2. Dharnidharacharya and James Tod

In the late 1920s, when he was still a young Vaishnava intellectual of Ayodhya, Swami Dharnidharacharya was recruited to write the history of the wealthy subgrouping of “Awadhia” (or “Ayodhia”) Kurmis concentrated in Patna, Gaya, and Saran Districts of Bihar. By 1930 he had published from Prayag (Allahabad) an important book on the history of the community, entitled Shri Awadhvamshiya Kshatriya Martandah (roughly translatable as “Honourable Awadh-Lineage Kshatriyas of the Sun”).^[1] The arguments and organizational layout of this book offer a glimpse of the mechanics of asserting a kshatriya identity, especially insofar as it relied on British Indological literature, and James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han in particular. Dharnidharacharya addressed two areas of overwhelming concern: his personal religious identity and his community identity as a kshatriya descended from the region of Awadh surrounding the town of Ayodhya. In terms of relative space devoted to each subject, the latter took marked precedence over the former. The two strands of identity were nevertheless fundamentally intertwined: Dharnidharacharya claimed preceptor (guru) descent and Awadh-centered kshatriyas claimed genealogical (vamshiya) descent from the same divine source, Ramchandra of Ayodhya, the earthly manifestation of God. Dharnidharacharya’s discussion of his religious identity fills the last forty-five pages (116–61) of the book and speaks to such issues as philosophy of religion, the Vaishnava avatars, the correctness of image worship and performance of funerary rites as prescribed in the Vedas, and sampraday history, including in particular his own tale of the vagaries of becoming a Ramanuji in the midst of an increasingly Ramanandi Ayodhya.

Dharnidharacharya’s life, and in particular recollections of the Ramanuji-Ramanandi crisis of 1918–21, which filled the formative years of his religious development, are recounted in chapter 3 (see the section entitled “Kshatriya Reform and Ramanandis”). It is significant, however, that the narrative of this conflict makes up the final nineteen pages of Dharnidharacharya’s book. The first three pages of the main body of the book, moreover, are a blessing to Ramchandra and Ramanuja, the two central components of Dharnidharacharya’s religious personality, and a brief discussion of his own name and village. The remainder of the book (pp. 4–115), recalling the kshatriya past of his community, was thus framed between introductory and concluding text that reflected the core concerns of the author’s religious identity. This framework is symbolically appropriate, I would argue, inasmuch as the kshatriya past depended on the details of Vaishnava memory and identity, firmly rooted in the present.

The central part of his text begins with a brief recounting of the main kshatriya branches descending from the sun and moon in a primeval age. The discussion then turns to a more lengthy narrative of the evolution of those lines into “historical” time, with special focus on the descent of the solar lineage in Ayodhya as continued through Ramchandra’s sons, Lav and Kush. This is followed by a brief outline of the main clan lines said to descend from Kush. Concluding this portion of the book is a lengthy delineation of correct ritual and commensal observances for orthodox, elite Hindus. As evidence for this reconstellated kshatriya past, Dharnidharacharya cited an immense range of information and interpretation, in both Sanskrit and vernaculars—including six Vedas, fifteen Upanishads, seven darshan (philosophy), four sutra (aphorisms), three vyakarana (grammars), sixteen dharmashastra (moral treatises), seven samhita (pilgrimage codes), nine itihas (histories), thirteen puran (mythologies), one kavya (poetry), six kosh (lexicons), two jyotish (astrologies) and three niti shastra (ethical treatises).^[2] This material provides the basis for the wealth of detail provided in Dharnidharacharya’s account. However, a critical component of the argument is the transition from cosmological time to historical time, and for this the author relies on the interpretation found in Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod’s massive contribution to Indological scholarship, The Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, compiled in the early nineteenth century.^[3]

