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The Dabistan and Galta

The radical voice of Hindi Ramanand is also powerfully echoed in the way the mid-seventeenth century author of the ‘Dabistan-e-Mazahib’ describes the peculiarities of the ‘Vairagi’ sect. The Ramanandis are known by this term till today. ‘Dabistan’ was describing the sect two centuries after Ramanand and some decades before the Galta conference of the Vaishnavas. The times were troublesome and confusing for the Ramanandis, who were passing through a crisis of identity and association. On one hand, they were actually living out the radical views of Ramanand, and on the other they were under pressure to internalize a conservative identity not only from the more dominant Ramanujis, but also from the rulers and chieftains. The legend, indicating Ramanand’s hesitation about taking Kabir, a Muslim weaver, as disciple had come down to author of the ‘Dabistan’ and his contemporaries. But, at the same time, his observations about the ‘Vairagis’ of his own times tell quite a different story. He records the legend about Kabir tricking Ramanand into taking him as disciple, but his own contemporary Vairagis included Muslims without any trick:

The Vairagis are not devoted to a particular worship; they say, the name of Vichnu suffices for the acquisition of Mukt, “the union with God”. This sect was formed in Kali yug and call themselves also Vaichnavas; they renounce the world and say: “our way is opposite to that of the Vedas and the Koran; that is we have nothing to do either with Muselmans or Hindus.” A great number of Muselmans adopted their creed such as Mirza Salah and Mirza Haidar; two noble Muselmans who became Vairagis. Of this sect, was Naraindas who sided with Ramanandis, which is one of the Sampradays that is the first of the four classes before mentioned. The author of this book saw him in the year 1052 of the Hegira [1642 A.D.] in Lahore…

This sect [obviously our author is referring here to Ramanandis with whom his Naraindas sided] do no harm to any living being which is common to all Vairagis, as well as to neglect devotion; but they do not admit the avatars and say God is exempt from transmigration and union… [65]

The author of the ‘Dabistan’ also notes the practical catholicity of the term ‘Vaishnava’ in his times: “In Hindostan it is known that whoever abstains from eating meat and hurting living animals is esteemed a Vaishnava without regard to the doctrine beforesaid.”[66]

According to Vaudeville, “the account of Kabir’s life given in the Dabistan is rather confused and it reflects some late Hindu traditions and interpretations of Kabir’s sayings; at the same time, a rather absurd story is introduced to show Kabir’s extreme devotion towards fakirs.” She says further in the footnote, “the Dabistan does not distinguish between the Vaishnavas, the Bairagis and the Ramanandis.”[67]

Actually, as Vaudeville herself notes, the Dabistan also reflects at least some of the ‘late’ Muslim traditions (even if ‘absurd’), showing Kabir’s ‘extreme devotion towards Fakirs’; it should not, therefore, stand guilty of ‘Hinduising’ Kabir. ‘Confused’ the author of the Dabistan certainly seems to be, but Vaudeville misses the crucial point – it is this ‘confusion’ which is most pregnant with historical significance. The boundary lines were actually not clearly demarcated; otherwise our Bhagwadacharya would not have to work so hard to delineate a clear-cut identity of Ramanandis in the early decades of the twentieth century. The ‘confused’ account given by the author of the ‘Dabistan’, if read in its entirety, makes clear that all Vaishnavas in his times were not called ‘Vairagis’, but all ‘Vairagis’ were seen as Vaishnavas. One fails to see here any ‘confusion’; after all, exactly the same situation prevails today. Ramanujis are of course Vaishnavas, but they are not called Vairagis.

In Dabistan’s time, Ramanandis like Naraindas mentioned by the author must have been under tremendous pressure from all quarters to align themselves unambiguously with this or that clearly defined tradition and communitarian identity. The community of Ramanandis was apparently trying to adjust to such pressures by insisting on some parts of their world-view and feeling free to negotiate with respect to the others. They were still freely admitting Muslims like the two Mirzas mentioned by the author into their fold, but in the universe of legends that the Dabistan reports, the Vairagis’ source of inspiration, Ramanand, was not willing to take a Muslim weaver as disciple. It is this ‘confusion’, which points to the complex history of the adjustments and conflicts Ramanandis were subjected to in those times.

