2. Ramanand and Ramanandis, ca. 1900–1940

Don’t ask about caste.
If you love God, you belong to God.

Sectarian traditions associated with precolonial Vaishnava and Shaiva soldiering and, more particularly, colonial sources describing monasticism in the nineteenth century confirm that the history of monasticism reflected social and ideological change in north Indian society. Likewise Ramanandi hagiography, read carefully, can reveal a great deal about popular ideological change in the Gangetic north, both within and without monastic life. This was true in the fourteenth century, when Ramanand is believed to have uttered the words quoted above; it continued to be true in the early 1600s, when Nabhadas listed in the Bhaktamal (“the garland of devotees”) the five brahman men, the two women, the kshatriya prince, the weaver, the cobbler, the peasant, and the barber who represented the first generation of Ramanand’s disciples.^[1] However, of fundamental importance to present-day Ramanandi identities are the first four decades of the twentieth century—and in particular the years 1918–1921, when “radical” Ramanandis decided to reject any institutional monastic connection between Ramanand and Ramanuja, the twelfth-century theologian of south India who had long been regarded as the originator of Vaishnava bhakti and, hence, a prominent figure in Ramanandi tradition. Needless to say, the Ramanandi conception of Ramanand would undergo fundamental, and controversial, change as a result of this decision. This chapter examines the ideological debates in the early twentieth century that occasioned this new vision of Ramanand, and the social and historiographical causes and consequences of those debates.^[2] The object is to bring the social and ideological dimensions of twentieth-century Ramanandi egalitarianism into better focus.

On the margin of Ramanandi history there has existed an ongoing European and American historiography of Indian religious belief, which has occasionally, though unevenly, touched on Ramanand and Ramanandis. Though this historiography has not yet altered in any substantial way the trajectories of ideological change in Gangetic society, it has on occasion come into sharp focus in the eyes of monks and lay devotees. This point was reinforced for me recently (18 October 1994) in Jaipur: while we were discussing the role of the Galta pith (religious center) in the history of Vaishnava soldiering in the eighteenth century, the Galta mahant’s eldest son and heir apparent to the mahantship, Avadesh Kumar Mishra, suddenly produced copies of two articles, Peter van der Veer’s “Taming the Ascetic” and Richard Burghart’s “Founding of the Ramanandi Sect.” The pages were worn and the margins full of handwritten commentary. We proceeded to discuss the contents of both articles for over an hour; Burghart’s piece was of particular interest to Avadesh Kumar Mishra, since (as we shall see in the pages below) it contains arguments that implicitly favor the Ramanuji side (favored by Galta) of a debate that began in 1918 and continues to influence the structure of the Ramanandi sampraday.

It is appropriate, then, to begin this chapter on the historiographical margin, by way of introducing the interpretive dilemmas occasioned by the study of Ramanand and Ramanandis, for academics as well as monks.

Ramanand Obscured

Notwithstanding the importance of the Ramanandi sampraday as the largest Vaishnava monastic order in north India (and perhaps the largest monastic community, Shaiva or Vaishnava, in India), Ramanand and Ramanandis have gradually receded from the pages of historical scholarship on India. One reason is an increasing scholarly interest in the sant tradition, since about 1400 an important literary-cum-religious movement in north India that until recently was regarded as the heir to Ramanand’s broadly articulated bhakti-sadhna message of “disciplined love for god.”^[3] Indeed, it can be argued that the increasing interest in sant studies has pushed Ramanand and Ramanandis into the background.^[4] Guru Nanak is included among the sants, as are several figures claimed by Ramanandis as members of Ramanand’s original circle of disciples, most notably Ravidas and Kabir. Sants are bound to each other in the clarity of scholarly hindsight by a disdain for brahmanical knowledge and ritual, an outspoken disregard for idols and images, and a dedication to egalitarian poetic verse—all of which lends to the study of sant literature a distinctly counter-elitist, folk-culture appeal.^[5] In addition, many scholars have been drawn to the uncompromising criticism of caste hierarchy common to sant rhetoric, not to mention the “low-caste” origins of most sant practicioners.^[6] Also a factor is the chronological implausibility of Ramanand’s life when viewed from the perspective of his main sant disciples. Charlotte Vaudeville, a pioneer in the field of sant literary and historical scholarship, calculated that Ramanand “would have had to live more than 118 years in order to be the real Guru of all the twelve disciples” attributed to him.^[7] The consensus among sant scholars today is that later sant traditions created a guru-disciple link with Ramanand in order to afford the sant poets greater social and political respectability.

However, the relative paucity of scholarship on Ramanand must also stem from the mixed social and political message sent by his life, as it is remembered. As both a Sanskrit-educated brahman and a Vaishnava-bhakti visionary, Ramanand is believed by many to have occupied an important and neglected space between two competing “Hinduisms”: one composed of sophisticated pandits, the other of radical poets. For Indologists reared on the basic structural oppositions of caste hierarchy, the difficult question is, can one life occupy both ends of the spectrum? So little of a reliable nature is known about Ramanand that the question cannot be answered with certainty. The multiple and seemingly contradictory meanings of this important life, in addition to the relative lack of “hard” biographical data regarding it, have inspired one scholar to cast doubt on Ramanand’s authorship of the famous verse discounting caste and to argue that Ramanand did not intend at all for a community, or sampraday, to gather around him and his message.^[8] Indeed it would require little in the way of argumentation to suggest further that Ramanand never even existed but was conjured up by monks at a much later date to satisfy a drive for brahmanical respectability within the order. With the thorny problem of Ramanand out of the way, it would be much easier to understand Indian social and cultural history as an ideological struggle ranged above an uncompromising caste divide. But Ramanand, shadowy and mystifying though he may be, has been kept alive by the force of Ramanandi tradition, although that tradition itself has undergone dramatic change.^[9]

Ramanand tends to be eclipsed in particular by Kabir and Ravidas, two figures who from the Ramanandi point of view were among Ramanand’s inner circle of disciples and whose ideologically potent verse, therefore, finds frequent expression in Ramanandi tradition. Kabir and Ravidas flourished in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and are remembered for the steadfast challenge they posed to the very idea of varna and jati as systems of human classification. Based on the rhetorical structure of his verse, Kabir appears to have hurled his invective from a self-imposed perch well beyond the social system; Ravidas, by contrast, spoke from deep within society, focusing on his own lowly status as a cobbler to better apprehend and articulate the injustices of varna.^[10] Kabir questioned the very foundations upon which varna and jati rested, entreating the learned brahman to “look in your heart for knowledge. Tell me where untouchability came from, since you believe in it.”^[11] He assaulted the sensibilities, interspersing direct insults with stark depictions of the blunt corporeality of human existence and thereby entering into an immediate and passionate dialogue with the listener.^[12] Kabir’s object was to lay bare human conceits, which he did by aiming sharply worded barbs at the brahman pandits who thronged the steps leading down to the Ganga in Banaras or at lecturing qazis (scholars of sharia, or Islamic law), comfortably ensconced among legal tomes. Though Ravidas did not utilize invective and shock tactics to make his point, he nonetheless urged his listeners, in a passage reminiscent of Ramanand’s couplet, to “ask not about caste,.…What is there in clan or caste? Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, all belong to the same caste.”^[13] He insisted, “A family that has a true follower of the Lord is neither high caste nor low caste, lordly or poor.”^[14]

The followers of Kabir and Ravidas who do not consider themselves Ramanandis have used varying strategies to pursue their goal of a more equal and just society. For example, there is the wide discrepancy between the original message of Kabir and the methods of his present-day devotees, noted by David Lorenzen: “The songs of Kabir himself display such a militant iconoclasm that it is quite consistent to assume that he meant to break with both Islam and Hinduism and establish an independent religious tradition. His followers, however, seem to have soon brought their sect into the orbit of non-caste Hinduism.”^[15] By “non-caste Hinduism” Lorenzen means to evoke a religious strategy that accepts “many of the behavioral forms or structures of caste Hinduism while at the same time infusing them with an ideological content that is in direct opposition to basic socioreligious values characteristic of caste Hinduism.”^[16] While Kabir’s present-day followers ultimately embrace varna, then, they manipulate it to suit the social needs of their own shudra and untouchable constituents. The full historical irony of this doctrinal-behavioral strategy was particularly evident in Patna during the 1987 all-India conference of the Kabirpanth. Notwithstanding the strident anti-varna pronouncements of modern-day Kabirpanthis, this conference was held under the auspices of the national headquarters of the Yadava Mahasabha, the political heir to the Yadav-kshatriya movement of the pre-1947 era and currently a major caste organization deeply involved in state and national politics.^[17]

But while the followers of Kabir seemed to have moderated his radical anti-establishment message, a process of radicalization seems to have occurred among followers of Ravidas. The modern Chamar (untouchable leatherworker) followers of that sant have developed a clear social agenda and are in no way reluctant to seek reform openly. A Chamar leader of Lucknow struck a militant pose by reinterpreting Ravidas as among those who “demolished the philosophical fort of the Brahman’s culture by denouncing unequivocally the distinctions of caste, sect, sex, and special privileges, and by downgrading sacrificial rituals, temples, and bibliolatry.”^[18] Similarly, today’s Chamars of Shri Govardhanpur, on the southernmost edge of Banaras, “have no intention of accepting their lot as if it were decreed by fate or religion” and have been working since 1967 to erect a large Ravi Dasi temple in the hope that “their four-story edifice will rival temples in other sectors of the city and become a familiar part of the pilgrims’ circuit.”^[19]

Though it is a much larger, wealthier, more powerful, and socially more mainstream monastic community, attitudes in the Ramanandi sampraday bear striking similarity to the modern ideologies espoused by the Ravidasi and Kabirpanthi communities, no doubt because of the importance of both Ravidas and Kabir to Ramanandi tradition. Indeed, the disagreements that would come to divide the sampraday after 1918 indicate that many Ramanandis believed that Ramanand—presaging Kabir—had intended all along to destroy the edifice of caste through concentrated polemic and vitriolic attack; others depicted Ramanand—like Ravidas—as a saint who rose above the injustices of caste and sought its atrophy through disuse. Ranged against them, however, was a strong subgroup of Ramanandis who felt that there was a place for both religious and social hierarchy within the sampraday—that some sadhus, by virtue of their sectarian pedigree, were “purer” and worthy of greater respect than others, and that some sadhus, by virtue of their caste background prior to entering the sampraday, were deserving of better treatment in the monastic community.