The intellectual challenge that confronted Dharnidharacharya was to confirm in scholarly terms the link between the extant Awadh-kshatriya identity of Kurmis in the central Gangetic tract and the remembered kshatriya heartland of Aryavarta, the region “conquered” by Aryas in north India. Doing so required the historical extrapolation of mythological meaning detailing the lineage of Ramchandra of Ayodhya. Such an extrapolation was readily available in Tod’s Annals, which Dharnidharacharya cited to the following effect:

The offspring of the sun-born [surya-putra] Vaivashwata arrived at the banks of the Sindhu [Indus] and Ganga [Ganges], and established his capital at Ayodhya, which was in fact the first settlement of Koshala. Tod then writes . . . that “two branches (Suryavamshiya) emigrated from Koshala, [one of which] established Rohtas on the banks of the Son river, east of Ara [Arrah] and west of Patna.” (At this time Suryavamshiya kshatriyas in the vicinity of Patna came to be well known as Awadhvamshiya kshatriyas.) And the other branch settled in the Kohari country in the vicinity of Lahaur [Lahore].^[4]

This is not an exact translation of Tod’s prose but a fairly accurate paraphrase.^[5] Moreover, the portion I have italicized is not to be found in Tod but is consciously inserted by Dharnidharacharya himself—hence his use of parentheses. Further, Dharnidharacharya presents no evidence to support the claim that the emigrant Suryavamshiya branch that settled in Patna eventually became known as “Awadhvamshiya,” or belonging to the lineage (vamsh) of Awadh. It is this lack of evidence, one presumes, that opponents of kshatriya identity movements would have highlighted in an effort to undercut the status claims of cultivators.^[6] Dharnidharacharya’s assertion of identity between Awadhvamshiya and Suryavamshiya kshatriyas can of course be understood as a dexterous manipulation of Tod’s work; it also represents the point of convergence between history, identity, and belief. In other words, transposing an allegiance to the great progenitor Ramchandra onto an Awadh-oriented kshatriya identity was a perfectly natural Vaishnava intellectual move. Dharnidharacharya would assert that no supporting evidence is necessary: the geographic roots of Awadh-kshatriya identity would be patently obvious to him and his audience, with or without Tod’s account.

But the fact that Dharnidharacharya chose to rely on Tod for what is the pivot between his mythological and historical exegesis is in and of itself important and speaks to the magnitude of Tod’s Annals (and related orientalist literature) in the evolution of kshatriya reform. Tod’s work was and is widely read by Indologists and, consequently, has experienced numerous reprintings in England.^[7] It represented for the colonial reader a well-known and readily accessible description of the “traditional” nobility of north India. Less well known is the fact that eight chapters of volume one of Tod’s Annals, made up of approximately eighty-nine pages under the title “History of the Rajpoot Tribes,” were translated into Hindi by Pandit Ramgarib Chaube and published by Khadgavilas Press in 1913; earlier translations had been published in Bengal in the 1890s.^[8] The Khadgavilas (or “lusty sword”) Press was an important early publishing house in Bankipur, the civil lines of Patna where much of the business of empire took place in Bihar. Its translation of Tod’s Annals was cited by Dharnidharacharya in his retelling of the Awadhvamshiya-kshatriya past.

The eight chapters in question represent Tod’s attempt at piecing together a “history” of the Rajput (kshatriya) clans of Rajasthan from Puranic sources and at relating that mytho-historical body of knowledge to classical European and Old Testament lore. Thus some of Tod’s chapter subheadings read as follows (the relevant chapter numbers are in parentheses):

• Genealogies of the Rajpoot princes (1)
• Connection of the Rajpoots with the Scythic tribes (1)
• Legends of the Poorans confirmed by the Greek historians (2)
• Synchronisms (3)
• The dynasties which succeeded Rama and Crishna (5)
• Analogies between the Scythians, the Rajpoots, and the tribes of Scandinavia (6)