All this came to a denouement in Galta, near Jaipur, in 1734 CE when the Ramanandis were forced to change their ‘deviant’ ways in return for the recognition as the authentic followers of the ‘ancient’ Shri Sampraday. This meant they could no longer occupy a position somewhere between the Vedas and the Koran and independent of both. They now had to pay the requisite symbolic and theoretical respect to the authority of the Vedas. They also had to ‘admit avatars’ and ‘be devoted to a particular mode of worship’ to align organizationally within the fold of the four recognized sampradays of Vaishnavas.

The Galta conference served as a culmination for the series of meetings and conclaves of the Vaishnavas that had been organized in the context of the ongoing fierce battles between them and the Dashnami Sanyasis. These were battles for the control over trade in various items, especially along pilgrimage routes. Both these monastic orders indulged in trade and a conflict of interests was inevitable. This conflict also took the form of conflict over the control of symbolic capital. Ritual congregations like the Kumbh were marked by great violence between the Vaishnavas and the Dashnamis, the latter having an upper hand due to their superior military organization and greater cohesion. The Vaishnavas felt terrorized and humiliated, as the author of the Dabistan suggests in the following report:

In the year 1050 of the Hegira [1640 A.D.], a battle was fought at Hardwar, which is a holy place of the Hindus, between the Mundis (i.e. Vaishnavas) and the Sanyasis in which the latter were victorious and killed a great number of the Mundis; these men threw away their rosaries of Tulasi wood which they wear about their necks, and hung on their perforated ears the rings of the Jogis, in order to be taken for these sectaries.[68]

Among the Vaishnava orders, only the Ramanandis were capable of taking on the Dashnamis, but due to their deviant ways, other Vaishnavas looked down on them. Cohesion was the need of the hour and the series of conclaves was meant to iron out the differences. The “less heralded agenda” (as Pinch puts it) for the Ramanandis, “was the elevation of Ramanand to a level equal to that of Ramanuja…”[69]

The rulers felt quite anxious about the armed conflicts among various sects of Sadhus. The Raja of Jaipur took an active interest in laying down the ‘rules of game’ and tried to enforce them in his region. Due to their social composition and the tradition of armed Sadhus, Ramanandis were expected to play the role of being ‘armed protectors’ of ‘the four Sampradays of the Vaishnavas. The interesting thing, however, was that they were not recognized as an independent Sampraday of the Vaishnavas. Both Nabhadas (who composed his Bhaktamal between 1585 and 1620 CE) and Raghavdas in his Bhaktamal (composed in 1660) mention Ramanand in the lineage of Ramanuja – who, according to them, was founder of one of the four Sampradays of the Vaishnavas. The south Indian Shri Vaishnavas were neither involved in the conflict with the Dashnamis nor much interested in the affairs of north Indian Vaishnavas in general. The Galta conference provided an opportunity for the Ramanandis to get recognition as the ‘authentic’ inheritors of Shri Vaishnava sect of Ramanuja in north India. It was a strategic arrangement serving everybody’s interests. Only the Ramanandis had the necessary wherewithal (reflected in the fact that out of fifty-two ‘gateways’ [70] recognized at Galta, thirty-six belonged to Ramanandis) to take on the Dashnamis, but they lacked ‘respectability’ due to their ‘deviant’ ways not only in matters of caste but also even with regard to ‘modes of devotion,’ as hinted at by the author of ‘Dabistan’. Quite naturally, these two ‘deviations’ – caste and worship practices – were interdependent. The Dashnami challenge forced all Vaishnavas to ‘sacrifice’ some of their specific features. Ramanandis had to ‘accept’ the Varnashrama discipline in exchange for being able to ‘claim a link with the far away Shri Vaishnava community’ (as Van der Veer puts it) or to ‘displace the Shri sect’ (as Burghart puts it) in the universe of the north Indian Vaishnavas. They had to give up any claims that ‘untouchables’ and women could be recognized as spiritual initiators – and with retrospective effect. Persons other than ‘twice-born’ males, even among the original twelve disciples of Ramanand (who included Kabir, Raidas and Padmavati – two of them lower caste and one a woman) were now seen as illegitimate transmitters of tradition. Ramanandis continued to admit disciples from among the ranks of ‘untouchables’, Shudras and women, as Pinch has said, but “henceforth they would have to link themselves to the Ramanandi past via one of original, twice-born disciples of Ramanand.”[71] In spite of all this the fact remained that in actual everyday practice the Ramanandis followed these rules of ‘Varnashrama’ only half-heartedly and according to their own convenience. On the other hand their inferior status vis-à-vis the ‘real’ Shri Vaishnavas continued to be emphasized symbolically; they were expected to adopt the names ending with word ‘Dasa’ – slave – while the Ramanujis had the sole privilege to append ‘Acharya’ – teacher – to their names. In the early twentieth century, Bhagwaddas caused quite a scandal when, in a deliberate symbolic gesture of defiance, he started calling himself Bhagwadacharya.