The Ramanandi Past: Hagiography, Lineage, and Doctrine

Ramanand is today held by Ramanandis to have been an avatar of Ramchandra, the god-king of epic Ayodhya, returned to earth to rescue Hinduism from the corrupting effects of human divisiveness. The institutional centrality of Ramanand has long been reflected in the guru parampara (preceptor lineage) that connects every Ramanandi through an unbroken succession of gurus with Ramanand himself and, eventually, Ramchandra. The details and meanings of Ramanand’s life, which were the subject of heated controversy in 1918–1921, emerge from commentaries on the Bhaktamal, a verse compendium describing important devotees authored by Nabhadas, himself a Ramanandi, in the early seventeenth century.^[20]

The beginning of the twentieth century did not mark the first time Ramanandi memory was hauled up for inspection, and a review of an earlier controversy confirms that efforts to manipulate the institutional memory of Ramanand reflects changing attitudes toward caste in the sampraday. According to orthodox Ramanandi tradition, an important gathering of Vaishnavas took place in the Galta region of Jaipur in the early 1700s, the ostensible purpose of which was to organize a defense against attacks by Shaiva gosains.^[21] The less-heralded agenda was the elevation of Ramanand to a level equal to that of Ramanuja, the twelfth-century Tamil theologian long considered the founder of Vaishnava bhakti, in north Indian Vaishnavism, and the delimitation of thirty-six legitimate “gateways” through which a Ramanandi could claim a guru-disciple link to Ramanuja.^[22] Those thirty-six gateways descended only through the twice-born (i.e., brahman, kshatriya, and vaishya) male disciples of Ramanand and excluded his shudra, untouchable, and female disciples. Though the latter (including, importantly, Kabir and Ravidas) were still considered followers of Ramanand, they “lost their role as a transmitter or preceptor of the tradition”; their disciples, in turn, who may have considered themselves Ramanandis, “now found themselves outside the Ramanandi sect.” Nevertheless, “other genealogies indicate that male and female Hindus of servant [shudra] and untouchable birth were still being admitted into the Ramanandi sect”—and, hence, that the corporeal fact of being shudra, untouchable, or female was not what offended Ramanandis in the early 1700s, but the staunch anticaste ideology articulated by those “tainted” members of Ramanand’s inner circle.^[23] Thus while prior to Galta Ramanandis may have denied outright the relevance of caste (not to mention gender) distinctions, after Galta they moved toward an ambiguous ideological position: they chose to “recognise the category of caste but adopt an entirely neutral attitude toward it with reference to their sectarian recruitment.”^[24]

In addition to ushering in what was the first major ideological transformation in the Ramanandi sampraday, the Galta meeting also represented the historical context for the composition of the first major addition to the Bhaktamal, entitled Bhaktirasbodhinitika and authored by Priyadas in 1712.^[25] Priyadas would add 634 verses to the extant 214-verse Bhaktamal, and his work would be included with almost all subsequent commentaries.^[26] His substantive contribution was to append the miraculous legends that have become commonplace today concerning many important figures in Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, including Tulsidas, Mirabai, Kabir, Ravidas, and, of course, Ramanand.^[27] This process of hagiographical accretion continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly after 1918 when a group of sadhus from Ayodhya would take up, once again, the question of Ramanand’s relationship to Ramanuja.

In the nineteenth century, however, a major change would take place in the way Ramanandis (indeed, all Indians) communicated religious tradition, which in itself may have contributed to (and certainly shaped the logistics of) the unfolding of the 1918–1921 controversy. This change was manifest in the printing press, which was gradually popularized throughout north India in the latter half of the nineteenth century.^[28] The result of this popularization, I would argue, was an increasing doctrinal self-consciousness among literate Ramanandis, and a hagiographical text as central as the Bhaktamal would not be immune to such a process.^[29] The rendering of the verse and commentary of the Bhaktamal into a form accessible to early twentieth-century Vaishnavas would have been a task that required constant oral exposition. In the major Vaishnava establishments throughout the Gangetic region, Ramanandi scholars were thus constantly engaged in exegesis of the Bhaktamal as a matter of experiencing and expressing faith, guiding lay Vaishnavas and young Ramanandis, and articulating a universal moral code. The relatively autonomous nature of those establishments had meant (prior to the arrival of printing presses) that local exegeses of the Bhaktamal hagiography could conflict and still not threaten the overall ideological integrity of the sampraday.

By the nineteenth century, however, with the spread of presses throughout the Gangetic north, this was increasingly no longer the case. A widely known commentary of the Bhaktamal was a Persian manuscript by Tulsiram, entitled Bhaktamalpradipan (Bhaktamal illuminations). Tulsiram was a highly esteemed rasik Ramanandi scholar of Ambala, a sizable town north of Delhi in what is now the state of Haryana. Two important Hindi translations of Tulsiram’s commentary were published in 1867, marking in all likelihood the first time this text had been rendered in multiple copies by a printing press. One translation, by Hari Baksh Ray, was produced fairly close to Tulsiram’s home in the town of Solma.^[30] The other translation (with minor additions), done by Pratap Sinha of Muzaffarpur District in north Bihar and entitled Bhaktakalpadrum (or, the tree of devotees), was so popular that by 1874 a third edition had been issued by the respected Naval Kishore Press of Lucknow; by 1952 a twelfth edition was published by its offspring, the Tejkumar Press.^[31] The next major Bhaktamal commentary to emerge, entitled Shri Bhaktamal: Tika, Tilak, aur Namavali Sahit and authored by Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad (a nephew of Tulsiram) in 1903, would be reissued several times.^[32] The cumulative effect of the appearance in print of multiple Bhaktamal editions must have been dramatic—not because of any partisanship Bhagvan Prasad, Tulsiram, or any other scholar-devotees may have evinced on the issue of Ramanand’s identity, but because the representations and interpretations of Ramanand’s life could now not only confront one another in print but, inevitably, would encounter the variety of local, unpublished interpretation.

Of the three published Bhaktamal commentaries just noted, the most recent—Bhagvan Prasad’s—would increasingly be regarded as the most authoritative. Bhagvan Prasad was a well-known Ramanandi scholar-devotee and a resident of Kanak Bhavan in Ayodhya, an influential rasik establishment. He was also deeply engaged in the British-Indian intellectual exchange of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his treatment of the life of Ramanand reflected this intellectual milieu, right down to his textual critique of nineteenth-century British scholarship.^[33] Bhagvan Prasad’s account relied for the most part on earlier versions of the Bhaktamal, including especially another Persian-language version by Tapasviram entitled Ramuze Mihovafa.^[34] Tapasviram (1815–1885) was Bhagvan Prasad’s father and Tulsiram’s brother.^[35] Hence, Bhagvan Prasad was in all likelihood regarded as the scion of north India’s first family of Bhaktamal exegesis. In addition to drawing on his family’s expertise, however, Bhagvan Prasad cited a Hindi document entitled Shri Ramanand Yashavali [The eminent renown of Ramanand], which was said to be based on a portion of the Agastyasamhita that detailed events said to be destined to occur in the future—thereby lending the account an unimpeachable Sanskrit, Vaishnava authority.^[36] It is likely that the details of Ramanand’s life as depicted in Bhagvan Prasad’s commentary (given below) derived primarily from this latter source, since his version conforms in all particulars to that given in a Hindi translation of the Agastyasamhita by one Ram Narayan Das in 1904, rendered in English by R. G. Bhandarkar in Vaishnavism, Saivism, and Minor Religious Systems in 1913.^[37]

What emerged as a result of Bhagvan Prasad’s exegetical labors was a critical examination of the fundamentals of Ramanandi tradition, an account of a life of unparalleled importance that tried to reconcile a variety of proto-doctrinal opinions through exhaustive scholarship. Was Bhagvan Prasad conscious of the cultural and historical import of his work? Certainly he understood its significance as a document of sampraday record. It is for this reason that he began the text with what he called Shri Vaishnava Namavali, a list of 108 prominent Vaishnavas throughout the central Gangetic region. The Namavali is more than just a list, however, for it supplements names, dates, and places with a confirmation of each individual’s contribution to the sampraday. It represented a way of commemorating the breadth of Ramanandi achievement, both geographically and intellectually; it also allowed Bhagvan Prasad to express his own personal religious roots within the Ramanandi universe.

