INTRODUCTION: THE TALES IN THEIR CONTEXTS

Chapter One
Madhu Nath and His Performance

First Encounters

Try as I might, I cannot remember the first time I met Madhu Nath, the senior author of this volume. That I came to record his performance of Gopi Chand was initiated neither by me nor by him but by his relatives Nathu and Ugma Nathji—some of my closest associates during my residence in the Rajasthani village of Ghatiyali. Madhu, although born in Ghatiyali, settled many years ago in another nearby village, Sadara. Therefore, although he celebrated life cycle rituals among his kinfolk in Ghatiyali, and periodically performed there, he spent most of his time in Sadara. This accounts for my being unaware of him as a special person after over a year's residence in Ghatiyali and a deep involvement with several households of his relatives there.

Because of manifold links between pilgrimage and death, I had been systematically recording "hymns" (bhajans ) sung on the eve of funeral feasts by the Nath caste and non-Nath participants in the sect which they led. I had grown increasingly interested in the Naths' peculiar approach to death and the liberation of the soul (Gold 1988, 99–123). When Madhu was directly introduced to me as a singer, in January 1981, I was reminded that my bhajan recordings of April 1980 were made at hymn sessions, first for his son and then for his wife. I had actually attended both their funeral feasts. This latter significant connection was phrased as, "You ate his son's and his wife's nukti" —nukti being the little sugary fried balls that are one of the most characteristic foods of ceremonial village feasts (called nukta ). During these particular feasts I must have seen Madhu, as I have seen so many

other hosts at dozens of similar events, harried and anxious to keep all his guests satisfied, with no time for casual conversations. Madhu always wore his pale red-orange turban tied low, almost hiding and also supporting the heavy yogis' earrings that might otherwise have caught my attention.

My memorable and formal introduction to Madhu Nath took place over half a year later when, after six weeks in Delhi and Banaras, where I had been recuperating from hepatitis, I returned to Ghatiyali accompanied by Daniel Gold (then friend and colleague but not yet husband). Daniel, as a historian of religions researching the sant tradition in North India, had become interested in Ghatiyali's Naths when I showed him the transcribed texts of their hymns—many of which had the signature (chhap ) of the poet-saint Kabir, and some of which employed the coded imagery common to Sant poetry (Gold 1987; Hess and Singh 1983).

Daniel expressed his desire to talk with persons learned in Nath traditions, and my research assistant Nathu Nath introduced to him several members of his family and sect. The last person he brought to us was Madhu, and that evening—Daniel's last in the village—Madhu performed, and I duly recorded, Gopi Chand's janmpatri or birth story. I was immediately intrigued and delighted: here was a living bard singing a story that was obviously about the same character as Temple's Punjabi version, yet evidently startlingly different in certain prominent details. I recalled from Temple nothing about Gopi Chand's being won as a boon by his mother's ascetic prowess or borrowed from the yogi Jalindar. Yet these were the dominant elements that framed the plot of Madhu's "Birth Story."^[1]

Until that first evening with Madhu Nath I had largely confined my recordings of folklore to much briefer performances: women's worship tales and songs, and men's hymns. Yet now I felt compelled to obtain the whole story of Gopi Chand, despite its lack of direct relevance to my pilgrimage research, and the perceptible ticking away of my finite time in India. My recording sessions were not continuous; Madhu made a trip to Sadara to look after his fields when he had finished the "Birth Story" (in one night) and the "Journey to Bengal" (in two). Persuaded to return so that I could have the complete tale of Gopi Chand, he next gave me "Gopi Chand Begs from Queen

[1] In chapter 3 I discuss how Gopi Chand varies from region to region.

Patam De," which belongs chronologically between the segments on birth and Bengal, and "Instruction From Gorakh Nath"—the conclusion. Seven years later I returned to Rajasthan with the express purpose of recording from Madhu the tale of Gopi Chand's maternal uncle, Bharthari of Ujjain. Despite the gap in time, the circumstances of the recording sessions in 1988 were not very different from those of 1981, except that the loudest crying baby on the second set of tapes belonged not to my host's household or neighbors but to me.

In January 1981 when I came to know Madhu Nath he did not strike me as a man undone by loss and mourning, although in 1980 he had buried first one of his two sons and then his wife. The son had suffered a long and debilitating illness through which he was intensively and devotedly nursed by his mother. She had, I was told, kept herself alive only to serve her child and had not long outlived him. Accompanying this double personal loss, Madhu had incurred the great economic stress of sponsoring two funeral feasts. I saw others driven to or beyond the brink of nervous collapse by just such accumulated pressures.

Yet Madhu Nath was calm, confident of his power with words, always entertaining, and sometimes very humorous. Retrospectively, I wonder if he did not derive some of his solidity, following this very difficult period of his life, from the teachings of the stories that he told so well again and again—stories with the bittersweet message that human life is "a carnival of parting." Another factor in his equilibrium could have been the Nath cult's promise of release from the pain of endless rounds of death and birth, and thus certainty of his wife's and son's liberation.

It is also true, however, that I approached Madhu Nath as a source of art and knowledge rather than as a man who had recently suffered much grief. We never spoke of his family; indeed, we hardly exchanged any personal courtesies of the kind that constitute much of normal village social intercourse. Madhu teased me sometimes—making jokes at my expense during the spoken parts of his performance—but outside the performance itself we did not talk very much in 1981. In short, although he was a wonderfully expansive storyteller, Madhu seemed to me a reserved and veiled person.

I did not attempt to obtain even a sketchy life history from Madhu Nath until my 1988 visit. My experience then confirmed in part the intuition that our lack of personal relationship could be attributed to

him as much as to me. My attempt at a life history interview rapidly degenerated, or evolved, into an illuminating session of "knowledge talk," rich in myth but skimpy on biography. What follow here are the bare outlines of Madhu's career as I gleaned them from that leisurely and rambling conversation, supplemented by a few inquiries made by mail through my research assistant Bhoju.

Madhu, a member of the Natisar lineage of Naths, was born in Ghatiyali, but in his childhood he was sent to live with an elder brother already residing in nearby Sadara. His brother was pujari or "worship priest" in Sadara's Shiva temple.^[2] The thakur or local ruler of Sadara—and this would have been in the thirties when thakurs still ruled—came into possession of a pair of yogis' earrings and took a notion to put them on somebody. Madhu, and other Naths who were listening to our conversation, concurred on the consistent if seemingly superficial interpretation that the Sadara thakur was endowed with great sauk (a term translatable as "passionate interest") in such works. Perhaps more salient, they also suggested that enduring "fruits" (phal ) accrue to the one who performs such a meritorious act. And they offered as evidence the information that, even today, when independent India's concerted attempts at land reform have greatly reduced the circumstances of Rajasthan's former gentry, there is "nothing lacking" in the Sadara thakur' s household.

Whether we see Madhu as beneficiary or victim of the thakur' s sauk, the rationale for his becoming the recipient of these yogis' earrings appears to have been more economic and social than spiritual. The landlord deeded some fertile farmland to Madhu's family in exchange for cooperation on the family's part. As for Madhu himself, he was young and clearly his head was turned by the attention he received in the ceremony, and the pomp with which it was conducted. Fifty years later he described to me with pleasure the feasts, the processions, and the "English band" that were for him the most impressive and memorable aspects of this function. He stated that, although two "Nath babajis"^[3] were called to be ritual officiants, he had no personal

[2] Through much of rural Rajasthan it is Naths, not Brahmans, who serve as priests of Shiva temples. The Nath cult and their lore are strongly, but not universally, identified with Shaivism; see chapter 2.

[3] Like maharaj or "great king," babaji, literally "respected father," is a common epithet and term of address for Nath and other renouncers. It has connotations of intimacy that other terms for "father" lack and may also be used affectionately for children.

guru. For Madhu, his own ear-cutting seems to have been completely divorced from the kind of spiritual initiation with which it is consistently associated, not only in the tales he himself delivers but in other published accounts.

Nevertheless, this experience and its visible physical aftermath—the rings themselves—surely set Madhu apart from the other young men of his village world. Although Madhu did not state this in so many words, what he did make clear was that after the ritual he found himself restless and unsatisfied with the life of an ordinary farmer's boy. His brother sent him out to graze the goats, but he felt this was "mindless work" (bina buddhi ka kam ) and quarreled with him. Evidently the economic fruits of Madhu's ear-splitting were being reaped not by Madhu but by the senior male member of his household. The brother declined to support a non-goatherding Madhu; Madhu declined to herd goats. At this juncture, Madhu decided to set off on his own. As he put it, "There was no one to control me so I had a sarangi [the instrument he plays to accompany his performances] made by Ram Chandra Carpenter." Madhu continued, "I rubbed it,"—meaning he did not know how to play properly—"and went to all the big feasts."

Madhu then listed a number of events (weddings, holiday entertainments, and so forth) that he had attended in several villages where Naths performed their tales, both for their own caste society and at the request of other celebrating groups. In the course of these meanderings Madhu hooked up with his mother's brother's son, Sukha Nath, who was already an accomplished performer. Madhu began by informally accompanying and making himself useful to Sukha. Eventually they agreed on an apprenticeship. Madhu said, "I'll go with you," and Sukha said, "Come if you want to learn." Madhu then sought permission from his grandmother in Ghatiyali, telling her—as he recalled it for me—"I'11 wash his clothes, I'll serve him, I'll live with him."

Madhu appeared to remember the years of his discipleship fondly, and no doubt selectively. He described eating two meals a day of festive treats for weeks at a stretch when he and his cousin were commissioned to perform for relatively wealthy patrons. It was particularly at such special events—the only occasions when the stories are narrated from beginning to end rather than in fragments as is the usual custom—that he mastered Sukha Nath's repertoire. This comprised the three epics Madhu himself performs: Gopi Chand, Bharthari, and the

marriage of Shiva. Madhu also knows countless hymns and several shorter tales.^[4]

At a time that Madhu estimated to be about five years after he acquired the yogis' earrings, he was married, eventually becoming the father of two sons. After his brother's death, the Sadara property came fully into Madhu's possession, as did the service at the Sadara Shiva temple. He seems then to have settled into a life divided between agricultural and priestly tasks in Sadara and exercise of his bardic art in a group of nine surrounding villages, including Ghatiyali.

Madhu Nath's Performance

Members of the Nath caste in Madhu's area of Rajasthan inherit and divide the right to "make rounds" (pheri lagan!a) and to collect grain donations, just as they do any other ancestral property. When a father's right must be parceled out among several sons, they receive it as "turns." The Rajasthani word for these turns is ausaro, but English "number" is also commonly used to refer to them. Of course, some who inherit the right to perform have no talent to go with it. For example, Madhu explained to us, when his cousin Gokul Nath's "number" comes, Gokul seeks Madhu's assistance and they make singing rounds together, for which Madhu receives a part of Gokul's donations.

Besides what a performer collects while making rounds, designated Nath household heads also receive a regular biannual share of the harvest—called dharo —in the villages with which they are affiliated. In 1990 this share, for Ghatiyali's Natisar Naths, amounted to two and one-half kilos of grain at both the spring and fall harvests from every landed household in eight villages. In Ghatiyali itself, where the Natisar Naths are landed residents, they do not collect dharo, although they receive donations on their performance rounds. Madhu explained that dharo was not allotted to Naths for singing, but rather for the "work" of removing locusts—a magical power that the caste claims. Nowadays, he concluded, they sing because there are no

[4] I recorded Madhu's performance of the "Wedding Song of Lord Shiva" in 1988; the tapes are archived with the American Institute of Indian Studies, Centre for Ethnomusicology, in New Delhi.

locusts, thanks to a governmental extermination program (clearly a mixed blessing for Naths).

It seems that performing Gopi Chand-Bharthari may have recently been transformed into an inherited right, in order to preserve the patron-client relationship founded on locust removal.^[5] By asking the kind of imaginative "what if" question that I always felt was too leading but from which we often learned the most, my assistant Bhoju elicited further support for this interpretation. What, he asked Madhu, would happen were he to practice his art in someone else's territory? Would there be trouble? Madhu responded with a firm denial: "We jogi s make rounds; we could go as far as Udaipur. We are jogi s so no one could stop us."

Twice a year, when it is his turn, Madhu Nath makes rounds in his nine villages. In any village on any given night, rather than remaining in a single location, he moves from house to house in the better-off neighborhoods, or temple to temple among the lower castes. At each site he sings and tells a short fragment of one of his lengthy tales—choosing what to sing according to the request of his patrons or his own whim.

Madhu is highly respected as a singer and storyteller of rich knowledge and skill who can move an audience to tears. His performance alternates regularly between segments of sung lines, accompanied by music which he plays himself on the sarangi —a simple stringed instrument played with a bow—and a prose "explanation" (arthav ). In this explanation he retells everything he has just sung, using more colorful, prosaic, and often vulgar language than he does in the singing. The spoken parts are performances or communicative events as clearly marked as the musical portions are. Whereas Madhu's ordinary style of speaking is normally low-key and can seem almost muted, his arthav is always enunciated distinctly and projected vigorously. The arthav, moreover, often incorporates the same stock phrases and poetic conceits that occur in the singing.

During both my 1981 and 1988 recording sessions, Madhu was

[5] According to Ghatiyalians, Naths were first invited to settle in the villages round Ajmer because of their magic spells. One of the episodes that definitively localizes Madhu's version of Gopi Chand contains a "charter" for the Nath power over locusts (see chapter 2 and GC 4).

1. Madhu Nath plays the sarangi and sings Bharthari's tale.

2. Madhu Nath gives an explanation of Bharthari's tale.

3. Madhu Nath and his son, Shivji, sing Bharthari's tale.

usually accompanied by his surviving son, Shivji, who sang along in a much fainter voice that was prone to fade away when, presumably, he did not remember the words. However, there were some occasions—notably more in 1988—when Shivji carried the words and Madhu faltered. Shivji played no instrument and did not participate at all in the arthav .

As I worked on translating Madhu's words, I replayed the tapes of his original performance. Inspired by Susan Wadley's exemplary demonstrations and discussions of the ways an epic bard in rural Uttar Pradesh self-consciously employs various tunes and styles (Wadley 1989, 1991), I began to try, in spite of my musical illiteracy, to pay attention to Madhu's use of "tune."^[6] My initial impression of Madhu's music had been that it was monotonous; what kept you awake was the story. This is partially but not wholly true. Compared to the bard Wadley describes, Madhu Nath's range of musical variations seems limited; yet he does deliberately modulate emotional highlights of his story with shifts in melody and rhythm.

[6] Other studies that helped me to appreciate the interpenetration of musical artistry and cultural meanings are Basso 1985; Feld 1982; Seeger 1987.

Madhu uses two patterned tunes, which he calls rags , in Gopi Chand and two different ones in Bharthari, where he also recycles both Gopi Chand rags . All four melodic patterns are flexible in that although each engenders verbal verse patterns, the melodic patterns frequently and readily change to accommodate narrative needs. In what I call Gopi Chand rag 1, for example, each verse normally has three similar lines and one longer concluding one. Long narrative sequences, however, may repeat the short lines many more times than three before concluding. And for an emotional or dramatic climax the long concluding line may repeat once or even twice. The main rag identified with Bharthari begins with a prolonged Rajajiiiiii —"Honored King ... "—that seems to signal the plaintive voice of the king's abandoned wife. Part 1 of Bharthari is performed in a style different from any of the others, its melody less interesting and less emotional, that seems to me in keeping with its orientation to external action.

