Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India

The Śrī Maṭh and the Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya in the Evolution of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya

Daniela Bevilacqua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351805704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Hindu Traditionalism addresses Hindu traditions that resisted contact with both Neo-Hindu thought and views of "classical" Hinduism perceived to be outmoded.

This book provides an in-depth understanding of Modern Hindu Traditionalism through the case study of the R?m?nand? order (samprad?ya) and the portrait of the Jagadguru R?m?nand?c?rya R?mnare??c?rya. This guru belongs to the ancient tradition of the R?m?nand? order, which is active at the present time and the biggest Vai??ava religious order in Northern India. Analyzing the historical evolution of the R?m?nand? order, the author shows how different centers have undergone different changes over the centuries, and focuses on the independence struggle of a group of R?m?nand?s from the R?m?n?j?s, which led to the creation of the role of Jagadguru R?m?nand?c?rya and the construction of the ?r? Ma?h. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book casts light on figures and processes central to the development of Hinduism in the twentieth and twenty-first century and consequently describes the role of religion in contemporary Indian society. The author examines the role religious institutions and their leaders have in the everyday life of individuals, how they interact with and in the society, and how they approach and interpret social and political issues. The R?m?nand?s' use of new methods of communication, in particular social media, is an innovative part of the study.

A welcome innovation in the studies of South Asian religion, this book will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and scholars of Hinduism and religion and politics.

1 On Rāmānanda

His life, teachings, and disciples

Introduction

When it comes to Rāmānanda, we have to face four main uncertainties: his place and date of birth; whether he was a Śrī Vaiṣṇava; whether he established the Rāmānandī sampradāya and whether he was a social reformer. These uncertainties are due to the fact that, although Rāmānanda is regarded as an iconic figure of the Indian Medieval period, and he is often mentioned in works about Sants and bhaktas, there is still a lack of evidence that leaves certain aspects of his life up to debate.

Hagiographies about Rāmānanda’s life show that all we know about Rāmānanda is based on historical reconstructions made by the branches of the sampradāya, which depended heavily on their historical period and religious approaches.

Likewise, the interpretations given by orientalists and scholars in the nineteenth to twentieth century about Rāmānanda’s life was influenced by the historical period in which they lived.

A comparison of hagiographies

Despite their historical inaccuracies, hagiographies can be considered as valuable historic sources about not only the lives of particular individuals, but also the communities which have produced the specific memory of those individuals (Mallison 2001: IX).¹ Therefore, it is helpful to regard hagiographies as mnemohistories concerned not with the past as such, but with the past as it is remembered. According to Jan Assmann, a mnemo-historical study examines texts as a vertical line of memory, seeking out the threads of connectivity—intertextuality, evolution of ideas, recourse to forgotten evidence, and so forth—that work behind the texts (1998: 9, 16).

This method is particularly helpful for hagiographies since it highlights how “an individual is remembered and continually refashioned or systematically renarrated in the production of a memory” (ibid.).

The core of Indian hagiographies is represented by lives of Sants involved in the spread of bhakti, who were often assimilated with God and given divine characteristics. The purpose of the hagiographies was for the writer to illustrate exemplary lives, and for the devotee to follow such exemplary lives (Snell 1994: 4).

In the next pages, I will introduce the main hagiographies produced in the Rāmānandī environment, with a focus on those that had a tangible impact on the development of Rāmānanda’s life story. Arguably, this development was directed by sthānādhārī (settled) Rāmānandīs who followed a saguṇa devotion and rasik sādhanā.

We will see that, in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, hagiographies display stories of bhaktas from across a wide spectrum of religious communities, including both Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas and heterodox groups, whose emphasis was their exemplary status as devotees rather than their specific group affiliation. In this context, the life story of Rāmānanda is narrated for its intrinsic message rather than to stress his figure.