Bhagvan Prasad’s account of the life of Ramanand spans approximately eighteen pages.^[38] It begins with the list of twenty-two gurus, starting with Ramanuja, who is referred to here only as “shri 108 swami,” and ending with Ramanand, whose name is preceded by the phrase, “ananta shri bhagvan,” or eternal God.^[39] This represented what would have been the generally agreed upon (if not official) spiritual lineage of Ramanand and therefore was a crucial element of Ramanandi guru parampara in the early twentieth century. Ramanand’s immediate guru was Raghavanand, who, in addition to being accorded the honorific “shri 108,” is given the suffix acharya, or virtuous leader. The reader is told that prior to meeting Ramanand, Raghavanand (whose name, like Ramanand’s, can be translated as “bliss in God”) gathered about him a multitude of devotees and traveled the length and breadth of India, finally settling in Kashi (Varanasi), where he became a well-known teacher and “initiated people from all four varna [brahman, kshatriya, vaishya, shudra] and four ashrami [student, householder, retiree, and ascetic] as fervent devotees of Ram.” This phrase is significant because Raghavanand’s varna-blind guru style emerges as a precursor to Ramanand’s own, for which the latter is so famed.^[40] Bhagvan Prasad then goes on to remark that Ramchandra became manifest as a disciple to Raghavanand in the avatar form of Ramanand. “In this manner,” he continued, “the glory of the auspicious path of Shri 108 Ramanuja spread and continues to spread like nectar all over earth.”^[41] The next five-and-a-half pages focus on the great significance of Ramchandra’s decision to descend to earth in the body of Ramanand, the description of which repeatedly employs the metaphor of a “bridge spanning the ocean of the world of mundane existence”; to the twelve main disciples of Ramanand, plus an additional two, Galabanand and Yoganand; and to a chart that lists the deities that took up residence in each of the bodies of these disciples. Five further pages trace Ramanand’s birth and childhood, and, most importantly, the circumstances of his discipleship to Raghavanand, which led ultimately to the creation of the Ramanandi sampraday as a distinct body of devotees. Bhagvan Prasad encapsulates the essentials of that account as follows:

Ramanand (originally Ramadatta) was born into a respectable kanyakubja brahman household in Prayag in 1300. He began schooling at the age of four and proved to be such a promising student that by the time he was eight there was nothing more the scholars of Prayag could teach him. At the age of twelve he took up residence in Kashi, where he became the student of an dandi sanyasi and lived according to smarta doctrine.^[42] He one day encountered Raghavanand in Kashi, who immediately foresaw his destiny and prophesied that young Ramadatta’s body was on the verge of expiration, and therefore urged him to take refuge in Hari (Vishnu). Ramadatta referred the details of Raghavanand’s outburst to his dandi sanyasi guru, who confirmed the prophecy but could offer no remedy. The sanyasi therefore urged Ramadatta to save himself [“protect your body”] by taking refuge with the great seer [i.e., Raghavanand]. The youth went to Raghavanand, prostrated before him, and said, “hé great master, consider this body and soul an offering and protect it in this world and the next.” Having performed the initiatory mantras and bestowed the name Ramanand upon him, Raghavanand then instructed his new disciple in the techniques of controlled breathing [pranayama] and deep meditation, so that when death [kal] came to spirit Ramanand away, he appeared already corpse-like. Ramanand eventually emerged from this death-like trance chanting the “shri mantra” and immediately became absorbed in serving his new guru.^[43]

At this juncture, Bhagvan Prasad remarked that Ramanand’s yogic abilities were only to be expected, inasmuch as “he is himself in reality the avatar of the great master [i.e., Ramchandra]; in any event [he continues], this is all a big lila [sport] and therefore proper.”^[44] Bhagvan Prasad’s comment here seems gauged to forestall the criticism that an avatar of god should not have to suffer such human frailties as mortality and waste meditative effort in cosmic subterfuge. Bhagvan Prasad then took special pains to point out the circular elegance of Ramanand, the very image of god, going about his menial duties as a disciple to Raghavanand, who is depicted in the same breath as both guru and devotee of Ramanand. The author picks up the thread of Ramanand’s life at a later date: “Ramanand then undertook a series of long pilgrimages that led him all over the subcontinent. Upon returning to Kashi, Ramanand approached Raghavanand to perform the appropriate ritual guru darshan [literally, viewing] of reunion. Ramanand’s codisciples meanwhile had been demanding that Raghavanand punish Ramanand for having not paid close enough attention to commensal restrictions while away on pilgrimage.”^[45] Raghavanand perforce ordered Ramanand to “go forth and propagate your own sampraday.”

One or two points need to be emphasized here. First, Bhagvan Prasad’s edition of the Bhaktamal should be understood not simply as a scholarly tour-de-force and a concrete example of deep faith, but as a commemoration, indeed celebration, of the Ramanandi sampraday.^[46] At the heart of that commemoration lay the divine figure of Ramchandra as lived through the avatar Ramanand. This important life is thus retold as lila, cosmic sport, an expository mode that allows the narrator to reconcile Ramanand’s godliness with the all-too-human predicaments in which he finds himself. Indeed, such predicaments are an essential part of lila, because they allow the audience to elicit human meaning from the behavior of gods on earth; were gods to refrain from becoming mortal and engaging in human activity, with mortal circumstances, lila would lose the inner logic that fuels it—hence the epic, heart-wrenching tale of Ramchandra exiled from Ayodhya and beset by the forces of evil. Ramanand is thus presented not only as a disciple in a religious community that descends from Ramanuja, but is portrayed as a humble student in performance of guru-seva (service). The crucial moment of the lila, of course, occurs when Ramanand is expelled from the discipleship of Raghavanand and the guru-brotherhood of his codisciples, an event that then enables him to complete the drama by creating the Ramanandi sampraday. Nothing in this account would have appeared problematic to Bhagvan Prasad, who in 1908 traced his own guru parampara back through forty-two generations of discipleship to Ramchandra of Ayodhya; in this parampara, Ramanuja was tenth in descent and Ramanand thirtieth.^[47]It would, however, prove offensive to a younger generation of Ramanandis a decade later.

Other Ramanands

Varying conceptions of Ramanandi parampara (tradition) both prior and subsequent to Bhagvan Prasad’s Bhaktamal commentary in the first decade of the twentieth century suggest that ambiguity on the question of Ramanand’s life tended to be the rule rather than the exception, a fact that enabled Ramanand to be all things to all Ramanandis. That this was no longer the case by 1918 is evidenced by the rancorous dispute that erupted over a new Ramanandi ideological orthodoxy that conceived of Ramanand as entirely independent of Ramanuja. The versions of Ramanand’s life that I present in brief below have in common a Ramanand that hails not from Prayag, the heartland of the Gangetic north, but from the peninsular south. First among these is a highly rudimentary biographical sequence that had been dictated to Francis Buchanan in the early nineteenth century during his tour of South Bihar. This version, as told by Jagannath Das, a Ramanandi of wide renown in Bihar and a main informant of Buchanan regarding Ramanandis, described Ramanand as a Dravira, or south Indian, brahman and disciple of Vedant Acharya, a Ramanuji and also a southerner. Though Jagannath Das understood Ramanand as fundamentally important to his own religious identity, Ramanand was nevertheless an intermediate link in a religious tradition that began with Ramanuja five or six guru-generations earlier.^[48]

Over a century after Buchanan’s tour a different version of Ramanand’s life appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, authored by the well-known missionary and Indologist, J. N. Farquhar.^[49] Farquhar began his 1920 consideration of the life of Ramanand by acknowledging his good fortune at having the opportunity to attend the kumbh mela, India’s largest pilgrimage festival, at Allahabad (Prayag) in 1918, where he met with many Ramanandis, including no doubt some younger sadhus who would soon lead the call for a new, more stringent Ramanandi tradition. Based on encounters with Ramanandis at the Prayag kumbh, Farquhar theorized that Ramanand was a south Indian who migrated northward around 1430, took up residence in Kashi, and flourished there until about 1470.^[50] Notwithstanding this southern connection, which he would eventually abandon in any case, Farquhar contended that Ramanand was completely unconnected to Ramanuja or any Ramanuji gurus, but acknowledged that he nevertheless borrowed liberally from the qualified monism of Ramanuja; only in later generations would Ramanandis and Ramanujis begin to associate with each other because of the proximity of their philosophical doctrines.^[51]