Ethnomusicologist David Roche (personal communication 1991) describes Madhu Nath's musical style as one influenced by caste traditions but infused by new influences. He says that the melodic phrases are "pan-North Indian"—not particularly Rajasthani. Madhu Nath's musical style is, according to Roche, a "contemporary bhajan style" reflecting the influence of regional religious dramas and mythological films. Roche finds Madhu's music historically influenced by the harmonium—an instrument introduced to India by Christian missionaries from the West in the late nineteenth century and soon passionately adapted to Hindu devotional singing. This influence is apparent to Roche in Madhu's "intonation and diatonicism, with emphasis on major and mixolydian mode tetrachords." Although Madhu uses no harmonium—nor do other Rajasthani Nath epic performers I have met—many of Madhu's relatives and caste-fellows in and around Ghatiyali participate in bhajan -singing groups regularly accompanied by harmoniums.

That Madhu employs the term rag to refer to the melodies he plays probably represents a folk usage rather than a significant link to Indian classical traditions. Once Madhu told Bhoju that he "always" sang in asavari rag , a named rag within the classical system. Because I was hearing four distinctive melodies, I hoped that Madhu had a name for each of them. I made clips from the tapes and sent this "sampler" back to the village with Bhoju. Bhoju wrote, "I took that

rag tape and listened to it with Madhu Nath, Shivji Nath, Ugma Nath, and Nathu all together, but no one could tell a particular name of the rags ." Rather, the assembled Naths used labels such as "the melody of rounds" (pheri ko rag ) or "Gopi Chand's melody" (Gopi Chand ko rag ). This seems to confirm Roche's suggestion that Madhu's music is not to be labeled among any fixed traditional systems but rather is part of a creative synthesis continually emerging in North Indian folk music.

It is widely acknowledged that any folk performance situation is a dynamic, interactive event,^[7] and this statement certainly describes Rajasthani performances in general and Madhu Nath's in particular. I shall examine the several ways in which Madhu and his audience sustain this dynamic during individual performances. Before doing so, however, I wish to suggest some broader contextual factors that contribute to these occasions but are more diffuse and difficult to pinpoint.

Rajasthan's regional culture includes a rich and diverse body of living oral performance traditions. These enliven a daily existence that may be both monotonous and laborious. On the one hand, an urban Westerner like myself, landed in a place like Ghatiyali, is overwhelmed by the abundance of festivals, rituals, all-night singing sessions, storytelling, and other lesser and greater artistic and communicative events; during my first months in the village I often felt that I was feasting at a perpetual banquet of live music and theater, with no tickets required. On the other hand, in 1979 81 the villagers had no TVs and few radios or tape recorders, while the nearest cinema was a costly three-hour journey distant. Any performance event punctuated the humdrum grind of labor-intensive agriculture.

Nath performance traditions must be viewed within this cultural frame: they exist as one genre in a wealth of related genres; they also exist as valued entertainment in a society not yet made blasé by multiple media. Rural Rajasthani society, moreover, venerates religious experts and accords recognition to many from different ranks and with varying sectarian affiliations. Like most of the region's popular folk traditions, Madhu Nath's performances meshed with his audience's twin passions for entertainment and enlightenment. Although Madhu himself protests that his stories are not siska , or

[7] Bascom 1977; Bauman 1977, 1986; Seitel 1980; Tedlock 1983.

"instruction," audience members claim that they are. The Nath tales are not unique, nor are they the most highly prized of performances available to Rajasthani villagers. Yet they have a welcome and secure place in the annual round.

Madhu Nath at times refers to the entire tale of Gopi Chand or Bharthari as a byavala , a term that one dictionary defines as a god's wedding song (Platts 1974). Before returning to Rajasthan in 1987 I speculated that both tales might be so described because they were somehow anti-wedding songs. However, as I was to learn, a third long narrative in Madhu Nath's repertoire is "The Wedding Song of Lord Shiva" (Sivji ka byavala ); it seems clear that he has named the others accordingly. Most villagers do not use the term byavala to refer to Madhu Nath's performances and often simply call them varta . This label reveals their kinship with other epic tales of Rajasthani herogods whose singing and recitation may be called varta , too.^[3]

According to the sensible, informed, and flexible definitions proffered in the recent important volume Oral Epics in India , the Bharthari-Gopi Chand tales fall beyond doubt in the epic genre. Epics in general are characterized as narrative, long, heroic, and sung (Blackburn and Flueckiger 1989, 2–4; Wadley 1989, 76). In the South Asian context, Blackburn and Flueckiger suggest, the quality "heroic" may be understood in three distinct ways. An epic may exhibit martial, sacrificial, or romantic heroism. Both the martial and sacrificial types "turn on themes of revenge, regaining lost land, or restoring lost rights," and stress "group solidarity"—all of which would apply to other Rajasthani epic-length tales. Romantic epics, by contrast, "celebrate individual actions that threaten that solidarity" (1989, 4–5). Clearly the tales of Bharthari and Gopi Chand belong in the "romantic" category if they belong anywhere. Yet our heroes are hardly traditional, undaunted lovers.

It might seem that the tales celebrate individual action that threatens group solidarity, but as I will discuss in more detail in the afterword, yogis gain nothing from a damaged social order. Rather, they maneuver for an intact social order that supports yogis. What then makes these tales romantic? Unless we consider them as stories of the union between guru and disciple, Bharthari and Gopi Chand are romances of parting. The theme of love in separation is a pervasive

[8] See Pande 1963 for the scope of varta .

one in Indian literature. Longing for an absent lover—whether soldier, ascetic, or clerk in the city—has inspired much poetry on mortal love (Kolff 1990; Vaudeville 1986; Wadley 1983), as well as an entire genre of devotional expression. But most literature inspired by love in separation suggests at least a movement toward, or the possibility of, future reunion. Bharthari and Gopi Chand, by contrast, continuously and irrevocably move farther and farther from their loved ones. Madhu Nath's performances of Bharthari and Gopi Chand can be styled romantic epics celebrating separation rather than union, if we keep clearly in mind that the separation they establish is eternal.^[9]

One factor distinguishing these stories from many others heard by villagers is that, although sung and told in the local dialect, they are not indigenous to Rajasthan—a matter I will deal with more extensively in chapter 3, where I attempt to trace their origins. Gopi Chand and Bharthari have been incorporated into Rajasthani traditions, and Rajasthani traditions have been incorporated into them. But these Nath tales are not self-defining epics that contribute to the identity of a regional culture—the kind of tales that people call "ours" (Blackburn et al., eds. 1989; Flueckiger 1989). Indeed, for Rajasthani farmers, Gopi Chand and Bharthari are stories of the exotic, in two senses. First, they are about other lands; second, they are about world-renouncers.

That Gopi Chand and Bharthari were understood in some ways as alien was brought home to me very strongly in 1988 when I asked some village men if they would want to be like Bharthari or Gopi Chand, and some village women if they would like their husbands or sons to emulate those figures. An almost universal answer from both sexes was "No, I wouldn't have the courage." Although some renouncers encountered and interviewed in temples spontaneously referred to Gopi Chand or Bharthari as exemplary in their capacity for tyag , or "relinquishment," no ordinary persons held them up as role models.^[10]

There is a real difference between my "induced"^[11] performances

[9] The only tale considered by the editors and authors of Oral Epics in India that belongs to Nath lore is that of Guga. Blackburn categorizes it as a romantic epic with a supraregional spread and places it about midway on the ritual-to-entertainment continuum (1989, 17–20). The same description applies more or less to Bharthari and Gopi Chand.

[10] See, however, Kothari 1989 on the unsuitability of many folk epic heroes and heroines as role models.

[11] See Goldstein 1967 for the "induced natural context" in folklore fieldwork.

of both tales and the performances that most villagers hear twice a year when Madhu makes his rounds. They hear fragments, and often their favorite fragments are repeated from year to year. People's understanding may be limited by lack of familiarity with the whole story. Most of those whom Bhoju or I questioned were easily able to retell the most popular episodes from both tales.^[12] Few villagers, however, had heard either tale from beginning to end from Madhu, although a number had seen theatrical performances at religious fairs. Several members of leatherworker castes (regar and chamar ) claimed to know very little about the stories; one complained that when Madhu came to his neighborhood he only spoke "a few lines" and left again.

My own experience of immediate audience reactions to the performances of Gopi Chand and Bharthari is limited to the context of the event which I sponsored, for I never observed Madhu "making rounds" (although he was recorded doing so by my colleague Joseph Miller). In the setting of my performance the responses were quite limited. After three or four hours of listening, until well past midnight, we would usually hurry home when Madhu ended his singing. Indeed, he often closed a night's session by saying to me, "Now go to bed."

Madhu Nath's Stories in Synopsis

It has been said of at least one Indian epic—and may be true of most—that no one ever hears it for the first time. Western readers, who have not participated from childhood in the culture that produces these stories, may need a "pony." Throughout these introductory chapters I often talk about events and characters in Madhu Nath's versions of Bharthari and Gopi Chand. Therefore, as points of reference for those citations, I offer skeletal plot summaries in advance, segmented and ordered according to Madhu Nath's performance as it is translated in this book (see also figs. 4 and 5).

Bharthari's "Birth Story" (part 1) describes how his father was cursed by his own father to enter a donkey's womb. The donkey suc-

[12] Episodes for Bharthari included Pingala's sati and Bharthari's encounter with Gorakh Nath at the funeral pyre (both in part 2), as well as Bharthari's begging and Pingala's lament (part 3). For Gopi Chand most commonly cited were his mother's instructions (part 1), his begging from Patam De Rani (part 2), his troubles with the lady magicians (part 3), and his farewell to his sister (part 3).

4. Family relationships in the tales of King Gopi Chand and King Bharthari.

ceeds after lengthy efforts in marrying a princess and founding a city, Dhara Nagar, where his three offspring—Bharthari, Vikramaditya, and Manavati—are born.

In part 2, Bharthari is king of Dhara Nagar and married to Queen Pingala. He rides out hunting and kills a stag, whose seven hundred fifty does, widowed, curse King Bharthari that his women will weep in the Color Palace as they do in the jungle. They then hurl themselves on the dead buck's antlers and thus commit sati .^[13] Bharthari wonders if his own wife is equally devoted. He sends her a handkerchief soaked in deer's blood with the message that he is dead. Pingala knows this is a test but decides to die anyway. Bharthari has other adventures in the forest but eventually returns home to find Pingala a heap of ashes. He goes mad with remorse, until the yogi guru Gorakh Nath arrives, demonstrates the illusory nature of life and death, and finally restores Pingala to the king.

Part 3 finds Bharthari sleepless and unsatisfied. Convinced that nothing in the fluctuating world matters, he abandons his wife and renounces his throne to seek initiation from Gorakh, who sends him back to the palace to beg alms from Pingala and call her "Mother."

[13] Although the common image of a sati is of a woman who chooses to be cremated alive on her husband's funeral pyre, any style of death may be called sati if through it a female follows a beloved male.

5. Nath guru-disciple lineages in the tales of King Gopi Chand and King Bharthari.

She reproaches him but gives the alms. This difficult task accomplished, Bharthari returns to Gorakh Nath's campfire.

Gopi Chand's "Birth Story" (part 1) opens with Manavati (Bharthari's sister, married into "Gaur Bengal") instructing her only son, Gopi Chand: "Be a yogi." She then reveals in a long flashback how she obtained the boon of a son from Lord Shiva although no son was written in her fate. In order not to break his promise, Shiva allows her to borrow one of the yogi Jalindar Nath's disciples, and she chooses Gopi Chand. The loan has a limit: after twelve years of ruling the kingdom, Gopi Chand must become a yogi or die. As a wandering ascetic, however, he will gain immortality. Gopi Chand, possessing eleven hundred wives and sixteen hundred slave girls, is not pleased with his mother's bargain.

In part 2 Gopi Chand tries to get rid of the guru by putting him down a well. But it is Gopi Chand who dies, and only the power of yogis saves him. Restored to his palace, he follows his mother's instructions and has his ears cut by Jalindar. The guru then sends him to beg alms from Queen Patam De, his chief wife, and to call her "Mother." Although Patam De finally fills his alms bowl, when her mother-in-law literally twists her arm, Jalindar has to rescue Gopi Chand from the palace, where he is surrounded by weeping women.

Against his mother's and guru's advice, Gopi Chand heads for Dhaka in Bengal to say goodbye to his sister, Champa De Rani (part 3). On the way he is harassed by seven lady magicians who transform him into various animals and abuse him. Jalindar sends a party of yogis to rescue him but it fails. The guru himself then accompanies

a second group, which succeeds. Gopi Chand proceeds to his sister's; she dies of grief in his arms but is brought back to life by Jalindar. Gopi Chand spends some happy time with her and then leaves alone.

In part 4 a dispute arises between,Jalindar's disciple Kanni Pavji and Gorakh Nath. Kanni Pavji tells Gorakh that his guru, Machhindar Nath, is enjoying women and lathering sons in Bengal; Gorakh tells Kanni Pavji that his guru,Jalindar, is at the bottom of a well. Gorakh goes to Bengal and rescues Machhindar, destroying his wives and sons along the way. Gorakh then brings seven species of locusts out of the well, tricks, Jalindar into giving immortality to Gopi Chand and Bharthari, and convinces him to emerge. All the great yogis then feast one another. At Gorakh Nath's "wish-feast" Kanni Pavji's disciples wish for improper foods and are degraded.

Madhu Nath's Performances for Me

It is winter. We assemble in that part of the Rajasthani village house called a pol —a covered entranceway wide enough to form a room that lies between street and courtyard, often with raised platforms on either side for storage or sitting. This area is a shady breezeway in the summer and a shelter in the winter. By the time we gather there after the evening meal it is already dark and slightly chilly. Everyone, male and female, has wrapped a shawl or blanket over his or her usual daily attire. In the center of the pol is a small fire of dry sticks that burns low, even its frugal warmth a luxury in this wood-impoverished region.

In January 1981 I had already lived fifteen months in the village, but recording Madhu Nath was my first experience as performance patron. I received a quick education in how to fulfill this role with appropriate liberality. I must supply the singer and his son with a "bundle of biris"—biris being harsh, leaf-wrapped cigarettes smoked by almost all males who have not taken a vow of abstinence. I must treat performers and audience to tea each night, which involved purchasing tea leaves, sugar, and milk in advance—the last item not always easy to buy in the evening. In addition, a quarter- or half-kilo of gur , unrefined brown sugar, was indispensable. The singers required gur to soothe their throats (Madhu had an awful cough, which did not deter him from relishing the biris ). A generous patron should pass small lumps of gur round to all the listeners once or twice in the course of an evening.

At the beginning of our recording sessions my comprehension of the sung segments of Madhu's performance was very limited. How pleased I was to benefit from the custom of arthav or explanation, in which Madhu repeated everything he had sung and elaborated on much of it. During the arthav , members of the audience who have passively listened to the sung portions are more actively engaged by a vital performer. A formalized element of performer-audience interaction in Rajasthan is the part played by the hunkar . A hunkar , which can only be awkwardly glossed as someone who makes the sound hun —a kind of affirmative grunt—is a standard feature of any storytelling event, from women's worship stories to men's informal anecdotes.

At first I thought the hunkar 's function was to offer a perfunctory reassurance to the performer that at least one person was really listening. Given the distracting surroundings of many village performances—often including clamorous childern and simultaneous competing activities—such assurance may indeed be needed. However, after being pressed more than once into fulfilling this role myself (which my frequent misunderstandings at times made me bumble or fake quite awkwardly), I began to perceive that a good hunkar can elicit a tale-teller's enthusiasm whereas a poor one can discourage a full telling.

A hunkar 's responses can shape the performance content as well as its quality. This too I learned from personal experience. On relistening to my tapes it was evident to me that when I played hunkar to Madhu, if he was in a generous mood, his arthav was noticeably changed: he used more standard Hindi (versus Rajasthani) vocabulary; he explained cultural phenomena he thought I might not understand; he glossed terms he suspected I was failing to grasp. For example, to my uncertain grunt following the line "Gopi Chand ruled the kingdom," he added, "Gopi Chand ruled, like Indira Gandhi rules."