Later on, changed historical conditions pressed for a clearer definition of sampradāyas’ boundaries, therefore the primary purpose of a hagiography was to stress the value of one sect, tradition, or lineage over another through the lives of specific individuals.

The development of Rāmānanda’s life story made a decisive step at the beginning of the twentieth century as part of a precise project planned by a radical group in the sampradāya. As we will see, during this time the number of life details included in the hagiographies increased to present a specific portrait of Rāmānanda as ācārya (religious preceptor).

The earliest hagiographies

Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Nābhādās wrote the Bhaktamāl, a work narrating the lives of Sants and devotees. In its 214 stanzas in Braj bhāṣā, the dialect spoken in the present Western part of Uttar Pradesh, the Bhaktamāl dedicates the chappayas (quatrain verse) number 35 and 36 to the life of Rāmānanda. This is the first historical account we have about him. The summary of contents is as follows:

• Rāmānanda was part of Rāmānūja’s paramparā, with only three gurus (Devācārya, Hariyānanda, and Rāghavānanda) between Rāmānūja and Rāmānanda.

• Rāghavānanda, the guru of Rāmānanda, taught the bhakti to the four varṇas and to the four āśramas after having traveled all over India and reaching Varanasi.

• In Varanasi, Rāmānanda became a disciple of Rāghavānanda.

• Rāmānanda is considered as an avatār of Rām, and a bridge for the wellbeing of the world.

• Rāmānanda had twelve disciples: Anantānanda, Kabīr, Sukhā, Sursur, and his wife Sursurī, Padmāvatī, Narhari, Pīpā, Bhāvānanda, Raidās, Dhanā, Sen.

• These disciples were examples of the ten kinds of bhakti.²

It is difficult to give an accurate value of Nābhādās’s chappayas since we do not have clear information about the author himself. Some information is from 1712 c.e., when Priyādās wrote a commentary on the Bhaktamāl called Bhaktirasabodhinī. There he says that Nābhādās was born in the “worthy family of Hanuman,”³ but he was blind and, when he was five years old, was abandoned by his widowed mother in the forest during a famine. There, he met Kilhadās and Agradās, who questioned his name and parentage. Kilhadās sprinkled water on his eyes to restore his sight and then ordered Agradās to become Nābhādās’s teacher. Agradās initiated him and brought him to Galtā, where he did sevā for the sādhus living there (Grierson 1909b: 620).

Although Nābhādās speaks about Rāmānanda in a panegyric manner, he gives more attention to his disciples: the stories of bhaktas and Sants are pivotal elements of the Bhaktamāl in a way that, to use the words of Pinch, “could accommodate both monastic and lay population,” addressing a Vaiṣṇava community in its entirety (1999: 369).

While Hare describes this community as a product of Nābhādās’s religious and literary imagination (2011: 66), I think that rather than imagining a community, Nābhādās was describing the mixed and heterogeneous Vaiṣṇava reality of his period at Galtā. It is likely that the main audience⁴ of the Bhaktamāl was composed of lay people, and this could explain why greater attention is given to bhaktas than ascetics: the lives of bhaktas, who were mostly common men, could be used as examples to follow in the everyday life. In this lay social framework, obstacles imposed by “definitions” were not present. Devotees could (as they still can today) follow more than one guru and worship Sants belonging to different traditions. What was (and still is) important was the religious insight that an individual could give and transmit.

Since tradition holds that it was Agradās who asked Nābhādās to write the Bhaktamāl, we may recognize in his work the effort of a bhakta who decided to collect the stories of exemplary lives to inspire other devotees under the consent of his guru.⁵

Anantadās’s Parcaī

The Parcaī (introduction) of Anantadās, collected at the beginning of the seventeenth century, brings together legends about bhaktas with the purpose of propagating the basic ideas of the bhakti.⁶ According to David Lorenzen (1991: 75), Anantadās was a disciple of Vinodī, guru-bhāī of Nābhādās, and probably hailed from Revāsā.

