Songs of the Saints of India 0195694201, 9780195694208

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Songs of the Saints ofIndia

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Songs o the Saints o India · T E XT AND NOTES B Y

John Stratton Hawley ' T RAN SLATIONS

BY

J. S. Hawley AND Mark Juergensmeyer

OXFORD V NI VERSITY PRESS

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OXFORD Vl'IVBP.SITY PllBSS

Oxford University Pren is a depanment of the University of Oxford. It funhers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Pren in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building. 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi t 10001. India ©john Stranon HawleyfMark juergensmeyer 2004 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First published by Oxford University Press Inc.. New York. t 998 This English edition published by Oxford University Press. New Delhi 2004 Oxford India Paperbacks 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmined, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. or as expressly permitted by law. by licence. or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the· address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

. Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press. Oxford. For sale in India, Bangladesh, Nepal. Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar only and not for export therefrom ISBN·l3: 978-0·19·56942~8 ISBN-10: 0·19-569420-1 Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

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For Ainslie Embree

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Acknowledgn:ients

The hdp of a number of friends and institutions has been essential in the preparation of this book. For theit critical but sympathetic reading of the manuscript, in part or in whole, we sincerely thank Ainslie Embree, Linda Hess, Lindsey Harlan, David Lorenzen, Philip Lutgendotf, Gurinder Singh Mann, W. H. McLeod, F~ces Pritchett, and Michael Shapiro. The illustrations, a last-minute surprise, arc from the hand of Braj Vallabh Mishra, to whom we arc most grateful For assistance: in translation we: arc indebted to Sandhya and -Shrivatsa Goswami, Om Prakash Jaiswal, and especially Krishna Caitanya Bhatt. A great debt is also owed to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for helping to provide us with the time away from teaching that enabled us to bring the book to completion. The National Endowment for the Hwnaniries has given generous support for the critical edition and verse translation of the poems of Surdas, upon which one chapter of this book is based, and the American Institute of Indian Studies has made possi· ble the research in India upon which the entire edifice rests. Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press has been the soul of patience and encouragement. Laura Shapiro is owed a special debt for giving the whole manuscript the benefit of her conswnmate. editorial eye on two separate occasions, and both she and Sucheng Chan have en· durc:d a fair amount of talk about it in between. Several of the translations have appeared-often in an altered

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

form-in earlier publications, and we are graceful for permission to draw upon them here. The books are as follows: Ainslie T. Embree, ed., Sources ofIndian Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Colwnbia University Press, 1988); John Stratton Hawley, Krishmi, the Butter Thief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Stir Das: Poet, Singer, Saint (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Caroline Walker Bynwn, Scevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., GtndeY and Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Finally, a word is in order co explain which· of us did what. For years we have worked together as mutual editors-Hawley for prose and J.ucrgcnsmeyer for poetry-and this volume grew out of that collaboration. We decided to expand our efforts from Surdas to his medieval poet-peers, and we did some of the field research as a team, discussing the shape and content of the book at various stages. Ultin1acely it was Hawley who wrote the prose portions of the book; we did the poems together. Typically, Juergensmeyer worked "from the ground up" on the basis of a literal translation provided by Hawley, though Hawley's verse translation is in the background on several occasions. Then, of course, we argued abou'c the whole thing, not just the poetry but the prose as well. Each of us happily acknowledges the other's sometimes irksome hc:lp. in a friendship that is now many years old. This book is dc:dica1ed to Ainslie Embree, a friend to both of us and to India in ways too numerous to record. New Yurk and Berkeley October 1987

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Contents I

Preface Guid~ to

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Transutemtian and Prrmunci4tian

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Introduction 3 ONE

Ravidas

9

TWO

Kabir

35

THREE

Nanak

63

FOUR

Surdas

91

FIVE

Mirabai

119

SIX

Tulsidas

143

Notes

175

Select Biblwgraphy

217

Glossary 225 Index 234

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PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