The opposite case, a situation far more comfortable if sometimes less educational for me, would be when someone who knew the story well acted as hunkar . That person might even supply key lines if Madhu seemed to be dallying before giving them. During climaxes other audience members chimed in, adding their bit to the hunkar 's own responses, which also became less perfunctory. Thus when King Bharthari surveys the seven hundred fifty magically created look-alike Queen Pingalas—a vision both awesome and slightly comical—a number of spontaneous commentators (audible on the tape but only selectively included by the scribe) added their exclamations to the

hunkar 's: "They looked just alike, all seven hundred and fifty!" Their faces were exactly the same!"

Madhu deliberately evoked audience participation by identifying persons in the story with persons in the audience.^[14] One way he did this was by caste. For example, when Jalindar Nath's disciples arrive in Bengal they encounter a gardener. Since there was a man of the gardener caste in the audience, Madhu named the gardener in the story with his name. Besides naming story characters after audience members, Madhu sometimes named audience members after story characters. Thus throughout the Gopi Chand performances he gently teased a younger relative by calling him "Charpat Nath" after one of the powerful yogi figures. This stuck, so that when Bhoju or I met that young man outside the storytelling context, we would call him Charpat.

The entire performance of Gopi Chand took five recording sessions, each from three and one-quarter to four and one-half hours long; it filled the better part of eleven 90-minute cassettes—or over sixteen hours of tape. Each night's session was broken up by short intervals of batchit (conversation), during which the recorder was shut down, usually following the arthav and preceding a new sung section, but sometimes coming between singing and arthav . During one of the breaks strong sweet tea would be passed round and eagerly swallowed, its caffeine and warmth both welcome.

The first part, the "Birth Story," was recorded in its entirety on 24 January 1981. It took two sessions, on the nights of 26 and 27 January, to record the whole "Journey to Bengal" episode. This was followed by a twelve-day hiatus in our recording (during which much transcription and translation work went forward). Madhu then performed "Gopi Chand Begs from Queen Patam De" on the night of 9 February and "Instruction from Gorakh Nath" on 10 February.

When I returned to Ghatiyali at the end of 1987, after an interlude of almost eight years, it was in order to record Madhu Nath's version of the tale of Bharthari, and my arrival was no surprise. I had written well in advance to Nathu and Bhoju. There were several surprises in store for me, however—one so serendipitous that, looking back, it seems like a most improbable stroke of fate. The very aged mother of

[14] K. Narayan very delightfully describes the expert practice of this technique by a North Indian guru (Narayan 1989).

Nathu Nath, my former research assistant, had died. His caste had decided to hold a major funeral feast to which Naths from villages all over the area were invited. Because this feast coincided almost exactly with the time I had to spend in Ghatiyali, it was certain that Madhu would be there, and not in Sadara as I had feared. It also presented a remarkable opportunity for Daniel Gold and me to meet many knowledgeable Naths. Much of my understanding of that caste's identity, presented in chapter 2, is the result of our conversations with Nathu's guests.

Word circulated among those attending the funeral feast that a foreigner was interested in their verbal art, and their caste lore in general. Several groups of strangers knocked at my door, a number of whom announced their capability and willingness to perform Gopi Chand-Bharthari. Even Nathu, who seemed to be annoyed with Madhu for reasons that never became clear to me, strongly suggested that I should record someone else's version. But I held out for Madhu, feeling that the continuity of my translation project required the same bard and that all these other potential singers presented an almost frightening distraction.

It was out of the question to record in Nathu's house, as we had in 1981, because the rooms were virtually overflowing with guests and all seating and tea-making resources were seriously overtaxed. Instead, we spread a carpet on the newly plastered courtyard of the Rajput house that had been my home in 1979–81 and was my camp this trip. We thus had cloistered Rajput women in the audience, and I was able to compensate for an old injury done to my former landlady. She had been angry with me eight years ago for not inviting and escorting her to the Gopi Chand sessions. Now she was able to savor Bharthari in the comfort of her own home.

Again, it was winter and we wrapped ourselves in shawls, savored our tea breaks, and sucked on gur . Madhu's performance got off to a somewhat slow start; Bharthari's birth story has more repetition in it than any other segment of either text. But soon Madhu warmed to his themes. His rendition of the central part of Bharthari—containing the best-loved climax when the king madly circles Pingala's pyre—was perfectly delightful and aroused much audience appreciation. Besides myself, Daniel, and our two inattentive sons, our gathering always included my research assistant Bhoju; my landlady; her daughter-in-law, grandchildren, and nieces; and a variable number

of neighbors and friends, who wandered in by plan or chance. Nathu, immersed in the work of the funeral feast, was unable to attend.

Madhu completed Bharthari's tale in three recording sessions held on the nights of 28, 29, and 30 December 1987. This represents approximately eight hours of recording, filling five and one-half 90-minute tapes. On the whole, the performance atmosphere for Bharthari was very similar to that for Gopi Chand eight years before, with only a few perceptible differences. Madhu's cough seemed a little worse; Shivji's singing seemed a little better; Bhoju was the hunkar most of the time and played his part vigorously.

Translation in Practice and Theory

Toward the conclusion of part I of Madhu Nath's Gopi Chand, Manavati Mother has at last won the boon of a son. She goes to select from among the yogi Jalindar Nath's fourteen hundred visible disciples the one that pleases her the most; then Jalindar will loan him to her by having him reborn as her child. But until she spots beautiful Gopi Chand, the queen is far from delighted with her prospects as she scans the meditating yogis. Her words—as Madhu Nath narrated them and I recorded them in 1981—were as follows: "What will I do with such bearded fellows? What will I do with such twisted limbs, or ones like this who don't even understand speech (boli hi na hamjai )? What will I do with them?"

When Madhu Nath thus elaborated the queen mother's expressions of distaste there was laughter among our small company—laughter that was dutifully noted in parentheses by Nathu Nath when he transcribed the recording. Why was there laughter? Because, as Madhu enunciated "those who don't even understand speech," he gestured toward me. True to his characterization of me as uncomprehending, although I laughed along with the rest, I did not catch this quick jest at my expense. I thought we were laughing at the images of yogis as unattractive, defective persons not likely to make it in the world. But Bhoju, my research assistant, explained Madhu's jibe to me, as kindly as possible, when we read the transcribed text together a week or so later and the scene was still fresh in his memory. Over the words "those who don't even understand speech" I penciled "like Ain-Bai," my village name (this third-person notation symptomatic I suppose of self-alienation common in fieldwork experience), and soon forgot about it.

Six years later, as I embarked on a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship that centered on the Gopi Chand tale, I rediscovered Madhu's little "joke" and paused to ponder this characterization of me—a confident, well-funded translator and published ethnographer—as someone who didn't even "understand speech." It brought to my mind a moment described in the preface to my book on pilgrimage: my first evening in the company of Bhoju Ram Gujar, the young village man who was later to become my closest assistant, pilgrimage brother, and eventually coauthor. During this night he had excited and tired us both by steadily imparting to me in lucid grammatical Hindi the mystical and multiple meanings of esoteric Rajasthani hymns as they were being performed during an intense all-night singing party celebrating the new benign identity of a restless ghost.

When it became apparent to this young man, around two or three in the morning, that I was exhausted and had ceased to absorb his explanations, he chided me by quoting a Rajasthani saying. "For you," he said, "all this is 'brown sugar for a deaf-mute' (gunge ka gur )." Steeped as I was in the rich village world, consuming its sweets but unable to hear its language clearly, where would I find the tongue to tell of it? In my published preface I exclaim, "What a perfect metaphor for the anthropological enterprise!" (Gold 1988, xiv). This metaphor, simultaneously evoking inexpressible delight and human disability, seems equally applicable to the efforts of translation—especially the translation of a multidimensional, interactive communicative event into a linear, soundless, printed story. In the remaining pages of this chapter I examine the phases of my translation efforts, returning in the end to some other metaphors—of hopelessness and possibility.

The first round of translation for Gopi Chand was certainly the most enjoyable. During February and March 1981 except for two short trips, each of a few days' duration, to wrap up loose ends in my pilgrimage research, and the usual distractions of festivals, rituals, and the interpersonal psychodramas that I had finally come to accept as part of village life, my time and attention were remarkably centered on the recordings and rapidly emerging written text of Gopi Chand.

I employed both Nathu Nath and Bhoju Gujar full time during this period. Ugma Nathji, nonliterate but more knowledgeable than Nathu in his caste's teachings, was also often on the scene. We worked in two neighboring rooms, each opening on the same courtyard but not adjoining the other, as was the architectural custom in the village. Nathu (with or without Ugma Nath) would sit in one room, listening

to tapes and transcribing Madhu's words with painstaking accuracy. In the other room Bhoju and I sat side by side at a small desk doing our "translation work" (anuvad ka kam )—as we explained it in most unsatisfactory fashion to the many skeptical questioners who wondered how we passed our days. This work involved reading through the pages Nathu had transcribed and stopping everywhere I had a problem with the Rajasthani. Bhoju would then endeavor to clarify my confusions with explanations and glosses in Hindi. I made notes in pencil directly on the transcription, in an ad hoc mixture of English and Hindi.

Occasionally, when confronted by something extremely puzzling, we would resort to the nine-volume Rajasthani Sabad Kos (Lalas 196–278; hereafter RSK ) with its ponderous definitions in Sanskritized Hindi. Far more often I just wrote the meanings of words as Bhoju dictated them to me. Sometimes he embellished his verbal descriptions with sketches, demonstrating, for example, the design of a kind of earring or the shape of a particular clay pot.

In midafternoon scribe and translators all took a long tea break together and often talked and joked in terms of the stories and the bard's language. If Nathu, whose caste identity was Nath or Yogi, had to go somewhere, Bhoju would recite the bard's favorite couplet: "A seated yogi's a stake in the ground but a yogi once up is a fistful of wind." Gossiping about the passion of an illicit lover when aroused by his woman, Nathu might say, "It was just as if a wick were lit to one hundred maunds of gunpowder"—parroting the bard's stock metaphor for Gopi Chand's emotional crises. Thus the text's special language merged as I learned it with everyday life.

I had not the slightest sense of what I would do with the results of all this effort. But I found the protracted routinized translation work to be very soothing. It filled my days and kept my mind from dwelling on all the things I would never be able to finish, or even begin, as time ran out. Inevitably but nonetheless abruptly, when we were but a few pages into part 4, I at last had to leave Ghatiyali. I did not spend any time with the text again until 1987—six years later. The summary of Gopi Chand's story, which I included in my dissertation (Gold 1984) and ensuing book (Gold 1988) as well as in the article that I coauthored with my husband (Gold and Gold 1984), was done from memory. As I discovered to my chagrin when I did return to the text, it contains a few errors, the result of my imperfect compre-

hension and memory lapses, combined with Madhu's occasional vagueness. For example, I stated in that summary that Jalindar Nath rescues Gopi Chand from Death's Messengers; actually it is Gorakh Nath who, after taunting Jalindar with the news that his given disciple is dead, frees Gopi Chand so dramatically.

The second round of translation work, still only for Gopi Chand, began in 1987 when, supported by a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at Cornell University, I sat daily at a computer with Nathu's transcription in my lap and typed directly onto the screen a rough and literal English version. I never lifted a dictionary during this stage but worked entirely from my own knowledge of the language and Bhoju's glosses that I had jotted down six years earlier. By late summer 1987 I had a 250-page double-spaced English typescript. The last 80 pages were by far the roughest since they covered the final segment that I had never read through with Bhoju. I think of this as the "reading-for-meaning" phase of my translation. At this point I felt I had a full understanding of the story and wrote several interpretive essays (Gold 1989, 1991).

Convinced, however, that nothing I said about Gopi Chand's story would be fully valid unless I knew Bharthari's as well, I made plans to return to Rajasthan over winter break 1987–88. During that hectic six-week trip I had nothing comparable to the earlier daily routine of eight or nine hours in which I used to sit peacefully reading with Bhoju. I did manage to go over and solve most of the problems encountered in part 4 of Gopi Chand. Although I set the transcription process in motion for Bharthari, I left the village with only twelve pages on paper. Nathu completed the rest after my departure; Bhoju made interlinear notes in red ink and forwarded it to me.

Later still (from June through September 1989) supported by an NEH translation grant, I entered yet another phase, during which I relistened to all the tapes. The tapes made me aware of nuances of meaning totally lost in transcription and helped me to relive interactive dimensions of the performance in which I had participated but which I had forgotten during my subsequent fixation on the story. As Madhu's wonderfully gruff and expressive voice, or his minor-key melodic sarangi riffs filled my ears, and I stared at fiat words on the grey shrunken screen, I despaired over the inadequacy of all translation.

While my ethnographic self retreated, stymied, I became obsessed

with definitions. During these months I compulsively read dictionaries, searching for every word I did not "know"—a category arbitrarily comprising every word for which I was relying solely on Bhoju's glosses—in a series of dictionaries (Rajasthani-Hindi, Hindi-Hindi, Hindi-English as required). I made alphabetical lists with cross-references. Words that I found in none of these references, or whose dictionary definitions did not coincide with Bhoju's, I listed, and every month letters filled with these queries flew back to India. Bhoju often consulted Madhu himself or Madhu's son, Shivji, before responding.

Toward the end of this unpleasant and laborious period, another translator and I were able to bring Bhoju to America. I had the uncanny experience of sitting in my Ithaca office, subzero temperatures outside, with a village voice in my ears. By then my involvement in these stories and the tradition that generated them extended beyond firsthand ethnographic experience; I had read numerous variants from other regions and times and was working out my interpretations. No longer did I passively take dictation from Bhoju; occasionally I found myself arguing with him.

When Gopi Chand's wife reproaches him for becoming a yogi, she says: "Grain-giver, I taste bitter to you, but you think that yogi's just swell. He shoved a loincloth up your ass and put these earrings on you. He pierced your ears and put these great big earrings in them." In the village in 1981 Bhoju told me that the word the queen used for "earring" meant "yogis' earring" because of course that's what she was referring to—the yogis' earrings her husband wore. But the word itself, muraka , refers to a small earring worn by ordinary men. It is not one of the several special words for yogis' earrings, most often called darsai or "divine visions." I thought the queen was being deliberately disrespectful by using this word, as she surely was about the loincloth up the ass—employing a crude term for anus. Bhoju, however, said she was just an ignorant woman who didn't know the right word for yogis' earring.

Later in the scene Gopi Chand calls on his guru for help and threatens that if the guru doesn't come he'll go back to taking care of his kingdom and get rid of his "earrings-and-stuff"—calling them murakyan vurakan —thus further exaggerating the queen's disparaging terminology. The echo-word formation readily implies "earrings and all the rest of this yogic paraphernalia." To me it seems to confirm

Gopi Chand's interpretation of the queen's language, adopted when he is momentarily swept over to her perspective (and I see him as constantly backsliding thus from a yogic to a householder's viewpoint). The bard is quite unlikely to have used the wrong word by accident as he himself wears these "divine visions" and is extremely conscious of their special power. Bhoju was still not convinced.

I relate this dispute because it reveals nicely how much of a translator's problem lodges not so much in words but in contexts. To translate muraka as yogis' earring—even though that is what it refers to—would be simply wrong. But to translate it as "earring" also leaves something out: the fact that it is the wrong word for the type of earring referred to. Any solution to such moments must transact a compromise between fluidity and semantics. As is no doubt too often the case, I resorted here to a footnote where I gave both sides of the argument.