Tod’s romantic fascination for the misty links between European and Indian antiquity reflected the broader orientalist musings of the period, an analysis of which can be found in S. N. Mukherjee’s study of the life of Sir William Jones.^[9] Among the many parallels of legend drawn by Tod, one of the most singular is his speculation regarding the lineages of Kush (Ramchandra’s son) and Cush (the son of Ham, whose progeny were allegedly cursed by Noah to eternal servitude). In a footnote to his discussion of the suryavamshiya Kushvaha descendants of Ramchandra, Tod remarked that

the resemblance between the Cushite Ramesa [Ramchandra’s Kushvaha] and the Rameses of Egypt [Noah’s lineage through Ham] is strong. Each was attended by his army of satyrs, Anubis and Cynolcephalus, which last is a Greek misnomer, for the animal bearing this title is of the Simian family, as his images (in the Turin museum) disclose, and the brother of the faithful Hanooman. The comparison between the deities within the Indus (called Nil-áb, ‘blue waters’) and those of the Nile in Egypt, is a point well worth discussion.

Of course, for Tod the beginning and end of all these speculations was the neverending search for a trace of the memory—in the form of myth—of human origins: “The Genesis of India commences with an event described in the history of almost all nations, the deluge, which, though treated with the fancy peculiar to the orientals, is not the less entitled to attention.” And, more to the point: “These [Greek, Roman, pagan, and Indian] traditions appear to point to one spot, and to one individual, in the early history of mankind, when the Hindu and the Greek approach a common focus; for there is little doubt that Adnat’h, Adiswára, Osiris, Bághés, Bacchus, Menu, Menes, designate the patriarch of mankind, Noah.”^[10] Indeed, the desire to reconnect the remembered yet fragmented past of mankind permeated the European orientalist imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplified best in Max Müller’s famous advice to young Indian Civil Service candidates over five decades later (1882) “that his heart should not sink when approaching the shores of India, for he was ‘going to his “old home”, full of memories, if only he can read them.’”^[11]

If Tod’s overriding concern was his desire to reach back into the recesses of human memory to arrive at some protohistorical truth about the nature of the human species, his more immediate object in these eight chapters was to present the patterned meaning of Indian mythology in a way that European readers could both understand and appreciate. And fortunately for the historian of British-Indian ideas, Tod is completely candid about the sources for his account:

Being desirous of epitomising the chronicles of the martial races of Central and Western India, it was essential to ascertain the sources whence they draw, or claim to draw, their lineage. For this purpose I obtained from the library of the Rana of Oodipoor [Udaipur] their sacred volumes, the Pooráns, and laid them before a body of pundhits, over whom presided the learned Jetty Gyanchandra. From these extracts were made of all the genealogies of the great races of Soorya and Chandra, and of facts historical and geographical.^[12]

Here Tod adds that of this large body of literature, the most useful for writing Rajput history were the Bhagavat, Skanda, Agni, and Bhavishya Puranas. It should not be concluded, however, that Tod or any other British orientalist was the first to apply Puranic literature to a reconstruction of the past and that this application was simply imitated by later Indian intellectuals. Quite the reverse is true: Tod, and orientalists generally, looked to this and other literature primarily because it presented an image of the past with valuable information for the present.^[13] Certainly the historical format in which they rendered the material was markedly difference from Indian renderings; nevertheless, the purpose of that rendering was familiar: a description of the past to explain the present. What is remarkable is that Dharnidharacharya, thoroughly ensconced in the social and religious upheaval of the early twentieth century, deemed Tod’s rendition of the Puranic past useful in his own reclamation of genealogical origins. Part of the reason was that Tod’s Annals were perceived as a politically sanctioned body of knowledge; after all, James Tod was not only a lieutenant-colonel in the British army, he was the political agent of the Honorable Company to the powerful western Rajput states, symbolic to many—both British and Indian—of martial valor. The two texts under consideration, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han and Shri Awadhvamshiya Kshatriya Martandah, though different in outlook and scope, bear one striking similarity: an overriding concern for origins. Tod expressed it in terms of Noah and the flood; Dharnidharacharya in terms of Ramchandra and the sun. But they spoke directly to each other across the nineteenth century in a language both could understand.

Notes