38, 45, 52; yogīs in, 50, 51–­52, 328nn127–­28 Lefèvre, Corinne, 106 legal practices: Mughal period, 100, 338n6; and tantra, 54–­55

422 9 index Lincoln, Bruce, 18 Locanadāsa, 257 Lodi dynasty, 67, 101, 115 Lofton, Kathryn, 21 Lorenzen, David, 71, 244, 317n6, 327n114, 331n178, 341n63, 342n65 Lubin, Timothy, 48, 327n103 Lutgendorf, Philip, 165, 167, 200, 217, 308, 366n16, 387n13 Maas, Phillipp, 174 McDermott, Rachel, 109, 378n93 McGregor, Richard S., 72, 160, 166, 215, 218, 361n61, 365n3 McLeod, W. H., 299, 380n145 Madhukar Shāh (Bundelā ruler), 125 Madhumālatī (Manjhan), 87, 261–­262, 264, 278–­279, 284, 382n6 mādhurya rasa, 199, 217–­218, 366n14 Mahābhārata, 49, 144, 172–­173, 174, 185, 186, 362n73 Mahdavi Sufism, 76 Maheśdās, 137 Māheśvara community, 50 Mahīpati, 295, 296–­299, 385n71 Maḥmūd of Ghazna, 66 mainstream integration of religious groups. See religiopolitical integration Mallinson, James, 142, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184–­185, 187, 347nn6, 11, 348n35, 350n59, 357n3, 360n51, 362n63, 362–­363n85 Mallison, Françoise, 92 Mamluk dynasty, 66, 67 Mān Bhawati (wife of Jahāngīr), 119 mañjarīs, 216 Manjhan, 87, 261–­262, 264, 278–­279, 284 Mān Singh (Marwar ruler), 348n15 Mān Singh (Mughal general): and Agradās, 200–­201, 367n26; importance of, 122, 344n123; and Jahāngīr, 344n107; and Kacchvāhā-­Mughal alliance, 117; and manuscript culture, 123, 124; and tantra, 342n68; Vaiṣṇava bhakti patronage, 119, 120, 121, 122–­123, 201, 345nn143, 145, 367n26 Mantrapīṭha, 42

mantras: and divine Name recitation, 269, 380n139; and divinization of the body, 57; and gāruḍikas, 58; in lay Śaiva religion, 49; in Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 158, 353n110; in tantra, 32–­33, 35, 154–­155, 261, 264–­265, 322n17, 323n26; in Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 158; in yoga, 173. See also divine Name recitation Marathi bhakti hagiographies, 295–­299, 385nn71, 73 Marxist approaches, 341nn62–­63 Massumi, Brian, 320n67 Mataṇgapārameśvara, 37, 323–­324n40 maṭhas. See monasticism Matsyendranāth, 162, 163, 170, 181, 357n4 Mattamayūra order, 325–­326n81, 328n134 meditational (gnosis-­centered) yoga, 172, 174–­175, 185, 192, 351n83, 358nn24, 28–­29 Mehtā, Narasi, 92–­93 Melvin-­Koushki, Matthew, 104 Menāriyā, Motīlāl, 347n8 metaphoric yogic imagery, 280, 281, 285–­287 methodology, 20–­22; terminology, 317n1, 318nn7, 11 Meyer, Birgit, 17 Minkowski, Christopher, 332n180 Mīrābāī: and Agradās, 205; and caste differences, 254; dating of, 382–­383n22; on mantras, 264–­265; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 282–­284, 286, 383nn27, 30; and Nāth yogīs, 383n30; and Śāktism, 258; and vernacular literature/culture, 85, 86 miracles, 292–­303, 337n125, 384n61 Mirigāvatī (Qutban), 87, 278 Mirnig, Nina, 55, 329–­330n152 Mīrzā Jai Singh I (Kacchvāhā ruler), 121, 124, 345n137 Mīrzā Muhammad Hakīm, 103 Mishra, Ratanlāl, 365n4 Misra, R. N., 325–­326n81 Miśra, Vācaspati, 332n180 Moebus, Oliver, 380n139, 386n1 Moin, Azfar, 74, 76, 100 monasticism: and asceticism, 10–­11; military functions of, 44, 69, 78, 325–­326n81; Mughal period warrior monks, 107, 340n40; and Pāśupatas, 51; Rāmānandi

index = 423 community, 4–­5, 11; in Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, 44, 69, 325–­326n81, 328n134; and Sufism, 78; Sultanate period, 69, 78; in tantra, 39, 43–­44, 55, 78, 325–­326n81; and two bhakti practice streams, 150–­151, 351n76 Mongol invasions, 70, 73, 74, 78, 83–­84 Monier-­Williams, Monier, 306 Monika, Thiel-­Horstmann, 373n126 Moran, Arik, 150 Mughal Empire: agrarian exploitation under, 106–­107, 340n39; centralization of, 106, 107, 270, 340n38; and Kacchvāhā clan, 115–­117; Mān Singh’s role in, 122, 344n123; and Timurid kingship, 84, 100, 102 Mughal period, 318n7; Akbar’s dynastic ideology, 102–­105, 112–­114, 339n22, 342–­343nn80, 84; Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 114–­115, 319n35, 343nn90, 92; Islam, 13; Kacchvāhā-­Mughal alliance, 107–­108, 115–­118, 121–­122, 198, 343n100, 345n137; languages, 105; legal practices, 100, 338n6; manuscript culture, 123–­124, 219; multiculturalism, 105–­106, 117–­118, 122, 340n33; Nāth yogīs, 109, 162, 163; occultism, 100–­101, 104, 339nn21–­22; Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition, 199; Rajasthan, 109, 116, 343n98, 344n106, 348n15; religious marketplace environment during, 195–­196, 204, 228, 235, 349n46; Sants, 162, 163; scholarship on, 13; Sufi mainstream integration, 100–­101, 102, 103, 119; tantra marginalization during, 109–­110, 341nn58; vernacular literature/ culture, 105, 106, 124, 214, 218–­219, 225–­226; warrior monks, 107, 340n40; yogīs, 338–­339n8. See also Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise Mughal-­Rajput court culture: and Agradās, 199, 204; and Akbar’s dynastic ideology, 99, 113, 343n84; and Mān Singh, 123, 345n145; and manuscript culture, 123–­124; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 114, 125–­126 munis, 184–­185, 363n88 music. See performance and song