Eventually I arrived at the most challenging and vexing task: to take the repetitive, awkwardly phrased, but reasonably accurate product of all this labor and transform it into something palatable, pleasurable, charming. After all, Madhu's performance was all those things. I no longer feel quite deaf and dumb, but what I have to offer is not exactly brown sugar. My first decision was to use the written word and the printed page traditionally. I respect and admire the groundbreaking efforts of Dennis Tedlock (1983) and Elizabeth Fine (1984) among others, who have tried to develop innovative ways of putting oral performances on paper. Yet I myself find it difficult to enjoy their productions aesthetically. Such devices as uneven type sizes, slanting lines, and coded symbols do provide a far better record of oral performance than plain linear print. But as access to an aesthetic experience, for me at least, they fail. My immediate reaction to uneven type and arcane symbols is an almost automatic blurring or skimming impulse rather than transformed awareness. Whether this is common or idiosyncratic I do not know. In any case, I have taken a different route.

Surrendering music and largely surrendering audience interaction, in a sense I gave up on sustaining an oral mode; readers will have to supply that from my descriptions and their own imaginations. What I tried to reproduce is the rough charm and spontaneous flow of Madhu's speech, without falsely embellishing it. The fourth round was literally countless rounds, for I could not say how many times I went over the English version, rearranging, rewording, and cutting.

Eventually I had to make substantial cuts, by which something is certainly lost, but much is gained for all but the most patient English readers.

I cut in three ways, or at three levels. On the grossest of these, I made the decision —after translating the entire performance — to omit the sung portions except for those that open and close each of the seven parts of the two epics. A few other maverick segments of sung text slipped in because they advance the plot significantly with no spoken explanation covering the same ground. Normally, however, the explanation gives all that was sung and more. The singing does not present beautiful poetry; it lacks rhyme and its meter is strongly subordinated to the sarangi rags . The pleasure in it, I have come to believe, both from discussions with Madhu's audience and from my own experience, is largely musical. But the pleasure of the arthav is intentionally verbal—and is therefore a pleasure much more easily translatable to the printed page.

The second level of cutting involved condensing most of a particular scene when it replicated almost exactly another that was fully translated. Such scenes are limited. The biggest reduction from the original involved the encounter between a begging yogi and a group of slave girls that occurs once in Bharthari and three times in Gopi Chand. Of these four instances, two were substantially condensed as noted within the text. Another highly repetitive moment is the contest between yogis and lady magicians; I gave Gopi Chand's initial encounter fully but condensed whenever possible, and so noted, the subsequent encounters between Charpat Nath, followed by Hada Nath, and their Bengali enemies.

The third level of cutting is the one that makes me as a folklorist most uneasy, but its execution may contribute most to making this text generally accessible. This is the excision of innumerable internal repetitions—repetitions that give the oral performer time to think, that give his audience time to take it all in, but that on the printed page become rapidly tedious. My aim was to retain enough of these to leave the English with a colloquial, oral "flavor," but to remove enough to keep the story moving at an acceptable pace.

Let me give an example, from the opening scene of Gopi Chand. The queen has just told her son to be a yogi, and he is questioning her knowledge of yoga. My translation in this book is as follows:

Then Gopi Chand said, "But mother, you live in purdah inside the palace, and yogis live in the jungle. They do tapas by their campfires in the jungle. But you live in the palace. So, how did you come to know any yogis?"

Madhu Nath's original speech translated word for word goes like this:

Then Gopi Chand said, "Oh, Manavati Mata, you live in purdah inside the palace and a yogi, yogis, they live in the jungle. They live in the jungle performing tapas by their campfires, and you stay in the palace, so how did you come to know yogis? How do you know them? Yogis live in the jungle, in the woods. And you live inside the palace, so how did you get to know them, you?"

I think this example speaks for itself, and it is perfectly typical.

Pottery Lessons

The act of translation is often enough metaphorically maligned, in images that include the translator as executioner, bigamist, and traitor.^[15] Fortunately, more benign images also exist. Perhaps the most pleasing of these, especially to an anthropologist steeped in notions of empathy, is that of the translator as friend, sharer, intimate—evoked by Kelly, who cites Rosecommon's seventeenth-century essay. Kelly writes of a "sharing between friends" that is "not merely informational: friends add to the information they share, a joy in the act of recounting it and a vicarious sharing of each other's experience on terms special to the friendship" (Kelly 1979, 63).

If part of a positive vision of translation is intimacy, another part is craftsmanship. Yet it is just such praiseworthy traits as skill, technique, and knowledge that contribute to the translator's self-image problem. If translation is skill then it is something less than art, a secondary act. Among all the metaphors proposed for translation, one of the most elegant and subtle is that of Walter Benjamin, whose essay "The Task of the Translator" begins with the skilled but artless act of gluing together pot shards but moves rapidly beyond this mundane figure into luminous visions.

[15] For translator as killer see Nabokov cited in Zvelebil 1987, vi; the bigamy image is one among several in Johnson 1985, 143, whose subtle exegesis I do not touch here; traitor is of course from the Latin pun-proverb.

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way, a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

Later in the same paragraph Benjamin continues: "A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully" (1969, 78–79).

Several metaphors are working on several levels here. On the one hand matching the pieces of a broken pot is like the reproduction of meaning in translation; and on the other the original and the translation are themselves both fragments, not wholes. Abandoning the pots with their shapes, Benjamin goes on to speak of covering and translucency. The translation does not cover the original but allows light to shine through—not from it, however, but upon it. There appears to be, in that light, a premise of a reality bigger than both translation and original. When I read Benjamin it reminded me of a broken pot in the Rajasthani bard Madhu Nath's own stories—a pot that can be neither glued together nor replicated.

This pot appears in King Bharthari's tale in the central episode of part 2. Here the yogi Gorakh Nath mourns for his broken clay jug, deliberately mocking King Bharthari's mourning for his cremated queen. The king says the jug is easily replaced, and the yogi retorts that the queen is too. They agree that the yogi will restore Queen Pingala to life if the king replaces the jug. The king commandeers the labor of scores of potters, but the yogi uses his "divine play" (lila ) to spoil the potters' work so they fail to get the original jug's color just right. When cartloads of jugs are delivered by exhausted potters, Gorakh Nath scorns them, holding up his shards of a slightly different color, and demanding once more a jug just like the one that broke:

So King Bharthari grasped his feet and prostrated himself. "Grain-giver, I've done the best I could, good or bad, I've ordered what I could. Now, Grain-giver, that's enough. Good or bad, black or fair, make me a Pingala. Just as I've brought these jugs, black or yellow, so bring her, black or yellow."

Of course, the yogi is able to summon up not one but seven hundred fifty identical queens and the sameness of their faces, clothes, and jewelry are elaborated upon to the audience's considerable wonder. On the surface the point seems to be that yogis are more powerful than kings or potters: without divine power, a king can't even replicate the form and color of a common clay jug; with it a yogi can infinitely multiply the form and color of a human being who has burned to ash.

Gorakh Nath's pottery lesson, however, goes beyond such trumpeting of yogis' magic power. For even perfect reproductions are illusions, if there is no graspable reality in the original. This lack of reality operates on several levels. We do not even know whether any of the seven hundred fifty Pingalas is the real Pingala—since she burned up and all these may just be Gorakh Nath's saktis , enslaved female spirits in Pingala's form. But, even if one of the restored queens is the real one, she is still no better than a whore (as Gorakh Nath makes clear) because no human love endures forever. All of them, perfect copies though they are, are just as false as the cartloads of jugs that do not match the original jug. They represent distractions from higher or calmer realities for which the yogi's unblemished and irreplaceable jug of pure cool water may itself be a sign.

Walter Benjamin's pottery lesson indicates that translating from one language to another might be like the act of matching fragments to rebuild a shattered whole, but that this work is neither perfect reproduction nor an illusory effort doomed to failure. Ultimately, Benjamin's images push our thoughts beyond the translator and his work, to consider the relation between languages, suggesting that a shared human capacity for communication exists beyond particular tongues.

Why do I thus laboriously juxtapose these very different uses of broken-pot images emerging from different cultural discourses and created for different didactic aims? One solid if small reason is that it seems to me auspicious that for both Nath yogis and European literary criticism a broken pot and its reconstruction or replication may become metaphors for the possible and the impossible, indicators of communication between two worlds (whether of French and German poetry, or of yogis and kings, or of Rajasthani peasants and Western readers). One ephemeral but larger reason for this pottery lesson is that both Benjamin's and Gorakh Nath's metaphors point beyond cycles of disintegration and reconstruction to some more stable area of light

or truth. For those of us who spend our days translating texts and cultures, this is encouraging.

Yellow or black, I have tried to make these tales stand up. Lacking yogis' magic along with much other knowledge and skill, I have labored even longer and harder than Bharthari's potters. I can only hope that the imperfect results presented here are, as Benjamin advises, limpid to the light of the original.

Chapter Two
Naths or Jogis in North India

The preceding chapter introduced Madhu Nath, the storyteller, as an individual and located him in the rural society of Rajasthan where he lives, sings, and explains his tales. Here I shall selectively explore some broader contexts of Madhu's knowledge, while continuing to touch base within the corpus of his performed texts. The tales of Gopi Chand and Bharthari as sung and told by Madhu Nath belong to a loosely bounded but nameable tradition whose roots reach back at least to the tenth or twelfth century. I shall speak of this as the Nath tradition, but its adherents or practitioners are often popularly designated Jogi , or in some areas Jugi —vernacular derivatives of yogi .

Throughout this book I use English "yogi" rather than jogi , unless referring to a specific caste in a specific region by its name of record. And I use the terms Nath and yogi interchangeably, except when focusing on the significance of their respective etymologies. Nath teachings and stories flow as one stream within popular Hinduism, contributing to and drawing from several others. The purpose of this chapter is to give readers of Gopi Chand's and Bharthari's tales a sense of these stories' roots, and of the bard's roots, within such broader cultural, historical, and religiohistorical patterns.^[1]

One way of understanding the popular stories of the Naths, including Madhu's tales, is to consider them as didactically motivated representations of renunciation. In these representations both a high

[1] The progression of this chapter very deliberately leads to the tales that are our central focus. Others have written about Naths themselves as a focal topic; those seeking a fuller and more "disinterested" treatment are referred to them: Briggs 1973; Dvivedi 1981, n.d.; Mahapatra 1972, 75–96; Pandey 1980.

evaluation of world-renunciation and an appreciation of the sacrifices entailed by acting on that evaluation are transmitted for the edification and entertainment of householders.^[2] The stories provide an interface between two distinguishable although intricately linked social and religious universes.

In thus formulating as separable but interwoven the lifestyles and worldviews of householders and yogi ascetics, I do not intend to address directly the big issues of "man-in-the-world" versus "world-renouncer" in pan-Indian thought. These issues have been elegantly if misleadingly formulated by Louis Dumont and worried over by many others including myself.^[3] Although the following discussion may shed some light on those vexed matters, my focus is on a smaller-scale but still complex contrast. This is the contrast between householder or grihasthi Naths who form hereditary castes ( jatis ), and renunciatory or naga Naths—using naga here in its unmarked sense of celibate member of a Nath sect.^[4] It seems no accident that it is frequently grihasthi Naths who purvey—not only to their own communities but to society at large—the stories of Gopi Chand and Bharthari, in which the central figures are, or become, naga Naths.

I begin by considering the term Nath as it is applied to renouncer members of a sampraday or religious sect.^[5] In this context the category

[2] For an interpretive approach to these issues, see the afterword. See also Gold and Gold 1984.

[3] For Dumont's formulation see Dumont 1970; for some reflections on, reactions to, and conflicts with Dumont see, for example, Bradford 1985; Burghart 1983a, 1983b; Das 1977; Gold 1988, 3–4; Madan ed. 1981.

[4] Meaning four under the masculine noun nagau in the RSK is nath sampraday ka vah vyakti jo vivah nahin karta hai "a member of the Nath sect who does not marry." During interviews in the winter of 1987–88 I heard both Rajasthani renouncer and householder interviewees regularly employ naga in opposition to giihasthi . Used thus, naga does not refer to the particular sect of Shaivite renouncers who go naked (the primary adjectival meaning of naga ) or to the "fighting nagas "—famous battalions of these unclothed ascetics, whose participation in local military struggles is recorded in Rajasthan and elsewhere.

[5] Some scholars argue that "sect" may not appropriately translate Hindi/Sanskrit sampraday . Barz, following Wach, shows etymologically that sampraday refers positively to a "vehicle for transmission of doctrine" whereas "sect" has negative implications of a splinter group. However, sampraday also suggests a "refuge" from the ordinary world, as sect may; Barz continues to use it (Barz 1976, 39–40). More recently, van der Veer prefers "order" or "monastic order" to sect because the "church-sect dichotomy" is so alien to Hinduism (van der Veer 1988, 66–71). Like Barz, I find it convenient to use "sect" here; like van der Veer, I warn against a false jump to Christian parallels.

"Nath" is a rubric that may cover any number of loosely organized associations of Shaivite renouncers, sharing certain orientations and practices.^[6] BeSides referring to a sectarian identity, the term Nath evokes a particular set of ideas concerning the merged physical and spiritual perfection possible for humans, and how to achieve it. And, not the least important in relation to our tales, Naths are strongly associated in popular thought with certain visible emblems, appurtenances, and behaviors.

I turn then to the phenomenon of householder Naths: castes whose group identity is rooted in renunciation. Such is Madhu Nath's birth group ( jati ), and it is not unique. Similar castes are present throughout India and Nepal.^[7] The distinction between Nath as sect or path and Nath as caste is pronounced and critical in indigenous accounts. However, as will soon become apparent, it is also imprecise, plastic, and subject to collapse at several levels.

Nath Renunciatory Traditions in Story and History

Nath may be simply defined as "master" and the Naths as "'Masters' (of yogic powers)" (Vaudeville 1974, 85). Other sources report various complex etymologies deriving from possible syllabic deconstructions of the word nath , producing meanings such as "form of bliss established in three worlds" or "he who removes ignorance of Brahm and is absorbed in truth-consciousness-bliss" (Lalas 1962–78).^[8] A yogi is an adept, a practitioner of yoga—deriving from a Sanskrit root meaning "yoke," carrying implications of self-discipline as well as union. Yoga

[6] Classifications and descriptions of various and variously organized groups of Nath renouncers are available elsewhere (Briggs 1973; Dvivedi 1981; Oman 1905, 168–86; Sinha and Saraswati 1978, 113–14; Tripathi 1978, 71–74); Nath traditions, rather than monastic organization, are my focus here.

[7] For two interesting examples see Bradford 1985, a discussion of how the South Indian Lingayat caste maintains its renouncer identity through historical and social changes; and Bouillier 1979, an ethnographic study of a renouncer caste in Nepal. On relatively recent fieldwork with other North Indian Jogi performers see Champion 1989; Henry 1988; Lapoint 1978. That a number of Jogi groups are nominally Muslim is a phenomenon well worth investigating, but I lack data and space to do it justice here.

[8] For other definitions and etymologies of Nath see also Dvivedi 1981, 3; Singh 1937, 1; Upadhyay 1976, 1–6.

is one of the six darsanas or major classical philosophical systems known in Indian thought.^[9] But in relation to Nath traditions it refers particularly to various physical and meditative techniques for selfrealization. ^[10]

Most scholars treat the terms Nath and yogi as interchangeable when dealing with the sect and its teachings (for example Vaudeville 1974, 85–86).^[11] Many, for the sake of clarity, settle upon one or the other to use when speaking of that tradition.^[12] The terms Nath and yogi are far from exhausting the descriptive designations applied to Naths. Briggs discusses "Gorakhnathi," "Darsani," "Kanphata," and "Natha"—all categorizations with identical or overlapping references that at times designate members of the sect(s) with which he is concerned (Briggs 1973, 1 2). Whereas the first in the series refers to the founding guru, the second two highlight the most visible and distinctive emblem of the group—their large earrings (darsani ) worn in split ears—the descriptive meaning of kanphata .^[13]

The origins of Nathism dissolve in the mists of a presumed selective merging of Buddhist and Hindu tantra, Shaivite asceticism, and yoga philosophy and practice that took place somewhere in the tenth or eleventh century (Briggs 1973; Ghurye 1964; Schomer 1987). A shadowy but imposing figure looming in those mists is Gorakh Nath—who probably lived but whose biography is totally overlaid with myth and magic.^[14] Although some locate Gorakh's birthplace in northwestern India (Sen 1954,74; Singh 1937, 22) and his lore certainly flourished in Punjab, merging with indigenous tales much as it has done in Rajasthan, most cultural historians agree that the real Gorakh came from the east. Briggs, who mustered most of the sources available in his time in admirably systematic fashion, concludes that "Gorakhnath lived not later than A.D. 1200, probably early in the 11th

[9] Sources for yoga as philosophy include Dasgupta 1924, 1974; Woods 1972; Raju 1985, 336–76.