Anantadās provides more details than Nābhādās, describing the lives of the most famous bhaktas of his time: Nāmdev, Angad, Trilochan, Kabīr, Raidās, Dhanā, and Pīpā, these last four said to have been initiated by Rāmānanda.

Anantadās says that Rāmānanda had his monastery in Varanasi (but does not give a more specific location) where people continuously sang the name of God Rām. In the Parcaī about Pīpā, he is said to be often in a state of ecstasy and, from other sketches, we come to know that he was credited with performing miracles.⁷

The same Parcaī gives precious information about Rāmānanda’s teachings, when Rāmānanda explains to Pīpā:

In my service you will have a double result, never to return again in a body. Only if you are like one dead in this life, can you find liberation. The second path I show you is that of bhakti. You can choose which ever you like and thus cross the ocean of rebirth. […] If you want to practise bhakti, do it at home.

(Callewaert 2000: 155)

Later on, Rāmānanda describes to Pīpā’s wives the path Pīpā is going to face since he has decided not to stay at home:

He will wander in strange lands, living on alms, with a shaven head and the garb of an ascetic, he has given up all the attachment to caste, status and family honour. A king and a beggar are equal in his eyes. He has no thought of sleep or hunger or pain or pleasure. Sometimes he might wear clothes, at other times he will go naked. This is my path, consider whether you can walk on it. […] If you can do the same, then you can come with us, ladies.

(Callewaert 2000: 156)

These two descriptions may be proof that Rāmānanda used to have two approaches: one completely ascetic and the other based on a “domestic” form of bhakti. This information would support the attribution of both a saguṇa and a nirguṇa form of worship to Rāmānanda. Indeed, ascetics, lay people, low-caste people, and women are commonly found in descriptions of his followers, which may explain the reason for a plurality of teachings. In the Parcaī, Rāmānanda emerges as a fundamental character for the development of the bhakti, a sat (real) guru who knows how to discipline his followers and who provides them with the more suitable path.

Why did Anantadās write a Parcaī on Nāmdev (who probably lived around 1300 c.e.), while preferring to refer only indirectly to Rāmānanda through the portraits of his disciples and their initiations? Perhaps, following what has been mentioned above, Rāmānanda was not a bhakta, but an ascetic, whose life could not provide a realistic example for lay people. As Callewaert notes (2000: 2–3), Anantadās’s purpose was to try to bring about sincere feelings of devotion while simultaneously imparting a moral lesson to devotees of the catuḥ sampradāyas,⁸ claiming that “if a person stays in one of the four sampradāyas he will be loved by Hari, he will be called pure” (Callewaert 2000: 225). If we consider that Anantadās was likely a contemporary of Nābhādās, this reference supports the image of a Vaiṣṇava community where belonging to the same Vaiṣṇava dharma counted more than belonging to a unique sampradāya.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century hagiographies

The stories narrated in the Parcaī became the basis for many commentaries of the Bhaktamāl, whose importance lies not only in the fact that they became a genre per se, but that they mirror the different religious environment in which they were formulated. For example, in the eighteenth century comment written by Priyādās (who was part of the Gauḍiyā sampradāya of Vrindavan), the role of the sampradāya is more prevalent than the role of the bhaktas, probably because of the need of the sampradāya to get support from royal patrons (Hare 2011: 103). In effect, during the eighteenth century Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas gravitating around Rajput rulers underwent a process of orthodoxization, which could have led to a reinterpretation and development of the stories contained in hagiographies to have a more precise identity in confrontation with other groups and communities.

The eighteenth century was also a crucial period for the Rāmānandī sampradāya because various branches were o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 On Rāmānanda: his life, teachings, and disciples
• 2 The historical evolution of the Rāmānandī sampradāya
• 3 Changes in the twentieth century
• 4 The Śrī Maṭh
• 5 The Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya Rāmnareśācārya
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Rāmānandī centers in Varanasi
• Bibliography
• Index