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Songs of the SRints of India bas been in print for the better part of two decades now, but somehow it bas never made it to India. In one way, this makes sense. The book was conceived as an effort to introduce Engiishspeaking We.sterners to a religious world that would seem distant and perhaps strange to most. It was translation not just in the linguistic/ literary sense, but in the cultural sense as well. With the passage of time, however, it has become ever more clear that India and the West are not . airtight entities. Increasingly they converge-the here and there are everywhere-and it is a pleasure to launch this revised South Asia edition onto that complex, miscegenous sea. For all the interchange, though, it may seem inappropriate for a Westerner to "translate" India to India. Several things make me hope the effort may be worthwhile. First, there's the hope that travellers, diplomats, business people, students-anyone who drops in on an Indian bookshop-might be looking for a volume that would make it possible to hear more clearly some of the major strains that run through the religious life of North India. For that, perhaps, a fellow traveller's account will serve well. Second, there's the realization that translation is sometimes requisite even in India itself, and that the medium of English serves as a powerful broker of intercultural and interregional exchange. As the language of so much that happens in Indian education, business, and government; there's really no way of avoiding its idiom, even when the subject at hand is tied closely to a home-grown mother tongue. Linguistic isolation is not. an Indian thing. I wonder if Hindi- , Gujarati-, and Punjabi-speakers may find that the stimulus of thinking about Kabir or Mirabai or Nanak in English opens up new ways of hearing the original. Then there's the political dimension. We don't land on it hard in these

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pages, but chere's no 3voiding the fact that b/J11/iti (intense religious devotion ) continues to have massive ram ifications on the public stage. For many people living in South Asia, the words of Kabir provide a beacon of interreligious sanicy, a way to get beyond the trauma of Hindus and Muslims at one another's throats. For others, a Nanak or a Tulsidas charts a course toward cultural and religious hegemonyfor Sikhs on the one hand, for Hindus on the other. Can·such reasoning be sustained if one digs deep into the saints' own words? Finally, there's the matter of scholarly perspective. For people who Jive in Nonh India-er in "Nonh India" abroad- the six poet-saints to which this book provides an introduction are lived realities. People feel they know who Mirabai or Ravidas or Surdas is. They have grown up with these bh11kti saints, hearing about th em from mothers and teachers and grandfathers and aunts, and in streets and schools as well. In that sense, t:1ese saints are their contemporaries. One of the book's key concerns is to complicate that sense of wellknown tradition by creating an awarenes·s that what seems commonplace and commonsensical is actually an anifact 'of time. Each of the poet-saints described and translated in this book has ·a history-a history that begins with an individual life (at least we can affirm this in most cases) and grows into a stream of remembrance that adds layer upon layer to lives that were first lived in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In thinking and speaking about them, later generations kept these lives alive in o:her centuries, and changed them in the course of doing so. The same is· true of the poets' words, which have been performed, amplifie•:I, and altered over the course of half a millennium. With each of these bhnkti poets, I anempt to discriminate berween the old and the new and the in-be!Ween, searching out and evaluating the manuscripts that ·promise co reveal these saints as they were appreciated close to the titne in which they themselves lived. It often turns out that the persons who emerge in this act of historical sleuthing are measurably, sometimes remarkably different from the poet-sain ts we think we know io well. Many of the songs of Surdas and Ka bir that are widely celeb rated today- the cornerstones of what mothers and grand fathers and t:'ie popular media convey-turn out to be entirely absent from th e manuscripts circulating most closely co their ov.in times. The poets whose words are translated here :ire nor the "received" poets. bur those v.. t.om the oldest available manuscripts reveal. It turns