[10] See Eliade 1973; Varenne 1976; Sinh 1975.

[11] Yogi, of course, may and often does have myriad associations unconnected with Naths.

[12] Ghurye uses "jogi" (Ghurye 1964, 114–40) and Oman "yogi" (Oman 1905, 168); Dasgupta prefers Nath (Dasgupta 1969, 191–210).

[13] I follow Dvivedi 1981 and Sundardas 1965 in spelling the sect name; others use kaphata (Briggs 1973) or kanphata (Ghurye 1964).

[14] For a full hagiography of Gorakh Nath (also Gorakhnath; Goraksanath) in simple Hindi see Gautam 1986; see also Briggs 1973, 179–207; Dikshit n.d.; Pandey 1980; Sen 1960, 42–54.

century, and that he came originally from Eastern Bengal" (Briggs 1973, 250; see also Dvivedi 1981, 96–97).

Sukumar Sen characterizes the Nath cult as "an esoteric yoga cult based on austere self-negation and complete control over the vital, mental and emotional functions" (Sen 196O,42). But as Nath teachings spread within popular Hinduism, both their content and mode of transmission changed. From secret instructions imparted by guru adept to select disciple, Nath ideas passed into folklore. There, these teachings are strongly associated with the "perfection of the body" (kaya siddhi ) and the quest for immortality (Eliade 1973; Maheshwari 1980, 101).^[15]

There exist numerous and conflicting stories of the origins and guru-disciple lineages of the early Nath gurus. One popular version with which Madhu Nath's tales coincide is that Gorakh was a disciple of Machhindar Nath who obtained his knowledge directly from Shiva (known as the Adi-Nath or original Nath), although he did it by trickery.^[16] This association of the founding Nath guru with a wily coopting of divine power fits well with the general character of most Nath gurus in popular lore. In part 4 of Madhu Nath's Gopi Chand we see Gorakh playing all kinds of tricks on his own guru, Machhindar himself. Although he acts thus for the guru's good, such behavior nonetheless runs counter to ordinary Hindu piety that prescribes nothing but diligent obedience in the disciple role. Most striking of all in the Gopi Chand tale, Gopi Chand and Bharthari obtain immortality only through Gorakh's devious tricking of Gopi Chand's angry guru Jalindar.^[17]

There exist texts, including technical manuals of esoteric yogic practice in Sanskrit and the vernaculars, whose authorship is attributed to Gorakh Nath himself, and to others closely associated with his teachings.^[18] The connection between Gorakh the folk trickster

[15] Some expounders of Nathism as philosophy explicitly bar such vulgar physical aspirations (Singh 1937, 28).

[16] For summary versions of the story of Machhindar Nath (also Macchendranath, Minanath; Matsyendranath) see Bhattacharyya 1982, 285; Mahapatra 1972, 82–83; Sen 1960, 43–44.

[17] Jalandhar.

[18] For extensive catalogs and discussions of literary works attributed to Gorakh Nath and his disciples see Briggs 1973, 251–57; Singh 1937, 35–39; Upadhyay 1976, 134–79. An English translation of one important text is Sinh 1975. For the Goraksa Samhita in Sanskrit verse with a simple Hindi explanation see Gautam 1974.

hero and Gorakh the author of esoteric yoga manuals may seem slim but has relevance for an understanding of the folk traditions. The popular reputation of Nath yogis is of persons who have benefited, mysteriously but enormously, from their secret knowledge of just such techniques. If the epic texts presented in this volume make little or no reference to specific techniques, they nevertheless assume their results: magical powers and physical immortality.

Madhu's texts posit some crude but handy stereotypes for what a yogi is and does. These tales reveal two kinds of yogis: the powerful, well-known few and the powerless, nameless many. Thus, the yogis' world can seem as hierarchical as that of householders, with rank based not on birth or wealth but on ascetic prowess. Ordinary yogis, if they are described at all, are often portrayed in most unflattering ways (Gopi Chand parts 1 and 3). A polite way for a householder to greet a yogi is to tell him he doesn't look like just any old yogi.

What all yogis have in common is a lifestyle outside the domestic and social realms of marriage, work, and caste and a dedication to meditation or divine recitation. Thus all yogis sit by a campfire (dhuni )—understood as an ascetic act in a tropical climate—with lowered eyelids (palak lagaya ) and repeat divine names (samaran ). When ordered by the guru to do so, they go into villages, towns, or castles and beg for alms (bhiksa mangna ). The powerful among them—Jalindar, Machhindar, Gorakh, Kanni Pavji,^[19] Charpat, and Hada, whose names and characters (except for Hada) are part of wider Nath traditions—possess the capacity to perform miracles. They can bring the dead to life and turn rocks to precious metals. Madhu's audience loves it when Charpat Nath whacks a stone with his tongs and it glitters as pure gold, or when Jalindar casually restores flesh and breath to a crumbling heap of bones.

An obvious cause-and-effect relation exists between the lifestyle and miraculous capacities of yogis. The primary conditions for, if not the sole sources of, yogis' miraculous powers are their ascetic practices or ardor (lapas ), often simply construed as unbroken meditation by the campfire. The ability to pursue such activity singlemindedly is in turn grounded in detachment from the worldly snares of women and wealth. If the hundreds of nameless, faceless, sheeplike disciples have not attained such powers, the tale suggests—if only obliquely—that

[19] Kanhupa, Krisnapad, or Kanpha.

it is because they have not fully overcome the physical and mental snares that bind mortals to an illusory world.

In physical appearance the yogis of Madhu Nath's tales look very much like members of the Nath sect described in earlier ethnological accounts (Ghurye 1964, 134; Risley 1891; Rose 1914). Their emblems of identity include a begging bowl (khappar ), a deer-horn instrument (singi nad ), a "sacred thread" made of black wool (seli ), iron tongs (chimta ), wooden sandals (pavari ), a body smeared with sacred ash (bhabhut ), and thick crystal earrings (darsani; mudra ). The earrings are especially important. For Naths, full initiation is marked by cutting the disciple's ears, and this cut is said to allow a yogi to bring his senses under control.^[20]

Less frequently referred to in the tales is the one emblem that the present-day Nath caste in Rajasthan retains, although only in the token form of their turbans: the wearing of ochre-colored cloth, called bhagva . Reference to yogis as wearers of bhagva occurs only in part 4 of Gopi Chand, when Gorakh Nath is prohibited from entering Machhindar Nath's kingdom because the roads are closed to all those clothed in ochre. Unlike the deer-horn instrument, which figures in almost every mention of a yogi's appearance, ochre robes are of course worn by many non-Nath renouncers, which might account for their relative neglect in the texts.

None of the yogis in Madhu's tales, including the gurus, are particularly well spoken; indeed they curse more freely than any other characters in the epic. They never attempt to impart wisdom or enlightenment through reasoned or impassioned words; rather their language is blunt, direct, and action-oriented. They give abrupt commands, and recalcitrance is met with shocking demonstrations of miraculous power. Beyond miraculous power, yogis also assert and exercise brute physical strength. When Jalindar's superiority in hurling spells is challenged by the lady magicians of Bengal, he rouses his cowardly disciples by proclaiming, "Well, sister-fuckers, if you can't win with magic and spells, then use your tongs, give those sluts your tongs, beat them." And indeed, more than once in the tales an angry

[20] Not all Nath renouncers wear darsani . The term aughar —although it has a number of general meanings evoking such qualities as "lazy," and "carefree"—refers to a Nath yogi whose ears are not split. Briggs understands this as a "first stage" (1973, 27), but it can also refer to particular sects whose practices are less "restrained" and closer to Tantric.

yogi wields his tongs—worshiped symbol of ascetic practice by the campfire—as a club. Beyond that, all the yogis like to smoke hashish and eat sweets. And even the greatest of the gurus are not above quarrelling with, competing with, and deceiving one another.

Clearly, Madhu Nath's tales of Nath yogis do not teach their audiences any practical or spiritual disciplines. Nor do they focus on relationships between human beings and God. Although Madhu Nath invariably utters a fervent "Shiv! Gorakh!" or "Victory to Mahadev!" at the close of each sung portion of his performance, thus framing it in devotion, references to divine grace and religious emotions are scant within the stories. Yet like the framing prayers, presuppositions of spiritual discipline, human-divine relationships, devotional feelings, and grace form the backdrop before which audience members see and evaluate the yogis' actions. This evaluation is clearly based on moral standards different from those appropriate to householders—or perhaps more accurately, on a clearly defined but unresolved tension between householders' dharma and renouncers' paths.^[21]

Teachings of yoga philosophy and techniques, attributed to Gorakh Nath and his followers, are not of immediate relevance in understanding Nath folk epics. On the level of allegory, popular Nath stories may indeed contain some mystic messages. For example, the unusual name of Bharthari's queen, Pingala, suggests an association with yogic physiology where the subtle channel called Pingala represents the right side, the sun, and violent action.^[22] Such an association, however, never surfaces in Madhu's explanations or in any villagers' reception of the tales, to the extent that I have investigated these.^[23]

The stream of Hindu thought most strongly and consciously associated with Nath teachings in rural Rajasthan is not esoteric yoga but nirgun bhakti or devotion to a God perceived as "without qualities." Nirgun bhakti is important to village religion, and one of the sects that promotes it is led by Naths (Gold 1988). The diffusion of Nath yogis and their lore antedates by several centuries the emergence of nirgun bhakti as preached and sung by medieval poet-saints called sants .

[21] I discuss this irresolution more fully in the afterword.

[22] David White (personal communication 1990) suggests that Gopi Chand's many women and his struggles to come to terms with them may have to do with the "awakening, taming and sublimation of the female energy within the yogic body."

[23] Members of Nath bhajan parties and their listeners will, by contrast, readily discuss esoteric, mystical, or subtle interpretations of the language of hymns.

Because of this chronology, 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 external trappings and postures of Naths were denigrated by Sant poets, who found them as false as any other exterior forms of religion.^[24] Most scholars of medieval Hindi literature acknowledge, however, that early Sant poets such as Kabir were conversant with Nath teachings, and that Nath esoteric imagery is important in Sant poetry (Barthwal 1978; Gold 1987; Schomer 1987; Vaudeville 1974, 88–89). Barthwal cites a respectful reference to Gopi Chand and Bharthari in Kabir's verses (Barthwal 1978, 141).

In the village where I recorded Madhu's tale, the situation is curiously reversed. Rather than an active Sant tradition retaining traces of Nath influence, in Ghatiyali the Naths as caste, as leaders of a local sect, and as members of loosely organized hymn-singing groups, seem to have appropriated and become the purveyors of a somewhat altered Sant tradition. Their "bhajan parties" have an extensive repertoire of hymns including many with the signature of Kabir; others are stamped by Gorakh and Machhindar. Sometimes, the same bhajan will bear on different occasions either a Sant or a Nath signature, probably depending on the orientation of the lead singer. Madhu, living as he did in another village, was not often a participant in the nirgun bhajan sessions in Ghatiyali. However, several times during his Gopi Chand performance he presented interludes of nirgun bhajans . Clearly he felt his repertoire of Nath tales and Sant compositions to be unitary.

But Nath and Sant traditions can seem profoundly different. Sants teach surrender to divine grace; Naths, although they invoke Shiva as the original Nath and first guru, stress not devotional feeling but austere practice and a transformation of the physical being. The quest for bodily immortality with which popular Nathism is strongly associated would appear to be a very different enterprise from the spiritual development fostered by the Sants. Yet in village traditions Nath and

[24] See for example Kabir's poem translated by Hess and Singh, that begins "How will you cross, Nath, how will you cross, so full of crookedness?" (Hess and Singh 1983, 76). Centuries earlier than Kabir, the South Indian poet-saint Allama is said to have demonstrated to Gorakh Nath the superiority of his inner devotion to the yogi's "solid diamond-body" (Ramanujan 1973, 146–47; thanks to David White for reminding me of this example).

Sant teachings blend together, are referred to loosely as nirgun bhakti , and are taught by Nath gurus.

Several significant cosmological and practical elements common to the two traditions help explain their close merging in popular thought. Foremost among these would be the concept of divinity as formless and indescribable (niranjan; nirakar; alakh ), and the idea that only a guru can help human beings to realize their identity with that unknowable divinity. The reliance on a guru is greatly stressed in Nath nirgun hymns, where the "true guru within" may be invoked as in Sant poetry. Reliance on and submission to an external guru inform the plot structure of both of Madhu Nath's tales. The single element of practice stressed in the epic tales, that of samaran or divine recitation, is also an important part of the meditative practice that Sant poets taught and followed.

Madhu Nath and participants in his sect identify themselves simultaneously as worshipers of Shiva and followers of nirgun bhakti . They do not see these two persuasions as incompatible. And indeed, Naths' worship is iconographically and mythologically unelaborated, in keeping with nirgun ideas. Shiva does appear as a minor character in both Bharthari's and Gopi Chand's epics, but he appears as a yogi, or just another guru, a step higher up in the power hierarchy and chain of command from Gorakh or Jalindar Nath, and lower than an unnamed bhagvan —the Lord.^[25]

Both Nath and Sant traditions disdain social norms and caste ranking, at least in relation to God.^[26] Gorakh, like most of the early Sant poets, is said to have come from a low level of society.^[27] However, teachings of human equality are notably absent from village Nath lore. Village society in the 1980s was still caste-ruled in many respects, and radical messages, publicly proclaimed, would probably not have been welcomed. Although Bengali traditions explicitly identify Gopi Chand's guru as a sweeper, Rajasthani versions give no indication

[25] The third long tale in Madhu's repertoire, "The Wedding Song of Lord Shiva," is almost solely concerned with deities in mythic time. This tale is not usually included in general Nath traditions, but many versions figure in Shaivite mythology (O'Flaherty 1973). When speaking of or invoking Shiva, Madhu Nath often calls him Lord Shankar; less frequently he says Mahadev or Bhola Nath.

[26] For examples see Gokhale-Turner 1981; Zelliot 1981.

[27] See Singh 1937, 23–24. The pervasive legend that Gorakh was born from a pile of cow dung testifies, some suggest, to humble origins.

that Jalindar is an untouchable. Yet a secret cult (of which I have no evidence beyond much gossip from many sources) with which Naths were often associated was said to feature as its central rite intercaste eating from a single pot. That this significant defiance of hierarchical codes should be elevated to powerful but hidden ritual speaks both for its importance to Nath belief and its untenability in the public domain of ordinary village life.

The influence of Nath sects on community life in Rajasthan has varied greatly over time and space. But it does not seem ever to have been a radical one, in the sense of undermining the socioeconomic status quo. However, the history of the Nath sect in Rajasthan is not divorced from political events. Indeed, in Rajasthan as elsewhere in India, historical research uncovers more and more political and economic roles played by supposedly otherworldly monks and yogis.28 Madhu Nath's texts propose that kings may be influenced by yogis, and such has certainly been the case at times.