Nām Pratāp (Agradās), 204, 211–­215, 222, 226 Nābhādās: background of, 139, 371n103; and rasik practice, 148–­149, 350n70, 351n74; veneration of, 372n106; and Viṣṇu devotion, 210. See also Bhaktamāl (Nābhādās) Nāmdev: critique of tantra and yoga, 249, 256–­257, 269, 295–­296, 380n142; and Dādū, 373n119; dating of, 336n93; and Nāth yogīs, 163, 274, 364n107; and vernacular literature/culture, 85 NammĀḻvār (Āḻvār saint), 39, 327n95 Nānak: critique of tantra and yoga, 248–­249, 299–­301, 380n133; and divine Name recitation, 159; Nābhādās’ exclusion of, 229, 230; and Nāth yogīs, 299; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 373n122; Siddh Goṣṭ, 248–­249, 376nn35–­36, 380n133; and vernacular literature/culture, 85, 86 Nandadās, 205, 214, 218, 222, 377n65 Naqshbandi Sufism, 76 Narahari-­d āsa, 260 Narasī Mehtā, 85 Nārāyaṇ Bhaṭṭ, 115 Nārāyaṇdās, 121, 280, 336n85 Narmamālā (Kṣemendra), 330n170 Narottama-­vilāsa (Narahari-­dāsa), 260 nāstika philosophies, 331n178 Nāth, Charapat, 276n42 Nāth yogīs: and alchemy, 382n13; and Dādū Panth, 192, 231, 245, 272, 273; diversity among, 183, 191–­194, 273–­274, 357n6, 362n65, 364n111; and divinization of the body, 80, 81, 190–­191, 208; Gorakhbāṇī, 182–­183, 189–­190, 273, 361–­362nn61–­3, 65, 364n100; and Hanumān, 129–­130, 167, 356n155; and hatha yoga, 182–­183, 361n60, 363n90; inclusivity of, 79; insignia of, 132, 170, 249, 347n6, 357n5, 376n42; and Islam, 191, 364n100; and Kabīr, 162, 163, 243–­245, 272, 274; and laya yoga, 183–­184, 362n66; Maharashtra, 297, 385n73; mainstream integration of, 133, 134, 338n8, 347n11, 348n15; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 278–­282, 285–­286, 382n21; Mughal period, 109, 162, 163; and Nirañjanīs, 272; and

424 9 index Nāth yogīs (continued) nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 141; origins of, 69, 133, 181; overview, 169–­171; panths, 171, 187, 357n8; Rāmānandi community connections to, 4, 129–­130, 142, 171, 355n136; and religious marketplace environment, 88; and Śāktism, 375n2; and Sants, 161, 162, 164, 356n155; scholarship on, 319n35, 355–­356n139; self-­designation of, 348n35; and Sufism, 78–­82, 88, 278–­282, 382n21; Sultanate period growth of, 69, 78, 133, 333n23; and transsectarian medieval culture, 170–­171; and vernacular literature/culture, 361n61; on women, 380n131; and yogi term, 187, 188, 363n88. See also bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity; Gorakhnāth; Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions; Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti encounters; yogīs Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions, 181–­185, 193–­194; and Agradās, 207, 208; and Dādū, 231; and diversity among Nāth yogīs, 192–­193; and divinization of the body, 208; and Hanumān, 167; and Nābhādās, 229, 231; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 232; and siddhis, 172, 181, 182, 186, 188–­191, 289, 361n56, 364n106; and yoga, 171–­172, 173, 177, 184 Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti encounters: and Bhagvān-­jī, 135–­137; documentation of, 138–­139, 348n35; Jagat Singh conversion legend, 134–­135; Payahārī-­Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8. See also bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity nationalism, 82, 317n5, 355–­356n139, 366n14 Nāyaṉārs, 38, 39, 156, 327n95 Neoplatonism, 335n80 Nepal, Nāth yogīs, 348n15 Nicholson, Andrew, 73, 331–­332nn178, 180 Nirañjanīs, 272, 370–­371n86 nirguṇ bhakti, 85, 162, 192, 204. See also nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction; Sants nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction: and Agastya Saṃhitā, 158–­159; and Agradās, 205, 208, 210–­211, 232–­234, 373nn125–­26; and bhakti

inclusivity, 341n63, 342n65; and bhakti poet-­saints, 210, 377n73; and caste differences, 110, 318n13; and Dādū, 232–­234, 373n122, 374nn133, 135; and Dādū Panth, 165, 272, 373n126; defined, 5; and Hanumān, 165, 166; and Islam, 231, 373n122; and Nābhādās, 231–­232; and Rāmānandi community, 139–­140, 141, 157–­158, 162, 231–­234; and Vaiṣṇavism, 92 Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, 30–­31, 329n147 Nivṛttināth, 364n107 Nizām al-­Dīn Awliyā, 75, 93, 262, 292, 294, 334n46, 337n125, 384n61 Nizām Gharib Yamanī, 293 non-­Saiddāntika tantra, 42, 325n65, 326n86 Novetzke, Christian, 6, 16, 86, 296, 297, 320n53, 327n102, 344n120 nyāsa. See divinization of the body Oberhammer, Gerhard, 36 occultism, 84, 100–­101, 104, 335nn80–­81, 339n21 Offredi, Mariola, 244, 361n62 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 67, 380n138 Orchha, 125 Orientalism, 5, 8, 12, 13 Orsini, Francesca, 14, 84, 85, 86, 87, 108–­109, 287, 336n88