By 1920, of course, the question of Ramanand had already erupted into a full-blown controversy within the Ramanandi community itself, and the issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, which no doubt was as closely read in Allahabad, Banaras, and Patna as in London, was sure to spark many responses. That of Rai Bahadur Lala Sita Ram is of particular importance, because of an extensive correspondence he carried on with the eminent linguist and Indologist Sir George Grierson from about 1904 until the mid 1930s.^[52] Sita Ram was a retired magistrate and deputy collector of Uttar Pradesh who became associated with Allahabad University and eventually authored the definitive, Vaishnava history of Ayodhya.^[53] In a letter sent to Grierson at the end of June 1920, Sita Ram expressed his strong objections to several points in Farquhar’s essay and offered a number of corrections to it, arguing in no uncertain terms that Ramanand was originally a guru in the Ramanuji tradition who later branched off to develop his own teachings of boundless love that refused to countenance the narrow-mindedness of caste and ritual.^[54] Interestingly, however, Sita Ram raised no objection to Farquhar’s original contention that Ramanand was a brahman from the south. Grierson received this particular correspondence two years after his essay on “Ramanandi, Ramawat” for the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Nevertheless, the imprint of Sita Ram’s Ramanandi views on the social implications of Ramanand’s bhakti tenacity, along with Bhagvan Prasad’s Bhaktamal-derived narrative of Ramanand’s life, emerge clearly in Grierson’s article.^[55]

The representations of Ramanand by Grierson and Sita Ram on the one hand and by Farquhar on the other reflect the determination of each party to offer a complete and static view of a Ramanandi sampraday that was in reality experiencing the throes of dramatic change. Grierson and Sita Ram’s Ramanand was a disenchanted Ramanuji who tried to span the caste divisions of fourteenth-century Gangetic society with a message of love and equality. Farquhar’s Ramanand, by contrast, was completely independent of the Ramanujis; Farquhar even argued, based both on his experience with Ramanandis and on his perception of the orthodoxy of a number of prominent “medieval” disciples, that “there is no evidence that [Ramanand] modified the social rules of caste in the slightest.”^[56] In retrospect, Farquhar’s presentation of the historical question of Ramanand reflects his attempt to reconcile the many different (and often conflicting) opinions he must have encountered during his discussions with Ramanandi sadhus at the 1918 kumbh. Grierson, by contrast, left India in the mid 1890s; his presentation of Ramanand’s life, therefore, reflects his connections with an older generation of Ramanandi scholars in closer contact with colonial officialdom, such as Lala Sita Ram and Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad, the Bhaktamal exegete.^[57]

These local variations on the theme of Ramanand’s life were no doubt supplemented by numerous others through the course of the nineteenth century, versions that differed not only in relatively minor details but on the overarching question of Ramanuja. The variety and fluidity of parampara in the pre-1918 phase serves to highlight again the most salient organizational feature of the sampraday, namely, the many-centered nature of Ramanandi authority. A product of the constantly shifting fortunes of powerful monasteries in local settings, this diffuse populism meant that the only opportunity for reconciliation of ideological differences (and perhaps the only occasion that required any reconciliation) in the sampraday occurred approximately once every three years on the occasion of the kumbh mela (held by turns in Nasik, Ujjain, Allahabad, or Haridwar)—and then only among those sadhus who chose to attend.

The Rise of Radical Ramanandis

The quest for power and influence in the Ramanandi sampraday took place on the ground of the past, and those best able to negotiate that ground ultimately dictated the immediate social and political dimensions of the monastic community. The major transformation in the institutional memory of the sampraday occurred between 1918 and 1921: an extended moment, focused on Ayodhya in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh, but concluded at the Ujjain kumbh in what is now western Madhya Pradesh. The events of 1918–1921 extended thus to the southwesternmost edge of the Hindi-speaking north, to Malwa, the Vindhya Range, and the headwaters of the Chambal River—a region that represents for many the border between south and north India. The location of Ujjain was geoculturally appropriate for the denouement of the crisis, given the implications of the debate for southern influences in the Ramanandi sampraday. While the object in the early 1700s in Galta was to elevate the status of Ramanand vis-à-vis Ramanuja while restricting the entry of radical anti-varna sentiment into the sampraday, the motive in 1918–1921 seems to have been to loosen that social stricture by making Ramanand altogether supreme and eliminating all mention of Ramanuja.

Though Ramanand’s divine status was practically assumed by Ramanandis at the turn of the century (at least, judging by Bhagvan Prasad’s Bhaktamal commentary), by 1918 a group of Ramanandis rejected vehemently the possibility that Ramanand was a member of someone else’s (i.e., Ramanuja’s) sampraday and insisted instead that he single-handedly founded the order. At stake, it was argued, was Ramanand’s position as the unequivocal proponent of Vaishnava bhakti (love for god) in the north, an issue that naturally would have some bearing on his status as the originator of the sampraday that took his name. However, while many conceded that Ramanand was an important link in the descent of Shri Vaishnava belief, they held Ramanuja to be the original earthly fount of knowledge and devotion.^[58] Conversely, the radical Ramanandi element could stomach no presentation of Ramanand that compromised in any way his complete and total control over his own destiny and the destiny of his religious community. I favor the term “radical” to describe these sadhus because they chose to elevate a core article of faith to force a reconstituted Ramanandi memory. The radical position demanded either allegiance or refutation: a Vaishnava was either a Ramanuji or a Ramanandi. Those who chose to retain the Ramanuja link—regardless of their opinion regarding Ramanand’s divinity—found themselves accused of opposing the avatar status of Ramanand and were labeled (and stigmatized) accordingly. After 1921 both sides would seek the moral high ground by claiming the appellation “Shri Vaishnava.”

Much of the resentment on the part of this new radical element stemmed from the association of Ramanuja and Ramanuji-oriented Vaishnavas with elitist attitudes and commensal practices. For instance, Shivnandan Sahay (Bhagvan Prasad’s first biographer) noted in 1908 that among the many differences between Ramanujis and Ramanandis, the former “only allow initiation to brahmans and kshatriyas.”^[59] In fact, such attitudes were not new. As noted earlier in the discussion of the Galta conference in the early 1700s, there had been a long-standing desire among elements within the order to limit (or at least control the ideological effects of) the entry of low-status individuals. We noted in the previous chapter as well the presence of elitist pockets in the Ramanandi sampraday in the early nineteenth century: Buchanan had observed in 1812 that though the terms Ramanandi and Ramawat were “applicable to either Brahman or Sudra, and in general both live together and are called Avadhut . . . , some Brahmans affect superior purity, will not eat with the Sudras, and are called Acharyas.”^[60] (By 1918 the term acharya, which refers to a person of virtuous conduct, would come to be associated with Ramanuji elements in the sampraday; by contrast, das, which means servant or slave, was symbolic of one’s Ramanandi status.) Finally, it may be noted that the perceived elitism of Ramanuji circles in the north was generally consistent with the historian Burton Stein’s conclusions (albeit for an earlier period) regarding the marked “Brahman-dominated Hindu orthodoxy” of south Indian Shri Vaishnava institutions, especially at Tirupati and Srirangam, which prohibited the infiltration of shudras.^[61]

While social and religious elitism was not a new phenomenon in the sampraday, the emergence of a widespread and coordinated opposition to that elitism was. In retrospect, one early indication that a major shift in attitudes was in the air may have been evident in the 1911 census returns for religious sect in Uttar Pradesh. The first response of a sizable number of Vaishnavas, when asked their sect (i.e., Vaishnava or Shaiva) by census officials in 1911, responded that they were “Ramanandis.”^[62] Given the subsequent conflict, it is likely that this response was provoked by increasing resentment felt by Ramanandis in their relations with elitist acharya elements in the order. The catalyst for the conflict was provided in 1918 by a visit to Ayodhya by the head of the Shri Vaishnava Totadri math in south India. Particularly galling to many Ramanandis was the fact that the Anantacharya (eternal leader) from the south refused to prostrate before Sita and Ramchandra images in two major Ramanandi temples, refused to accept prasad (a ritual offering of food or drink), and in general “behaved like a strict Brahman who thought the Ramanandis an inferior community.”^[63]

These angry recollections stand in sharp contrast to those of Swami Dharnidharacharya, a rising young Bihari intellectual of Ayodhya who drew close to the visitor from the south during his brief visit in 1918. Dharnidharacharya, looking back in the 1930s, was so impressed with the philosophical and moral discourses by the Anantacharya held regularly in Kanak Bhavan that, as he put it, “my heart was cleansed and I realized that there would be no better opportunity to become his disciple.”^[64] When he became the chela (disciple) of the Anantacharya, he was given the name “Dharnidhar Ramanujadas,” or Dharnidhar, slave of Ramanuja. This choice of names could not have failed to irritate those radical Ramanandis who had begun associating the elitist elements in the sampraday with the figure of the south Indian theologian, Ramanujacharya. However, the use of “das” as a suffix suggests as well that the Ramanuji-Ramanandi battle lines were not firmly marked out at that time (1918), and that many Ramanandis accepted a servile position with respect to the acharyas in the order.