Stemming from their reputed powers as religious adepts, miracle workers, and gurus but obviously supported also by a skillful command of statecraft and diplomacy, some members of the Nath sect have acquired considerable influence over ruling families and have been directly involved in affairs of state. The most notorious instance of Naths' political activities in Rajasthan unfolded during the rule of Raja Man Singh of Jodhpur.

Man Singh, the Maharaja of Marwar in western Rajasthan from 1803 to 1842, initially obtained the Jodhpur throne with the powerful aid of the yogi Ayas Dev Nath. Whether this aid was effected by prayer or by poison is unclear. Whatever the case may be, Man Singh's grateful resolve was to "rule Marwar strictly in accordance with the advice of the Naths" (Sharma 1972, 155). During Man Singh's reign, members of the Nath sect acquired unprecedented wealth and power in his kingdom, and their numbers swelled (1972, 177). That some at times abused their privileged position, indulging in luxury and sensuality, is history. The story of how the British attempted to diminish Nath influence in Jodhpur, even as the Maharaja's own behavior

[28] Historical studies discuss worldly parts played by many renouncer sects, including Naths; these include active participations in trade, politics, and diplomacy as well as military ventures (Bayly 1983, 183–85; Ghosh 1930; Sarkar n.d.; Singh 1937, 23–24).

became more yogi-like, is not the tale I have to tell here.^[29] Yet Man Singh's case demonstrates that the gap between story and history is not so great as it may appear to Western readers of Madhu Nath's tales.

The last few lines of Madhu's performance of Gopi Chand include some auspicious predictions for the followers of Jalindar Nath (as opposed to those of Kanni Pavji who have been degraded to nomadic snake-charmers). One of these predictions is: "When armies die then we make the king a disciple and bring his army back to life. We bring it back to life, and make the king a disciple." The history of Man Singh's Jodhpur demonstrates that yogis have indeed at times swayed the beliefs and actions of kings, and when the tale-teller boasts of his sect's potential temporal influence he is not just spinning fantasies.

But let us beware of reading either story or history one-sidedly. Another lesson from Man Singh's reign is that yogis are susceptible to corruption, and this could serve as a cautionary tale about the alluring world of illusion to which yogis are not immune (the theme occurs too in Gopi Chand part 4). With the accumulation of wealth and property come worries over inheritance—increasing the temptation to abandon celibacy, beget a lineage, and return, even if only partially, to a householder's existence.^[30]

Horace Rose complains in his discussion of Jogi divisions and subdivisions (in an ethnographic survey of Punjab and the northwestern provinces compiled at the end of the nineteenth century) that "Though professing Jogis are forbidden to marry, many of them do so, and it is impossible to disentangle the jogis who abandon celibacy from those who do not profess it at all and form a caste" (Rose 1914, 410). Rose, as a surveyor who must produce a neat alphabetically organized glossary of castes within his appointed region, is evidently peevish over these blurred categories. But his failure to "disentangle" yogis who form a caste from renouncers who have abandoned celibacy highlights one of the perpetually shifting boundaries between householding and renunciation.

[29] At one point a British officer, Ludlow, observed that "the Maharaja would have passed anywhere for a 'religious mendicant'" (Singh 1973, 82–83). See D. Gold 1992 for a full discussion of this revealing drama of cultural confrontations.

[30] For processes of "sedentarization" among Ramanandi monks of Ayodhya see van der Veer 1988, 126–30.

Nath Fatis

Naga Naths as renouncers are celibate ascetics whose traditions must be passed on through recruitment and guru-disciple transmission. Theoretically, such associations have nothing to do with jati , or birth-given caste status, but only with separate human beings' decisions to follow a particular path to divinity. In considering the distinction between householder and renouncer, however, it should also be kept in mind, as recent studies by Burghart and van der Veer have amply demonstrated, that there are many kinds of renouncers, many degrees of asceticism, and many transitions, both gross and subtle, between those degrees (Burghart 1983a, 1983b; van der Veer 1988). For example, it is not unusual for a renouncer to keep a mistress and subsequently appoint his natural child by her to be his chief disciple and successor.^[31] How did castes of married yogis come to exist? "Abandonment of celibacy" is certainly one common explanation.^[32]

Renouncer Naths, who may regard householder groups with a certain amount of disdain, tend to formulate the transformation explicitly as a process of degradation. Householder Naths are fallen ascetics whose ancestors could not resist the blandishments of women and domestic life. As one renouncer with whom we spoke expressed it, "Householder life is like honey, it attracts flies."

Risley provides several origin stories of Jugi castes in Bengal, all of which reinforce the proposition that these groups were engendered by a fall from ascetic perfection. In these stories the fall is attributed to seduction of the yogis by irresistible females. In one instance the caste is the product of the union of former ascetics with widows of the merchant caste; in another yoginis (female yogis) tempt siddhas (perfected male yogis) and their intercourse results in the ancestors of the caste (Risley 1891, 355–58).

Gorakh Nath is, according to Bengali legend, the only one of five original Naths to resist the attractiveness of women and all that they

[31] Komal Kothari reports groups of householder Naths in western Rajasthan who call their children chelas or "disciples" —a nice twist on the kinship metaphor that dominates the nongenetic guru-disciple relationship (personal communication 1988).

[32] See, however, Vaudeville who argues that "married"Jogis are not necessarily fallen ascetics because Nathism itself is "a kind of anti-Brahmanical, half-Buddhistic creed" (Vaudeville 1974, 87), by which she implies, as did many householder Naths, that asceticism is no prerequisite for the spiritual achievements to which Naths aspire.

represent and offer (Sen 1960, 45). As we have already noted, in Madhu's tales, Gorakh's own guru, Machhindar Nath, becomes a not-so-unwilling "victim" of Bengali queens—an episode appearing in most Nath traditions and popularized in theater and romantic literature. It is only with great difficulty that Gorakh is able to pry Machhindar away from his householder's life. Of course, mythological explanations that shift the blame from male weakness to female allure offer a rationalization that may appeal to the male bards who usually perform and transmit caste origin stories.

The ancient Hindu pilgrimage center of Pushkar, located in Ajmer district, Rajasthan, has thousands of temples, many of which are associated with a particular caste and provide guestrooms and priestly services for pilgrims of that caste. Here, the Nath sampraday and the Nath jati have separate accommodations. Renouncers do not patronize the householders' temple, nor do householders normally visit the renouncers' location. In January 1988, just following our extensive conversations with Naths from many villages who had assembled in Ghatiyali for the three-day funeral feast in December, Daniel Gold and I interviewed householders and renouncers, resident priests and wayfarers at both these Pushkar temples. We also visited a retreat of naga Naths on the outskirts of Pushkar.^[33]

Despite the preliminary nature of this round of fieldwork, we were able to note certain consistent patterns in responses to our inquiries about the differences between grihasthi and naga Naths. Naga Naths often vehemently expressed a conviction that there existed a world of difference between them and grihasthi Naths. One of them formulated this distinction in a terse but illuminating fashion. He said that for him and his fellow renouncers everything is interior and "hidden" or "secret" (gupt ) whereas householders need external props. "Renouncers don't have to sing hymns or hold knowledge talks," he asserted. "They can just be mast (carefree, intoxicated): eat, drink, sleep." This is consistent with the impression given in Madhu Nath's tales that being an ordinary (non-miracle-working) yogi doesn't call for any particular aptitude.

Folklore and classical satire on renouncers often judge their exter-

[33] On this trip our time was limited. We considered these interviews preliminaries to a future depth study of Rajasthani Naths but learned a lot from the many persons who kindly agreed to talk with us.

nal trappings (ashes, beads, muttered prayers, and so forth) to be the hollow insignia of professional hypocrites. According to ascetics, however, householders are the ones whose religious postures belie their worldly concerns. Ascetics insisted that householders must perpetually, and by and large futilely, struggle to control their bodies and minds in order to draw their attention away from the ever-pressing and seductive concerns of the world of flux. Renouncers have none of these concerns and thus relax.

Householder Naths expressed their own strong convictions that living in the world offers no impediment to spiritual achievement. One of them, for example, told me that there is absolutely no difference between death rites for married members of the Nath caste and naga Naths.^[34] He claimed that the use of "Gayatri mantras" at these rites—powerful spells known to sect gurus—ensures the highest Hindu aim of liberation (moksa ) and that one's worldly condition, whether householder or renouncer, is of no account.^[35]

That this speaker took death rites as the critical conjunction of renouncers and householders is no accident. Their death rites are the most distinctive feature of the Nath caste, setting them apart from other Hindu villagers.^[36] Naths bury their dead near their homes, rather than cremating them outside the village as is the custom for other Hindu castes. Moreover, the place of burial, although unmarked by more than a pile of stones, is referred to as a samadhi —a term usually reserved for monuments memorializing the final resting place of powerful world-renouncers.

Madhu's caste calls itself Nath, and all its members take the surname Nath, while other villagers use Nath as a term of reference for them. In the tales of Gopi Chand and Bharthari, however, although Nath occurs as a surname for renouncers, it is used less often as a general term of address or reference for people. Rather jogi and the inter-

[34] Sandra King Mulholland who has done extensive fieldwork among Nath ascetics in Uttar Pradesh comments that "not all ascetic Naths indulge" in spells and rituals (personal communication 1990).

[35] The Gayatri mantras spoken of by members of the Nath caste and sect are a set of powerful secret spells used particularly in death rituals. They should not be confused with the Sanskrit prayer recited each day by orthodox Brahmans. According to the householder Naths we interviewed in Ghatiyali, there are twenty-four Gayatri mantras and someone who knew them all could bring the dead to life; but no one today possesses that knowledge.

[36] See Gold 1988, 99–105, for more about Nath death ceremonies.

6. Ogar Nathji, a naga Nath and Madhu Nath's paternal cousin, at the grave site (samadhi )
of Nathu's mother during her funeral rites.

changeable jogi are constantly employed. When "Nath" is used to address an ordinary yogi it occurs significantly in situations of exaggerated politeness—those in which the addresser compliments the yogi as appearing "princely" and "established." Besides being used as a surname, Nath sometimes occurs in the texts in reference to Lord Shiva, the "true Nath."

Pre-independence census data and various ethnographic surveys usually do not present Nath as a caste name. Nineteenth-century British sources report castes called Jogi (or Jugi) in Bengal (Risley 1891), Rajputana (Census of India 1921), and the Punjab and NorthWest Frontier Province (Rose 1914). A Hindi census from Rajasthan, however, lists Naths as one of six subgroups under the broader heading of Jogis (Marwar Census n.d.). Commonplace throughout Indian history is the manipulation of status by castes through name changes, among other strategies. Several of the nineteenth-century sources attribute low rank and bad reputation to Jogis (Risley 1891; Rose 1914). In general, their image appears to be strongly associated with wandering minstrel-beggars, fallen ascetics, or low-status weavers. The term Nath clearly carries fewer of these pejorative associations. It is understandably preferred by the present-day Naths of Rajasthan, many of whom are prosperous farmers and serve as Brahman-like priests in temples patronized by clean castes. The current preference for Nath as a caste name in Rajasthan, then, represents a move toward greater respectability consonant with an improved economic condition.

If today's Rajasthani Naths are dissociating themselves from the negative images of begging jogis , they are in no way interested in unlinking their identity from the powerful yogi gurus whom they accept as founding ancestors. Madhu and all of his caste fellows with whom I spoke have a clear pride in this special identity, one explicitly emerging from the same roots as the Nath sect, although now distinct from it. Moreover, the traditional part Naths play in village society is based on their credentials as spell-wielding magicians—credentials rooted in their descent from yogis.

According to people with whom we talked (I cannot document this), several hundred years ago local thakurs or landlord-rulers invited families of Naths to live in their villages and gave them land grants in exchange for their magical services. Naths possess verbal spells to avert plagues of locusts and hailstones whenever they might threaten the village crops. As this power was explained to me, it consisted not in

making these plagues disappear but in sending them down the road a way. Therefore, it is not surprising that any village ruler who could afford the land grant might be interested in having a family or two of Naths settle within his dominion.

The text of Gopi Chand contains, as we shall see, the "mythic charter" for Naths' power over locusts and their right to eat well as a result of this power. Gorakh Nath commands seven species of locusts to obey yogis of both sexes: "Brothers, when yogis tell you go, then go. And maintain the honor of robe-wearers. Help them to earn their livings.... And keep their stomachs full of bread." By the 1980s when I first met them, Ghatiyali's Naths were lamenting the loss of their status as locust-removers owing to the government's successful use of pesticides to eradicate this perpetual agricultural hazard, Yet, some Naths still claim a power over hailstones and drought, and several Nath women whom I knew possessed effective spells to remove the pain and ill effects of scorpion stings.^[37] Moreover, in Ghatiyali Naths are hereditary priests at two of the three shrines most closely associated with the physical well-being of the village and its livestock (Gold 1988, 44–58). It is still in their interests to maintain their special identity even though they now derive most of their income from agriculture. Many are educating at least one of their sons for white-collar professions, and whether the part of resident magicians will continue to appeal to them remains to be seen.

It should by now be evident that, although the Nath jati and the Nath sect have separate temples and their members may express strong opinions concerning their nonidentification with one another, in other ways they are closely associated, and at times they merge. Members of the Nath caste often become householder initiates into sects led by Nath renouncers, and participate in sect rituals, although these may be performed under the direction of a renouncer-guru. Such participation can be a powerful force in the lives of householders. One way the Nath sect recruits members is through the offering of children by devotees who have received favor, and householder Naths are perhaps more disposed than other castes to offer their children up in this fashion to become Nath renouncers. In Madhu's case (chapter 1)

[37] The efficacy of these spells is not simply in their words but must be cultivated by the person who wields them through an initial period of constant repetition accompanied by ascetic self-discipline.

we see another intersection: a young member of the Nath caste is given an initiation appropriate to a renouncer yet continues on a householder's life course.

Although caste origin myths and the comments of many living renouncers explicitly posit human frailty and moral debasement at the root of householder Naths' existence, the Nath jati 's lore that comprises this book sympathizes intensely with those attracted to worldly life.^[38] Moreover, it perpetually vacillates in its evaluation of that attractiveness, which derives from much more than simple animal sexuality. Domestic love, and the ever powerful Hindu ideal of continuity in the male line, are values that the Nath caste's lore treats with respect. Pingala's lament, acknowledged as one of the most powerful scenes in King Bharthari's tale, has a moral force not easily refuted.

The teachings of the Nath sect are best known not through religious texts but through their stories. And purveyors of those stories, all over India, are often members of Nath or yogi castes. What makes this lore distinctive is that it is about renouncers but plays largely to householders. Thus the continuities established in the preceding discussion of sect and caste will continue to inform our investigation of Nath oral traditions.

[38] Who first told the stories of Nath yogis to whom is a tantalizing but unanswerable question. A cross-referencing of householders' and renouncers' values is, I believe, at the core of these traditions.

Chapter Three
Naths in Folklore and the Folklore of the Naths

The figure of the ascetic or world-renouncer is a remarkably pervasive and persistent one in Indian literature, spanning regions, languages, centuries, and genres. Wandering holy men — whether genuine selfless saints, pompous and self-important platitude-spouting preachers, or fraudulent self-serving rascals — are stock figures in classical Sanskrit theater, simple vernacular tales, and oral epics. Moreover, modern Indian fiction shows a remarkable fascination with such characters and often skillfully probes the psychological ambiguities and individual quirks that may underlie unkempt hair and ochre robes.^[1]

Among the large numbers of ascetics in narrative literature, Nath yogis comprise a minor subcategory. At first glance, Naths are exemplary of a certain fairly homogeneous type: the master of showy "supernatural" powers. If these powers are accepted as genuine, then the yogi is an awesome and godlike being with control over the phenomenal world. If they are shown as pretense, then the yogi is pure sham and his otherworldly scorn for convention is readily construed as a perfect orgy of self-indulgence.^[2]

[1] The many fictions involving renouncers include Ganguli 1967; Markandaya 1960, 1963; Narayan 1980. For an illuminating discussion of other fictional accounts see Madan 1987, 72–100.