Padmāvat (Jāyasī), 87, 262, 264, 278, 279, 280–­281, 284, 336n85, 382n20 Padoux, André, 33, 36, 307 Pāñcarātra tradition: and Agastya Saṃhitā, 159; bhakti in, 39; and brahmanism, 42; early form of, 324n59; mainstream integration of, 40, 41, 325n68; and Purāṇas, 46; scriptures in, 321n4, 324n60; and yoga, 36, 154–­155 Pañca Sakhā, 271–­272 Paramānand, 205 Pāśupatas, 50–­51; dating of, 327n114; geographical spread of, 51, 328n124; and lay Śaiva religion, 47, 50, 51; mainstream integration of, 51, 53, 328nn123–­24; and Purāṇas, 46, 47, 51; scriptures, 51, 328n121;

index = 425 and temples, 328n118; and yoga, 328n127; yogīs, 49, 51–­53 Pāśupata Sūtra, 50 Pātañjala Yogaśāstra, 174–­175, 272, 358nn24, 28–­29 Patañjali, 34, 174, 185, 186, 358nn28–­29 Pauwels, Heidi, 109, 125, 139, 228, 240, 258, 259–­260, 280, 287, 378n89 Payahārī, Kṛṣṇadās, 137; and Agradās, 197, 198, 365n4; and Bhagvān-­jī, 135–­136, 348n28; characteristics of, 140–­141; and Daśanāmīs, 363n85; and definitions of yogīs, 362n83; disciples of, 140, 349n40; Jagat Singh conversion legend, 134–­135; and Kacchvāhā clan, 108, 121; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209, 369n46; as muni, 184–­185; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 141, 231–­232; and Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition, 198, 366n12; and rasik practice, 142, 349n49; and Sants, 162; sources on, 139, 348–­ 349n37; Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8; and two bhakti practice streams, 150; works attributed to, 141, 349n43; and yoga, 142, 171, 182, 349n49 Pechilis, Karen, 5, 7, 38, 324n45 pedagogical other. See bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity Pellegrini, Ann, 18 performance and song, 89–­97; and affect, 18–­19; Bhāgavata Purāṇa on, 156, 352–­ 353n101; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 92, 268; and community, 16–­18, 90–­91, 268, 337n118; in contemporary bhakti, 353n102; diversity in, 321n76; and embodiment, 320–­321n71; and ethical values, 19–­20, 91–­93, 337n118; as intrinsic to bhakti, 89–­92, 336n114; in Sufism, 76; and vernacular literature/ culture, 86, 87–­88; vs. written compositions, 124, 346n155 Persianate culture: and decline of mainstream tantra, 67; and Islam, 72–­74; and Mongol invasions, 70; and Mughal manuscript culture, 123; Mughal period, 105–­106, 123–­124; and pre-­Sultanate Turkic

dynasties, 65–­67; term for, 332n1; and transcultural hybridity, 13, 15, 70–­72, 77, 87, 333nn27, 31, 360n42; and vernacular literature/culture, 85. See also Sufism; Sultanate period Peterson, Indira, 38–­39 Phul, Shaikh, 101, 338n7 Pinch, William, 81, 108, 112, 157, 194, 227, 250, 288–­289, 290, 301, 355n135, 385n91, 386n93 Pīpā, 85, 161, 162, 163, 228, 265 Pīpā-­parcāī (Anantadās), 157, 200, 251 Pollet, Gilbert, 385 Pollock, Sheldon, 65, 95, 160, 331n178, 337n131, 354n121 practical magic. See pragmatic religiosity pragmatic religiosity: defined, 41–­42, 325n64; and Hanumān, 356n143; and Sufism, 77–­78, 79. See also pragmatic religiosity in tantra pragmatic religiosity in tantra: contemporary, 307–­308, 387nn13, 17; and divine power, 33; and esoteric practice, 58–­60; and Gāruḍa Tantras, 57–­58, 330nn164, 170; importance of, 41–­42; and sādhaka authority, 35; scriptures on, 30; and Sufism, 77, 79. See also tantric healing Prahlād Caritra (Agradās), 214, 222, 226 prāṇāyāma, 79, 159, 173, 174, 183 premākhyāns, 87–­88, 95–­96, 277–­282, 336n85, 382n6 prema rasa, 95 Prithīnāth, 192, 364n111 Priyādās, 121, 135, 138, 146, 226, 258, 301, 385n91 professional ascetics, 9–­10, 44, 49, 50, 51–­52, 53. See also Pāśupatas; yogis protection. See pragmatic religiosity Protestant biases, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 305, 387n3 Pṛthvīrāj (Kacchvāhā ruler), 137; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209, 369n46; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 141, 231–­232, 373n124; Payahārī-­Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8; and Rāmānandi patronage, 108, 115, 121, 132, 349n49 publics, 16, 320n53. See also bhakti public Puraṇ, 182

426 9 index Purāṇas: on ascetic yoga, 174; on bhakti, 152, 327n98; and brahmanical expansion, 54; and lay Śaiva religion, 46–­47; and Pāśupatas, 46, 47, 51; and Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, 52; and Śaiva tantra, 52, 54, 329n146; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 342n66. See also Bhāgavata Purāṇa; specific works Pūraṇmal (Kacchvāhā ruler), 115 Puṣṭi Mārg community, 118. See also Vallabha Qadiri Sufism, 76 Qutban, 87, 278 Quṭbund-­d in-­A ibak, 66 Rām devotion: Agastya Saṃhitā on, 158, 353–­354n119; and Agradās, 158, 209, 216, 353n112; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 267, 269; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 210; and Rāmānandi community, 141, 353n110, 368–­369n45; Sultanate period, 160, 354nn121–­22; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 134. See also divine Name recitation; Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition; rasik practice Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition: Agradās as founder of, 86, 142, 197–­198, 203, 204; and bhakti critique of tantra, 147; content of, 198–­199, 366n14; and Dhyān Mañjarī, 199, 203, 204, 215; and gardening, 200; on life of Agradās, 365n4; origins of, 142, 197–­198, 204, 366n12; Raivāsā community, 201–­203, 367nn26 Rāghavānand, 353n103 Rāghavdās, 139. See also Bhaktamāl (Rāghavdās) Raidās: and caste, 254; critique of tantra and yoga, 239, 251–­252, 267, 269; on divine Name recitation, 159, 213; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209; and Mīrābāī, 383n30; and Nāth yogīs, 162, 163, 272, 274; and Rāmānand, 157; and Rāmānandi community, 161; and Sikhs, 230; and vernacular literature/culture, 85 Raisal Darbari (Kacchvāhā chief), 120 Raivāsā Rām-­rasik community, 201–­203, 367nn26

