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Ramanand is indeed a unique figure in the religious and literary history of northern India – resplendent in the glory of being traditionally considered the Guru of historically well-known Sant poets Kabir, Raidas and Pipa, yet obscure so far as his own life is concerned. On the one hand, he has been a source of inspiration for many intellectuals who have questioned and criticized Brahman supremacy until as late as the early twentieth century; on the other, more recent scholars often describe him as an epitome of Brahman orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The irony lies in the fact that it was one such interrogator of Brahman supremacy within the Ramawat Sampraday – an early 20^th century scholar named Bhagwadacharya, about whom we will be hearing a great deal – who contributed most directly to the construction of the Brahman image of Ramanand. This essay intends to deal with the historical context and cultural import of this irony in some detail.

It is interesting to note that whatever little we know of Ramanand is gathered from medieval vernacular sources – the hagiographies found in the Sant and Vaishnava traditions and the poetic compositions attributed to him in the Adi-Granth and Sarvangis of Rajjab and Gopaldas. By contrast, Sanskrit writings from medieval north India take no notice of Ramanand at all.

Yet, modern scholarship clearly privileges two Sanskrit works attributed to him, the Ramarchan Paddhati and the Vaishnava Matabaj Bhaskar in determining his world-view. We will also discuss a third, the Ananda-Bhashya. It is to be noted that the world-view reflected in the Hindi compositions attributed to Ramanand is quite different from the one reflected in these Sanskrit works. For the sake of convenience let us call the Ramanand, as reflected in the Sarvangis and Adi-Granth, ‘Hindi Ramanand’ and the Ramanand reflected in the Sanskrit works attributed to him, ‘Sanskrit Ramanand’. I hope to demonstrate that the privileged position of Sanskrit Ramanand is not rooted in any serious research but in uncritical acceptance of very recently constructed image of Ramanand as an orthodox Acharya of the Ramawat Sampraday. Because of this acceptance, the Hindi Ramanand has been effectively marginalized in academic discourse on the Bhakti sensibility.

Similarly interesting is the fact that all pre-modern references to Kabir make the following two points: Kabir was born a Muslim weaver, and he was a disciple of Ramanand. But modern scholarship, particularly in the western academy, has convinced itself that Ramanand could not have been even a contemporary of Kabir, not to talk of any connection between the two. David Lorenzen and Pinuccia Caracchi, however, remain exceptions to this scholarly consensus.

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As far back as 1978, Richard Burghart noted the “poverty of information”[1] regarding the life and views of Ramanand. Over the last three decades, this poverty has not decreased in any way. William Pinch observes in this context,

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?[2]

The fact that he is believed ‘to have occupied an important and neglected space’, should have made Ramanand an interesting figure for scholars of Bhakti, but as Pinch himself has noted,

Indeed it can be argued that the increasing interest in Sant studies has pushed Ramanand and Ramanandis into the background. 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.[3]

If one were to go by the Hindi compositions attributed to Ramanand which have been preserved in Adi-Granth and Sarvangis, Ramanand himself would come out as someone who, having a ‘disdain for brahmanical knowledge and ritual, an outspoken disregard for idols and images and a dedication to egalitarian poetic verse’, would be a figure quite suitable for ‘a distinctly counter elitist, folk culture appeal’. But the Sanskrit Ramanand gets in the way. There is such a world of difference between Sanskrit and Hindi Ramanands that Charlotte Vaudeville, having cited a pada by ‘Hindi’ Ramanand (found both in the Adi-Granth and the Sarvangi of Rajjab) has this to say: “If this pad was really composed by Ramanand, the latter should indeed be considered a true follower of the Sant-Mat: idol worship is clearly rejected, the supreme lord is conceived of as invisible and all-pervading, solely revealed through the sabda uttered by Satguru.”[4] But since “modern Ramanandis… claim their orthodoxy in matter of worship and caste…” – that is, since they take ‘Sanskrit’ Ramanand as their authority – “that liberal saint (which comes out in the Hindi compositions) may have been another Ramanand but of that other Ramanand, we know nothing: he may have been influenced by Nath-panthi beliefs and, at the same time, cultivated a preference for the Vaishnav name of Ram.”[5]

Vaudeville’s idea that the ‘liberal saint Ramanand’ was someone else is not unprecedented. Ramchandra Shukla, the eminent literary historian and critic writing his ‘Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas’ (‘a History of Hindi literature’) way back in the fourth decade of the last century, cites the same pada and comes to the same conclusion (the nature of his sympathy was different though.) – “It is clear from this citation that such padas could not have been composed by Vaishnava Bhakta Ramanand. Maybe some other Ramanand penned them.”[6]