[2] Siegel 1987, 191–96, discusses and translates fragments of hilarious Sanskrit satires on ascetics and their practices; Narayan 1989 provides performance context and audience exegesis for stories of true and false gurus. See also Bloomfield 1924.

Assessments of the parts played by yogis in Indian folklore have become more sophisticated over time. Writing in 1914, Rose cites a Mr. Benton who declares: "The Jogi is a favourite character in Hindusthani fiction. He there appears as a jolly playful character of a simple disposition, who enjoys the fullest liberty and conducts himself in the most eccentric fashion under the cloak of religion without being called in question" (Rose 1914, 389)

About ninety years later, Zbavitel in his history of Bengali literature sees Nath stories as representing "the extreme of non-realistic trends in Bengali literature." He continues:

They are fruits of an almost unbounded imagination, withdrawing from the hard facts of life. No wonder that in the atmosphere of the 17th and 18th centuries which for most inhabitants of the country were a period of the utmost poverty, insecurity and misery, their attraction grew, because it offered an escape from the facts of everyday life which were not at all bright and pleasant. (Zbavitel 1976, 191)

Still more recently, Gill, whose endeavor is interpretive and psychological, discusses the Punjabi legend of Puran Bhagat, in which Gorakh Nath plays a major part. He finds there that "the touch of the yogi doesn't heal but inflicts sharper cuts to open wounds" (Gill 1986, 137). That is, Gill sees the yogi figure in this well-known Punjabi legend as neither jolly nor escapist but rather as embodying painful conflicts inherent in the human condition as construed within a Punjabi worldview.

Each of these differently couched, differently oriented, and differently motivated appraisals of yogis in stories speaks to Madhu Nath's Rajasthani versions of Gopi Chand and Bharthari. If we look for "liberty" and "eccentricity," we do indeed find a cavalier imperiousness about the yogi gurus. They throw their weight around with impunity (remember that guru means heavy), and they are heedless of common "morality," whether it be honesty, compassion, or familial loyalty. As for Nath tales being products of, or outlets for, an efflorescent and even escapist imagination, certainly a measure of delight for Madhu Nath's audience derives from pure fantasy. An imperious donkey stamps its foot and an entire city is surrounded with double walls of copper and brass. Given the job of grazing oxen, a yogi in disguise waits until his employers leave, then urinates. Where the stream falls lush green grasses spring up; he then lounges about while the

animals in his charge grow sleek and fat. The audience revels in these moments, and they do indeed contrast with ordinary life.

But it is Gill's insight into the yogi's figure as a painful one that seems still more germane to the Rajasthani tales of Gopi Chand and Bharthari. Gopi Chand's sufferings dominate his story; Queen Pingala's heartbreak is acknowledged by all to be the climax of Bharthari's tale. These stories fully acknowledge that yogis not only experience pain but inflict it. Indeed there is far greater stress on the sufferings of Pingala than of Bharthari; and Gopi Chand's personal trials are enormously magnified by his empathy with those who mourn his departure.^[3]

The powerful Nath does not play exactly the same part in every story in which he appears. Different yogis have distinct personalities and histories and exhibit among themselves varying relationships of alliance and animosity. Moreover, those who follow them do so for different reasons in different stories. Even within Madhu Nath's own repertoire, repetitive as it is in some ways, the personalities, motivations, and sensibilities of various yogi figures emerge as extremely variegated.

Gopi Chand is pushed into renunciation by his mother and his fate; a vainglorious and uncontemplative king, he becomes a despondent and powerless yogi, buffeted about by the designs of friends and enemies. Bharthari, by contrast, is decisive both as king and yogi; he stands firm and is even stubborn whereas Gopi Chand repeatedly, helplessly yields. Gopi Chand is readily moved by the persuasions of all his loved ones; Bharthari acts on principle and reveals no empathic responses. Neither renouncer-king displays the kinds of authoritative yogic competence and commanding guru nature that give characters such as Gorakh and Jalindar Nath their particular auras. Gorakh and Jalindar are often worshiped as gods in temples, Gopi Chand and Bharthari only rarely. And even the perfected yogis do not present a homogeneous category or type: their personalities and predilections are evident. Gorakh, for example, is a sometimes devious trickster but Jalindar is forthright and forceful.

Stories that are part of the Naths' own performance repertoires,

[3] Frances Pritchett points out that the sorrows of an abandoned or neglected suffering woman are pervasive in Indian literature (personal communication 1990). The Nath tales' special twist is that neither war's glories nor a courtesan's favors but rather a guru's teachings and an ascetic life are the cause of males' defections.

like those of Gopi Chand and Bharthari (as well as Gorakh Nath himself and Guru Guga),^[4] focus squarely on Nath heroes. There are many other tales in many regional traditions where Naths have peripheral but critical roles as advisors or aides to heroes who are not themselves renouncers, or who become renouncers only temporarily and for instrumental reasons.^[5]

When yogis appear in folklore, worldly aims and renunciative modes of being combine and recombine in diverse motivational configurations. Mortal love and worldly ambition, genuine self-sacrifice and spiritual questing are not opposed but juxtaposed.^[6] Folklore often capitalizes on a yogi's potential to be sexually desirable and martially victorious. Such elements are muted, but not imperceptible, in Madhu's Gopi Chand-Bharthari cycle. Madhu's tales give precedence to emotions rather than sexuality, to familial responsibilities rather than royal or military duties. In common with most popular traditions, these tales too reveal the ambiguities that surround any attempt by human characters to free themselves from worldly entanglements.

Bharthari and Gopi Chand

I turn now to a closer examination of the particular origins of Bharthari and Gopi Chand. For Madhu Nath, both tales are part of a unified, integrated repertoire. The two are linked not only in the similar patterns of their stories—both are kings who turn yogi—but genealogically, as sister's son to mother's brother (see figure 1). Indeed the janmpatri of Bharthari reports the birth not only of Bharthari but also

[4] Guru Guga's life story is little known in Madhu Nath's area of Rajasthan but is found elsewhere in that state as well as in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab (Kothari 1989; Lapoint 1978; Temple 1884, 1: 121–209, 3:261–300).

[5] For example, in the Rajasthani Pabuji epic one character, Harmal, turns yogi in order to complete a dangerous journey and another, Rupnath, is raised as a renouncer but uses his power to support a battle for family vengeance (Smith 1986, 1991; Blackburn et al., eds. 1989, 240–43). In the Punjabi Hir-Ranjha tale (Shah 1976; Swynnerton 1903, 3–67; Temple 1884, 2:507–80) and in the ballad of Malushahi and Rajula from Himalayan Kumaun (Meissner 1985), frustrated lovers become yogis in reaction to the hopelessness of their romantic quests but also in order to further these quests.

[6] Van Buitenen's classic essay on the Vidyadhara hero in Sanskrit stories (1959) made this point; see Lynch 1990 for some reformulations. See also Kolff 1987 for a very interesting and comprehensive discussion of temporary renunciation as an important aspect of the Rajput warrior's identity.

of Manavati, Gopi Chand's mother; and the end of Gopi Chand's tale finds him splitting the fruit of immortality with his uncle. This link between the two renouncer-kings is posited not only in Madhu Nath's stories but throughout most of popular Nath lore. The two are familiarly referred to as a unit: mama-bhannej or "mother's brother-sister's son."

For Madhu and his audience, the stories of Bharthari and Gopi Chand, performed in a familiar dialect, belong to local lore. My original approach to interpreting these tales was a parochial one: I wanted to understand their meanings for Ghatiyalians. But even that limited endeavor necessitated broadening my horizons. For example, Gopi Chand's tale is largely concerned with one or more lands called Bengal. True, the women of Madhu Nath's Bengal dress in the red and yellow wraps characteristic of Rajasthani women (rather than less garish Bengali saris) and knead and roll out wheat bread (rather than boiling rice). Nonetheless, Gopi Chand's journey to Bengal is very much a journey into fabled and remote territory. Bharthari's entire story is also located elsewhere—in Malva, a fairy-tale kingdom to Rajasthanis.

In this respect the stories of Bharthari and Gopi Chand differ strikingly from epic tales of regional hero-gods that take place in a familiar landscape. It was possible for me in 1980 to spend several weeks journeying through a storied countryside where the god Dev Narayan's life history was geophysically embodied. A slightly indented rock was reverently identified as the hoofprint of Dev Narayan's magic mare, Lila; a simple stone well was known as the divine warrior's bathing place and thus a source of healing mud and water; a row of slanted stones bowed as Devji passed by; a modest hilltop pool marked his miraculous birthsite.^[7] Such imminence is not available for Bharthari and Gopi Chand. Events preceding their renunciation are not indigenous and thus not enshrined. I have, however, visited a number of sylvan shrines dedicated to Shiva in Ajmer and Bhilwara districts, near Madhu Nath's home, featuring caves where Bharthari and Gopi Chand are said to have meditated together, or spots where their tapas is memorialized by divine footprints or by a dhuni or campfire shrine with yogis' tongs.^[8]

[7] For Dev Narayan as worshiped in Ghatiyali and environs see Gold 1988, 154–86; for a summary of his epic tale see Blackburn et al., eds. 1989.

[8] Such shrines to yogi gurus are of course found in many other parts of India as well.

7. Bharthari Baba's divine footprints (pagalya ) at a shrine near a well (its engine-driven pump is visible)
in a field belonging to a naga Nath community in Thanvala, Nagaur district, Rajasthan.

Nath stories and the characters who inhabit them have lives of their own that reach beyond what is available in a single telling or a single bard's knowledge. Madhu Nath's performances for me are moments in a long history. The ongoing process of transmission and diffusion through time and space brings about countless permutations. Here, I shall very briefly consider some of these permutations in order to illuminate the unique performances that are my subject. My intention is by no means to present an exhaustive inventory of extant versions but rather to highlight interesting trends in the complex history of an oral tradition.^[9] I hope thereby to convey the ways that

[9] The research for this chapter led me across more than one regional and linguistic boundary. In the case of Bharthari, it also led from vernacular oral tales back to Sanskrit texts. For Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Bengali I depended on translations, or English summaries; the comparisons I offer here are necessarily circumscribed by these linguistic constraints. I found references to versions of Gopi Chand's tale in Oriya, in Marathi, and in South Indian languages (Chowdhury 1967, 186–87; Sen 1954, 73–74; Sen 1974, 68)—none of which I discuss here.

one performer's version of an oral tale emerges from multiple streams of tradition and yet has a coherence and weight of its own.

Because of their evident origins in different places, probably on different sides of North India, I shall treat the two tales of Bharthari and Gopi Chand discretely. The issue of when, where, and how they came to intersect and partially fuse—somewhere in the middle of North India—is a mystery upon which little light can be shed; that union appears to date back at least several centuries. Although in terms of the bard's repertoire, Gopi Chand is the favored performance, chronologically and conceptually Bharthari precedes it. For when Gopi Chand, advised by his mother to renounce the world, demands to know what king had ever been fool enough to become a yogi, his mother is able to cite her brother, Bharthari, as a role model. Therefore, although until now I have given precedence to Gopi Chand for several reasons (it was first in my heart and my studies, and first in the favor of Madhu Nath's audience), here I shall begin with Bharthari.

Bharthari

Tradition identifies King Bharthari as the former ruler of the real city of Ujjain, located in what is today Madhya Pradesh. Ujjain and its surroundings—an area that Rajasthani villagers even today call by its traditional name of Malva—is a frequent point of reference in local lore. Dhara Nagar, another name for Ujjain, is often the kingdom inhabited by any king who appears in Rajasthani women's worship stories. Bharthari's birth story, as told by Madhu, includes the founding of Dhara Nagar, by the grace of Nath gurus and the acts of a haughty donkey who is Bharthari's progenitor, Gandaraph Syan,^[10] cursed by his father to enter a donkey womb.

Bharthari, the legendary king of Ujjain who turns Nath yogi, is generally considered to be identical with the Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari, renowned for three sets of eloquent verse on worldly life, erotic passion, and renunciation.^[11] The legends surrounding the poet Bhartrihari

[10] As Nathu transcribed Madhu's pronunciation, this prince's name is sometimes Gandarap and sometimes Gandaraph , sometimes Syan and sometimes Sen . I regularize this.

[11] Whereas books about the Sanskrit poet often refer to the legendary king, the legends of Bharthari rarely refer to the Sanskrit poet—an exception being Duggal's retelling (Duggal 1979). Miller, who gives us some beautiful translations of Bhartrihari's poems, notes, "In spite of the legend, the content of the verses suggests that the author ... was not a king, but a courtier-poet in the service of a king" (Miller 1967, xvii). Bhartrihari the poet may be the same as Bhartrihari the Sanskrit grammarian, author of a famous treatise, the Vakyapadiya . Coward 1976 and Iyer 1969, 10–15, both favor this identification; Miller 1967 is more skeptical.

identify him, as Madhu identifies his Bharthari, as the elder brother of the Hindu monarch, Vikramaditya; Bharthari's decision to renounce the world brings Vikramaditya to the throne. The name of Vikram is associated with a fixed point, 58–57 B.C. , from which one major system of Hindu dating, the Vikrama era, begins. However, King Vikramaditya's status as a historical personage is also open to doubt.^[12]

The tale of Bhartrihari's renunciation takes up but a few pages in the cycle of Sanskrit stories surrounding Vikramaditya. These have been translated and retold in English and are often summarized in introductions to collections of the Sanskrit poet's work.^[13] The plot involves a circular chain of deception that will inevitably recall to Western readers the French farce and opera plot evoked by the title La Ronde .

A Brahman, as a reward for his intense austerities, receives the fruit of immortality from God; he presents this prize to King Bhartrihari, who gives it to his adored wife, Pingala.^[14] She, however, passes it on to her paramour, and he to a prostitute who offers it once more to the king. Having extracted the truth from each link in this chain, and stunned not only by his queen's perfidy but by the generally fickle ways of the world, Bhartrihari decides then and there to pursue a more stable reality, turning the rule of his kingdom over to Vikramaditya.^[15]

Madhu Nath's version of Bharthari's story does not include any

[12] For the historicity of King Vikramaditya see Edgerton 1926; Sircar 1969.

[13] See Edgerton 1926 for translations from the Sanskrit; see also Bhoothalingam 1982 who adapted a Tamil version of the Sanskrit for young readers in English. For an elaborate, embellished retelling in Hindi see Vaidya 1984, 7–24. Versions of the story are also referred to in Miller 1967; Kale 1971; Wortham 1886.

[14] As a woman's name, Pingala is rare. The RSK lists a variant, Pingala as a name of the goddess Lakshmi as well as the name of Bhartrihari's wife. Its primary meaning, however, is one of three main, subtle channels in the human body described by yogic physiology.

[15] Some elaborations on the story have Bhartrihari first exiling Vikramaditya after the debauched queen accuses him of assaulting her honor in order to cover up her real indiscretion. Then Bhartrihari must recall Vikramaditya and exonerate him before following the guru Gorakh Nath to a renouncer's life (Duggal 1979).

reference to tins circle of illicit connections. Pingala here is an impeccably true wife. Rather than woman's infidelity, the premise of Madhu Nath's tale is that even the most faithful woman is part of the illusory nature of the universe and thus not worth loving. Jackson in a note on the lore surrounding Bharthari's Cave—a famous shrine in Ujjain—and Rose in his ethnographic survey of the Northeast both relate stories similar to Madhu Nath's in which Pingala is true (Jackson 1902; Rose 1914). Gray translates a fifteenth-century Sanskrit play, the Bhartrharinirveda of Harihara, that also has a plot very similar to the Rajasthani folk telling (Gray 1904). However, to my knowledge all the popular published dramas and folk romances (kissas ) ^[16] about King Bharthari and Queen Pingala center on the fruit of immortality and Pingala's deceit (but she usually reforms in the end).