Rajab, 263 Rajasthan, 116, 192, 219, 273–­274, 343n98, 344n106, 348n15, 383n30. See also Rajputs Rājataraṅgiṇī (Kalhaṇa), 326n86 Rajjab, 162, 165, 205, 230, 231, 368nn35, 39 Rajputs: and Akbar’s dynastic ideology, 113, 342–­343nn80, 84; and Babur, 115; and decline of Śaivism, 108–­109; definition of, 338n2; and manuscript culture, 123–­124, 219; martial culture, 341n57; and Mughal court culture, 98, 99, 113, 114, 199, 204, 343n84; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 113, 114–­115, 118–­119. See also Kacchvāhā clan; Mughal-­Rajput court culture Rāj-­yog (Payahārī), 141 Rāmānand, 140, 157, 161–­162, 165, 349n38, 353n103, 355nn134–­37 Rāmānandi community: and Bhagvān-­jī, 136; Bhairava shrine, 129, 164; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 156–­157; and Daśanāmīs, 362–­363n85; as emotional community, 17; establishment of, 114; and Hanumān, 121, 164–­166, 345n135, 356n151; inclusivity of, 110, 157, 158, 159, 371n103; and Kacchvāhā clan, 108, 115, 121, 289, 345nn133, 135; Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209, 229, 368–­369nn45–­46; lineages (dvārās) in, 349n38; mainstream integration of, 120–­121, 132, 165, 219, 220, 225–­226, 229, 356nn144–­45; Nāth yogī connections to, 4, 129–­130, 142, 171, 355n136; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 139–­140, 141, 157–­158, 162, 231–­234; Payahārī-­Tārānāth encounter legend, 131–­132, 288–­291, 347nn4–­8; and religious marketplace environment, 80, 89, 195–­196, 204, 228, 235, 349n46; roots of, 157–­163, 164; and Sants, 157–­158, 161–­162, 214, 229, 355nn134–­36; self-­designation of, 348n35; and Sikhs, 230; and Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 157, 158, 353nn103, 106, 108; and Sufism, 234–­235; two practice streams within, 139–­140, 147, 148–­152, 156, 158, 165, 166–­167. See also Agradās; Kīlhadev; Nāth yogī-­ Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions

index = 427 Rāmānandis as yoga practitioners: and hatha yoga, 140, 142, 148–­149, 181, 182, 188, 349n46, 381n164; Kīlhadev, 144, 145–­146, 169, 362n73; Payahārī, 140, 141–­142; and yogi term, 185, 187, 363n88. See also ascetic (tapasvī) yoga Rāmānuja, 157, 228 Ramanujan, A. K., 1, 320n57 Rāmāyaṇa, 49, 114, 174, 198 Rāmcandra, 160, 199 Rāmcaritmānas (Tulsīdās), 86, 87, 210, 251, 354n119, 369n56 Rana, R. P., 119, 341n61 Rānā Saṅga, 115 rasa: and Agradās’s Dhyān Mañjarī, 195, 217; defined, 337n131; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 232, 234; Rūpa Gosvāmi on, 365–­366n7; and Sufism, 87, 93–­96, 234–­235, 375n139. See also rasik practice rasik practice: Agradās, 142, 199, 206, 216, 220–­222, 223–­224, 235, 366n17, 367n30, 371n89; divine Name recitation in, 200, 350n51, 366–­367nn19–­21; exclusivity in, 223, 371n95; and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 197; and Hanumān, 165; and Nābhādās, 148–­149, 350n70, 351n74; and Payahārī, 142, 349n49; and Rāmānandi community, 148; and Sultanate period, 366n16; and tantra, 222–­225; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 142, 147, 148, 349n49, 351n74. See also Rām-­rasik bhakti tradition Rasik-­P rakāś-­Bhaktamāl (Yugalpriyā), 202–­203, 354n119 Rasikpriyā (Keśavdās), 222 Rasmañjarī (Nandadās), 218 Rāspañcādhyāyī (Nandadās), 218 Rastelli, Marion, 35 Ratan Singh (Kacchvāhā ruler), 115 Ravidās, 86 religiopolitical integration: brahmanical expansion, 53–­54, 56–­57, 60, 329n138; Nāth yogīs, 133, 134, 338n8, 347n11, 348n15; Pāśupatas, 51, 53, 328nn123–­24; śanti rituals, 323n22; Sufism, 74–­75, 78, 161, 289–­290; yogīs, 29, 30, 52, 338–­339n8. See also tantra as medieval mainstream; Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise

Richards, John, 113, 317n1, 342n80 Richardson, Edwin, 344n121 rīti poetry, 124, 218, 222, 370n82, 371n94 Rizvi, Saiyid Athar Abbas, 293 Rosenwein, Barbara, 17–­18, 96, 320n67 royal patronage. See religiopolitical integration ṛṣis, 184 Rushd-­nāma (Gangohī), 79, 88 Sāṃkhya school of philosophy, 172, 175 Sadāśiva Saṃhitā, 218 Safavid Sufism, 101, 102 saguṇ bhakti, 5. See also nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction Sahajiyā Vaiṣṇavas, 272 Saiddāntika Śaiva tantra, 43, 54 Śaiva Siddhānta tradition: and Agradās, 222; bhakti in, 36–­38, 323–­324n40; and brahmanism, 42; gurus in, 44, 322n11; inclusivity of, 52, 55–­56, 329–­330n152; monasticism in, 44, 69, 325–­326n81, 328n134; and Pāśupatas, 52, 53; scriptures in, 321n4, 324n60; Sultanate period decline of, 68–­69; and tantra as medieval mainstream, 40, 44, 52–­53, 326n86, 328n134 Śaiva tantra: bhakti in, 37–­38; divine power in, 322n18; and goddess worship, 54, 329n140; initiation in, 31; Kaula tradition, 133, 170; Mughal period decline of, 341n58; non-­Saiddāntika cults, 42, 325n65, 326n86; and Purāṇas, 52, 54, 329n146; Saiddāntika, 43, 325n65; scholarship on, 324–­325n61; scriptures in, 30–­31; Tamil, 38–­39, 324n45; and tantra as medieval mainstream, 40. See also Nāth yogīs; Śaiva Siddhānta tradition Śaivism: and hatha yoga, 179; lay religion, 45–­50, 326n90, 327nn94, 98–­99, 102–­103; mainstream integration of, 40; Mughal period decline of, 108–­109, 341n58; and Nābhādās, 158, 353n111; Purāṇas, 47; and Rāmānandi community, 363n85; and Vedānta, 61, 331n179. See also Pāśupatas; Śaiva Siddhānta tradition; Śaiva tantra śakti, 33, 322n18

