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By the time Shukla was writing his canonical volume in the course of the 1920s, the ‘radical’ faction of modern Ramanandis led by Bhagwadacharya and Raghuvaracharya. (who later adopted a different course, as we shall see) had succeeded in creating and historically back-projecting the figure of ‘Acharya’ Ramanand, a person who did not belong to the spiritual lineage of Ramanuja, who did not come from south, but was born in Prayag, who had established his own independent Sampraday, and who had the Bhashya on the Vedanta Sutras to his credit. After all, in the Brahmanical tradition one cannot be recognized as Acharya if one has not authored a Bhashya. The supposedly ‘authentic’ Sanskrit text ‘Ramarchan Paddhati’ was also attributed to Ramanand during this period of the early twentieth century and the ‘authenticity’ of various manuscripts vigorously debated – the purpose being either the approval or the rejection of traditional ‘guru-paramparas’ that indicated the connection between Ramanuja and Ramanand. It was with this rejection in view that the traditionally accepted floruit of Ramanand was vehemently denied and he was placed one century earlier. ‘Ancient’ manuscripts were produced as and when required in order to make a point in the ongoing struggle of ‘independence’ from Ramanuji hegemony. The ‘poverty of information’ noted by Burghart has only further strengthened the certainty of radical Ramanandi conclusions about such crucial points as the floruit and world-view of Ramanand. The presumption of an eternal Brahmanical ‘conspiracy of appropriation’ has itself become an important datum: if so much was suppressed, is its value not automatically certified as soon as it is once again “brought to light”?

Winand Callewaert has the following to say about Anantdas, the 16^th century hagiographer of leading Sants:

He sang about Namdev, Kabir, Raidas, Dhana, Angad, Trilochan and Pipa. More famous Bhaktas he could not have chosen and four of them (Kabir, Dhana, Pipa and Raidas), he says were initiated by Ramanand. Namdev, Angad and Trilochan were too far away in the past, even for his sense of history to call them disciples of Ramanand.[8]

Unlike Callewaert, Anantdas, of course was not gifted with a proper sense of history, but his sense of chronology seems to be quite precise. He was careful enough to note that ‘the first Bhakta who lived in this kali age was Namdev; he had God in his hands.’[9] According to Callewaert himself, ‘The saint Namdev lived around 1300 A.D,’[10], hence Anantdas seems to be right in describing him as the pioneer of Bhakti proper in ‘this kali age.’ If indeed he was obsessed with ‘Brahmanising’ Kabir and others by making them disciples of Ramanand, why not Namdev and others? Why not make Ramanand the pioneer? After all, Anantdas was a Ramanandi himself and Ramanand lived between 1299 and 1410 CE, as Callewaert and others with a rich sense of history would want Anantdas to believe. But obviously, Anantdas knew better.

The certainty rooted in the poverty of information coupled with a rash dismissal of medieval understanding of the time and temperament of Ramanand forces not only Callewaert but also many others to overlook the simple and profound fact that all four bhaktas mentioned by Anantdas as the disciples of Ramanand belong to 15^th century CE. Instead of taking note of such facts from medieval Hindi sources, and by ‘going from known to unknown’ as David Lorenzen tries to do, [11] such scholars have chosen to reject the Ramanand – Kabir connection ‘known’ consensually to the traditions in favor of a Sanskritized Ramanand active between 1299 and 1410, who was completely ‘unknown’ not only to Anantdas, but to each and every source from medieval India.

In fact, Sanskrit Ramanand of the fourteenth century has entered the unquestioned consensus of Bhakti scholars. As we saw above, Vaudeville wants to believe in some other Ramanand who should ‘indeed be considered a true follower of the Sant Mat,’ she like many others, here follows Bhandarkar and has assumed 1299-1410 to be ‘Hindu traditional dates’[12] of Ramanand. On the other hand, she feels, “Modern Hindu opinion tends to make Kabir a disciple of Vaishnava reformer Ramanand: Kabir is supposed to have received ‘the name of Ram’ from him, by way of initiation.”[13] And this ‘Vaishnava reformer’ could have nothing to do with ‘Sant Mat’ as his modern day followers ‘claim their orthodoxy in matters of worship and caste’. As we will see in the course of this essay, the so-called ‘Hindu traditional dates’ are quite modern and it is, in fact, the tendency to make Kabir a disciple of Ramanand that is rather traditional, while it is the ‘orthodox’ Ramanand who represents a modern construct. Strange as it is, this Ulatbansi (upside-down logic) of taking modern as traditional and vice-versa has become an unquestioned consensus in modern Bhakti scholarship.

Vinay Dharwadkar tells the whole story of attempts to absorb Kabir in a ‘particularly conservative variety of saguna Vaishnava devotion’ (shall we say Hinduise him?) with enviable self-assurance:

One series of biographical accounts constructed after about 1600, for example, has suggested that he [Kabir] was the illegitimate child of a brahmin widow in Banaras, who abandoned him at birth, leaving him to be discovered by a childless julaha couple named Niru and Nima, who then adopted him and raised him in a community of poor Muslim weavers. It has also been suggested that Kabir was a precocious adolescent and acquired a diksha-guru by tricking a high brahmin – the philosopher and theologian Ramananda – into accepting him as a disciple and initiating him into bhakti. The stories in this series acquired their influential forms in the Kabir Parachai, composed by Anantdas around 1625, and the Bhaktirasabodhini, composed by Priyadas about 1712, both of whom were commentators of the Ramanandi Sampraday, and tried to absorb Kabir, however implausibly, into a particularly conservative variety of saguna Vaishnava devotion.[14]

Self assured this story might be, nonetheless it has several holes. Priyadas was not a Ramanandi, Anantdas of course was. Nonetheless, nowhere in his Parachai of Kabir does Anantdas describe him as ‘the illegitimate child of a brahmin widow’. On the contrary he is quite unambiguous and insistent on Kabir’s ‘Muslim julaha’ origin. Priyadas does the same. In fact, it is only in the 19^th century that Kabir is given a brahmin widow as mother! But that is another story. The point here is that Dharwadkar’s confident description of the ‘Ramanandi Sampraday’ as a ‘particularly conservative variety of saguna Vaishnava devotion’ is not answered even by the modern Ramanandis, not to talk of those in the medieval north India.

We indeed know little of Ramanand; there are no certain ‘facts’ available about his life. But the ‘fact’ remains that all medieval mentions of Kabir concur unanimously on two points: he was born a Muslim weaver, and Ramanand initiated him. Starting with Hariram Vyas, the native of Orchha who was the first to make mention of Kabir in the mid-16^th century, proceeding to Anantdas writing his Parchais at the turn of 16^th century, and continuing with the author of Dabistan-e-Mazahib in the mid-17^th century, everyone ‘knew’ that Kabir was ‘initiated by Ramanand’. The fact of this consensus cannot be dismissed simply as ‘attempts to Hinduise Kabir’. Tradition – Hindu, Indian or any other for that matter – is something more than institutionalized conspiracy!

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[8] Winand Callewaert, ‘The Hagiographies of Anantdas: the Bhakti poets of North India’, Surrey, 2000, p 1.

[9] Ibid. P 32.

[10] Ibid. P 3.

[11] David Lorenzen, ‘Kabir Legends and Ananata-Das’ Kabir Parchai’, New Delhi, p 10-18.

[12] ‘A weaver named Kabir’, p.52

[13] Ibid. P 87.

[14] Vinay Dharwadkar, ‘Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs’, New Delhi, 2003, p 19-20.

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