Although I have called attention to a dramatic dichotomy between types of Pingalas in Nath traditions, let me note that these striking differences mask an underlying symmetry. In the end, it is women—true or false, beloved or despised—whom yogis abandon. Madhu Nath's version actually seems at one moment in the arthav to consider Pingala's fanatic fidelity as yet another dangerous feminine wile. Gorakh Nath implies that by becoming sati Pingala was trying to kill her husband. And yet if we shift perspectives once again, we may view both types of Pingalas as the impetus for Bharthari's enlightenment, and thus as valued positive forces in these tales of renunciation.^[17]

Bharthari and Gopi Chand's relationship—both as maternal uncle

[16] For popular folk romances based on the Vikram cycle, including brief references to Bharthari and the fruit of immortality, and an insightful discussion of "women's wiles" in this genre, see Pritchett 1985, 56–78.

[17] With a script that explains Bharthari's infatuation and Pingala's perfidy through predestination, one version of the tale actually makes such a collapse nicely logical. Dehlavi's Hindi play Bharthari Pingala frames the fruit-of-immortality circle with a glimpse into Bharthari's previous birth as one of Gorakh Nath's disciples, Bharat Nath. While on an errand for his guru, Bharat Nath is distracted by a beautiful fairy and sports with her in the woods. The fairy is punished for misbehaving with a yogi by Indra, the king of the gods, who forces her to take a human birth. Bharat Nath is given the same sentence by his guru. Indra tells the fairy that she will deceive her husband and cause him to renounce the world, consequently suffering the heavy sorrow of widowhood in her youth (Dehlavi n.d., 32). To mitigate Bharat Nath's misery, Gorakh promises his errant disciple that the same beautiful female who caused his downfall will bring about his reunion with the guru (26). In this frame Pingala's infidelity represents not lack of character but a cosmic plan. Bhoju reports hearing a very similar version from a Brahman schoolteacher who saw it performed in Alwar; that tale tidily made Pingala's lover an incarnation of Guru Gorakh Nath.

and nephew, and as two Naths with immortal bodies—is mentioned in several versions other than Madhu Nath's (Dehlavi n.d.; Dikshit n.d., 264). In Rajasthani folklore not contained within the epic tales themselves, Bharthari and Gopi Chand are paired as immortal companions still wandering the earth. Thus they appear as the authors of hymns (bhajans ) to the formless lord (Gold 1988, 1O9) and are recalled in proverbs: "As long as sky and earth shall be / Live Gopi Chand and Bharthari" (Jab tak akash dharati, tab tak Gopi Chand Bharthari ). Most of the longer versions of Bharthari's tale make some reference to his gaining an "immortal body" (amar kaya ), but none is particularly illuminating about the nature of this immortality. Madhu Nath never refers to immortality in telling the tale of Bharthari, but when Gopi Chand receives the blessing (or curse) of immortality from Jalindar Nath, in part 4 of his separate tale, Bharthari is with him and shares in the fruit.

Distinctive to Madhu's telling is a general concern for mundane detail: many descriptions of actions and relationships, well understood or easily imagined in village thought, that do not advance the story line but rather situate it in familiar experience. These include a gathering of village elders in time of crisis; the technology of potters; the negotiations of patrons and clients; the mutuality and interdependence of subjects and rulers. Such familiar scenes or situations may, moreover, be suddenly spiced with magical occurrences or divine intervention: donkeys talk to village elders, a guru's play spoils the carefully crafted pots; messengers come from heaven to straighten out the king and save his subjects. It would seem that Madhu and his teachers, in adapting a traditional tale for village patrons, elaborate both the familiar and the magical to strike a captivating blend. And yet, as we will see, although Gopi Chand's story certainly shares some stylistic and thematic qualities with Bharthari's, it follows a different recipe.

Gopi Chand

In Madhu's version as well as all others except those originating in Bengal, Gopi Chand is described as the king of"Gaur" Bengal. Gaur was an ancient Bengali kingdom that fell to Muslim invaders in the thirteenth century (Sarkar 1948, 8). Although there is no evidence pointing to an association of a historical Gopi Chand with the kingdom of Gaur, attempts have been made to link Gopi Chand with various

Bengali monarchs of the Pala or Chandra dynasties (Grierson 1878; Majumdar 1940); however, too many conflicting details preclude any certain confirmation of these indentifications (Chowdhury 1967, 186–87; Sen 1954).

Versions of Gopi Chand do not divide neatly into two types, as versions of Bharthari do according to Pingala's good or bad character. However, a number of motifs in Bengali versions consistently contrast with those recorded or written down in western India. ^[18] For example, Gopi Chand's sister is a significant figure in Madhu Nath's tale as well as in other tales from western India but is never mentioned in Bengali versions. As the stories are told in Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, Gopi Chand must go east to Bengal to meet his sister. She is thus married into a Bengal that is alien to the Bengal that Gopi Chand rules, a doubling of distance and foreignness.

I might speculate that the journey to a sister who inevitably dies of grief, to be revived by Jalindar's magic, accrues to the non-Bengali versions in order to lend a sense of completion or closure to the king's renunciation. In two Bengali versions, Gopi Chand parts with difficulty from his wives but eventually goes back to them; in the western Indian traditions he leaves the world and women for good, after parting from his sister. Attachment to the sister is, as Madhu's Manavati Mata firmly instructs her son at one point, a far more serious matter than any bond to wives.

Like the visit to the sister, the motif of Gopi Chand burying his guru in a deep well and covering him up with horse manure occurs in all but the Bengali versions. Moreover, this episode is almost always linked, as it is in Madhu's tale, with the subplot of Gorakh Nath's journey to Bengal to rescue his guru Machhindar from magicianqueens. That is, the two gurus are ignominiously trapped in two different ways, and their respective disciples compete as to who will rescue his first. ^[19]

[18] I draw on Grierson 1878 and Sircar n.d. for translations from Bengali; Temple 1884 translates a Punjabi oral drama; Dikshit n.d. and Yogishvar n.d. respectively provide Hindi prose and drama versions.

[19] In all versions but Madhu Nath's that include the guru-in-the-well motif, the deliverance of both gurus (Machhindar from Bengal and Jalindar from the well) occurs before, not after, Gopi Chand's initiation. Thus, Jalindar's magical power to be up and about and active in Gopi Chand's tale, despite being down a well and buried under horse dung (which we must accept in order to follow Madhu's plot line), is unnecessary in these more "logically" structured versions. Perhaps somewhere en route to Rajasthan the plot sequence was rearranged.

I initially thought that the lengthy episode concerning those troublesome females, the seven low-caste lady magicians of Bengal, was unique to the Rajasthani Gopi Chand. As some of these characters appear in other Rajasthani folk traditions, this surmise seemed plausible.^[20] However, although no other versions give anything near the weight and the detail that the Rajasthani does to Gopi Chand's female adversaries or place them as obstacles between the king and his sister, Bengali and Hindi texts do have Gopi Chand's progress obstructed by one or more lowborn, low-living, magic-wielding females. I have argued elsewhere that the Rajasthani version, which allows both king and audience to develop so much sympathy for Gopi Chand's kinswomen, especially needs the lady magicians to make parting from virtuous females less cruel. The Bengali magicians are women the Rajasthani village audience loves to hate (Gold 1991).

One element that all six versions notably have in common is the dynamic instigating role played by Gopi Chand's mother. In all versions Gopi Chand's mother is a religious adept—although her role may range from immortal, wonder-working magician to dedicated devotee. In all versions it is she who makes the fateful decision that her son should become a yogi—an idea that would obviously never have occurred to Gopi Chand of his own accord.^[21] Thus, Gopi Chand is propelled toward renunciation, just as is Bharthari, by a woman.

In the Bengali versions of the tale—which we may accept as probably closer to an "original" version insofar as they are produced in the hero's native region—Manavati is a powerful yogini who has learned the secret of immortality. This is in accord with Bengal's reputation in the rest of India as a place of powerful females.^[22] Never-

[20] See Bhanavat 1968 for an episode concerning Gangali Telin, one of the lady magicians who torments Gopi Chand, in Rajasthani lore on Kala—Gora Bhairu or "Black Bhairu and Fair Bhairu."

[21] An exception I encountered as this volume goes to press is a new report on fieldwork among Naths in Bhojpur (eastern Uttar Pradesh); C. Champion describes a version of Gopi Chand, "completely different from the Bengali" in which his mother, "confronting her son's decision to become a renouncer tries only to interfere by invoking all the arguments in her possession" (Champion 1989, 66; my translation).

[22] For a discussion of legends about an Eastern kingdom of women see McLeod 1968, 110–12. Even travel literature of this century may capitalize on such legends and their possible anthropological realization. In one such account Bertrand refers to Bengalis' fear of "sorceresses having the power to change men into animals" (Bertrand 1958, 173); see also Dvivedi n.d., 53–54. In a comprehensive survey of women in Bengali literature, Rowlands 1930 discusses Gopi Chand's mother and wives.

theless, even in Bengal it is not so easy for a woman to be a guru. Sircar's unpublished translation from the Bengali contains a vivid rendition of this plight of the divinely powerful yet domestically powerless woman. She describes to her son how her husband, Gopi Chand's father, preferred death to having his wife as a guru: "You are but the wife of my house, / but I am the master of that house. / If I accept wisdom from a housewife / How can I call her guru and take the dust off her feet?" (Sircar n.d., 13).^[23]

Chief among the distinctive aspects of Madhu Nath's account are a critical plot feature and an attendant emotional timbre. Madhu's is the only text that explains Gopi Chand's birth as a loan to his mother (although others do ascribe it to his mother's devotions or asceticisms).^[24] Although all the versions have Gopi Chand initially resist the idea of renouncing the world, Madhu's is the only one in which Gopi Chand perpetually laments and sorrows, calling on his guru like a child at every difficult moment. These two factors are in constant interplay in Madhu's text. By portraying Gopi Chand as doomed to yogahood but attached to the world, by having his feelings oppose his destiny, Madhu's tale creates a space for resistance and generates the human drama (or melodrama) that made me wish to translate this tale as a counterpoint to prevailing images of resolute renouncers.

In other versions it is women who display most of the emotion; Gopi Chand passes through their pleas and reproaches with a certain dignified detachment (much as Madhu's Bharthari hears out and denies Pingala). But Madhu Nath elaborates on the king's inner turmoil, not only by returning again and again to the rainstorm of tears in his eyes, but also by providing trains of consciousness (veg ) or reveries when Gopi Chand expresses his regret, despair, and simple shame.

Like his telling of Bharthari's story, Madhu's Gopi Chand tale incorporates some familiar details of daily rural life: the ways that barren women seek divine remedies; the washerwoman's rounds to

[23] See O'Flaherty 1984, 16O, 280–81, for a case from Sanskrit mythology rather than Nath folklore in which a wise wife must resort to extreme subterfuge in order to act as her husband's guru.

[24] David White (personal communication 1990) pointed out to me that the idea of a human life as a loan is a very ancient one in Hindu thought. See Malamoud for a comprehensive discussion of "a theory of debt as constitutive of human nature" in Sanskrit texts (Malamoud 1989, 115–36).

8. Gopi Chand's queen faints as her husband in yogi's garb begs for alms; faded cover
illustration for Balakram Yogishvar's published Hindi play of Gopi Chand .

collect laundry; the companionable filling of water pots by groups of women. But, while these mundane details can seem to dominate his Bharthari performance, generating more interest than do the chief characters and their problems, in Gopi Chand's story the setting is always subordinated to character and interpersonal dynamics.^[25]

In Madhu's version of Bharthari, magical moments are embedded in a realistic tapestry of rural life—a life inhabited by largely twodimensional characters. In his Gopi Chand, events in the world float on the surface of deeply reverberating internal spaces and highly charged interpersonal channels. These inner worlds, moreover, are not bounded. That the same bard can present two tales of renouncerkings so differently suggests that the tales themselves, despite being part of the common lore of the Nine Naths, have retained distinctive features of their disparate origins.

Uncoupling

Taken together Madhu Nath's tales of Bharthari and Gopi Chand offer a surprising variety of impressions of and information about yogis, even as they use stock images and repeat certain events. A striking example comes from the almost identically framed scenes in the two tales when the king arrives as a yogi outside his wife's palace. Both Gopi Chand and Bharthari have trouble communicating with their former slave girls before crossing enough portals to meet their former queens. Indeed, this is so obviously the same episode that Madhu sings it for Bharthari in the Gopi Chand tune. But the actual encounter between husband and wife is a different story. Gopi Chand's resolution dissolves; he is tormented, wavering, tearful, and plaintive. Bharthari stands firm. Nor are the queens to be merged. Pingala is a more formidable lady than is Patam De Rani, and her lament has its own quality. When she launches it, as if to accentuate this difference, Madhu Nath switches from a Gopi Chand tune to the characteristic Rajaji melody of Bharthari.

[25] In a recent insightful and provocative paper Brenda Beck observes in Indian folk epics a general stress on "the world of emotion and inner mental states," and suggests that the audience appreciates these emotions not through direct expression but through "understanding the structure of situations in which characters find themselves" (Beck 1989, 155). Such would be true of Bharthari; Gopi Chand presents emotions in unsually forthright fashion.

The identities and histories of Bharthari and Gopi Chand appear to resemble each other more when contrasted with the renouncerking of a related popular tradition. In the preceding chapter I discussed some mutual influences of Nath and Sant traditions in popular Hinduism. Among the "garlands" of devotees whose life histories form an important part of Sant devotional literature is Raja Pipa (McGregor 1984, 42; Sharma 1983, 184–85). As counterbalance to all the variations we have just observed in the tales of Bharthari and Gopi Chand, it is instructive to consider Pipa's career.

Like Gopi Chand, Pipa has several wives. When he decides to become a renouncer they first try to stop him and then beg to accompany him. Where Pipa's story fully diverges both from Bharthari's and Gopi Chand's is that one of his wives, Sita, is so devoted and virtuous that she submits to the double requirement to come without belongings and naked, and does go with him. Together, Jack Hawley suggests, in a thought-provoking analysis, they point to a possible change in the social order deriving from bhakti or devotion. As Hawley puts it: "What is wanted instead is a new understanding of what one already is, and a genuinely new society in which the roles of house-holder and renunciation are not polarized. ... Pipa and Sita form the nucleus of that society." They remain married but devote their lives to others—a kind of "mutual self-renunciation" (Hawley 1987, 64).

Whatever the variety and religious dedication of their female characters, Nath tales do not allow women to accompany men in renunciation. Indeed, the men must be rid of them at all costs. Whenever a woman does beg to go along (as do Bharthari's wife, Pingala, and Gopi Chand's sister, Champa De), she is admonished in many ways that women have no place in the wandering life of a yogi. Yet women in these tales often can and do go separately, gaining power as independent beings rather than as companions to males.

It is not, therefore, that Madhu's tales deny spiritual progress to women; quite the opposite. But they do indeed deny spiritual progress to couples. Following Hawley's point, it would seem that to accept a couple's capacity for spiritual selflessness might be to break through to a redefined social order such as bhakti proposes. This would be a world where human relationships other than the privileged gurudisciple bond were not so thoroughly devalued as they are in Nath

teachings. Nath stories do not make that leap. In them, proper yogis are consistently without interest in society beyond their enjoyment of its cooking. And yet—as we shall at last find out, for the story is about to begin—Madhu Nath's tales tell us far more about the problems and pleasures of that social universe than they do about the world of detached perfected immortals.