Ignoring the circumstances and the context that led to the construction of Ramanand as ‘Acharya’ by the modern Ramanandis, Vaudeville and many others have also failed to take note of the interesting fact that even Sanskrit Ramanand is quite liberal, so far as caste is concerned. It was bound to be so, because Sanskrit Ramanand was being constructed precisely in order to bestow ‘orthodox’ approval on the lack of strict observance of Brahmanical rules of conduct by modern Ramanandis. The crux of the matter for the ‘radical’ Ramanandis in the early twentieth century was to resist the arrogance displayed by the Ramanujis – that is, adherents of the Ramanuja or Sri Vaishnava Sampraday – who prided themselves on their accurate observance of the caste rules and ‘superiority’ accruing from the same.[7] The Ramanujis made no effort to hide their contempt for the Ramanandis, many of whom came from the middle and lower castes.

The specificity of the social base of the Ramanandis is a historical constant that will be noted by any observer who has bothered to look into the social composition of the Ramanandi Sampraday and its lay followers, be it the author of Dabistan-e-Mazahib in the seventeenth century, Buchanan and Wilson in the nineteenth century, or Peter Van der Veer and William Pinch in the late twentieth century. Naturally, with their members coming from the middle and lower castes, the Ramanandis could hardly observe caste rules as ‘accurately’ as the upper-caste Ramanujis. Consequently, they were literally treated as ‘country cousins’ by Sanskrit speaking, caste-rules-observing Ramanujis. Their ‘inferior’ status (which accrued from their negligence of caste rules) was reinforced by many symbolic gestures in everyday life and, more particularly, on symbolically significant occasions like the Kumbh gatherings, where they were supposed to follow after the Ramanujis in the ritual baths and processions. So much so that on such occasions the Ramanandis used to bear the palanquins carrying the Ramanuji Mahants and Acharyas.

We will have occasion in the course of this essay to hear the voices and detail the attempts of the ‘radical’ Ramanandis like Bhagwadacharya, who were angry at this humiliation and bent upon radically severing any connection with the Ramanujis. Bhagwadacharya did this by pushing back Ramanand’s floruit by a century and making him a native of north India, thus eliminating any possibility of his belonging to the fold of Ramanujis. Bhagwadacharya argued this on the basis of Sanskrit writings he attributed to Ramanand. The ‘traditionalists’ among the Ramanandis, those who upheld the late floruit and southern origin of Ramanand, fiercely resisted the attempts of such ‘radical’ Ramanandis, though they accepted several of the Sanskrit texts as genuine. The point I wish to elaborate in this essay is that, in taking the ‘evidence’ advanced in favor of Ramanand’s early floruit at face value, which was to privilege Sanskrit Ramanand over the Hindi one, academic scholars have completely missed the context of such ‘evidence’ and consequently the irony of situation. In fact, this early and Sanskrit Ramanand is not supported by the historical evidence, but is the product of modern Ramanandis’ attempt to create an orthodox sanction for the heteropraxy of their Sampraday. Little did the ‘radical’ Ramanandis realize that their modern construction of a Sanskrit Ramanand belonging to 14^th century would distance the historical Hindi Ramanand actually belonging to 15^th century from his traditionally accepted circle of disciples causing, what is nowadays seen as, chronological and temperamental improbability. This was the unintended consequence of putting the past into the service of the present without any regard for plausible evidence – the cost of creating ‘traditions’ at will.

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[1] Richard Burghart, ‘The Founding of the Ramanandi Sect’ in ‘ Religious Movements in South Asia 600-1800′(Editor David Lorenzen,) New Delhi, 2004,p.231.

[2] William Pinch, “Peasants and Monks in British India”, New Delhi, 1996, p 50.

[3] Ibid. P 50.

[4] Charlotte Vaudeville, ‘A Weaver named Kabir’, New Delhi, 1993,p.88.

[5] Ibid. P 88-89.

[6] ‘Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas’ Varanasi, (Samvat 2035, i.e. 1978 CE), p.86.

[7] In the early phase of their history, even the Shri Vaishnava were quite liberal on the issue of caste. Ramanuja himself is credited with establishing rather liberal Pancharatra form of worship in many temples. The Shri Vaishnavas even had Shudra functionaries in their temples. By the fourteenth century, however the Shri Vaishnava were divided on the issues of caste along with on other issues of doctrine. the vijayanagar rulers played a major part in ‘undermining the rights and privileges of the Shudra functionaries in the temples. See Burton Stein, ‘Social Mobility and Medieval South Indian Sects’ in ‘Religious Movements in South Asia 600-1800′ (Editor: David Lorenzen), New Delhi, 2004, p 80-101.

A role similar to that of the Vijayanagar rulers was to be played three centuries later by the ruler of Jaipur in order to make Ramanandis stick to caste order and its ideology.

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