428 9 index Śāktism: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 240, 256, 258–­260, 378nn89, 92; bhakti tradition in, 260, 378n93; divine power in, 33; and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 109, 378nn92, 94; Mughal period decline of, 108–­109, 111, 341n58; and Nāth yogīs, 375n2; and Rajput martial culture, 341n57. See also tantra samāʾ, 76, 270 samādhi, 172, 175, 358n29, 360n41 Samanid dynasty, 65–­66 Saṃhitās, 30, 321n4, 324n60 Saṃnyāsanirṇaya (Vallabha), 251 Sanderson, Alexis, 32, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 53, 54, 55, 321n1, 322n8, 327n99, 329n146 Sangari, Kumkum, 7, 110 sanguinary practices, 325n62 Śaṅkaradeva, 109, 257–­258, 261, 269, 378–­379n94 Sanskrit culture. See Indo-­Persian cultural hybridity śanti rituals, 323n22 Sants: and Agradās, 195, 203, 204, 207–­208, 211; vs. bhakti poet-­saints, 354–­355n127; caste of, 372n113; and divine Name recitation, 159, 161, 162, 213; Nābhādās on, 227; and Nāth yogīs, 161, 162, 164, 356n155; origins of, 160–­161; and Rāmānandi community, 157–­158, 161–­162, 214, 229, 355nn134–­36; and religious marketplace environment, 88; scholarship on, 319n35; and Sikhs, 162, 355n135; and Sufism, 88, 161; Tulsīdās on, 354n119; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti, 161–­162, 354n127; and Vaiṣṇavism, 92; Vyās on, 228, 372n113. See also bhakti poet-­saints; specific people Sarvāṅgayogapradīpikā (Sundardās), 273 Sarvāṅgī (Gopāldās), 162, 165, 230, 272 Sarvāṅgī (Rajjab), 162, 165, 230, 272, 368nn35, 39; Agradās’ poetry in, 205, 207–­208, 213, 231 Satya Pir, 81, 334n69 Savāī Jai Singh II (Kacchvāhā ruler), 121 Sayyid dynasty, 67 Schaefer, Donovan, 18 Schofield, Katherine Butler, 93–­94, 371n95

Schomer, Karine, 162 Schwartz, Jason, 37, 54–­55, 111, 179, 323–­324n40 scriptures: in lay Śaiva religion, 45–­46, 49, 326n90; Pāśupatas, 51, 328n121; and Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, 52; in tantra, 30–­31, 54, 56–­58, 321nn2–­4, 324n60, 330n164. See also Purāṇas Sears, Tamara, 10, 44, 69, 78 Sen, 161, 162, 163, 230 Shackle, Christopher, 334n65 Shāh Jahān (Mughal emperor), 122, 345nn128, 137 Shajarat al-­Atqiyā, 294–­295 Sharma, Krishna, 5, 7, 219n31, 341n63, 351n83, 387n3 Sharma, Mahesh, 111 Sharma, R. S., 329n151 Shattari Sufism, 76, 79, 100–­101 Sheffield, Daniel, 104, 339n26 Sheikh, Samira, 88, 108–­109, 335n77 Sher Shāh Surī, 116 Shīrāzī, Hidāyat Allāh Muanjjim-­i, 339n22 Shukla, Ramchandra, 13 siddhas, 170 Siddh Goṣṭ (Nānak), 248–­249, 376nn35–­36, 380n133 siddhis: Bhāgavata Purāṇa on, 146, 154, 155, 289, 352n99; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 193, 289; as common to all forms of yoga, 173, 177; and definitions of yoga, 186–­187; and divine power, 34–­35; and Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions, 172, 181, 182, 186, 188–­191, 289, 361n56, 364n106; tantric focus on, 33–­34 śikh-­nakh, 217 Sikhs: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 255, 299–­301; on divine Name recitation, 213; and Hanumān, 165; inclusivity of, 110; Nābhādās’ exclusion of, 229, 230; and Nāth yogīs, 245, 299; and Sants, 162, 355n135 Śilā-­devī, 111, 342n68 Singh, B. P., 218 Singh, Piar, 249

index = 429 Sītārām, 132, 142, 349n49, 366n12 Śiva. See Śaivism Śivadharma, 46, 47–­49, 51, 327nn95, 103, 328n128 Śivadharma corpus, 45–­50, 51, 54, 326–­ 327nn90, 94, 329n147. See also specific texts Śivadharmasaṇgraha, 54, 329n147 Śivadharmottara, 46, 47, 49, 51, 327n99, 328n128 Śivastotrāvalī (Utpaladeva), 37 Six Gosvāmis, 115, 120, 343n92, 371n102. See also Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Siyar al-­Aqtāb, 295 Skanda Purāṇa, 51, 152, 328n127, 329n147 Slouber, Michael, 57–­58, 330n168 smaraṇa. See divine Name recitation Smith, Frederick, 57, 58 Smith, Jonathan Z., 22 Smith, Travis, 46–­47, 51, 52, 53, 56, 386n1 song. See performance and song śraddhā, 49 Sreenivasan, Ramya, 279, 280, 336n85, 340n38, 344n106 Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, 157, 158, 332n180, 353nn103, 106, 110 śṛṅgāra rasa, 95, 198, 204, 219, 337n134, 366n14 state power. See religiopolitical integration Stewart, Tony, 14, 72, 81, 216, 380–­381nn149–­50, 382n21 Stoker, Valerie, 10 A Storm of Songs (Hawley), 2 śūdras. See caste; inclusivity Sufi influences on bhakti, 3, 303–­304; and bhakti public, 96–­97, 338n140; and ethical values, 92–­93; and historiography of bhakti, 82–­83, 335n72; and mainstream integration, 290; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 279, 280; and rasa, 93–­96; scholarship on, 13–­14; and vernacular literature/culture, 86–­87; and written compositions, 88, 291 Sufism, 163; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 81–­82, 254, 276, 277–­278, 280, 291–­295, 384n61; Chishti order, 14, 75–­76, 79, 102, 103, 333n31, 334nn45–­46; commonalities with bhakti, 276–­277; diversity within, 14, 320n49; on divine love, 81, 94, 334n65; divine Name