The radical Ramanandi opinion that began to solidify after 1918—much to the dismay of Dharnidharacharya and similar figures—was characterized by its proponents as svatantra (sovereign or free) and held essentially that Ramanand had originated a religious tradition wholly independent of any connection with Ramanuja and the Shri Vaishnavas of the south.^[65] Central to the propagation of this view was another young Ramanandi sadhu, one Bhagavad Das (later Bhagavadacharya), who had become a disciple of a prominent rasik guru in Ayodhya in 1919.^[66] To redress the many injustices and insults that he felt were being heaped upon Ramanandis by Ramanujis in the sampraday, Bhagavadacharya formed two committees: the “Shri Ramanandi Vaishnava Mahamandal,” a “supra-council” that directed the svatantra movement, and the Puratatvanusandhayini Samiti, charged with identifying and studying historical documents associated with Ramanand.^[67] Both were devoted, ultimately, to purging the sampraday of Ramanuji elements. Bhagavadacharya was soon challenged to a debate, which took place in the Hanumangarhi, the main naga fortress of Ayodhya. After it became apparent that no one had the rhetorical skills to defeat Bhagavadacharya, his guru and reportedly the most powerful intellect in Ayodhya, Mahant Swami Rammanoharprasadacharya of Bara Asthan (big place), was persuaded to oppose him in debate. According to recent Ramanandi recountings of these events, it was felt that since there was no one in Ayodhya who possessed the courage to face Rammanoharprasadacharya, the Ramanuji side would emerge victorious.^[68] In the end, and contrary to all expectations, the young disciple won the day.

The Ayodhya debate, which occured in 1919 or 1920, did not in any way signal the end of the matter. Indeed, according to Ramanandis it only created the need for the more august “historical” debate at the 1921 Ujjain kumbh. The specific question to be addressed was whether the sacred books of the south Indian Shri Vaishnavas offended Ramchandra; implicit to the debate was whether Ramanuja was regarded by Ramanand as a monastic predecessor. The Ramanuji side was defended by Swami Ramprapann Ramanujadas of the Totadri math; Bhagavadacharya argued on behalf of the radical Ramanandi position.^[69] The jury took little time in deciding in favor of Bhagavadacharya and stating that henceforth the Ramanandi sampraday was to be independent of Ramanujacharya and south Indian Shri Vaishnavas. The new guru parampara placed Ramanand twenty-second in descent from Ramchandra and included no mention whatsoever of Ramanuja.^[70] Crucial to the Ujjain victory was the discovery of a fifteenth-century guru parampara that made no mention of Ramanuja; this parampara was said to have been authored by Agradevacharya, a grand-disciple of Ramanand, and was uncovered by the aforementioned research committee (Puratatvanusandhayini Samiti).^[71]

Even the conclusion reached at Ujjain did not completely resolve the dispute, and those Ramanandis who are today thought of as Ramanujis continue to reject the validity of the 1921 Ujjain debate. Among their objections are the charges that the fifteenth-century guru parampara was forged by Bhagavadacharya, and that the juries for both the Ayodhya and Ujjain debates were strategically loaded with prominent naga mahants and others sympathetic to the radical postition.^[72] Indeed, it would take years of writing and propagandizing before Bhagavadacharya’s position would be regarded as “orthodox” by Ramanandis themselves. In a 1924 contribution to a major Hindi-language journal of Banaras, one Shyamsundardas continued to insist that the “thread of descent [in the Ramanandi sampraday] began with Ramanuja.”^[73] Three years later Bhagavadacharya would publish his first major work, ShrimadRamanand-Digvijayah (The World-Conquest of Ramanand), a four-hundred-page treatise in Sanskrit and Hindi on the life of Ramanand, thus correcting the hagiographic “deficiencies” of Ramanandi tradition. In the introduction to that work, Bhagavadacharya rearticulated his position on Ramanuja, focusing in particular on the narrative of Ramanand’s life found in the Bhaktamal: “The intention with which Nabha-ji composed his poetic verse is a point of great dispute. There is no harm in suggesting that Nabha-ji’s intent was to show that Shri Ramanandacharya used the very same philosophical system that Shri Swami Ramanujacharya had used to propagate religious ideas.…However, it would constitute a great error to suggest that he intended to depict Shri Ramanand Swami-ji as a disciple of the sampraday and tradition of Shri Ramanuja Swami-ji.”^[74] In the same year (1927), another debate would be held in Vrindaban; according to a recollection of these events by one late twentieth-century admirer of Bhagavadacharya, the Ramanujis were said to have behaved so disrespectfully that, henceforth, they would no longer be considered part of the fourfold division of Vaishnavas (known as the chatuh-sampraday) and would no longer be allowed to share ground with Vaishnavas at the major festivals.^[75] The extent to which the radical position came to dominate Ramanandi attitudes throughout the north is reflected in the fact that Ramanujis failed to take part in the ceremonial procession of the monastic orders at the 1932 kumbh held in Ujjain.^[76]

Many scholars continued to assert into the 1930s, however, that Ramanand was not the sole, independent originator of the sampraday. In the early 1930s, Kalyan (Benediction), a widely distributed monthly magazine published in Gorakhpur, brought out a special number on the lives of famous yogis and swamis, entitled Yogank. This issue described Ramanand as a follower of Ramanuja who had been excommunicated for careless commensal behavior while on pilgrimage. Avadh Kishor Das, a supporter of the radical position and the editor of a 1935–1936 collection of essays on Ramanand and the Ramanandi sampraday, responded by attacking the editors of Kalyan:

We have nothing whatsoever in common with the Ramanuji sampraday. We disagree with them on every point. Ramanand a follower of a sampraday which we do not even accept as legitimate? How many hearts burn with this statement? But it does not end there. This enemy of the Ramanandi sampraday has launched a heavy attack.…

The editor and author of Kalyan should realize that jagat-guru [lord-of-the-world] Shri Ramanandcharya-ji was never a follower of the Ramanuji sampraday but was rather according to the eternal proof of the shrutis [revealed wisdom] and shastras [legal texts] the leader of the Shri sampraday, which later became known by his name. No one excommunicated him and he was not any common devotee, but was the leader of countless devotees and the avatar of lord Shri Ram.^[77]

Avadh Kishor Das concluded by exhorting Ramanandis to confront those responsible in Gorakhpur and demand an explanation and an apology.

Eventually the views of the radical faction came to dominate the Ramanandi sampraday. Ramanandis became those who adhered to the svatantra, or independent, position and refused all links with the Ramanuja heritage, while those who retained those links were known as Ramanujis. Since guru parampara represented a fundamental element of Ramanandi identity, the dispute was certain to affect everyone in the sampraday. Even Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad, who by all indications endeavored to remain aloof from Ayodhya politics and left little in the way of comment on the radical interpretation of Ramanand’s life, seems to have been touched by the controversy. In 1908, a decade prior to the eruption of the dispute, Bhagvan Prasad’s guru parampara had placed Ramanuja tenth and Ramanand twentieth in descent from Ramchandra.^[78] Bhagvan Prasad passed away in 1932, over a decade after the Ujjain decision. In a 1940s memoir written by one of his admirers and dedicated to explicating the subtleties of Bhagvan Prasad’s teachings, a guru parampara is given that is said to have been taken from the pages of Bhagvan Prasad’s 1928–1929 diary.^[79] This guru parampara makes no mention whatsoever of Ramanuja. Likewise, in subsequent editions of Bhagvan Prasad’s commentary on the Bhaktamal, a guru parampara of Ramanand is given that places Ramanand twenty-second in descent from Ramchandra, again omitting mention of Ramanuja.^[80]

There remain, however, pockets of Ramanuji strength throughout north India. Vaishnava centers today dominated by Ramanujis include the Janaki-asthan in Sitamarhi, north Bihar (said to be the exact location where Sita was discovered emerging from the furrow left by her father’s plowing), and the Galta Pith on the outskirts of Jaipur. Indeed, even Ayodhya continued to harbor many sadhus who chose not to accept the parampara advanced by Bhagavadacharya. Among them was Dharnidharacharya, who returned in 1924 despite bitter memories of Ayodhya as the center of the movement to repudiate Ramanujacharya. Indeed, as far as he was concerned (writing in the 1930s), a final decision was never reached regarding the official guru parampara.^[81]

Bhagavadacharya himself would rise, in the 1970s, to the very pinnacle of Vaishnava monastic authority as a result of his lifelong efforts. His was a circuitous route to the top, however, and along the way he would alienate many within and beyond Ayodhya, including his own guru, Mahant Rammanoharprasad, whom he defeated in debate.^[82] Even though his ShrimadRamanand-Digvijayah was published in 1927, and despite the fact that his radical position was gaining increasing acceptance among Ramanandis through the 1920s and 1930s, it would appear that Bhagavadacharya was regarded as something of a revolutionary for many years. Indeed, in 1929 Swami Raghuvaracharya of Bara Asthan (the math in Ayodhya that Bhagavadacharya had joined in 1919 and had been obliged to leave after defeating his guru in debate soon thereafter) authored a commentary on the Anandabhashya (Discourses on Bliss), which was purported to be the specific teachings of Ramanand; this text would remain unchallenged through the 1930s and 1940s as the authoritative statement of Ramanandi doctrine.^[83] Following the tumultuous 1920s, Bhagavadacharya would retire to a cave at Mount Abu and begin formulating his scholarly campaign; he would eventually shift his base of operations to the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat and begin writing in earnest.^[84] In 1955 Bhagavadacharya publicly took issue with the way Ramanandi doctrine was being taught, denounced Raghuvaracharya’s Anandabhashya commentary as completely devoid of any connection to Ramanand’s true teachings, challenged all comers to a debate on the veracity of the sources for that text, and promised to produce a document of his own. His opponents remained (according to him) silent, so in 1958 he published ShriJanakikripabhashyasya (The Discourses of Shri Janaki, or Sita).^[85] In 1963 Bhagavadacharya authored yet another treatise, entitled ShriRamanandabhashyam (The Discourses of Ramanand), which created considerable consternation among major sampraday figures in Ayodhya and Banaras.^[86] In 1967 his first major work, ShrimadRamanand-Digvijayah, was reissued (as ShriRamanand-Digvijayah) by the Adhyapika Shrichandandevi Press, Ahmedabad, signaling the consolidation of his position as India’s preeminent Ramanandi intellect.