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out that manuscript traditions vary radically from poet to poet-wirh Mirabai the traces are faint to the point of disappea.ring- but we try to get back as far as possible in every case. This means there will be some disappointments for readers who "know" these poets well. Some of the poems held dearest will be missing. Some of the life stories most treasured will be brought under the microscope of textual and historical criticism, and dismembered-or at least cast in an unfamiliar light. Such an approach, constrained by what the man uscript cradi· tions allow, is still relatively rare in Indian scholarship on the bhakti poets of North India. I hope it will be stimulating, not alienating; and I will try again and again, in incroducing these poet-saints, to make connections to the present, as well. After all, there is no past without the present, any more than there is any present without the past. Fifteen years have passed since this book was first printed in 1988, and the book began to take shape even earlier than that. Much has happened since- in the realm of politics and culture, in the Mfeel" of life in North India, and in the specific appearance of living persons and institutions who help me introduce these poet-saints as they are remembered and venerared today. In preparingthis new edition, I have made some efforts to update the original text, but I have not wanted to' aite~ its spirit any more than necessary. I will be pleased if a good dose of North India as Mark Juergensmeyer and I knew it in the 1980s survives alongside a few dashes of 21st-century reality. Fortunately, the bulk of the text is anchored several centuries earlier-in the life and times of six medieval or early-modem saintsand did not have to be revisited with the same concern for accuracy in relation co an ever-evolving presenr. But there too one muse confront a set of significant changes: changes in the scholarship that cond ition our perception of the past. Bhakti studies have hardly stood still in the course of the last fifteen years. To the extent that was feasible from the point of view of the Press, I have altered the text of the first edition to reflect those developments. But this process had its limits. New perspectives had to described in such a way char they could be sandwiched into the same physical space as had been required to set ouc che old, and no changes were possible in the bibliography. A good bic didn't fit. For chat reason I will devote the remainder of this preface • to a brief review of studies rhar have Jppeared since 1988, works chat have ·s uch an important bearing on our subject rh ar they really should nor be overlooked. Because the book is aimed at readers of English-

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persons who would need translations to get at che original Hindi or Punjabi or Brajbhasa- the works on which I will fc;>cus are almost without exception tho;e that have appeared in English. I wili proceed from poet to peer following the order in wh ich they are introduced in the book itself. For Ravidas (or the variant names Raidas or Rohidas) the basic new resource is Winand Callewaert and Peter Friedlander, The Lift and Works~( Raidtis (Delni: Manohar, 1992) . Several articles by Joseph Schaller also make instructive reading, and those with access to Hindi will find Shukdeo Singh's RRidas Wini (Delhi: Riidhiilq~i:ia Prakii~an, 2003) to be a major contribution. For Kabir the list i; considerably longer. Charlotte Vaµdeville's last great work on Kabir bas now appeared: A l*iiver Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University P1ess, 1993). It is notable both for the seasoned conspectus it provides and for its critically informed translations. In addition one has the fine collection of critical peTspectives provided by Monika Horstmann, ed., Images of Kabir (Delhi: Manohar, 2002) . Valuable in many respects, this collection is particularly helpful because several of its chapters open a window onto debates about Kabir that began and are still current in Hindi. These especially concern the question of whether Kabir should be read primarily as a Dalit ("oppressed") poet-someone speaking on behalf of the downtrodden classes of Indian society-r as a figure who gives voice to a much broader set of concerns. The principal debaters are Dharmavir on the one side and Purushottam Agrawal on the other. At quite a ·different level Winand Callewaert's The Millen11iun1 Kabir Tfiiii: A Collection of Pads (Delhi: Manohar, 2000), which was prepared with help from Swapna Sharma and Dieter Ta illieu, offers the most .authoritative treatment of the pad! 5abda genre of compositions atcributed to Kabir in old manuscripts. The bulk of the work is in Hindi and devanagari scnpt, but the introduction is accessible to readers of English. David N. Lorenzen discusses and tra nslates Kabir's life-story as told at the end of the sixteenth century by Anantadas in Kabi,. Legends nnd Annnta-das's }~nhir Pm·nchai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991 ). a book on which he collaborated with Jagdish Kumar and Uma Th ukral. Finally, the. beautiful transfations and analyses of The Bij.1k of Kabir made by Linda Hess in cooperation with Shukdeo Singh are now available in a South Asia edition (Delhi: Oxfe>rd Universirv l>ress, 2002).

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The works of W. H. McLeod provide the scholarly backbone for the profile of che life and person of Guru Nanak that is presented in S .:ritical edition worked out by Bryant but also consider a number of variants that appear in the early manuscripts upon which his edition is based. There have been some major developments in scholarship on Mirabai since S