recitation in, 76, 270, 271, 380–­381nn149–­50; ethical values in, 92–­93, 337n125; growth of mass-­based, 74, 76–­77; hagiographies, 292–­295, 384nn56–­57; healing metaphor in, 262; holy places in, 75, 76; inclusivity of, 79; and Indo-­Persian cultural hybridity, 77, 87, 333n31; and iqtāʾ system, 71; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 278–­282, 382nn6, 21; and Mongol invasions, 74, 79; Mughal period mainstream integration of, 100–­101, 102, 103, 119; and Nābhādās, 227, 231; and Nāth yogīs, 78–­82, 88, 278–­282, 382n21; and occultism, 101, 338n7; and pragmatic religiosity, 77–­78, 79; premākhyāns, 87–­88, 95–­96, 277–­282, 336n85, 382n6; and Rāmānandi community, 234–­235; and rasa, 93–­94, 234–­235, 375n139; and religious marketplace environment, 88; and Sants, 88, 161; similarities to tantra, 77–­78, 334n61; Sultanate period mainstream integration, 74–­75, 78, 161, 289–­290; and vernacular literature/ culture, 84, 85, 86–­88 Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-­Dīn Yaḥyā al-­, 104, 339n21 Suhrawardiya Sufism, 76, 339n21 Sukhmanī (Arjan), 269–­270, 380n145 Śukla, Rāmcandra, 166 ṣulḥ-­i kull, 104 Sultanate period, 15, 64–­97; brahmanism, 68, 332n181; Chishti Sufism growth, 75–­76, 334n46; decline of mainstream tantra, 60–­62, 65, 67–­70, 177, 332–­333n12; democratized yoga, 177–­179, 180, 359–­360nn37, 39, 41, 51–­52, 361n53; early bhakti poet-­saints, 85–­86, 336n93; growth of mass-­based Sufism, 74, 76–­77; and Hindu religious identity, 73; languages, 85, 87, 336n88; late, 83, 84–­89, 115, 335n77, 335nn82–­83, 336n110; Mongol invasions, 70, 73, 74, 78, 83–­84; Nāth yogīs, 69, 78, 133, 333n23; occultism, 84, 335nn80–­81; pre-­Sultanate Turkic dynasties, 65–­67; Rām worship, 160, 354nn121–­22; and rasik practice, 366n16; religious marketplace environment during, 88–­89, 336n110; role

430 9 index Sultanate period (continued) of Islam in cultural change, 65, 67, 68, 72–­74, 332–­333n12; Sants, 160; scholarship on, 13; Sufi mainstream integration, 74–­75, 78, 161, 289–­290; temple destruction, 67, 332–­333n12; Timur invasion, 72, 83, 84, 335nn77, 82; transcultural hybridity in, 13, 15, 65, 70–­72, 77, 87, 333nn27, 31, 360n42; vernacular literature/culture, 71, 84–­85, 86–­87, 335n82, 336n85 sumiran. See divine Name recitation Sundardās, 272–­273, 381n160 Sūrdās: and Agradās, 205; and bhramargit genre, 377n65; critique of tantra, 252–­253; dating of, 382n22; and healing metaphor, 263; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209; and metaphoric yogic imagery, 284–­285; on performance/song, 90, 336n114; and vernacular literature/culture, 85, 86 Surī, Sher Shāh, 101 Svātmārāma, 273, 361n60, 362n66, 363n90 Ṭahmāsb, Shāh, 101 Talbot, Cynthia, 108, 121–­122 Tamil: bhakti traditions, 36, 38–­39, 324n45, 327n95; tantra, 38–­39, 324n45, 327n95. See also Āḻvārs tantra, 29–­63; and Agastya Saṃhitā, 159; bhakti incorporation of, 215, 222–­225, 371n102; bhakti in medieval, 36–­40, 323–­324nn40, 45; and brahmanical expansion, 53–­54, 56–­57, 60; contemporary attitudes toward, 12, 305, 307–­308, 386n1, 387nn13, 17; definition of, 35–­36; diversity within, 36; divine power in, 33, 34, 322–­323nn18, 21–­22; folk practices in, 53, 56, 57–­58, 329n138; inclusivity of, 31, 52, 55–­56, 329n151, 329–­330n152; initiate classes in, 31, 322n11; initiation in, 31, 43, 223, 322n11; mantras in, 32–­33, 35, 154–­155, 261, 264–­265, 322n17, 323n26; and medieval transsectarian culture, 40–­42, 59–­60, 170–­171, 330–­ 331n172; monastic orders (maṭhas) in, 39, 43–­44, 55, 78, 325–­326n81; Mughal period mainstream integration of, 111; Mughal period marginalization of, 109–­110,