By the late 1960s Bhagavadacharya was approaching his hundredth year and presumably had outlived most if not all of his opponents from the 1920s; indeed, his very longevity may have contributed to his ascent in sampraday politics by the 1970s. More important, however, were his organizational and literary energies, which during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were manifest in social reform efforts to eradicate untouchability, in his authorship of more than forty articles and books in both Sanskrit and Hindi on Ramanandi doctrine, and in his editorship of a journal, Tatvadarshi (Reflections on the Supreme Spirit).^[87] In 1971 his centenary was celebrated with great fanfare in Ahmedabad. Judging by the hundreds of luminaries in attendance, Bhagavadacharya had attained great stature both within and outside the Ramanandi sampraday—particularly in Gujarat state politics and in the all-India associational politics of the Bharat Sadhu Samaj (or Indian Sadhu Society).^[88] Finally in 1977, at the Prayag kumbh, a wide array of sampraday leaders would declare him the first jagadguru-Ramanandacharya (universal leader [wearing the mantle of] Ramanandacharya) since Ramanand himself, and the twenty-third in descent from Ramchandra, in gratitude for his lifelong service to the sampraday.^[89] Not only would this mark the pinnacle of Bhagavadacharya’s career, the granting of such an honor to the firebrand of the 1920s would signal that the radical Ramanandi view had achieved wide acceptance in Vaishnava circles by the 1970s.

In a variety of ways, then, the concerns expressed in Ayodhya in 1918–1921, which continue to ripple through north India today, mirrored those of the early eighteenth century in Galta. The important difference, however, is that in the early twentieth century the side generally perceived to have predominated—the radical Ramanandi faction—favored a radicalization of the meaning of Ramanand’s life with respect to Ramanuja and varna.^[90] By articulating a guru parampara free of any mention of Ramanuja, radical monks were in effect rejecting the very notion of social superiority which, in their view, fueled the Ramanuji “acharya” avowals of religious exclusivity. Given the details of Ramanand’s contested life and the core Ramanuji assertion that Ramanand was expelled from the society of monks for careless eating practices while on pilgrimage, an opinion after 1918 on the question of Ramanuja as a spiritual antecedent of Ramanand could only be articulated with reference to caste and commensality. While this question is taken up in greater detail below (“Caste and the New Ramanandi Order”), it should be noted that van der Veer has argued (rightly) that caste was not the only consideration in an individual’s decision to support either the Ramanuji or the Ramanandi position. Van der Veer cites as evidence the fact that “even abbots of Kurmi and Barhi [cultivator and carpenter] castes chose to become Ramanuji.”^[91] While I agree generally with van der Veer’s position, I disagree with two assumptions that are implicit in his observation. The first is that the low ascriptive status of Kurmis and Barhais was self-evident (to observers and to the subjects themselves) and remained unchanged through the twentieth century. While this assumption was shared by the brahmanical and colonial elite in the early twentieth century and appears commonplace in the discourse of backward classes of the late twentieth century, it was probably not an assumption shared by many Kurmis and Barhais themselves in the 1920s. For Kurmis, Barhais, and others, caste in the first half of the century was very much in the eye of the beholder, and many in those communities held themselves to be of high-caste status and were actively promoting programs of varna reidentification in an effort to claim for themselves a noble, kshatriya past.^[92] And, I would argue, whether they considered themselves high caste in the 1920s depended very much on whether they conceived of varna merely as a social idea to be manipulated or as a fundamental, essential, and all-encompassing mold from which there was no escape—in a word, as caste.

Van der Veer’s second assumption, which emerges out of the first, is that given a low ascriptive status, Kurmis and Barhais should have supported Bhagavadacharya’s radical position, thus demonstrating a disdain for caste hierarchy. While quite plausible at first glance, this assertion should raise a logical query: if in fact Kurmis and Barhais indeed believed themselves to be of low status, how could they possibly evince a disdain for caste in the first place? The answer, of course, is that while they were no doubt aware of the many assertions that they were socially inferior, they did not necessarily consider themselves to be of low status. Rather, the overt Kurmi and Barhai support for the Ramanuji position should be read as a conscious expression of their own perceptions of themselves as high status, which would be consistent with peasant attitudes toward caste and status that were coalescing outside the sampraday. And again, a belief in one’s high status requires a commitment to the very idea of hierarchy.

Varna, jati, and caste are slippery concepts under the best of circumstances. This is in part because the very idea of status had long been a matter of contention in north India. Crucial to my understanding of caste is the examination from within of all casual assertions of ascriptive status, including caste. I would argue that the success of the radical Ramanandi faction in the Gangetic region after the 1920s (and particularly by the 1970s) signifies that caste no longer represented an all-encompassing, unquestioned social code for a critical mass of Vaishnava sadhus. Discerning what such ideological shifts may have meant for “ordinary people” outside the sampraday is a task for chapters 3 and 4.

New Hagiography, New History

The altered mythology of Ramanand’s life imposed by the radical sentiment entailed the evolution of a new and more socially and religiously aggressive Ramanandi history.^[93] In the early 1930s a group of influential Ramanandis, tacitly supported by Bhagavadacharya, formed the Ramanandi Literature Publication Committee whose goal was the publication and propagation of Ramanandi books.^[94] The founding members of the committee included Sitaramiya Mathuradas, who had played a leading role in the 1918 committee that investigated the tradition of the Ramanandi community; Ramballabhasharan, a leading rasik of Ayodhya; and Bhagvandas, a prominent mahant of a naga akhara in Ayodhya. The committee provided an important forum for the articulation of the wider social and religious concerns of Ramanandi history, conceived almost entirely in terms of two broad historical themes: caste elitism and the coming of Islam to India. Ramanandi concern with caste elitism focused on the restrictive recruitment practices of the major historical rival to Vaishnava monasticism, the Dasnami organization said to have been established by Shankaracharya in the beginning of the ninth century. The Ramanandi history of Islam in the subcontinent depicted Ramanand as the champion of a Hinduism that had been weakened by internecine struggle with Dasnamis and therefore vulnerable to violent Muslim persecution.

Much like their perception of Ramanuja’s Shri Vaishnava practices, radical Ramanandis understood brahman elitism to be the defining feature of the Dasnami order. Bhagavadacharya described the exclusivity of Shankaracharya’s Dasnamis as the religious and social antithesis of core Ramanandi teachings:

Having overcome Buddhism, Swami Shankaracharya-ji established his own monastic society. But in this he was not entirely successful. His insipid monism was incapable of drawing any followers. It was also heretical and mean-spirited. His path was only open to the brahman jati; it was difficult for others to enter. As a result, brahmans [given their small numbers] could not enlarge this community, and others were not given the opportunity to try. Ramanand understood the precise nature of this dilemma. He was well-acquainted with the consequences of parochialism.^[95] From its very inception the sampraday was egalitarian. Swami Shri Ramanand was not at all reluctant to place its egalitarianism before the world. The result was that one huge community was formed, and this was the equivalent of a holy boon for the spread of religion.^[96]

Ramanandi hindsight in the twentieth century decried the Vaishnava-Shaiva rivalry as “Hindu versus Hindu” conflict. In order to endow the narrative of this internecine strife with dramatic force, the new Ramanandi historiography relied on a depiction of Muslims as unidimensional villains bent on the destruction of a divided Hindu society. In the words of Sitaramiya Mathuradas, Shaivas stood by opportunistically “while Vaishnavas were butchered by Muslims.”^[97] Bemoaning the caste-mindedness that was thought to have fed rival monastic antipathies and Hindu decline vis-à-vis Islam in this period, another author wrote, “This was not a time to bicker about jati differences, this was a time to ‘worship god and be part of god.’”^[98] The egalitarian presciptions of radical Ramanandis in the 1930s relied, then, on a new Ramanandi view of the past rife with distinctly anti-Muslim rhetorical tones.

It should be noted that Ramanandis in early twentieth-century Ayodhya struck this ardently anti-Muslim pose despite the fact that much of the land with which the various orders within the sampraday enriched themselves was given to the Ayodhya monasteries by Shuja ud-Daula (the Nawab of Awadh) in the late eighteenth century. Judging from Buchanan’s description, written in the second decade of the nineteenth century, an antagonism toward things and people Islamic at that time could not have been further from the minds of Ramanandis: “The Ramanandis or Ramawats [of Gorakhpur district] have very numerous establishments, and a great deal of land free of revenue, the greater part of which I am told, they obtained from Suja ud Doulah, to whom they contrived to render themselves very agreeable. They are indeed skilful courtiers. Most of the lands were therefore granted to the convents of Ayodhya, near where this prince resided.”^[99] Nevertheless, the radical Ramanandi view in the twentieth century broke with its eighteenth-century antecedents and held that fourteenth-century north Indian Hindu society had been embroiled in internecine squabbles and had suffered the relentless persecution of Muslim tyranny.