Another issue at Galta was the king’s irritation with the armed bands of Sadhus. The then king of Jaipur had his own agenda of ‘regulating’ the activities of the sadhus of various persuasions. Many scholars – Ghurye (‘Indian Sadhus’, 1953), Burghart, (‘The founding of Ramanandi Sect’, 1978), Horstmann (cited in Pinch, 1996) – have analyzed the significance of the Galta conference for the north Indian Vaishnavas. Giving a good summary of these analyses, Pinch has underlined the far-reaching historical import of Galta conference:

Records housed in the Kapad Dwara (warehouse of valuables) of the Jaipur state provide independent corroboration of Vaishnava arms and of attempts to limit the entry of the low-born into the Ramanandi Sampraday in the Jaipur region after 1700. In the 1720s and until his death in 1743, Maharaja Jai Singh II evinced a strong interest in religious affairs, particularly religious affairs having to do with the Vaishnava institutions in his realm. And, not unlike Warren Hastings a half century later, Jai Singh II apparently looked askance at the phenomenon of armed monasticism and sought to discourage it. To this end, he solicited and received four separate bond agreements containing pledges from prominent Vaishnava Mahants, nine of whom identify themselves clearly as “Ramanandi”, to give up the practice of keeping arms and to boycott or otherwise punish those who continued to do so. From separate correspondence it is evident that the Maharaja also solicited opinions from Bengali Vaishnavas regarding the rights of Shudras and other low classes, and obtained pledges from Ramanandi Mahants and other Vaishnavas not only to maintain strict caste rules in commensal relations but to no longer accept shudra and antyaj (low-born) disciples. The fact that Jai Singh II’s efforts to impose orthodox behaviour on Vaishnava monks involved the demilitarization of the armed akharas in tandem with the barring of low-born novitiates suggests that arms and low status were connected not just in the Maharaja’s vision of a new-orthodox Vaishnavism, but in the social-historical reality of Ramanandi monasticism.”[72]

The Galta conference took place in 1734, but in the early 19^th century Francis Buchanan was recording the contempt that Bengali Vaishnavas still felt for Ramanandis: “the convents of Brahmans, who have adopted this [the Ramanandi] order, as usual are confounded with those occupied by Shudras, nor have I been able to distinguish the number of each… my Bengalese assistants confounding them [Bihari Vaishnavas] with the Vaishnavas of their own country hold them in utmost contempt.”[73] It was natural. After all, Buchanan himself found that in Patna district ‘while some Vaishnava gurus are Brahmans… most are Shudras’.[74] The wily Ramanandis did not take even a century to ignore the restrictions on Shudras acting as gurus. Some years after Buchanan, H.H. Wilson also noted the fact that most of the Ramanandis came ‘from the poorer and inferior classes.’

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[65] ‘Dabistan-Mazahib’,(Persian), first published in English translation by David Shea and Anthony Troyer in 1843, reprint, Lahore, 1973, p.266. I have retained in this citation, the archaic grammatical structure and spellings of Indian names.

[66] Ibid, p.262.

[67] Vaudeville, op.cit, p.50.

[68] ‘Dabistan-E-Mazahib’, op. cit. p.267.

[69] Pinch, op.cit. p.53.

[70] ‘Dwara’ – gateway- is the word used among Vaishnava sects to denote a branch, each being named after its founder, a noted sadhu of the sect.

[71] Pinch, op.cit.p.27.

[72] Ibid, p.28.

[73] Cited in Pinch, p.37.

[74] Ibid.p.38.

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