341nn58; and Nāth yogīs, 183–­184, 362n66; and Purāṇas, 54; and rasik practice, 222–­225; rise of, 29; sādhaka authority in, 34, 35, 323n26; and śanti rituals, 323n22; scholarship on, 41, 42, 324–­325n61; scriptures in, 30–­31, 54, 56–­58, 321nn2–­4, 324n60, 330n164; and siddhis, 33–­35; similarities to Sufism, 77–­78, 334n61; transgressive practices in, 29, 41, 42, 325nn62–­63, 326n86; and Vedic tradition, 31, 322n7; women in, 31, 322n8, 380n131; and yogīs, 11–­12, 38. See also bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity; Nāth yogīs; pragmatic religiosity in tantra; Śaiva Siddhānta tradition; tantric healing; tantric yoga tantra as medieval mainstream, 40–­45, 61–­62, 68–­69, 134; and initiation, 43; and lay Śaiva religion, 38, 45, 52; and legal pluralism, 54–­55; and medieval transsectarian culture, 40–­42; and monasticism, 43–­44, 325–­326n81; non-­Saiddāntika cults, 325n65, 326n86; Pāñcarātra tradition, 40, 41, 325n68; and Pāśupatas, 52, 53; Śaiva Siddhānta tradition, 40, 44, 52–­53, 326n86,

328n134; Sultanate period decline of, 60–­62, 65, 67–­70, 177, 332–­333n12; and temple-­based religious life, 39; vs. transgressive practices, 41, 42, 325nn62–­63, 326n86; and warlords, 42–­43, 325n68 Tantras: and brahmanical expansion, 54; defined, 30, 321n4, 324n60; Gāruḍa Tantras, 57–­58, 330nn164, 170; on healing, 58, 330n164; vs. Vedas, 31 tantric healing: and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 261, 264–­268; Bhūta Tantras on, 330nn164, 167; and esoteric practice, 59; and folk practices, 57–­58, 330n168; Gāruḍa Tantras on, 57–­58, 330n164; gāruḍikas, 57–­58, 261, 330n170, 379n102; and healing metaphor, 261–­262. See also pragmatic religiosity in tantra tantric Śaivism. See Śaiva tantra tantric yoga: and Āḻvārs, 39; Bhāgavata Purāṇa on, 154–­155; laya yoga, 39, 176, 179, 181,

index = 431 183–­184, 188, 362n66; overview, 175–­177, 359nn32–­34; six-­limbed, 176, 359n33; and Sufism, 279, 382n6; and yogīs, 363n88. See also Nāth yogīs tapas. See ascetic (tapasvī) yoga Tārānāth, 131–­132, 134, 136, 137, 288–­291, 347nn4–­6, 8 tazkirā, 227 temple-­based religion: lay Śaiva, 47, 49–­50; Mughal period, 118, 122–­123, 345nn143, 145; and Pāśupatas, 328n118; Sultanate period, 66, 67, 68, 332–­333nn12, 17; in tantra, 43–­44 Tēvārum, 39 Timur invasion, 72, 83, 84, 335nn77, 82 Tīrthāvalī (Nāmdev), 295–­296 Tiruvāymoḻi, 39 Törzsök, Judit, 326n86 transgressive practices: marginalization of, 12, 319n42; in tantra, 29, 41, 42, 325nn62–­63, 326n86 Trilochan, 230, 247–­248 Truschke, Audrey, 105–­106, 114, 340n33 Tughlaq dynasty, 67, 71–­72, 83, 335n83 Tukarām, 257 Tulsīdās: and Agradās, 205; background of, 354n119; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity, 239, 240, 249, 250–­251, 252, 254–­255, 301; on divine Name recitation, 213, 369n56; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 209; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 210, 377n73; and vernacular literature/culture, 86, 87 Turkic conquests. See Sultanate period Tūsī, Nasīr al-­Dīn, 100 Tyagi, Jaya, 329n140 Upadhyay, Omkar Nath, 344n107 Urban, Hugh, 386n1 Utpaladeva, 37 Vaiṣṇava bhakti: Āḻvārs, 38, 39, 153, 156, 327n95, 352n88; connections with Nāth yogīs, 4, 129–­130, 142, 162, 171, 355n136; diversity within, 138; divine Name recitation in, 92, 141, 144, 162, 198, 200, 203, 213, 350n51, 350n58, 354n119, 369n56;

inclusivity of, 110, 341n63; lineages (dvārās) in, 349n38; Nābhādās on, 355n133; and rasa, 95; and rasik practice, 142, 147, 148, 349n49, 351n74; and Sants, 161–­162, 354n127; and Sufism, 92–­93; and tantra, 39; transsectarian, 110–­111, 161, 342n66, 349n46, 354n127; two practice streams within, 139–­140, 147, 148–­152, 156, 158, 165, 166–­167, 351n76; and warrior monks, 110, 341n57; and written bhakti compositions, 147–­148. See also Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism; Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions; Rāmānandi community Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 108–­113; and Agradās, 225–­226; and Akbar’s dynastic ideology, 112–­113, 114; as appeasement of Hindus, 344n121; and bhakti public, 119, 344n120; and caste differences, 110, 341n61; criticisms of, 111, 342n71; and decline of Śaivism, 108–­109; Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, 114, 118–­120, 198; Jagat Singh conversion legend, 134–­135; and Kacchvāhā clan, 108, 115, 119–­121, 132, 198, 289, 345nn133, 135, 349n49; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 110, 134; and Mān Singh, 119, 120, 121, 122–­123, 201, 345nn143, 145, 367n26; and Mughal-­Rajput court culture, 114, 125–­126; and Payahārī-­Tārānāth encounter legend, 133–­134; and Rajputs, 113, 114–­115, 118–­119; Rāmānandi community, 120–­121, 132, 165, 219, 220, 225–­226, 229, 356nn144–­45; and Sufi mainstream integration, 289–­290; and transsectarian ethos, 110–­111; and two bhakti practice streams, 150–­151; and vernacular literature/culture, 219, 226; and written bhakti compositions, 124 Vaiṣṇava tantra, 38, 39, 327n95. See also Pāñcarātra tradition Vaiṣṇavism: Agastya Saṃhitā, 158–­160, 161, 217–­218, 223, 353nn106, 111–­12, 118; and diversity within bhakti, 319n31; divine Name recitation in, 158, 159–­160, 269, 353–­354n119, 380n138; ethical values in, 92; and inclusivity, 327n103; and Nābhādās, 228; and nirguṇ-­saguṇ distinction, 92;