A vision of Muslim persecution in the past did not mean, however, that the Ramanandi sampraday had no room for some Muslims in the present. The radical vision articulated by Bhagavadacharya included the careful reiteration that the “first generation” of Ramanand’s followers emerged from virtually all sections of society—especially, in the person of Kabir, Muslim society. Ramanand’s first circle of disciples represented an ideal model for coexistence in the present, but on Ramanandi terms: Bhagavadacharya laid great stress on the assertion that “Vaishnava religion is not reserved for only one certain jati and only one lineage; rather, any jati, any lineage, any class, and any person can find a place in its huge domain.” And not only was Kabir the quintessential example of devotion and diversity in this paradigmatic vision of society, along with the other disciples he was thought to have been a manifestation of Vaishnava divinity: “Much as the community of gods took the form of monkeys and aided Ramchandra when he was an avatar, many liberated souls took earthly form in the age of avatar Ramanand. Narad, Bhisham, Bali and others became brahmans, kshatriyas, vaishyas, shudras, Muslims, etc. and carried out fully the wishes of Ramanand.” In much the same way that the radical Ramanandi vision deemed varna insignificant in matters of belief, Islam too was conceived as but a minor impediment to participation in a community driven by Ramanandi love. If “thousands of brahmans, kshatriyas, vaishyas, shudras, and untouchables fell in love with the beauty of Vaishnavism,” why exclude Muslims? Indeed, according to Bhagavadacharya, Ramanand invited such a diverse range of devotees to be his own disciples precisely so he could “through them cleanse Bharat [India] all at once in the unremitting current of the Ganga.” The exact dimensions of the “cleansing” process were left to the discretion and imagination of the reader.^[100]

Caste and the New Ramanandi Order

Bhagavadacharya’s strident reiteration of Ramanand’s fourteenth-century liberalism signified the reemergence of the view that caste status could constitute neither an obstacle nor an asset to full participation in the sampraday. The experiences of other Ramanandis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confirm this general disdain for commensal restrictions according to caste, but at the same time reflect a fundamental equivocation on the issue of varna differentiation. Perhaps no individual better reflects the Ramanandi disdain for caste than Bhagvan Prasad, the Bhaktamal exegete who ranked among the top intellectuals of Ayodhya at the turn of the century.^[101]

Bhagvan Prasad was born in 1840 into a family of scholarly, well-to-do Kayasths, already noted for their long-standing contributions to Ramanandi literature.^[102] Much of his childhood was spent in Mubarakpur, a prestigious Kayasth enclave near the town of Chapra in Saran District. In Mubarakpur a local Ramanandi named Shivcharan Bhagat—a Koiri (vegetable gardener) “whose knowledge of Persian was so great people addressed him as munshi (scribe)”—had an early influence on Bhagvan Prasad’s religious education.^[103] In 1858, one year after his marriage, Bhagvan Prasad became a disciple of Swami Ramcharandas, of Parsa village, Chapra District, who bestowed upon him the name Sitaramsharan, a typically rasik title that connotes taking refuge (sharan) in the conjoined deity of Sita and Ramchandra.^[104] In 1863 Bhagvan Prasad became a subinspector of schools, and his subsequent employment in this line took him all over Bihar. It was not until 1881, however, that Bhagvan Prasad was introduced to the famous rasik of Bhagalpur, Shri Ramcharandas Hanskala, and was granted the title Rupkala, which may be translated as “manifest beauty.” Bhagvan Prasad never had children, and between the years 1885 and 1895 his mother, father, and wife all passed away; left with no immediate family ties to Bihar, Bhagvan Prasad, like his father and uncle before him, retired to a contemplative life in Ayodhya.

In addition to earning a broad reputation as a rasik poet and Ramanandi scholar, Bhagvan Prasad gained a certain notoriety during his government service as one who was only too willing to flout the norms of public decency. While in Patna as Deputy Inspector of Schools, as biographer Shivnandan Sahay noted with reluctant admiration, Bhagvan Prasad frequently “attended to the personal religious needs of his palanquin-bearing Kahar, his servants, and his shoe-repairman as Vaishnavas, one and the same.”^[105] Bhagvan Prasad’s blatant disregard for caste in the pursuit of the Ramanandi ideal of religious devotion aroused the consternation of many of his peers, who complained that ministrations to people of shudra and untouchable status would only result in a depletion of the economic and social services provided by those segments of society. In particular, respectable people were greatly put out by what appeared to them a presumption of dignity on the part of lowly shudras. According to Sahay, many of them raised objections to Bhagvan Prasad’s ministrations to mere laborers—in this case Kahars—on the grounds that the latter would develop ideas about proper and improper work and eventually refuse to perform the back-breaking task of palanquin-bearing.^[106] While the fears of respectable society may have been real, it is also extremely likely that Bhagvan Prasad’s close religious interaction with shudras and untouchables evoked a more visceral response, quite apart from any impending scarcity of laboring Kahars. Even Sahay himself felt obliged to apologize for his subject’s behavior, explaining that “as far as I understand, his idea was that by ministering to these people they would be more attentive to the salubrity of their meals and would thereby not be faced with any obstacles en route to salvation.”

Bhagvan Prasad’s ministrations reflected his own personal interpretation of the social mandate implicit in the religious message of Ramanand. However, Ramanandi ambivalence toward caste emerged in discussions about the prescribed stages of a sadhu’s entry into the sampraday. In his biography of Bhagvan Prasad, Sahay expressed the view that originally anyone (including untouchables) could have become Ramanandi sadhus, but that by his time (the early 1900s), “Ramanandis bring disciples from only those jatis from whom water can be taken.”^[107] For those designated shudra by the elite, this phrase, “from whom water can be taken,” was a common enough euphemism for a person of “pure shudra” status, with whom restricted physical contact could be made. From the elite perspective, such physical contact would have occurred in the course of consuming goods and services common in everyday life; the designation “pure shudra” implied a substantial body of “impure”—hence untouchable—people with whom physical contact was both unnecessary and improper. Buchanan, in the early nineteenth century, had included in the term “pure shudra” the well-known designations of Kayasth, Koiri, Kurmi, Kahar, Goala, Dhanuk (archers, cultivators, palanquin bearers), Halwai (sweets vendor), Mali (flower gardener), Barai (cultivator and vendor of betel-leaf), Sonar (goldsmith), Kandu (grain parcher), and Gareri (blanket weavers and shepherds).^[108]

By the late nineteenth century Kayasths had begun organizing a movement to reject their ascribed shudra status in favor of a kshatriya one; by the early twentieth century, many others—particularly Kurmis, Koiris, Kahars, and Goalas—followed the Kayasth lead (although each utilized distinct arguments) and defined for themselves similar kshatriya identities.^[109] All these reform movements, however, had in common serious attempts at the redefinition of physical labor in terms that reflected the newfound desire for respectability. Shivnandan Sahay’s observation that “Ramanandis bring disciples from only those jatis from whom water can be taken” reflects a subtle but important equivocation on the issue of caste, an equivocation that spelled the difference between those who were able to join the ranks of Ramanandi sadhus and those who could only benefit from the teachings of Ramanand and Ramanandis.

Furthermore, the fact that an initiate had gained entry into the sampraday did not necessarily mean he was guaranteed equal treatment irrespective of varna status. According to Lala Sita Ram, author of an important Vaishnava history of Ayodhya, numerous exceptions were made for high-caste novitiates of a major naga akhara (the Hanuman Garhi in Ayodhya). Those exceptions included a waiver of the thirteen-year age limit for initiation as well as freedom from having to perform “any lowly tasks,” i.e., having to prepare meals, clear and clean dishes, carry wood, and draw water from the well.^[110] It is worthwhile noting, in this context, that present-day Ramanandis claim that prior to 1921 all Ramanandis had to perform these lowly tasks for the acharyas among them—who were exempted from such work and whom the Ramanandis would label “Ramanuji” after 1921—and that this was one of the main reasons that Bhagavadacharya strove to repudiate all connections with the south Indian Ramanujacharya.^[111] And despite the apparent victory of Bhagavadacharya and the rise to orthodox status of his views, in areas where Ramanujis remain strong Vaishnava sadhus are fully cognizant of and responsive to caste distinctions. According to Burghart, who worked primarily in Janakpur in Nepal’s eastern terai,

[The sadhus] claim that one’s mind and body are formed of one’s caste, and since the soul dwells within one’s mind and body until death, caste rules of commensality must be observed within the sect. For this reason Ramanandis of male Twice-born body do not accept ‘imperfect’ (kacca) food or initiation from Ramanandis of Once-born [shudra] body. Even the Ramanandi Renouncers and Great Renouncers . . . who dress in bark, roam in itinerant monasteries and smear ashes on their body observe caste rules of commensality amongst themselves.^[112]

While Lala Sita Ram candidly accepted the fact of such caste distinctions in the process of training monks, he nevertheless defended what he saw to be the progressive attitude of the Ramanandi sampraday in the early twentieth century. For instance, he noted in his correspondence with Sir George Grierson that “a visit to any of the akharas of Ramanandi bairagis will convince that Sudras of all classes are as freely admitted and invested with the sacred thread as the twice born.”^[113]

Investiture with the sacred thread conferred, by definition, elite “twice-born” status and was theoretically reserved for vaishyas, kshatriyas, and brahmans. By performing this ceremony on behalf of shudras, the Ramanandi sampraday (or some in the sampraday) effectively undermined the hierarchy implicit to caste through the adroit application of varna ideology. The practice of sacred thread investiture in Ramanandi akharas should ultimately be understood in the context of the kshatriya identity movements of the early twentieth century, inasmuch as it encapsulates in a single ritual the entire thrust of the kshatriya campaigns. Lala Sita Ram’s assertion of Ramanandi progressivism in this regard would suggest that the sampraday was involved, at least tangentially, in the process of varna reidentification. It should be added that the willingness to countenance varna distinctions in monastic recruitment and training and the recognition of the varna systemics implicit to sacred thread investiture as a strategy for shudra social advancement are both entirely consistent with the essentially Ramanuji position expressed by Sita Ram in his reaction to Farquhar’s 1920 presentation of Ramanand.