432 9 index Vaiṣṇavism (continued) Pañca Sakhā, 271–­272; professional ascetics in, 51–­52; and Rāmānandi community, 157–­158; and religious marketplace environment, 88; and Sufism, 81, 88; and Vedānta, 61, 331n179; and vernacular literature/culture, 88; vulgate, 3, 92, 269, 318n8, 342n66, 354n127; and yoga, 153 Vajrayāna Buddhism, 40, 41 Vākarī tradition, 385n73 Vallabha, 114, 118, 251, 344n121 van der Veer, Peter, 171, 353n103, 356n155 Vārāṅ Bhāī Gurdās, 299–­300 Vasudeva, S. D., 328n127 Vaudeville, Charlotte, 79, 109, 162, 171, 244, 256, 353n110, 356n155, 380n138 Vāyu Purāṇa, 329n147 Vedānta: and Islam, 331–­332nn178, 180; and origins of bhakti, 153, 319n31; origins of, 179, 331n176, 360n42; and tantra, 61; and yoga, 179–­180, 331n179, 360nn44, 48 Vedic tradition: and ascetic yoga, 173, 358n21; divinization of the body in, 322n14; and tantra, 31, 322n7. See also brahmanism Venkatkrishnan, Anand, 352n86 vernacular literature/culture: and Agradās, 86, 148, 204, 214–­215, 218–­219, 226–­227; and Anantadās, 226–­227; and bhakti poet-­saints, 85–­86, 336n93; Hanumān in, 166, 356n151; and lay Śaiva religion, 47, 327n99; Mughal period, 105, 106, 124, 214, 218–­219, 225–­226; and Nāth yogīs, 361n61; premākhyāns, 87–­88, 95–­96, 277–­282, 336n85, 382n6; rīti-­granth genre, 218, 370n82; and Sufism, 84, 85, 86–­88; Sultanate period development of, 71, 84–­85, 86–­87, 335n82, 336n85; and Vaiṣṇava bhakti early modern rise, 219, 226. See also written bhakti compositions Vidyāpati, 378n92 Vidyāpīṭha, 42, 325n63 Vinay Patrikā (Tulsīdās), 250 Vinodī, 197 viraha, 262, 263–­264, 277, 282–­285 Viṣṇu devotion, 113–­114, 210. See also Vaiṣṇavism

Viṣṇudharma, 327n103 Viṭṭhalnāth (Śrī Gusainjī), 118 Vopadeva, 94–­95 Vrindavan, 108, 114, 118–­119, 120, 216–­217, 345n128. See also Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism Vyāsa, 174, 358n28 Vyās, Harirām, 227–­228, 240, 247, 256, 259, 342n71, 355n135, 372n113 Wagoner, Phillip, 13, 65, 71 Walbridge, John, 339n21 Wallis, Glen, 322n18 Warner, Michael, 16, 17, 19, 320n53 Wedemeyer, Christian, 21, 40, 321n1 Weightman, Simon, 279, 382n6 White, David Gordon, 35–­36, 59, 62, 133, 185–­187, 193, 322–­323n21, 347n11, 386n1 wilāyat, 74 Wilke, Annette, 322n17, 380n139, 386n1 Williams, Tyler, 18–­19, 90, 123, 337n118, 370–­371n86, 374n131 Wink, Andre, 68, 333n17 Wolcott, Leonard, 356n143 women: and goddess worship, 329n140; in tantra, 31, 322n8, 380n131; in yoga, 176, 361–­362n63. See also inclusivity

worldview, 15–­16 written bhakti compositions: of Agradās, 142–­143, 148, 204–­211, 367–­368nn33, 35, 39; and authenticity, 241–­242, 375n7; and bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­ yogic religiosity, 130; and bhakti public, 125, 147–­148, 196, 350n69; and initiation, 223; and Mughal manuscript culture, 124–­125, 219; and paper technology, 346n156; vs. performance, 124, 346n155; and Sufism, 88 Yaśovanta Dāsa, 272 Yelle, Robert, 386–­387n2 yoga: and Agastya Saṃhitā, 159; and brahmarandhra, 144, 350n59; and Dādū Panth, 272–­273, 381n160; and definitions of bhakti, 152, 153–­156, 351n83, 352n93; definitions of, 173, 185–­187; etymology of, 172, 185; and Islam, 334n61; and lay Śaiva religion, 50, 51,

index = 433 238n127; Mahābhārata on, 172–­173, 185, 186, 362n73; meditational (gnosis-­centered), 172, 174–­175, 185, 192, 351n83, 358nn24, 28–­29; and Nāth yogī-­Vaiṣṇava bhakti distinctions, 171–­172, 173, 177, 184; and Pāñcarātra tradition, 36, 154–­155; and Pāśupatas, 328n127; Pātañjala Yogaśāstra on, 174–­175, 272, 358nn24, 28–­29; and professional ascetics, 52; Sultanate period democratization, 177–­179, 180, 359–­ 360nn37, 39, 41, 51–­52, 361n53; and Vedānta, 179–­180, 331n179, 360nn44, 48; Yoga Sūtra on, 34, 174, 185, 186, 358n28. See also ascetic (tapasvī) yoga; bhakti defined in opposition to tantric-­yogic religiosity; hatha yoga; Nāth yogīs; siddhis; tantric yoga; yogīs Yoga Bhāṣya, 174

Yoga Sūtra (Patañjali), 34, 174, 185, 186, 358n28 yogic imagery, metaphoric, 277–­287; and Kṛṣṇa devotion, 283–­285, 380n132; in Mīrābāī’s poetry, 282–­284, 286, 383nn27, 30; and Sufism, 278–­282, 382nn6, 21; in Sūrdās’ poetry, 284–­285 yoginīs, 326n86 yogīs: definitions of, 186–­187, 245–­246, 362n83, 363n88; in lay Śaiva religion, 50, 51–­52, 328n127; mainstream integration of, 29, 30, 52, 338–­339n8; Pāśupata, 49, 51–­53; siddhi-­seeking, 34, 181, 186–­187, 361n56; as sinister, 186; and tantra, 11–­12, 38, 363n88. See also Nāth yogīs Yugalpriyā, Jivārām, 202–­203 Ziegler, Norman, 113, 342–­343n80