Hence the Ramanandi sampraday in the early twentieth century did not (and still does not, if we accept the arguments of Burghart and van der Veer) constitute a monolith of opinion on the relevance of caste rank in monastic life. That a debate was emerging at this time in the sampraday, with varna and status as the central issues, is clear; it is also clear that the debate was closely linked both chronologically and thematically with the divisiveness over guru parampara in 1918–1921. Hence the position taken by Shyamsundar Das in 1924, who (like Sita Ram) has already been cited for his Ramanuji stand with respect to Ramanand’s guru antecedents: in the pages of north India’s most respected Hindi-language periodical, the Nagaripracharani Patrika, Shyamsundar Das disputed the contention that “Ramanand broke completely with the strictures of varnashramdharm [living according to the dictates of varna and one’s stage of life]” even though “there is no doubt that in choosing his disciples he gave no thought to considerations of jati.”^[114] Questions of caste propriety were inescapably linked to the issue of guru parampara, inasmuch as the choice of one’s disciples (or, conversely, one’s guru) represented the most concrete expression of social ideology.

By the 1930s three discernible factions appear to have emerged around the issue of caste status in the sampraday.^[115] Again, disagreement revolved around whether an individual—in this context a shudra individual—retained his varna status after becoming a Ramanandi monk. The egalitarian view, favored by a group led by Bhagavadacharya, held that “amongst sadhus there is no varna system at all” and that “someone of shudra origins can be considered just as pure upon becoming a Vaishnava ascetic as a Vaishnava from a brahman family.” In opposition stood Swami Raghuvaracharya (the author of Anandabhashya, theologically dismissed by Bhagavadacharya in later years) and his adherents, who maintained that “the varna system does in fact exist amongst sadhus and upon becoming a Vaishnava ascetic a brahman remains a brahman and a shudra remains a shudra,” and thus “the two could never eat together.” A third view, maintained by “Udasin”^[116] scholars of Ayodhya, occupied the middle ground between the two opposing factions by arguing that though “the shudra Vaishnava who exhibits all the qualities of a good Vaishnava can be considered pure in all respects . . . , this [purity] is only ornamental; in reality, he is not the same as everyone else.”^[117] Because of the multiplicity of authoritative voices in the sampraday, the question of varna would prove to be difficult to resolve. Bhagavadacharya would himself take up the cause of untouchables after his move to Ahmedabad.^[118] Apprehensive of the potential divisiveness of the controversy, particularly given the increasing influence of monks like Bhagavadacharya, one Ramanandi urged “all the scholars of the sampraday [to] convene and issue a judgment.” Whether such a meeting ever took place is not known, though it is clear that the conflicting attitudes continued to thrive.^[119]

Conclusion

The belief in a glorious past in which persecutions by both Muslims and Dasnamis were overcome, the devotion to the central figure of Ramanand (and through him Ramchandra) unfettered by an association with the south Indian brahman Ramanuja, and the dedication to an egalitarian social order that invited the participation of elite, shudra, and untouchable alike—these constituted the core reference points for a radical Ramanandi after 1921. The following poem by Ramavatar Yadav, entitled “Yatindra-stav” (Hymn to a Great Sadhu) and featured prominently in a 1935–1936 publication honoring the reinvigorated conception of Ramanand, brought these three elements together to glorify the living past of the sampraday:

Though Hindu jati was lost in a fog of ignorance,
    you shined a light on the right path.
Though we endured many blows at every step,
    you nourished us with great support and wisdom.
Though some fled the battleground of their fate,
    you injected vitality back into their veins.
You cleansed the holy ground once again,
    and showed the world the one-ness of Vishnu.
Who could have exposed the fallacy of high and low
    if such a sadhu had not entered the world?
Who else could have inspired the notion that no one is
    impure amid the tranquility of God’s realm?
Who else could have drawn so many across the ocean
    of existence in the sparkling moment of Ram-mantra?
Who else could have inspired Kabir and Ravidas to
    liberate the oppressed with but a bit of verse?
Who else could have comforted the fallen souls who flocked
    to them beneath a shower of resplendent love?
Who else could have banished the evil notion that
    “he who can be cut and wounded must not be Hindu?”
Who else could have shown such valor destroying the
    monolith of sin and expelling narrow-mindedness?
Surrounded by enemies everywhere, who would have preserved
    the name “Hindu” had such a sadhu not arrived?

In their reconstructed hagiography radical Ramanandis viewed Ramanand, like Ram himself, as the savior of Hindu India. Ayodhya, as north India’s center of Ram worship and, hence, the main geographic focus of Ramanandi devotional attentions, could only grow in stature along with Bhagavadacharya during the twentieth century—and, not coincidentally, at the expense of older centers, such as Galta, dominated by Ramanujis. And as Bhagavadacharya’s stature grew, so did the new Ramanandi emphasis on a history of Muslim tyranny as both a catalyst and a backdrop for Hindu decline prior to the arrival of Ramanand. In retrospect, then, some of the factors that would combine to render Ayodhya a political flash point in the late twentieth century were already coming into place after 1918. As we shall see in the following chapters, Ayodhya would be reinforced as a central place in the popular imagination of north Indians through other, nonmonastic means.

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the increasing use of print by Ramanandis would create new strains in the sampraday, simply by bringing into focus the varying versions of tradition extant in the community of monks. Hence, print technology would help to intensify the transformation of long-held hagiographical differences into full-fledged ideological battles. That such battles were fought prior to the arrival of the printing press—though perhaps with less frequency—seems clear from the decisions taken at Galta in the early eighteenth century. Because many important monastic centers tended to be far apart and off the beaten track, rendering long-distance communication difficult, such periodic meetings were crucial to the resolution of sampraday conflicts. The kumbh mela would answer this need in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by serving as a periodic—but not too frequent—forum for settling internal as well as intersectarian disputes and for making major sampraday announcements. As a medium for the articulation of sectarian views, however, the kumbh would be supplemented and, increasingly after 1921, superceded by the printed word. Bhagavadacharya’s investiture as jagadguru-Ramanandacharya in 1977 at the Prayag kumbh itself, an honor that capped a five-decade torrent of publications, is the strongest example of this new monastic reality.

The existence of the office of jagadguru Ramanandacharya after the 1970s should not be taken, however, as an indication that a supreme monastic authority can now quash doctrinal dissent in the sampraday. To the contrary, the creation of the position has resulted since the death of Bhagavadacharya (in 1981 by most accounts) in multiple claims to the title, most of which recognize Bhagavadacharya as the first jagadguru-Ramanandacharya since Ramanand himself.^[120] Hence, despite the dominance of radical Ramanandi views, the sampraday still does not constitute an ecclesiastical monolith with one group of religious leaders dictating religious opinion for the rank and file to follow. The sampraday remains, fundamentally, a populist organization, the monastic systemics of which depend on the recognition, respect, and support individual gurus and swamis receive in villages, towns, and cities throughout north India. An important consequence of this institutional flexibility is that multiple views on guru parampara and caste can continue to coexist in the twentieth century, without necessarily threatening the overarching integrity of the sampraday. Indeed, the fact that there existed a mediating, “Udasin” view on the issue of caste in the sampraday in the 1930s is of great significance here, suggesting that the contending factions in the sampraday were not involved in a damaging, two-party conflict. Indeed, it is possible to argue that this represented the institutionalization of ambiguity on the question of caste, which in turn has allowed the sampraday to contain a broad array of social ideologies through much of the twentieth century and, thereby, to continue to broaden its appeal in north Indian society.^[121]

To what extent did the campaigns for peasant-kshatriya status outside the sampraday, discussed in the following chapters, contribute to or inform the varna debate among Ramanandis, and vice versa? Given the intricacy of monastic networks in peasant society and the nineteenth and twentieth-century interests of monks in social reform, there should be no doubt that the two worlds spoke to each other in myriad ways. However, as has been noted in the conclusion to the previous chapter, a new feature of religious and social discourse in peasant society in the early twentieth century was the initiative taken by local intellectuals beyond the arena of monastic sampraday. In other words, the relationship between peasants and monks, and the popular conception of religion in day-to-day affairs, was undergoing change in the early twentieth century. Discerning that change and its social, political, and economic implications is a task for the following chapters.

Notes